Who Am I?
While blogstorming over at Blog Azeroth, Bunnyfer suggested that we write about how we came up with our character names. After reading several different posts about character names, I decided it was time to make my contribution as well.
I stole the name Birkin from a game I played on and off for about 4 years, called EVE. Back in 2003, a few buddies and I started playing EVE together. During the installation, we were trying to decide how we wanted to play the game. Like WoW, you could create guild-like groups, called corporations. Collectively, we decided that we wanted to live the evil mercenary-for-hire role, and therefore needed to come up with a corporation and personal names that would be recognizable and coincide with each other.
While we were all staring at the character creation screen, we finally came up with our theme. We decided to name our corporation, The Umbrella Corporation. Yes, we’re all Resident Evil fans, and so we then began to name our characters after toons in the series. I knew who I wanted to name my toon after from the moment we came up with the theme. I quickly typed in “William Birkin” and exalted when I saw the name wasn’t already taken. I quickly made my toon high in Intelligence and Research skills, as I wanted to fulfil the mad scientist role.
This was the beginning of my journey in the most in depth MMORPG I have ever played. No matter how many times I took a couple months off to try another game, I always came back to EVE. I ended up creating 2 OTHER accounts so I could run 3 simultaneous characters at once. (Not nearly as complicated as WoW to do) Even in my second account, I continued the Resident Evil theme with my next highest skilled player, James Marcus.
Well, after playing together for a year, my buddies didn’t like the passive skill system in EVE as much as I did, and decided to move along to the next big hit: World of Warcraft.
I was totally against the change. I loved playing EVE, and I thought WoW was a phase. Little did I know that WoW would be the force it is today. I resisted playing WoW for quite a long while, until one day, my buddies ganged up on me when I came to visit one weekend and presented me with a 10 day free trial key. Reluctantly, I installed WoW, and was again, forced to choose a character name.
Surprisingly, instead of choosing Birkin, I googled some “god of war” and came up with an Undead Warrior named Mider. After leveling in the beginning zone to level 5 with two of my closest friends hovering over me and helping me get used to the controls, they finally left me to go play their late 40 toons. I got the invite to their guild that they had created, and surprisingly had about a dozen people we knew from friends of friends in real life.
I had obviously had a late start on leveling, so I went to work! After a couple of days, I found myself at level 18 in Sepulcher, and I was not enjoying my Warrior at all. I didn’t like melee combat. I didn’t like having an escape route if I got too much aggro while questing. I just wasn’t enjoying it, and mostly it was due to a lack of understanding of the class.
I decided to start a new character. I created an Undead Warlock named Sheikra. I got the name from a roller coaster at Busch Gardens. 🙂 After leveling to 35 and standing at the top of a plateau in Thousand Needles, getting pissed off by the second that I can’t kill this stupid elite Thunderhawk before the adds around her respawn, I decided that WoW wasn’t for me. I missed EVE too much, and my friends were in their late 50s already, and my leveling was coming slow as ever. I was fed up. I quit WoW.
About 6 months later, I decided to give WoW another chance. I had reigned supreme in EVE for a while, and was living the high life. I wanted to supplement my easy living in EVE with a bit of WoW on the side.
After reactivating my account, I logged into my Warlock. There I sat, in the same spot in Thousand Needles. I immediately logged out and went to the character creation screen, and knew that I had to start on a new character, as this was going to be a whole new experience for me. I was determined to avoid the same mistakes I made the first time around that made the experience so unenjoyable for me.
After thinking for a while about what I wanted to play, I came up with an Undead (yes, I like Undead) Priest. I knew immediately that I wanted to use the name Birkin for my toon. I wanted to start out on an upbeat note and I knew that branding my new toon with a name that I’ve grown to love over the past year and a half would kick start my WoW career like nothing else could.
Unfortunately, by the time I reactivated, my two good friends that started me playing, were in two different raiding guilds at this point. They had left the original guild behind for the casuals. I stayed in that guild until I hit level 40. At that point, I knew it was time to part ways and seek out a change. It turns out that my friend’s guild was merging with another guild in the same boat as them, and so I took that time to join Draconis Occisoris. It was all downhill from there, as I kept the Birkin name, and cancelled (then reactivated, then cancelled, then reactivated, then cancelled…) my EVE account off and on over the years.
Currently, I’m an officer in DO and we’re making the transition to 25 man content due to the recruitment push I set forth in the past couple months. Every once in a while I’ll get a whisper with someone proclaiming how big of a Resident Evil fan they are, and all I can do is smile and reminisce.
Birkin's Brain 