World of Warcraft post #1 - The past

Hello my friends!

This post and 2 future posts will be about World of Warcraft. I had this idea of writing about my past and present experiences in World of Warcraft and also predict a bit about the future of World of Warcraft. So let’s get started then!

I started to play WoW back in February of 2006 after me and a bunch of friends who were playing another MMORPG called Tibia, felt kind of bored of that game after playing it for about 2 years. So we all bought ourselves a copy of “vanilla WoW”. We each rolled a Night Elf, me personally rolled a hunter due to my class in Tibia had been a hunter-type character. *yay +5 points for imagination*. We all leveled together, questing, doing dungeons etc. It was a lot of fun. The friends I was playing with were good real life friends so whenever we’d get together outside the game, it would be our main topic of discussion. We also arranged LAN-parties and played together over a weekend.

Sadly over time, my friends interests were more in the PvP aspect of the game and I was more of a dungeon-person so I started looking for some raiding guilds to play with. So after a bit of searching I found a guild that needed a hunter. This was just when Zul’Aman had been opened. *the level 60 one, not this new 85 business!* I was really excited over this and wanted to get in there as soon as possible.

So we started to raid, the guild was horribly organized and nobody really took charge over anything. There was a lot of favoritism going around due to that the founders were all real life friends etc. But I didn’t care too much, I just wanted to see the content and have fun, which because I was favorited quite a lot, I got to do. *hihi* But sadly all good things must come to an end. And as any WoW-player will tell you, after doing the same raids over and over, you start to lose interest,  which I did. So I hung up my gun after playing my little hunter for quite a few months and un-subbed for my first time and continued on with other games. Until….. *drum roll!*

The Burning Crusade! Yes, much like many others, I returned to the world of Azeroth *and beyond* with the release of WoW’s first expansion. With excitement pumping through my veins and joy in my heart, I picked up Burning Crusade along with my old friends and we headed towards Outlands….for about 20 minutes. The amount of ganking and people fighting over quests made the game unbearable for me. I was so disappointed. All my excitement was torn away from me the moment I saw the amount of people fighting over the same stuff. I had it in my mind that it would be a lot of people, but you never quite grasp how much people play on your server until they’re all at the same place at the same time.

So what did I do? well, the new expansion also introduced 2 new races. The Blood Elves and the Draenai. So I created a little Draenai priest, introducing Peyn. I enjoyed my priest, it’s the 1 character where I’ve had the most fun on in WoW and played the longest. Even starting at level 1 was exciting due to the new starting areas, the new quests, the new graphics. It felt like starting WoW from the beginning *at least until I hit Darkshore..sigh*.

While leveling Peyn, I ran into some very interesting people in Scarlet Monastary during a dungeon run. A paladin healer and a warrior tank, unlike most people in a random pick-up groups, they were somewhat well-mannered and spoke english so I decided to try and get to know them a bit better. Turns out they were a real life couple from England and they had just started a guild, so I asked if I could join them and they happily *I think* invited me. There was already a bunch of people in the guild that I grew very fond of very quick. We had many laughs in guild chat and many interesting runs in the leveling dungeons together.

I stayed in this guild all the way from level 35-ish upto 70 *which was the max level at the time*. Sadly I leveled quite a lot quicker then many others in the guild so when I hit 70 and wanted to start raiding, I really felt terrible about leaving that guild. It had been my home for quite a while and I had a lot of fun with the people in it. Even after leaving I still stayed in contact with many friends I had made within the guild and some of them that were also level 70, joined the same raiding guild.

And boy, oh boy.. did we raid. I must have done Karazhan a million times, I kid you not. I basically lived in that place. I knew every single boss like the back of my hand, every tactic, every phase, every timer. Karazhan was the place for me. I was shadow spec at the time because we had plenty of healers in the guild and I’m pretty sure I was the only shadow spec’d priest in the whole guild which was quite awesome. Back in the day when shadow priests were mana batteries and were basically praised for their awesomeness *this is not my skill or anything, the spec was just so very viable (cough, OP! cough)*.

Sadly the leadership in this guild wasn’t very good, people went inactive without notice, people stopped showing up to raids and I really only wanted to raid and have fun with people on ventrilo so I decided to bail on this guild aswell after having a talk with the leadership and being very un-impressed with their answers. So I was guildless for a while and didn’t enjoy it at all. Good thing some old friends from the first guild had now reached 70 and was raiding pretty hardcore with a somewhat serious guild, so I applied to them and got invited quite quickly.

Really really oraganized guild. First time I had ever been in a really well organized guild with class-leaders, proper management, proper sign-ups for raids and everything. They were all really friendly aswell. Barely any egomaniacs at all, which if you’ve ever raided in WoW, you know is rare! We flew through Karazhan like it was nothing, same with Gruul’s Lair, Magtheridon, Serpenshrine Caverns and Tempest Keep. We even made it into Mount Hyjal. As you can see, things were going well, but sadly I don’t have any interesting stories. Because things were just going too well. Raiding started to feel like a job to me, It wasn’t about the laughs on vent, about the hilarious yells when a tank pulls the wrong target. Everybody was so focused on progression that somewhere, we forgot the fun part of this game. So after our first Mount Hyjal run, I decided to once again call it off with WoW.

I still subbed a month here or there just to see what was up, but I never stuck around any longer periods after that. I think I had gotten burned out *which is kind of crazy if you think about it, this is supposed to be something fun, right?* I had lost most of my interest for this game. I didn’t even come back for Wrath of the Lich King expansion. I had no interest at all for it.

I tried a little PvP on my friends rogue in Wrath, but never anything special. Time moved on and so did I. Played a bunch of other games in the meantime. I figured I’d come back eventually to WoW. If history has taught me anything is that WoW will always have some kind of place with me, it rubs me in just the right way somehow *no, pervs*. There has been plenty of more experiences I didn’t mention, small and big. These are just some of the adventures you can have in World of Warcraft.

I will try to release the next post for Friday aswell. I want to get some of our consistency back, I feel like it’s only fair to anyone who likes our crazy shenanigans. Thank you for reading and if you have any significant moments in World of Warcraft that you wish to share, please do so in the comments, in an email or on twitter. Good bye for now.