Interview: Veluca #12

Today we bring you an interview with Veluca, who was so friendly to fly me to Greymane Manor. 

Thundercable: Would you share with us your afk age, gender and home country?

Veluca: I just hit 18 a few days ago in fact, Male, and the Republic of Ireland.

Thundercable: Is there a story behind your character's name?

Veluca: To some degree. You see, this character is in fact my first RP character, albeit an incredibly evolved version. The character was originally a rogue during my early days, so I wanted them to have a suitable sounding name, the name Veluca came to me in my head, and I liked it, I even ended up looking it up and whadda y'know, apparently the word "Veluca" was a term for "snake/poison" in some foreign language I've never heard of, so young me thought this was a great combination.

It was only months later down the line that I realised where my young brain had inadvertently pulled the name from, a game by the name of Mount & Blade, in which there is a city called Veluca, happens to be the biggest exporter of wine in that game.

Thundercable: Since when do you play WoW and how did you get into RP?

Veluca: Technically speaking I've been around since vanilla, though the majority of that experience was levelling a character on my neighbor's account while he was actually doing things with his life. I didn't get my own account until around a third of the way into TBC, though I didn't actually -do- a lot until like, mid-late Wrath.

As for RP, I was introduced to the idea by an old, old friend of mine, whom I still speak to to this day, from my previous server Saurfang. They essentially taught me what RP was and I ended up being intrigued. They then disappeared without a trace one day, a few months later I decided to make an alt on Argent Dawn to try out this RP thing, this was, if I recall, probably around 2011-2012 ... actually yeah, middle of 2012.

I started off, as mentioned earlier, as a rogue, and thus the bdrp hijinks ensued. One day I ended up seeing an advertisement in trade for a "mercenary RP guild", In my youth and inexperience I thought this was a great idea, so immediately whispered the advertiser, and was instantly invited, and somehow managed to become an officer due to doing the guild master a favor involving temporarily holding the GM position so that I could give it to their alt.

From there the leader decided that we'd instead abandon the mercenary act and become a house guild, and that I would play the younger sister of the house's leader ... we were, and this pains me now to admit it, "House Stark".

I legitimately did not know what Game of Thrones was at the time, so I did not know any better than to accept this as top quality RP for the next few months of my dreadful RP career.

Until I met a very dear friend of mine who spent the next few years RPing and fixing me and is probably the reason why I'm at least semi-competent these days.

Thundercable: Could you give us a short summary of Veluca's story?

Veluca: Well, to understand Veluca, it's kinda necessary to mention her IC husband: Danielus, since myself and the player behind said husband worked together to form the backstory, and a majority of the RP with these characters, they were also the person I mentioned meeting and teaching me how to properly RP after the "Stark" thing from the last question.

Veluca was set up in an arranged marriage at a very young age to a suitable ... uh ... suitor. But due to bad things ended up being forced to marry their brother, Danielus, the two didn't get along at first, due to Vel's youth, (14/15 at the time of marriage) and disliking the idea of being essentially given away as a present to people she didn't even know or like.

Eventually however the two did grow affection for one another, and lived together for several years until the nasty business in Gilneas with the worgen,. Both her and her husband were afflicted with the curse and escaped with the rest of the refugees to Darnassus. Vel for the most part stayed put whilst her husband went off on numerous misadventures through Kalimdor, fighting against the Horde in Ashenvale and doing wizard things until they resettled themselves in Stormwind, her husband becoming a merchant to support them, and amassing enough wealth to live rather comfortably in the city.

Her husband eventually took Veluca herself as an apprentice, and that's where we -actually- started role-playing. From there Veluca's gone a long way from being a simple apprentice at magic, barely able to fling a spell, to a fairly competent caster and summoner, who specializes in conjuring and manipulating Shadowflame under her husband's tutelage, and with a few pointers from the people she's met and the guilds ... well, mainly one guild, that she's been in.

Her closest thing to a goal is to learn everything she can and become a full-fledged magus under her husband's teachings, and mayhap one day have a family, something that has been a long-standing problem with the pair for their eleven year long marriage.

Thundercable: What is your favorite RP event you were part of on AD?

Veluca: I suppose my favorite event, well ... it's less of a singular event and more of a large event chain, was one from my favorite guild, The Eldritch Covenant.

The event in question being a month-long guild expedition through Kalimdor, it was just after a server-wide event in Northrend, the name of which escapes me ... around July-August 2014.

The entire expedition was a massive month-long trip, that I have many fond memories from, and met many friends during, though in particular, the highlight for me was how -alive- everything actually felt. No matter what time it was there would always be -something- happening. You could log in whenever and dive into a continuous ongoing camp RP with people having been there role-playing and discussing things for hours before you even arrived.

It truly felt alive and really hammered home a very warm feeling of community, that there would just always be something happening. Others who were there might view it as nothing major, but to me that in itself was special, and that doesn't even begin to touch on the events which were always terrifically fun and engaging as well.

Thundercable: If you could change things in WoW to improve the RP experience what would that be?

Veluca: I suppose the first thing I'd do perhaps is trying to figure out a more tangible way to explain the game's lore to players in-game.

Having quest text and books containing little nuggets of lore is fine and dandy until you realise only about a tenth of players actually pay attention to either of those things.

I'm not sure entirely how they'd manage it or go about it, but it would give more people a reason to actually get invested and give role-play a go perhaps. Reading through endless pages of wikis and lore videos when I was getting started with RP was quite daunting, and might just outright turn other people off the idea. While they're at it, Blizzard could probably do with fixing a bunch of some of the more vague and broken aspects of their universe's lore.

As for improving the functionality for those of us already here, well ... there's not much to say that hasn't already been said, more in-depth customisation, some form of cross-faction speech that doesn't involve metamorphosed warlocks or being in Ashran, communal instances for guilds perhaps.

The only other things I can think of are a bit biased towards my own preferences as a warlock RPer: Glyphs to allow more customisation of our demons perhaps, different recolors, a better system for naming our demons, etc.

Thundercable: Three short questions: What's your favorite place to be in WoW, what's your favorite tavern and who is your favorite NPC?

Veluca: Favorite place. Uh ... to be honest, I'm quite fond of Gilneas, though of course, I almost never have a reason to be here OOC, and none at all to be here IC, so I rarely get to see it.

Favorite tavern, The Slaughtered Lamb, a lot of fond memories of RP there, plus it's quite the cosy little place, setting aside the crypt and the warlocks and demons below.
And favorite NPC ... hm, that's a toss up between Mistress Nagmara, the succubus from the Grim Guzzler, I always liked her quest of getting the potion for her so she'd unlock the door ... or Blackheart the Inciter from Shadow Labyrinth, for all the horrifying but amusing memories of him mind controlling the entire party to murder the healer whilst all you could do was sit and watch it happen.

Thundercable: Is there a person you would like to see me interview next, and do you have a question you would like to ask that person?

Veluca: The only one I could think of being appropriate off the top of my head would be Arlemont, The Eldritch Covenant's guild master and a very good friend of mine, and unlike me isn't a complete nobody and has somewhat of a reputation among the forum community.

Thundercable: Thank you for the interview and for your time!