I created my "Draginol" character on the Uther Pacific time-zone server.  The first day was a mess. Just total lag. Too frustrating.  Amazingly, other people apparently have a lot more patience or something because when I got on today, there were an amazing number of people who had zipped up to leve 18 or higher already.

I was in the alpha and beta of World of Warcraft.  It took me about a week of playing to get to level 15 and another 3 weeks to get to level 30.  Roughly speaking, in one day you can get up to around level 8 fairly easily if you know what you're doing. Assume a couple more days to get to level 15.  This is assuming around 4 to 6 hours of play in a given "day".

My 7 year old son is also playing. He's on as a Dwarft fighter called "Charly". He's having a blast with it. Been making use of a new internal beta of a program we're going to call Mob Master to let me control both accounts at the same time.  I have two PCs and two accounts and so when Alex isn't playing, I control both Charly and Draginol with my keyboard/mouse using Mob Master.

Some friends of mine told me that they object strongly (and note politely) to this kind of thing. Which, frankly annoys me quite a bit.  Those of us who don't have big gangs of buddies to help with quests can have (almost) the same benefit by using something like Mob Master.  Yea, some geek with bots or something could probably abuse it but that's not Mob Master's fault. I don't see how there's any problem with someone with two legitimate accounts with two legitimate characters being able to form a party that they control both characters. It's not quite as good as having an expert behind each one (since you obviously can only give commands to one player at a time) but it's definitely made some of the quests a lot easier.  It's a hellluva lot less cheesy than buying "gold" on eBay or something.

Anyway, so I got Draginol up to level 10 when I got tired of it.  I'm still not sure how I will feel about it long term. I played it so much during the beta/alpha that I'm not seeing a lot of new stuff.  If I can find more people I know on the Uther server that would make it more fun. Soloing gets old in a hurry even with two characters.

So if you're on Uther, look me up. If you're into these kinds of games, I think you'll like World of Warcraft. The lag issues seem to have subsided dramtaically and it's a very well put together game.