WRUP: Another day in the office

Every week, just at the start of the weekend, we catch up with the WoW.com staff and ask them, "What are you playing this week?" (Otherwise known as: WRUP!) Join us to see what we're up to in and out of game -- and catch us in the comments to let us know what you're playing, too

[The following may or may not be a dramatization of actual events.]

On a sunny autumn day, in an exceptionally metropolitan (yet fictitious) city, on the 38th floor of an exceptionally corporate-looking (yet fictitious) building, the ever fashionable Alex Ziebart pushed open the carved, mahogany doors of his office and sauntered out into the slightly less attractive general office of the WoW.com non-senior staff. Alex smiled as several eager (yet fictitious) interns immediately stopped in their tracks and focused their eyes on him with full admiration.

The WoW.com staff, who had previously been working at various levels of productivity, now sat up attentively and looked to Alex, who had stopped his stride in the center of their desks. "My friends" he said, his voice deep like the honey-rich call of a bassoon. Mat McCurley swore he saw Anne Stickney shiver at the words of their senior editor.

"In addition to your usual W.R.U.P. assignment, I have a task for you all." Alex punctuated his words by tossing back the lengths of red gabardine that cloaked his Spartan form. "Bring me the oldest WoW screenshot you still have saved."

And so it was done.

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Amy Schley (@wowlawbringer): This was my very first main, a dwarf hunter with his favorite bear, both of whom were turned into ghost forsaken thanks to the dead sailors and marines in the Wetlands. I discovered that my oh-so-clever name of Oso (male bear) was inappropriate for my obviously female pet. A renamed Osa has accompanied me to 80 and is my favorite tank.

This weekend? The normal -- guild alliance raid (Hi SCAR buddies! Don't Zaboo me, please), heroics, farming to level my new alchemy profession, cleaning house, teaching Sunday School and working on my patent specification and my Patent writeup.

Anne Stickney (@Shadesogrey): This weekend I will be writing like mad.

I have two screenshots, the first is of my very first character and dates back to January 15th of 2005. My character had just dinged level 30, and I finally got to wear a hat. I did my best at trying to give my character clothes that made her look nice, but at about level 25 or so I realized the destiny of druids was to look like amazingly mismatched clowns, so I threw up my hands and went for it. The second was taken a few weeks later, when my character, level 32 or thereabouts and in much nicer Green Whelp Armor stumbled across someplace she should not have been, and coincidentally one of the most beautiful places I had seen in WoW to date.

Basil Berntsen (@outdps):This is my baby huntard, circa fall 2007. That cat ended up being named after (and looks just like) my RL cat, and I had him until 3 days before they announced that they were increasing the stable slots.

This weekend, I will podcast so hard it hurts.

Dan O'Halloran: Finally got a key for Final Fantasy XIV open beta so will be diving into that this weekend as well as the new LotRO Vol 3 Book 2 Free To Play new content. Already ran Operation Gnomeregan on my main Alliance toon. May run Zalazane's Fall for fun, too.

Daniel Whitcomb (@danielwhitcomb): I lost most of my real early stuff in a HD Crash, but here is my earliest screenshot: Me in my Feral Gear set, back in Vanilla WoW.

Dawn Moore (@dawnwow): This is the oldest screenshot I can find, dated April 24th, 2006. It's cropped rather awkwardly because I was posting it on LiveJournal at the time (yes, I had one of those.) The character is Nuri, my very first priest, and first Horde too. With her is a Snowshoe Rabbit (with the original model!) I went through quite some trouble to deliver. Back in the day, non-combat pets weren't very popular, so finding a rabbit on a Horde auction house was unheard of. Since you couldn't have opposite faction characters on PvP servers until recently, I had to corpse run a level 5 gnome to a neutral AH and have my then boyfriend buy it before I could even roll my priest. It was worth it though. I named it Muffin.

Fox Van Allen (@foxvanallen): Boy, this weekend. First things first: My roommates are dragging me out to a club again, so those of you in Boston have yet another chance to see me jerk around arhythmically to Ke$ha. After I sleep it off, I figure I'll probably sign on and run some more Burning Crusade heroics on my level 70 Druid and get some It Came From the Blog playing time in as well (I'm not neglecting poor Foxlight on purpose, I swear). And, um ... yeah, that couch. This weekend. This is totally shaping up to be a get-a-new-couch kind of weekend. For real. A couch that doesn't smell funny. Totally.

As for my oldest screen shot ... my hard drive kinda exploded on me about two months ago, and I lost everything. I guess that would make my oldest surviving screen shot the first one I ever took for use at WoW.com. Ah, back when my shadow priest used to be a dwarf -- memories!

Gregg Reece (@undeadfish): I'm getting ready for a Pathfinder campaign and trying to figure out what would be the most fun class combo to play. Suggestions would be appreciated for really messed up combos. Otherwise, I'm going to attempt to get time to actually play the beta as opposed to previous weekends where I plan to do so, but never end up being home long enough to be on the computer.

Joe Perez (@Lodurzj): Playing Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions, Witch Hunt DLC for Dragon Age: Origins and doing some massive healing runs at level 85 in the Cataclysm beta.

My screenshot is the oldest one I still have floating around, it was shortly after release and my first flight from Darnassus to Auberdine and I was just way too excited to be flying on a Hippogryph with my Night Elf Hunter. I had played horde before that and swapped to play alliance with my friends, so it was super exciting.

Second screenshot (the one named fae4b6b4) for giggles is just so you guys can see how horrible my UI was back in the day. I was playing on a 12" macbook and it was the first time I had tried messing around with ANY addons at all lol.

Kelly Aarons (@Cadistra):I'm at work so I can't grab a screencap, but this weekend will involve shipping some WoW Eh orders, and prepping for WoW.com's next comic premier. I'll try and sneak in some SMT: Strange Journey and hop on a fun Naxx run with the guild.

Lisa Poisso (@emused): I'm not playing anything this weekend - I'm going to do my best to stay horizontal with my nose in a book. The oldest screenshot I can put my hands on today isn't among my oldest, but I guess it's still early enough ...

Matt Low (@matticus): Apparently there's a new Mass Effect 2 DLC that I need to go beat. Going to go knock that out of the way. I want to get in a few beta instance runs this weekend. Sadly, my gear requirements aren't quite high enough. Not sure what i can do and I hit 85 as well. Guess I'm going to have to wait.

My screenshot is so old, its a freakin' .tga file. You can see KTM, CT Mod and some other ancient raiding addons that were considered a staple years ago.

Mathew McCurley (@gomatgo): Vacation. Bye bye. Send all of your Spartan UIs to sacco@wow.com.

Matthew Rossi (@matthewwrossi): This weekend I'm going to come up with a campaign setting for a tabletop RPG just for kicks. Also, probably some raiding, possibly ICC or Ruby Sanctum.

Rich Maloy (@stoneybaby): I'll be freaking out all weekend because the first episode of Big Crits Season 2 premieres next week on Machinima.com, which means I'll be working with the editors all weekend on it. Actually, I won't be freaking out on Friday because that's my nine year anniversary with my girlfriend. Nine years. Wow.

My oldest screenshots were lost in a tragic hard drive crash, thankfully I saved a few choices ones. Here's my oldest of the few that survived the crash. This was the group that I ran dungeons with back in vanilla WoW. That's me as the boomkin in the middle, Finnmaccool; those were pre-Stoney days.

Robin Torres (@cosmiclaurel): Jan 8, 2005 is when my screenshot was taken -- when The Spousal Unit and I still played Alliance only and during the days when Quest Minion was king.

I will be playing Civ 4: Beyond the Sword all weekend along with some WoW, of course. Oh and Words with Friends, which needs to get on Game Center.

Zach Yonzon (@battlemasters): I've been amusing myself with a Facebook game called Pirates Ahoy! which has gotten even more fun after last week's update which introduced a glorified form of rock-paper-scissors PvP.

The oldest screenshot I could find is a recovered file from a crashed HD so I'm not sure it's actually the oldest, but this is a seven-man BRD run with my wife and friends on our original server. That's my hunter on the upper left with a bat (Ressan the Needler) before bats came in vogue with Zul'Gurub.

Psst, WRUP? -- What R U Playing this weekend? Join us to see what we're up to in and out of game -- and catch us in the comments to let us know what you're playing, too!�