Whirly: good to go

I used to two-box back in EQ. I thought I’d give it a try in WoW. I have a MacBook Pro that I use for everything other than playing games. It had an old copy of WoW installed that took a day or so to patch and install expansions. It runs a bit hot while playing, so I reduced in-game graphics and desktop resolution as far as possible. I picked up a 10 day free trial for the experiment.

I use Synergy to control both my PC and Mac with the same keyboard and mouse. It worked well with the two WoWs except for an occasional problem when moving the mouse off the Mac while my toon is turning. The toon can start rotating, which is difficult to stop.

The whole point is to add a fourth to our regular group of three. I figure a hunter would be the perfect bot, so I created a Warrior / Hunter. It’s a quick killing machine at newbie levels, but the hunter seems to generate more aggro than the Warrior so far.

Next, I tried running two instances of WoW on my PC. I had to reduce the window size of both, which I didn’t like, but it might be better with a second monitor – my possible next attempt. The down side was having to click on each window to gain focus. I started alt-tabbing between the two then realized I could use my keyboard’s macro capabilities to automate the process. I created a macro that switches windows and tells the Hunter to /follow the Warrior, and another than has the Hunter /assist the Warrior. It works quite nicely.

We are taking a break from WoW. Running instances, with just the three of us, was getting a bit boring. The whole burning crusades thing was the same and we felt the needed for a little break.

We are playing ToonTown. We were in beta some years back. It seemed funner then. There isn’t any grouping in TT and, so far, we are individually running streets looking for whatever our quests call for. Hopefully it will become interesting once our missions call for us to do buildings. That’s assuming we stay around long enough.

We are talking about starting over in WoW. I’m not sure we are going there. It seems crazy to abandon our mains at this point. Maybe a reduced play schedule or something is the way to go. There are no other games calling us at this time. We’ve been playing together since EQ. I would hate for us to bust up now.