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.
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It's interesting to me that I started nearly the same time as you did. I think my start date was in November of 2006, but the account creation date isn't on my Battle.net account any more and the payment history doesn't go that far back now. (It stops in 2008.)
ReplyDeleteThough I knew about Wow I hadn't tried it until my youngest daughter was trying out the trial edition (20 days time / max level 20). Funny how the max trial level is still 20. :) Anyway, I had wanted to be in game in case any bothered her. In my muddled thinking I figured an adult reporting issues might be listened to more than a young girl. Thankfully it was never an issue.
Amusingly she didn't stick with it, but obviously I did. I had set myself a goal of seeing if I could hit level 20 before the trial ran out. I figured if I liked the game enough to do that it would be safe to subscribe. Its funny how this detail sticks in my mind, but others around that early game haven't.
As I didn't have any friends who played the game I was that prototypical solo Wow player. It wasn't until New Years day of 2007 that I created the character Piper (now Lyonesse), a Night Elf hunter that I found the combination of class & race that pulled me along to then max level. I still remember entering Darnassus and being so excited by that city. I still play her on a regular basis, and she's now my oldest (surviving) character. Not my main any longer -- that will be forever Pallais now -- but one that I still pursue various solo activities with. :)
As far as grouping goes, it took me a long, long time to find the right guild for me. At first a good chunk of that was me. I wasn't in the right mental space to deal with guilds after the death of my second wife. I generally held it together in real life, but online my sharp edges weren't covered. :/ All of that was my fault, but looking back I can see anonymity wasn't healthy for me or others. :sigh:
Over time and several expansions I found my current guild. Ironically it was in Cataclysm that I found the right group of people. The guild I was in had gone through the many things that would normally kill a guild, but somehow as we replaced people the right mixture joined and we've been raiding off and on every since. :)
Early October 2006 was when the South Park episode about WoW came out. I wonder whether that being spread around online contributed to the game's viral growth at the time.
DeleteI was extremely social in the game's early days - more so than I am now to be honest! I started with friends but made more inside the game in no time at all. There will be more about that in future installments of this series.
I think so. That South Park episode is what got my daughter to want to try Wow out. I think it pulled in more of us late Classic players than anything else. (Though now I wish I had bought the original Collector's edition, of course. ^_^)
DeleteI'm enjoying your reminisces and glad there will be more. :)