WoW Memories #4: October 27th, 2006

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.

The first three installments were all first impressions that I posted one day after another, but from then on, mentions of the game started to be further apart.

The following was originally posted on October 27th, 2006 under the title "WoW Ramblings":

Thoughts from someone who's been playing her first MMORPG for a week now:

The world, it is a-purty. When I read some articles about the game before getting it I saw some comments about people not liking the graphics because they thought the polygon count was too low or something. Bollocks. It's not that it is particularly high, but the whole world is just so well-made that you don't really notice. When your character is crossing the sea on the back of a hippogryph you're much too busy marvelling at the detail on the waves below and the stars above to worry about things like your ride's claws not being perfectly rounded.

Races: I'm surprised to say that people are more boring than I expected. I knew that they were shallow and as such it was clear to me that there would be a lot less Orcs than Night Elves for example. But that most people would still choose to simply be humans in a fantasy world where they could also be one of seven more or less fantastical races? That floored me. I mean, I made a human character¹ and the starting area there was absolutely flooded (see my initial thoughts about not even being able to find my own character). I made a Night Elf and it was pretty quiet there. I made a Troll and the place was absolutely dead, even though it's the combined starting area for two races. The mind, it boggles.

Addictiveness?² Still undecided. I have been playing a lot this week, but I wouldn't say that this went beyond anything I've done previously when I really got into a new game I got. The "problem" is that it can be really hard to put an end to things. When I play Sims and it's getting late I can say to myself that I'll just finish one more Sim day and that's it. It's rare that something unexpected happens that will make me change my mind. In WoW you have the real-people wild card which makes things a lot more difficult. I.e. you are about to call it a day when a complete stranger asks you for help with something. While it's not advisable to follow a stranger to unknown places in real life, things are quite different in the virtual world and you can soon end up walking down an unknown road with no clue where you'll end up and when. Or you just want to quickly catch a few fish when a friend asks you to go on a quest with them... and suddenly you're in the process of crossing the continent without even knowing what you've just gotten yourself into.³ It's a complex issue.

Crossing the continent brings me to one of my few complaints: While there definitely is a lot to do in the game, you end up spending even more time just going back and forth between places, which can get quite annoying.⁴ There are ways to speed things up once you reach the higher levels, but when you're still as new as I am, travelling is really quite tedious. Especially when quest givers keep sending you back and forth between places on opposite ends of the map. Rawr.

Anything else? Oh yeah, I wonder if one-man invasions like the one I described here⁵ are a common practice? Because today Nemi and I saw it happen on Darkspear too, when a high-level Orc Shaman invaded Aubergdine and killed everyone in sight while running laps around town. Is this considered fun? Surely there can be no other point to it, seeing how I can't imagine the game rewarding people for killing newbies. Admittedly it was vaguely amusing to watch, but only for as long as you didn't get involved yourself - as both Nemi and I did by accident when we cast spells on people who had been involved in the fight before and were instantly vaporised by the Troll⁶ as a result.

¹ I think it's funny that I was so judgemental about this, yet did not draw a connection to the fact that my own first character was also a human, and the one I kept playing afterwards was a night elf.

² Again, even as I enjoyed myself immensely, my fear of unhealthy addiction was very real.

³ I'm pretty sure this was in reference to Nemi making me do the Wetlands run to join her in Westfall (where she'd had to go for her druid's seal form quest).

⁴ My friend Matje told me at the time that people also jokingly referred to the game as "World of Walkcraft" for that reason. I think it goes to show that people weren't blind to Vanilla's flaws even back then... we just loved it anyway.

⁵ This linked back to my second post about WoW.

⁶ I can't believe it took me 18 years to notice that I changed the assailant's race between the start and the end of the paragraph. What was it, an orc or a troll?