To level quickly or with pleasure?

These days it's been almost exactly a year since I started to play WoW. It feels like an eternity. Thinking about how terribly little I know about what I was entering, and how hard even the smallest of things were for me, I can't help smiling.

My very first char, a paladin, I abandoned quite fast. She got some kind of disease I didn't know how to cure her from. It was a picture of a man, at first yellow, then more and more red... and I couldn't understand why she died so fast. If a defias guy even looked at her, she went down immediately.

Then I created my present mage, Larisa, and somehow I heard about the concept of repairing, so I let her grew up and progress in the game.

Oh, what times it was! Everything was a big adventure. Everything was new, I remember how I with sparkling eyes entered Ironforge for the first time. Not to speak of Stormwind and the thrilling subway transport. I was so enthusiastic at the run that I called for my whole family, wanting everyone to come and see what an awesome game this was.

I took the day as it arrived, played quite unsystematically, heading where the quests brought me. I remember for instance how I made a terrible long and troublesome journey to the other island, where I came to a god forgotten place, where I was supposed to kill a rare kind of basilisks. Then I went the whole way back to the quest giver again. This trip must have taken me several gaming nights. I really felt like a brave explorer!

A little later I encountered Jame's levelling guide and started to play much more systematically. I did all the quests in one area, then I moved on. I brought items would use later. And so on. This made me levelling quicker and easier than I had before. But thinking back about it, was it only for good?

Those first, lovely, innocent steps you take in Azeroth will never come back. Levelling up your first char is a pleasure. You'll come to new areas all the time, you make all the quests for the first time. Why hurrying up that process? It's different if you're pulling up an alt, in order to use it for endgame at lvl 70. Then I can very wall understand if you just want to get over with the levelling, being able to deal with what you really want to do with the char.

However, this is a bit hard to tell others about. If you've once found the levelling guides and addons telling you where to go for quests (for instance Lightheaded, which I use myself), it's hard to stop doing it. Once you've god the knowledge that those aids exist, the time of innocence has run out. And suddenly you start levelling quickly rather than with pleasure.