A Child of Warsong Gulch

The other week, after finishing up the run through the Deadmines with my mother and my daughter, I was about done with World of Warcraft for the day.  Corralling an eager 7 year old over Skype can be a chore.  My mom was also done for a while.

My daughter, however, was still keyed up to do something in Azeroth.

She wanted to do something fun.

Since she had already hit level 20, I decided to let her try out Warsong Gulch.

She plays a hunter, which is one of the classes that can get away with being at the low end of the level curve in battlegrounds in my opinion, so I figured she wouldn’t get completely pounded.  Being the level 20 in the 20-29 group means that people often make a bee-line straight for you, but if you can hang back and snipe, you can do okay.

I showed her how to get to Stormwind Keep and which NPC to speak to in order to join the queue.  And, rather surprisingly to me, the wait time for WSG was pretty short.  She was in a match in a about a minute.

I left her there with instructions to “kill the people with the red names” and then went off to watch a TV show with my wife about twelve paces away.

The match started and I could tell she was having a good time.  She was cheering and obviously felt like she was doing well.  When the match was over she took off her headset and ran over and bounced around while telling us that her side had won the match.  This was something new and exciting for her, this online team sport.

Her side won the next match.  More cheering!

Then, in the next match, her team lost.

She came over and complained about how the other team had more people and they were all higher level and they ganged up on people and it wasn’t fair!

I got an angry look when I laughed.  All she missed was claiming they were using hacks.  If she had said that I would have declared her ready for Counter-Strike.

I told her that you can’t win every time, a phrase that cut no ice with her.  She is not a good loser, something she does not get from me.

She went back to play another match and was mollified by victory, that which salves all wounds.

At the end of the evening I took a screen shot of her achievements.  She had a couple none of my characters ever got.  Plus, it seemed that she went off and tried Arathi Basin as well.  I did not even know that was available at level 20.

Last weekend gave us a nice stormy Sunday afternoon to play on the computer.  I was mucking about in EVE Online, but she wanted to go back to the battlegrounds.  She brought my mom along as well, who at least had gotten her character up to 27 and so could hold her own in the scrum.

I heard her giving my mom lots of advice while they played, some of it of rather dubious value, but several quite insightful bits.  But after she was done for the day I checked her achievements again.

She may officially now be better than me in WoW Battlegrounds.

I think she just needs the typing skills to harague people in raid chat (Don’t just stand there!  Got get the flag!  We don’t need so many on defense!) and she’ll be an expert.

Spelling skills are, of course, not required.