WoW Memories #7: November 11th, 2006

I'm celebrating WoW's 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 following was originally posted on October 11th, 2006 under the title "More WoW Talk":

After a week of frustrating uni work it was good to be able to just spend a whole day playing again. Mind, I still have work to do for next week, but just for this one day I got to enjoy pure bliss again.

As such I think it's time for some WoW observations again - randomly illustrated with pictures that have little to do with what I'm talking about, but I just like taking screenshots, and what's the point of taking them if nobody is ever going to see them?

First off, I think it's interesting to note that even though I've been playing for almost a month now, I've still made almost nothing but positive experiences with the game. Considering the kinds of stories I've heard from some people that's pretty damn impressive. I mean... yes, I have seen people pretend to engage in sexual acts.¹ I've also seen people beg, be careless, rude or generally unkind, but those are the exception rather than the rule. On the other hand I've teamed up with a lot of random strangers from all kinds of places - England, Poland, Italy, Romania, to name just a few - who were really nice, made me laugh and generally made my time worthwhile.

²

Getting used to all the game-specific lingo can be quite a challenge at times. Of course there's a fair deal you pick up automatically, other times you just ask nicely and people are more than willing to explain things to you, but there's just so damn much of everything... If I look at a random post in [a WoW forum community I had joined] you can bet that there'll still be a lot of comments including acronyms and other game-specific terms that mean absolutely nothing to me.

³

Also, while virtual realities like this allow for a lot of deception, allow you to be prettier and more talented than you'll ever be in real life, there are some personality traits that just show through no matter what. Case in point: my klutziness and dorkiness. I wish that some of the conversations I've had in game could have been saved to illustrate my point, but I'll just have to paraphrase:

Me: Where's the Howling Vale? I can't find it!
Friend: A little west of where you are right now.⁴
Me: *goes west, fights monsters* Does it actually say Howling Vale? Cause I see lots of monsters but it doesn't say...
Friend: Yes, it does.
Me: *runs in circles some more, killing some more monsters* I can't find iiit!
Friend: *comes over, points to the right of where I'm standing* Over there.
Me: ... oh.

I also have the most disconcerting habit of falling off things⁵, which manifested itself as early as Teldrassil (the starting area of the Night Elves), when I fell off the edge of the world a huge waterfall while trying to look over the edge. And died. Only yesterday I was going to take the ship from Booty Bay with Nemi and another guy, but somehow I managed to walk off it, and by the time I had climbed out of the water and came running back I could only yell "Nooo!" in a dramatic manner as the ship left without me. Not much later our party was leaving Ironforge, I ran ahead with an encouraging "I'm ready, let's go"... and promptly fell into one of the lava flows around the city. Fortunately it was covered by a net or something, so I didn't die, but it was still very embarrassing. Needless to say that Nemi was in stitches.

⁶

I also called the city of Auberdine "Aubergine" once. *shifty eyes*

On the whole I find the most fun part of the game so far to do challenging quests or instances together. It's fascinating what amounts of teamwork being stuck in a cave together can inspire (if you don't happen to stumble upon any of the aforementioned unkind exceptions). The only downside of the whole thing is that these things are often simply damn hard. I've tried to do Gnomeregan twice in the last couple of days and both times my group failed (meaning we died halfway through and then gave up because it had gotten late). Yet I still can't wait for the next time we get to try it. And then of course it's on to the next one! Am I a masochist or what?⁷

¹ I remember someone who was playing a male character asking me to do the /kneel emote (innocent ol' me complied of course), just to then stand right in front of me and do a /dance emote involving a lot of hip-thrusting... you get the idea. Obviously this stuck with me as rude, but on the whole I was significantly less bothered by this kind of thing back then than I would be now I think. I don't think it's uncommon to develop less tolerance for people giving you crap as you get older.

² I took that screenshot while our little group was auto-running from one end of Ashenvale to the other. This felt like it took up a lot of our time early in the game.

³ I remember in those early days I would often go into an inn and actually have my character lie down on a bed before logging out because it just seemed right. Definitely one of those aspects of innocence and immersion you can't go back to.

⁴ I find it interesting that I threw the names of friends around left and right without explaining to my readers who's who, but in this particular exchange I opted not to name the person and just put "friend". I wonder why. Also, I remember having this exact same problem with finding the Howling Vale while questing in Classic...

⁵ Now there's something that hasn't changed in almost twenty years!

⁶ This screenshot was taken inside the Stockades. I really wish I'd written down more about all those dungeons runs I did...

⁷ Okay, I guess this hasn't changed either.