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 November 18th, 2006 under the title "WoW Weekly":
Time for some WoW observations made in the past week again! ;-)
When Darkspear was down on Wednesday1 I decided to play with Isadora on Norgannon again - the first character I made, a paladin that has practically been reduced to being my twink2 seeing how I'm always using Tiranea to play with Nemi & Co. Not having any friends to play with on that server seriously takes away a lot of the fun, but that night wasn't so bad because I finally joined a proper party for once. I wouldn't say that I got along with them as well as with some of the people I've met on Darkspear, but for what it was worth we bonded. It started after we had finished the quest that originally brought us together3 and we were wondering what to do next and one of the guys said that there was an elite bear he wanted to kill. I asked whether he had a quest for that and he said no, he just wanted revenge for getting killed by it earlier. That was a feeling I could relate to only too well from some experiences I've had on Darkspear, so we went and slew that bear - twice even.4
It was also interesting to be the leader of the group for once, as I always tend to trail somewhat behind when playing my priest. As a paladin among three warriors - who were two, four and six levels below me respectively - things were quite different though and I was constantly busy trying to draw the mobs at me instead of away from me. At the same time I was still the healer of the group as well, mostly busy trying to save the "baby" of the group from dying, with the main difference being that I could just let the enemies hack away at me while healing the others, 'cause unlike a priest a paladin can take quite a lot of damage. Makes me wonder whether I don't actually like that class better than the priest...5
On the whole I think we've also had more friendly encounters with Horde members than hostile ones, saving several Hordies that were on the brink of death by killing the mobs that were attacking them. It would be too cruel to just stand by and watch, you know? And as Nemi put it: "This ain't a PvP server."6 I already joked that our newly-formed guild "The Dark Crusaders" should be called "The Nice Crusaders" instead.7
And finally, only one reason why questing with several druids at once is fun:
There's nothing like several bears doing a synchronised jig!8
1 I repeatedly noted in other (non-WoW-related) entries that I was unable to play that day because the server was down. I'd forgotten that even back in 2006, servers being down for hours on end was still a pretty regular occurrence.
2 I meant alt, not twink. It's an interesting curiosity of language to me that the word "twink", which in an MMO context stands for an alt that has been geared to the teeth with the help from a higher-level character, came to mean simply "(regular) alt" in German.
3 Based on the screenshot and my memory, that would've been Gathering Idols in Loch Modan.
4 There is actually a quest for Ol' Sooty, called Vyrin's Revenge, but at the time I didn't even know the Farstrider Lodge existed. I don't remember when I first came across it, but I know it was several years later, which at the time made me wonder how the heck I'd managed to miss a whole quest hub in the corner of Loch Modan for that long.
5 I did grow to like paladins a lot too, though I wouldn't necessarily say more than priests. It does strike me as interesting that I showed an instinct to "protect" my fellow players so early on.
6 I think it says a lot about my nature that the very idea of wanting to fight the other faction was so utterly foreign to me to begin with. I just saw them as strangers I couldn't talk to and was curious to find other ways of communicating.
7 I like how quickly I brushed over us becoming part of a guild here! From what I remember it started with us befriending a human warlock called Khytez (pronounced "Kites") in Duskwood. I have this vague memory of grouping with him to help him summon somebody. Soon we were getting invited to join his guild, which was called "Knights of the Light", which is a very stereotypical classic WoW guild name. However, we'd been in the guild for no time at all when I was told that some people were going to leave to form their own guild and that Nemi and I should join them. I had no idea about anything yet at that point, what guilds were even about or why we were doing any of this, but I just did as I was told. The new guild was called "The Dark Crusaders", which is another very stereotypical classic WoW guild name. We had a pretty good time for several months, until one day I logged on to find that the GM had disbanded it in a fit of rage over something unknown. We tried to gather the survivors in the newly formed "The Happy Lemmings" but it was never quite the same.
8 Imagine if there was no /dance emote in WoW. Would there have been as many people making videos of their characters, considering how many of those videos involved people dancing? I wonder if the game would've evolved differently if they hadn't cut the dance studio from Wrath...
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