I'm celebrating WoW's upcoming 20th anniversary by looking back at my own early experiences with the game 18 years ago, as documented on a personal blog that I was keeping just for myself and some friends at the time.
Today I'm combining two posts since they were both very short.
The following was originally posted on October 22th, 2006 under the title "Socialising In The Twenty-First Century":
Yesterday was full of quite a lot of socialising of different kinds.
[The first two thirds of the post talk about me playing Neopets1 with other people, followed by me throwing a karaoke party for my real life friends in the evening.]
And because that wasn't yet enough to make my day, I got back online after all my guests had left and made a new WoW character to play with Nemi2 on an English server. She said she'd want to be a Night Elf, so I said I'd be one too.
Can you guess who is who?3
Either way, things really are more fun when you do them together. Certainly there are still tasks you'll want to take care of on your own, but when it comes to things like venturing into a cave or attacking a particularly strong monster it's definitely nice to have someone who watches your back and can help you out when you get in trouble.4
The following was originally posted on October 23rd, 2006 under the title "*shuffles uneasily*":
Don't really have anything interesting to say about today. Went to uni, cleaned the piggies' cage5 and generally didn't feel too hot.
The only fun thing I did was play WoW with Nemi again, and this time Mechanichamster joined us too.6 Do I sense a new addiction?7 I sure hope not, because my Sims deserve better than that.8 Still, at the moment I can't help it I guess, after all the game is all new and shiny to me.
1 I played Neopets for about five years before getting into WoW, and I tend to think of it as my "proto-MMO" nowadays. While it was a simple browser-based game and the world of Neopia only existed as a bunch of flash images, it did invite people to think of it as a virtual world, there were "dailies" to do and I ended up interacting with other players quite a lot, which included joining a guild, signing up for multiple forums, and contributing to a Neopets fan blog for a while.
2 I've mentioned my friend Nemi a couple of times before. In a nutshell, she's another person I met on an online forum around 2001. She was from Sweden and we met up in real life a couple of times. We ended up playing WoW together for something like a year or two, though our association became more loose over time, as she was more progression-minded than me. She also came back for Classic for a couple of weeks, though quickly lost interest again.
3 On the left we have my priest Tiranea and on the right Nemi's druid Elentiel. I think either her or Matje recommended that I should roll a priest because having a priest around would be handy for getting into groups. I had no idea what that was going to mean in practice, but I didn't mind filling the role. I ended up enjoying it enough that Tiranea stayed my Alliance main for several years, until I stopped playing in Cata. It wasn't until last year that I finally dusted her off in order to do the night elf heritage quest.
4 With how much railing I've seen against "forced grouping" over the years, I've occasionally come to doubt my own commitment to it. Do I just love group content because that's simply what I got used to over the years? This post shows that the answer to that question is no. I had barely been playing WoW for a few days when I concluded that it was much more fun with other people than to just play by myself.
5 I was still living with my mother at the time and we owned two guinea pigs.
6 Matje created a night elf warrior called Dantaniel to play with us, but from what I remember we didn't actually end up grouping that often. He spent most of his play time raiding with his guild on his mage main on another server and would just log in every so often to level his new alt a bit. Being a much more experienced player, he had no issues keeping up with us even with less play time, but our schedules just didn't seem to align that often.
7 I'd mentioned the subject of addiction previously, and it would come up again later too. I think it's easy to forget for how much hype there was about WoW at the time, there was also fear-mongering about its addictiveness, with the news reporting on people who had got so lost in WoW that they lost control of their real lives. I don't think I seriously expected it to have that kind of effect on me, but I was definitely a little worried about potential negative impacts it could have on me.
8 It goes to show again just how much I was into Sims 2 at the time that I was worried about "neglecting" my characters in the game in favour of WoW.