I could have been your “Sheila,” I picked up WoW on a whim to try it out after playing around with the free trial. My husband joined because I was playing. I had a friend who played and we played with him briefly on his server but found it frustrating. He knew all the quests and was zipping around leveling very quickly, whereas we knew very little. We ended up making new characters on another server he didn’t play on.

The first little while we spent meeting people and leveling together. The thing is, though, that unless you set out to deliberately isolate yourself – no person exists in a vacuum. We met other folks around our level, other people who were in guilds, and eventually applied and were accepted to a guild.

Even without a prior “in,” people in the guild were helpful and yet it was really isolating. We saw all of these things going on at level 70 and nobody was leveling alts or really had time to spend with us. The sole interaction we had with some of them was “I’ll run you through Scarlet Monastery.” I hated it.Sprinting along behind a max-level tank annihilating an instance and playing loot-monkey was not my idea of a good time.

Eventually, a few people who hadn’t been playing for some months started to play again – they had characters at our level. We ended up becoming close friends and we all quit that guild together. We simply had nothing in common with the “level 70″ people who lorded it over us and made us feel like stupid noobs. At least one of the folks we befriended was an experienced player who had re-rolled the character he played with us, and he taught me sooo much that I wouldn’t have known on my own, how to maximize my DPS, how to gear, how to gem. He was a valuable resource.

My leveling experience would have been a poorer one without his help, and it wouldn’t have been any fun swept behind a veteran, but it also would have been bad to not have anyone willing to help me or answer questions. I think it comes down to the “teach a man to fish” idea. I am happy to help new players or answer their questions when I come across them, but I won’t carry or boost them through content so that they don’t experience the game on their own.