This is not my IF!

Of course by IF, I mean Iron Forge...

I was concerned about forgetting to jump to the new server so I did it today. Fairly easy. The directions don't quite jibe with the reaction of the interface, but hey, since when is that a novel experience for the end user. LOL. (After you jump servers via the web page account management on WoW, the actual WoW interface asks you what realm you want to change to...ie, log in on, ie, what's your new realm.)

So after I jumped I logged in to see if all my precicious bits and bobbles came with me, which they did. As it turned out, I had last logged out in IF, right by the gryphons. So there I was...and it was...really, really...quiet. I mean, there were the gyphons and the gryphon master...and me.

About then I noticed on the general chat channel a remark that I wished I'd written down. It went something like this: This is not IF, this is not my IF. And he was right. No lag. No slow-mo crashing about into people and objects that are so thick they overlap. No ambient noise of spells being cast behind me and duels and voice emotes all around, no clopping rams or whizzing snowballs. There was no LED-like crawl from the trade channel hawking various blue and purple goods considerably over-priced; only a few, intermittent LFG for SM or LFM for Scholo. WTF?! Where was I?

Now, I know that I'm walking around the same IF; it's the same software app. sitting on a different server. But I can feel the difference. It's like a bad sci fi movie where you wake up and everyone looks the same but something's not right and you know, you sense, these are replacements and something evil is going down...and you want to run. LOL. Seriously.

Sure, it didn't help that my social panel (!) didn't show any friends, or that my guild slate was empty. But still, this was a palpable vibe...out of phase, ersatz IF, nature out of joint... I want to think about this some more.