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. Since there was never an intent to have these posts be read by a wider audience, a lot of things will be lacking context (which would have been obvious to me and my friends at the time) so I'm adding footnotes to make things clearer, and to judge my past self's choices.
The following was originally posted on October 21th, 2006 under the title "More WoW Fun":
Ah, the bizarreness of the human condition.
Yesterday I logged on
one more time to see how many Germans would be online in the middle of
the night.1 Unsurprisingly the place was pretty dead. Except that I ended
up running right into the middle of a commotion.
As it turned
out Goldhain2, the village next to the starting grounds, was suffering a
two-(or-three)-man invasion by an Orc huntress and her pet lion and some
other Horde guy I couldn't identify.3 He had a staff and made himself
invisible a lot.4 Now, they couldn't actually attack any players without
being attacked first, so they started slaughtering NPCs instead, which
caused a lot of "OMG, the village is under attack" messages to pop up in
the chat.
A few brave souls actually ventured forward and tried
to take them on, but they were killed almost instantly. It was really
sad. After that everyone else made sure to not attack the Horde players
anymore, but they kept following them around, jumping up and down and
yelling for help. I thought it was quite sad and funny at the same time.
I guess that was the revenge for everyone making fun of the Orc corpse that lay on the town square all day long.5
1 As a reminder, I was still living in Austria back then, bought the game in German, and rolled my first character on a German server.
2 Goldhain is the German name for Goldshire. I was using the German client and while I was writing about the game in English, I didn't immediately realise that some places had different names in German and English.
3 I think it's interesting that even though I rolled on a PvE server and had no interest in PvP at the time, literally the second post I wrote about the game was about an instance of world PvP. In the starting zone. People are not exaggerating when they say that it was happening everywhere back then.
4 The only class that would fit that description would be druid, but then I'm thinking that if it had been that, I would have made note of the giant bloody minotaur instead of "a Horde guy with a staff"? I think it's more likely that it was something like an undead mage or warlock whom I simply struggled to keep track of.
5 That last sentence is fascinating to me simply because the notion that a dead orc in town would keep general chat talking all day is kind of incomprehensible to me nowadays, but I guess those were different times and it took a lot less to get everyone excited and chatting.
Posts
I remember Alliance building raids to attack Crossroads all the time on my server. They'd get tired of attacks on Goldshire and would return the favor by messing things up for the Horde players at Crossroads.
ReplyDeleteTarren Mills vs Southshore happened, too, but since I was mostly on Kalimdor that's the world PvP I noticed most. It is a bit odd to look back at it as people would take you generally as long as you had a mount. Fresh level 40s weren't much help against some 60s, of course, but those days it seemed like people just wanted bodies. :)
Ahh the good old days :) I had guildmates who played the game in German too, it was almost impossible to follow their discussions on Teamspeak haha!
ReplyDeleteIt's crazy that WoW is turning 20 this year. I have so many fond memories of Vanilla....even if I'm no longer playing. Maybe I'll still dedicate a post to it too, come to think of it!
If you feel like indulging your nostalgia a bit, the upcoming anniversary event seems like a good opportunity by the way!
Delete