I Travel by Myself
If you’ve ever wanted to quit your job, travel the world and play WoW whenever and wherever you please – take it from Caesar of US Dark Iron-H, it’s as good as you’d ever dreamed it could be. Since then, he’s managed to keep his WoW account alive and has played on and off from his laptop and internet cafes all over the Pacific and Asia. So far, he’s logged in from two dozen different countries on almost every sort of network issue you could imagine. In March 2007, Caesar sold his house, put the rest of his belongings in storage and hit the road.
We caught up with Caesar in Kuala Lumpur to see if his travels are turning out to be as cool in practice as the idea was on the drawing board. (TLDR version: They are.)
15 Minutes of Fame: So where are you this week? Next week, I’ll be in Penang, Malaysia and maybe in Thailand, depending on how fast I move. (Editor’s note: Moments before this article was scheduled to go live, Caesar e-mailed to say he had just in fact added Thailand to the list of places from which he’s logged into WoW.) Last week I was in Bintan, Indonesia and Singapore. Caesar: I’m in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
What prompted you to sell your house, pack up and fly out? Also, selling my house before the market took a dive is looking like a good move in hindsight. I have no regrets, whatsoever. I wanted to see the world. ð I actually went and did it. I have always enjoyed traveling and learning about places, and this was the opportunity of a lifetime. Everyone always talks about going out to see the world.
I’ve been traveling now since March of 2007, so around 17 months. In that time, I’ve been to over 40 countries and territories, some of which most people have never heard of, let alone visit: Nauru, Tonga, Samoa, Vanuatu, Kiribati, Micronesia, Palau, Easter Island and the Marshall Islands.
I get e-mails every few days from people who find my website and say, “I’m so jealous. You are doing exactly what I want to do.” Every day is a new adventure. You get to see places in a way which you never possibly could just watching TV or reading the news.
What other destinations do you have in mind? I’ll eventually get to Europe and Africa. I sort of make everything up as I go along. I really don’t know the specifics yet. I hope to be moving in a westerly direction over the next year, through the Middle East towards Europe and Africa. The current plan is to explore Southeast Asia, then go to India.
So how does WoW fit into your trek across the globe? I occasionally will go to a raid if they need a 25th and I happen to be online, but my gear sucks and I can’t contribute that much. Given where I am, I am usually 10 to 13 hours off of the server time, so raiding is usually out of the question. I haven’t seen much of the 25-person content in BC.
Also, it is not unusual to have extremely high ping times, which makes it difficult to raid or do serious PvP. (I’m a Discipline Priest.) I haven’t been able to really play on an Arena team, as they started doing Arenas after I was out of the country. Playing Arena matches seems to take up much less time than raiding. If I could play again on a regular basis, I think I’d focus more on playing Arena matches. I’ve always enjoyed PvP healing more than anything else.
How long have you been a WoW player? I also played EverQuest extensively. My first character was a Night Elf Hunter, which I got to level 60. I’ve been playing MMOs ever since Ultima Online came out in the late ’90s. I rolled my first character in WoW a few days after the game was released.
When PvP and Penny Arcade started their war on Dark Iron, I created my current main, Caesar, an Undead Priest. I’ve been playing him ever since. I eventually took some players to form a raiding guild called Djork (which is currently recruiting, BTW). I was an officer in Panda Attack, which had well over 600 people in it at the time. I’d call it a casual raiding guild. The main guild for the PvP side of the war was Panda Attack.
You were a guild leader for a time, weren’t you? I stepped down right after we had killed Nagafen in Blackwing Lair. What content was your guild working on at that time in the game? It made for a good point to hand off control. I quit as guild leader a few months before BC was released. How did you wrap up that commitment when you needed to move on?
Are you still a member of the guild? The guild is currently working on the Black Temple. Yes, and I am technically still an officer — but I do very little and can’t raid on a regular basis.
I have become an ultra-casual player. I think the addition of daily quests is the best thing that has happened to WoW. I’m currently doing dumb stuff like collecting pets for achievements when WotLK releases. I wish they added more quests for more factions — preferably older factions, not brand new ones. Due to time zone differences, ping time and the fact that I play on a laptop, I can’t do much more than daily quests and battlegrounds. I’ve managed to get exalted with the Skyguard, Ogri’la and the Shattered Sun Offensive.
Do you find yourself striking up WoW-related conversations with people you meet? I think there is a common gaming culture around the world. I could easily tell what was going on by listening to them, even though I couldn’t speak Korean. When I have seen people in other countries play, it is amazing how similar it is. I watched some Korean players play once. No matter where you are from, what language you speak, if you play games on a regular basis, you’ll share similar lingo, slang and mannerisms. I’ve also seen a lot of similarity in the Counter-Strike players I see. Have you discovered cultural differences in the way players play and talk about playing the game? I’ve met a few travelers who have played WoW, but they are also usually pretty casual players. I got to know some guys in Perth and Adelaide, Australia, who played WoW when I played in their LAN center.
Have you been keeping up with Wrath news? I’ve been pretty underwhelmed with both so far. I personally would rather see a sharp and clear division between PvP and PvE in the Discipline and Holy trees, and just respec as needed, rather than have two trees that try to the same thing with similar talents spread across both. If you’re still on the road when the expansion hits, do you think you’ll load it up and begin casually working through the new content as you can, or will you hold out for later? Yes. I’ve been paying attention to Priest class news and seeing what they will do with Engineering. All the new talents seems to be PvE-oriented. They still don’t seem to have any coherent idea of what to do with the Discipline tree.
I have no idea how or when I’ll be able to get a copy of the expansion. I assume I wont be able to install it for at least a few weeks after it ships. The only think I can think of would be for someone in the United States to buy a copy for me, send me the game code and let me download the software from Blizzard. If I’m somewhere with poor bandwidth, it might even be longer.
If anyone from Blizzard is reading this, please consider putting in achievement for the number of countries logged in from. ð
Do you play other games as you travel — any handhelds or anything like that? I have some simple Bejeweled-type games installed. My laptop is a Mac, so that has limited the games available to me, as I find it very hard to find games for the Mac while traveling. The only game other than WoW I currently have installed is Civ 4. There is a new expansion for it, but I can’t find it anywhere. Yes. I often have a lot of time on my hands. I also have an iPod Touch, which now that the 2.0 software is out, makes for a good time-killer if you are on a train or a plane.
I’ve been looking for a copy of Diablo II for the Mac since I heard about the plans to release Diablo III. I’d like to play through it again, and the expansion. Again, finding games for the Mac is really hard in Asia.
What’s been the most precarious log-in experience you’ve had abroad? The only place I could find with a decent internet connection was at the main building for the national communications company. I’ve been able to log in in places with satellite connections like Samoa. They didn’t allow for laptops and didn’t have games installed, but I could have probably logged in from there, too. They had a small internet cafe with the giant satellite dishes right outside. The oddest internet experience was probably in the Marshall Islands. The cost for DSL in the Marshall Islands is $5,000 per month, and the actual bandwidth is an extra $800/month. WoW requires more bandwidth than just checking your email or surfing the web.
Where did you not expect to be able to log in — but did? The Solomons are an out-of-the-way country, and I never expected them to have good internet connectivity. Honiara in the Solomon Islands. I was surprised to find it not only wasn’t bad, but it was pretty cheap as well.
Where did you expect to log in — but couldn’t? Connectivity in Asia is cheaper, better and much more ubiquitous than I found it in Australia. Free wi-fi is almost unheard-of in Australia. Even paid wi-fi was often very slow. It wasn’t so much that I couldn’t log in, but I found the internet situation in Australia to be much worse than I expected. If I played in an internet cafÃĐ, my connection would usually be fine, but often times finding good wi-fi was hard to do.
I can’t think of any time I couldn’t log in from somewhere. I’ve had poor connections and there were places I didn’t even bother to try. In hindsight, I could have logged in from Easter Island, but I didn’t make the effort.
Any updates to the list of places you’ve logged in? The connection there was pretty slow, so in theory I could have probably logged on and chatted, but probably nothing more. Since I wrote that, I spent over five months in Australia and have also been to Papua New Guinea, Singapore and peninsular Malaysia. I wasn’t able to log on in PNG because I had to uninstall WoW from my laptop temporarily for photo storage.
Any tips for travelers who want to keep their WoW habit rolling along? When you are doing long-term traveling like I am, then being able to kill a few hours and talk to people you know online is really nice. Leave the laptop at home. I know a lot of people will read this and will roll their eyes, saying “If I were traveling, I wouldn’t be playing WoW.” If you are going on a short vacation, I’d agree.
I use OpenDNS as my default DNS server most of the time. I also use my iPod Touch as a wi-fi finder and strength tester. Pulling out an iPod is much easier and safer than pulling out a laptop. It seems to solve a lot of problems.
Despite the rumors, I have never had my account suspended because of all the different IPs I’ve logged in from. Simply logging in from another place is not grounds for getting your account suspended.
How can interested readers follow along on your progress across the world? I keep an active travel blog where I write about my travels and share my photography, which you can subscribe to. I’m also active on Twitter. I also have started a video podcast recently which you can get on iTunes.
I always welcome hearing from people while I’m on the road. I travel by myself, so e-mails, tweets, text messages or even messages in game (if you happen to play Horde on Dark Iron) are welcome and appreciated.
Whet your appetite on more 15 Minutes of Fame with interviews of WoW players of every stripe: from players you’ve probably heard of, players who have their own thing going on, and players just like you!
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