Interview With a Leveling Guide Author – Dave “Dugi” Farrel, Ultimate WoW Guides

Dave “Dugi” Farrel of Ultimate World of Warcraft Guide fame gave me a few minutes of his time yesterday to answer some questions I had. I hope this helps you get to know the man behind the guide, what goes into a leveling guide, and dispel a few of the more insidious myths out there (aka the “level to 80 in week myth”).

Interview With a Leveling Guide Author
Jon Weston interviews Dave Farrel

Jon – Can you start off by telling our readers a bit about yourself, what your gaming and professional background is, and how you came to create a leveling guide for World of Warcraft?

Dave – Thanks Jon, my name is Dave Farrell, I’m a 28 year old website designer and I’ve always been a gamer all my life. Back in the day it was Atari and Nintendo, now World of Warcraft is pretty much the only game I play. I was one of those crazy people who obsessed with getting Rank 14 when WoW first came out, unfortunately I only managed to get Rank 13. Its very nice to have the ‘Warlord’ title for my character, many of the new players always ask how I got it.

My friends always make fun of how much I play World of Warcraft, but I know if they give it a try they will love it too. The social aspect and interacting with real people is really what draws me into the game as well.

Jon - Can you tell us about how you made your guide? Was it all a solo effort, or did you enlist help along the way? Do you continue to improve your guide today?

Dave – Well I really wanted to be able to play with my friends, but some of them have a lot of difficulty with playing the game and not knowing what to do. So I began creating a guide for them to follow, which proved to be a big hit. Everyone was having fun with it and over the past 4 years I have continuously built my guides to where they are today. I received a lot of help from my wife and sister, both of who now play World of Warcraft because of me. My sister now has a level 80 Orc Warlock, my wife likes to take her time with leveling and try out new characters. I also received help from a variety of hardcore gamers that I met in WoW and after 4 years I still play with them, even though I have never met them in person.

Ask any of our members and they will confirm that we are always updating and improving the guide. We have just recently overhauled our leveling guide to a new automated step-by-step system which is a huge improvement over our old guide. We have many more plans to come, such as language support of German, French, Spanish and Russian. We also have a secret project to expand the guide further but that’s all I can tell you

Jon – Its often hard to find who to believe when we’re talking fastest /played times to level 80. Can you tell us where you think your guide stands in leveling speed compared to the rest of the guides available, and what it is that makes yours the fastest?

Dave – I just want to explain to our readers that when any guide states the number of days it will take you to 80, they actually mean your /played time. Some websites fail to mention this, which is quite misleading to new players thinking they can get to level 80 in a week when that is only possible if they play non-stop for the entire week.

Jon – So when guides promise, “level to 80 in a week”, they actually mean 7 days of /played time… which is actually a hundred plus hours of actual game play… not how many days of the week it’ll take you..?

Dave - Correct.

Ever since blizzard released their RAF (recruit a friend program) which allows you to grant free levels to your friend up to level 60, now we can never be sure if speed leveling records are legitimate. And different people have different styles of playing, some players play everyday while others play only a couple of days a week. The players who only play a couple of days a week can build up a lot rested experience bonus and their overall played time to get to level 80 can be considerably less than someone who plays everyday without rested experience bonus.

Our guide will guide you to level the fastest way possible by 100% questing which is the most fun way. The guide is essential to make sure that you waste less time travelling back and forth, and complete only quests that are worth doing for the experience.

What makes our guide faster has a lot to do with the the automated system that we have for our add-ons, many guides out there don’t provide an automated system, which means that once you have completed a step you have to manually click next to go to the next step and its even worse if you’re using a printed guide. This means you to have to read the objective, and double check to make sure that you have completed it then click the next step. Imagine double checking your steps 15,000 times because that’s how many times that you would need to do it until you reach level 80 that can easily add a lot of days to your total played time. With an automated system, the add-on will do all the checking for you. It will detect when you accept, complete, or turn in a quest and continuously take you to the next step pointing you to the right direction.

A lot of leveling guides also seem to only focus on hunters, and only include hunter quests, while our guide will automatically detect the class that you’re playing and automatically insert your class quest at the most efficient time. This is also crucial to your leveling speed because these class quests can be time consuming, but will give you important skills to allow you to level faster.

Jon – If you had to choose just two aspects of your fast leveling guide that you’re most proud of, what would they be and why?

Dave – It would have to be our leveling guide, it comes complete with all class quests and its available in both in-game and printed format for people who prefer to have both. We’re also the first guide to offer an in-game leveling talent guide, and we’re also the best value guide on the web, sorry I guess that’s 4 things!

Jon – Can you tell us about map-mods? How do you see their role in WoW today, and in particular, how do they effect people wanting to level fast.

Dave - Map-mods are extremely useful for automatically showing where the quest can be completed (by way of a directional arrow and map indicators), but it still doesn’t provide the efficient leveling path that is crucial to minimize travelling time, so map mods alone don’t necessarily mean faster leveling. While a map mod is included with our guide, its not required as our leveling guide alone is sufficient to take you to level 80. I’d like to note that because we don’t rely on map mods our leveling guide is very friendly for people with slow computers, as mapmods can place extra demand on your computer and can make your game run slower.

Jon - Can you tell us about what support you provide after your customers buy your guides?

Dave - We offer a very high level of support, we have a lot of step-by-step video tutorials that will help guide our members to get started. And if anyone needs more help we have a very active forum where our staff and myself will reply to any question or discuss any topics with you, or you can also contact our technical support using our contact form and we always reply within 24 hours.

Jon – Are you helping them out with any questions they pose? Are you answering support questions personally or do you have a staff?

Dave – Yes definitely, I invite you to check out our forum and you will see that I personally reply to most of the questions. I also have one other staff with me (Jess) that helps me during my time off to make sure that everyone gets the fast support that they need. I can answer anything WoW related.

Jon – Are you an active WoW gamer? How many hours do you play a week, and is your main Alliance, or Horde… or both?

Dave – I am a very active WoW player, I have two Horde level 80 characters that I maintain, a Warrior and a Druid. I enjoy the PVP aspect of the game mostly, because that really suit my lifestyle. I don’t like to commit myself to a set play time schedule of raiding for 2 hours straight.

I used to play at least around 7 hours a day because I was so addicted, but due to the time I spend with our members and what with the updates in WOTLK I have been sacrificing my game time lately to put more work into Ultimate WoW Guide. We really strive to give our customers the best value possible. So at the moment I have only been playing a couple of hours a day, but I’m looking forward to getting back into it more when most of our projects are complete.

Jon – What do you think is the next step in leveling guides? Do you think there’s still something to be tapped to increase leveling speeds even further?

Dave – Blizzard have future plans to cut down leveling time considerably in the next expansion. Creating a new character becomes more and more daunting to new players as max levels are increased with every expansion. I’m really hoping they will just do something similar to what has been done with the death knight, eg once you have 1 level 80 character you can create a level 55 character of any class and the starter zone with give you a complete set of blue gear. I think that would be the perfect solution as it would be a shame to change the first time experience of exploring all the zones of World of Warcraft as you level from 1 – 60.

Sorry I got a bit off track, I think there always improvements, optimizations and leveling path tweaks that you can do to increase leveling speeds. With more improvements to the leveling add-ons and maybe video tutorials on how to play each class at different levels, or how to defeat elite NPC’s… this can help a lot of new players.

Jon - Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule Dave, I look forward to trying your recently updated guide (which I’ll be reviewing here soon!).

Dave – No worries Jon thank you!

If you’d like to try Dave’s most recent update to his guide, you can get a free leveling guide trial of levels 1 through 20, here. Even if your characters are way above this level, it’ll still give you a better hands on idea of how well the guide works… and if nothing else, why not use it to give any new characters you or friends start a boost through the early levels. 

If you’re interested in learning more about Dave’s fast leveling guides, which also include gold and pvp guides, click here to head to his home page!

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