2/22/17, hour and a half long session at home on my desktop. Today I hit level ten and was able to change specializations for my warlock. This is another game system that has been changed since I last played. Originally, a class would commit to a single specialization, and then never be able to change. Now a class can change whenever they want, as long as they are not in combat. This is an interesting dynamic that I wish had been around during my time playing a human paladin. This gives players the functionality to preform multiple different roles while dungeoning (for example, in a single dungeon, a paladin would be able to play all three roles; tank, healer and damage). I decided to focus on the demonology strain for the time being (summoning monsters to protect me), and then try the others later. An interesting moment occurred during my game play, regarding player gender identification. I had been grinding through several quests, working with another player (a male level eight monk), and we ended up discussing how much the game had changed (they had been playing since before the cataclysm update but not as early as I had started). It was during this discussion that I discovered that the player was a woman. It was a bit of a surprise to me, seeings as she was playing as a male undead monk. I asked her why she wanted to play as a male undead and she told me that she didn’t want to be treated unfairly by other players, like she had while playing as a female blood elf. She told me about how players would frequently do her favors or went out of their way to be overly nice and help her, assuming that she didn’t know how to play the game, even at the high levels. What she said bothered her even more was at high levels as a female, people just assumed you were a male playing a female character, because “girls don’t play WoW that long”. As a male undead, she found that people don’t treat her negatively or positively. The male undead is treated as more or less androgynous or simply masculine and no one really cares. People help you if you need help or if you ask, based on your personality and not your gender, which she said was far more important to her. She simply was looking for a “fair” playing experience. This made me want to start a female night elf character to see how people treat me, and discover if there really is a difference. I might do that for my last blog entry.