Everquest started to bring MMORPGs into the mainstream of popular culture. What Everquest started though, World of WarCraft finished. With ten million players and counting, it has more than succeeded in bringing MMORPGs into the mainstream. Even with all of the time and money invested into improving this relative newcomer genre of online games, there are still many problems that game companies have been seemingly unable to fix.

To get to the ever popular end game content, players will have to spend hundreds of hours leveling up their characters. The world record up until April 2008 had been 149 hours for leveling up the whole way to level 70. While that has recently been beaten, it will still take the average player hundreds of hours to level up the whole way. When Wrath of the Lich King is released later in 2008, it will take players even longer to level up to level 80. Therefore, it's vitally important to understand how to maximize your entertainment while leveling up. After all, you'll be spending hundreds of hours getting to level 70 (and soon, level 80).

In WarCraft lore, the events of WoW take place after WarCraft III, the last WarCraft RTS game. Blizzard is well known for telling a great story, and World of WarCraft is no exception. Players will feel pulled into the game, especially the first time they play through it, if only for the storyline. With the various kingdoms destroyed in the events of WarCraft III and The Frozen Throne (its expansion pack), players will set out to help rebuild the kingdoms. Leveling guides will help players maximize the enjoyment they receive from playing WoW, and will let them focus on soaking up the story (or level up more quickly) instead of getting stuck on difficult quests.

Two of the main methods for leveling a character up are grinding and questing. The former is used to describe sitting in front of your computer for hours on end killing the same monsters over and over to rack up experience points. Grinding has been a staple of MMOs since before the days of Everquest, and it's almost taken for granted as a part of the MMO experience. However, many people are unhappy with grinding. They feel it to be too monotonous to be worth ten or fifteen of their dollars a month in subscription fees, but this is a relatively new movement in MMOs to steer away from grinding. Before, there weren't any alternatives, and players were simply stuck grinding to level up. Southpark had a now famous spoof of WoW gameplay when the main characters killed millions of low level boars to level up. While that's a bit of exaggeration, the idea remains the same.

World of WarCraft did a great deal to change this idea about MMOs though. Blizzard's writing staff did a terrific job coming up with thousands of quests for players to undertake, and each of them gives a fair amount of experience. WoW combines many of the elements of single player RPGs and fuses it with the benefits of an MMO world. Suddenly, players were able to complete entire story arcs and epic quests in Azeroth instead of just killing dragons and orcs for rewards. Blizzard has done a lot towards perfecting the MMORPG genre. In fact, epic storytelling is what really started the entire roleplaying genre off. Dungeons and Dragons can be considered the start of modern gaming and its ideals, and that was almost entirely about storytelling and immersing the characters in another world. Grinding was an unfortunate side effect of a lack of content for MMO worlds, but that trend is being reversed.

However, Blizzard left grinding open as an option for players, and some players might prefer grinding over questing. Either way, World of WarCraft is about choices, and Blizzard gives it players several. Questing is now much more integrated into the entire MMO experience than ever before thanks to World of WarCraft, and the effects on the genre can already be seen in new games such as Lord of the Rings Online, a game that resembles WoW in terms of gameplay and general atmosphere.

But why the rush to level the whole way to the level cap? Many people play MMOs just for the PvP (player versus player) experience often available only late in the game. Also, many of the hardest dungeons require dozens of high level characters to have so much as a chance of being successful. These areas have the greatest rewards, but as such, they are also the most competitive and difficult out of any in the game. There really isn't any point to even attempting the end game content unless your character is leveled up completely.

In fact, other aspects of WoW require high level characters as well. Many crafting materials can only be acquired by high level characters simply because lower level characters can't defeat the enemies in the vicinity of those resources. For the greatest rewards, players need to level up. After all, that's the single most fundamental point of the RPG, which has evolved from epic storytelling to more of a competition to have the absolutely strongest character ever.

When creating a character in WoW, players can choose races from two main factions: the Alliance and the Horde. Neither are intrinsically more powerful than the other, but they start in different locations and have unique races to each. Because WoW has become so wildly popular, a number of guides have risen up to help players get the most out of the game. Unfortunately, the guides tend to more often than not be centered around the Alliance for leveling concerns (in fact, a new one has been released at www.wowaddicts.com with a new world record for leveling a character to level 70), but one Horde guide in particular stands out.

Joana's Horde guide is still the definitive leveling guide for Horde players after years of service. You might ask why you would want or need a leveling guide, but the answer is quite simple. Especially for new folks, players are likely to spend hundreds of hours leveling up their characters. Along the way, they probably won't know which quests are most beneficial, and they won't know hard quests from the easier ones. When you're leveling up, do you want to get stuck on one quest for two hours before giving up, or would you want to know not to do it before hand?

These leveling guides have been helping players level up their characters more quickly while also increasing the amount of fun they have while doing it too. Not only are they given a hand picked list of quests that balance fun and speed, but they also won't have to waste any time looking for other folks to complete group quests with. People who already know the plot arcs probably won't care one way or another about reading the quest stories and completing every single little deed in the land of Azeroth, so they'll want to know which quests they can easily complete on their own.

That's where Joana's Horde guide comes in. By giving players a hand picked list of the fastest quests, they can reach the end level content more quickly and easily than before. Also, players will never find themselves forced into grinding to level up, a danger that they may fall into if they don't plan ahead while questing. With helpful links to popular WoW quest sites Allakazam and Thottbot, Joana's Horde guide gives players the definitive tools they'll need to complete any quest quickly and easily.

However, the strength of Joana's Horde guide is also its weakness, depending on your perspective. Players looking for a compact guide detailing which quests to choose will undoubtedly love Joana's Horde guide. However, the guide itself only has links to those two sites. This means that players will be spending a lot of time minimizing WoW to go click on the links to see how to do quests if they get stuck. However, the guide is short enough that it can be printed out, so players who don't care about reading the various guides for each quest or are already familiar with the quests will love the succinctness of Joana's Horde guide.

Beyond the written guide though, Joana recorded much of the journey to level 70 for players to watch. This allows them to get a bird's eye view of the strategies that Joana employed for her Horde character, and while both high definition and normal versions had previously been available of the videos, only the normal definition videos remain (the high definition video site has since been taken offline). Still, the video guides present players with yet another perspective for acquiring these strategies, and it's a tool all players can appreciate. Not only that, but video guides are undeniably more entertaining to learn from than written guides, and they prepare players a great deal more for the trials that lay ahead of them. Video guides may become the standard in the coming years due to their growing popularity.

Leveling guides are great at helping characters level up more quickly and helping them to enjoy the world of Azeroth and Outland much more. However, Joana's Horde guide is only available for Horde players. Alliance players will want to look to the brand new guide released at www.wowaddicts.com by Glutony, a level 70 dwarf hunter, who recently smashed the previous leveling world record of 149 hours. Glutony wrote down all the steps he took to complete his record setting achievement, and his guide is almost as epic as World of WarCraft itself. At more than six hundred pages, he leaves no page unturned for players, and they can have the most comprehensive leveling guide ever. So regardless of whether you want a Horde guide (Joana's Horde guide) or an Alliance guide (at www.wowaddicts.com), there is a leveling guide to suit your needs.