18/10/2019

10 Years of WoW Blogging

Nogamara from Battle Stance celebrated his blog's tenth birthday today. Go and congratulate him, because he's awesome!

Reading that post also gave me pause though. 2009 to 2019... wait, didn't I start blogging on here in 2009 as well? The answer is yes: in fact, technically this blog's anniversary was about three months ago, and I completely forgot about it. (I have no idea why Parallel Context's tenth anniversary the other day didn't trigger a similar line of thought in my mind by the way... brains are weird.)

I suppose I didn't really think of celebrating this blog's anniversary at least in part because I've been completely focused on my Star Wars: The Old Republic blog for the last eight years, and tended to think of this one as lying dormant. However, Nogamara even counted two whole years of his blog's lifetime during which he didn't make a single post at all - meanwhile I somehow ended up putting out at least half a dozen entries per year even during years when I thought of myself as totally not playing WoW, so... I guess that counts as active in some way?

My first ever post was made on the 12th of July 2009 and called Some thoughts on heroic Oculus. I have to admit that, on re-reading that post, I chuckled at myself referring to it as "the o-word". Yes, I know you're not supposed to laugh at your own jokes, but me from ten years ago might as well be a different person and I think she's kind of funny sometimes, OK?

It's kind of amazing to me now just how prolific I was during the first one and a half years of this blog: I posted pretty much every other day! I was going to say something like "I have no idea how I had the time to do that" but then I remembered that I was unemployed for at least half of that time, so that probably helped.

Incidentally, WoW also played a role in eventually ending my unemployment - and that post was my introduction to reddit, since someone linked it there and gave me a crazy traffic spike.

Anyway, I remain impressed by the sheer amount of things I actually had to say about the game in late Wrath in particular. I kind of wish I'd started this whole blogging lark much earlier; then I would now have a detailed record of everything I thought during Burning Crusade as well.

Going through the archives of those early years, you can see the very slow and gradual decrease in my enjoyment of WoW. My second post on the blog was called Four reasons why I like pugs, and especially in the early days there were still quite a number of happy posts about grouping experiences, but over time the percentage of things that annoyed and frustrated me clearly grew.

I quit in March 2012 and had no intentions of coming back, until my now-husband unexpectedly gifted me the Mists of Pandaria expansion and some game time at the end of 2013, which had us going through a little levelling adventure together, until we both hit max level and quickly got bored again.

In 2015 I discovered the world of private servers during a burst of nostalgia, so then I wrote about my experiences on those at intervals over the next couple of years. Conveniently Blizzard announced WoW Classic mere weeks after I'd got fed up with yet another piece of private server drama, and that eventually led me to where I am now, blogging about WoW Classic. It feels crazy to think that a whole decade has passed in that time, because it certainly hasn't felt that long to me.

I would say something like "to the next ten years", but the thought of one day being able to say that I've blogged about World of Warcraft for twenty years is kind of terrifying in its own right. We'll just see how it goes, alright? Thanks for being along for the ride.

5 comments:

  1. Thanks for the kind words :)

    Funny thing though, because as with Belghast's blog I'm kinda certain I had been reading this blog in its first years on and off but didn't really stick around, only to rediscover it when I stumbled upon your SWTOR blog when I dove back into SWTOR in 2017 after my 5? year hiatus. So congratulations to you as well! And yeah, the 2 year break is a little bit of cheating, but I'm no stranger to extended breaks, and I've been blogging for nearly 20 years now, so I don't really count breaks - 2 years is nothing and I posted to other non-gaming blogs in that time anyway :P

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    1. Oh, I also had a personal blog first, which I started back in 2004. That feels a bit different though, as it was more diary-like, not really written with a public audience in mind. It was more of a place to share life updates with friends, the way people now do on social media.

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  2. Congrats on being around for a decade! A single game blog has the drawback of being kind of quiet when you're not playing, but it looks like gotten in a few posts every year.

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  3. Happy blogoversary!!!!

    I was hoping you'd post something, but I wasn't sure if you really counting the time spent away from the blog once you (temporarily) moved away from WoW.

    But nevertheless, I'm really happy for you, Shintar!

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    1. Well, I do count it and I don't. I don't count it as time spent blogging about WoW (and I guess the title of this post is a bit misleading in that regard), but I did blog about MMOs and this blog stayed up during the entire time, without ever going completely dead. It all depends on how you look at it.

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