My First Dungeon on Turtle WoW (Was Messy)

I felt that my first dungeon run on Turtle WoW was worthy of its own post, because it turned into quite an unexpected adventure (in both good and bad ways).

To set the scene, I noticed early on that Turtle's UI included the little dungeon finder eye that was added during Wrath of the Lich King as an icon on the edge of the mini map. I clicked on it to make sure that it was indeed what I thought it was, and while there was a second tab for manual group finding, the primary one was indeed an automated dungeon queue, though it required level 13 to access. I thought to myself that this was a bit odd and un-Vanilla-like, but then it's not an unusual thing for private servers to mix and match different expansion features, so I just shrugged it off.

When my little hunter hit level 13, the option to queue up for Ragefire Chasm opened up, so I signed up for that. (If you have experience playing on Turtle WoW, you may already be able to guess where this is going.) Somewhat to my surprise, I was in the queue for over an hour before anything happened. I mean, I know that wait times as a damage dealer are always longer, but the low level open world zones had been plenty busy and I couldn't quite fathom why seemingly none of these people would be queueing for dungeons.

I was inside a cave in Elwynn Forest when I finally got the pop-up telling me that a group had been formed. I excitedly pressed the "Let's do this!" button and quickly found myself in a group with four Horde characters. Now, I'd read some stuff about cross-faction play being a thing on Turtle, so that part wasn't really a surprise, however what was a surprise - and an unpleasant one at that - was the lack of a teleport to the dungeon.

So here I was, a level 13 Alliance player in Elwynn Forest, with the rest of my group waiting for me in Orgrimmar. Oh. OH.

I immediately apologised, telling them that I was new to the server and had expected this automated group finder to work like Wrath's, and that it probably wasn't worth waiting for me to get over there. I felt profoundly embarrassed, and part of me wanted to quit group right there, but I also hate leaving a group I only just joined, so I kind of hovered for a bit to await the party's judgement. Maybe Turtle WoW also had summoning stones? Someone (I think it was the tank but I'm not 100% sure now) said that it was fine and that they could probably wrangle a higher-level warlock into summoning me over there.

Still feeling a bit sheepish and uncertain about what to do with myself now, I decided that the best course of action for me was to at least make a good faith attempt at legging it to Orgrimmar in the meantime, even if I was unlikely to get very far. When I arrived in Darkshore, I noticed some strange things happening to the group, with people leaving and re-joining repeatedly, until the whole party was suddenly disbanded - or at least, I was suddenly group-less.

I just figured that I'd been kicked after all and felt a little sad, even if I thought it was understandable. As I was already on the road, I kept running south in an attempt to at least make it to Astranaar, since I was already in the area. However, not soon after, I got a re-invite to the group, and this time it included a level 60 troll warlock who sent me a summon. I appeared in Orgrimmar in front of the RFC entrance and thanked everyone once again.

Aside from me, the group consisted of a bear druid tank, an undead mage, a goblin warlock and an undead priest healer. The mage handed out some water and we quickly seemed to be off to a good start inside the dungeon.

At one point a green cloak with +2 agility dropped, and since I was still wearing a white, I rolled need on it. I wasn't surprised that I didn't win, but I was surprised that the other person who had rolled need on it was the warlock. Still, I wasn't going to complain - for all I knew, classes might be working differently on this server and I had only just had a demonstration of how little I actually knew about how things worked around these parts.

However, the mage took note, was not pleased and asked the warlock why they were needing on everything. It was only then that I noticed that the lock had indeed also needed on other items such as random gems. "I'm a JC" was their defense, which I thought was pretty weak (especially since I was one too) but again I didn't say anything. The mage continued to argue and rant about it though, and the lock started passing on everything for a little while, though they later resumed rolling.

The mage then also started complaining that the lock was just on follow and not actually doing any damage. I couldn't tell whether that was true, but it did seem like they were mostly just ambling about and not casting any spells. Still, nobody was responding to these accusations at all, even when the mage started outright demanding that the group leader should just kick the warlock already. It was as if they were just shouting into a void.

We made it past the first boss, but on one of the trash pulls that followed, my hawkstrider pet suddenly shot off into another group of mobs around the corner. I've played Classic hunter for so long now and have had so many pet accidents, but I still don't know what caused this particular one, as he was not on aggressive and the mobs were around a corner and not even visible to me. Either way, the moment I saw what was happening I said "omg, I'm so sorry, I don't know why he did that". We tried our best, but sadly it was too many mobs at once and we wiped.

The mage made one last complaint about how the warlock was supposedly only auto-attacking, before calling us all the "worst classic group ever" and quitting the party. Everyone else cared about that about as much as they had cared about the person's previous complaints, which is to say nobody even commented on it in any way. We just ran back, revived, and then finished the rest of the dungeon just fine with the four of us who remained.

When we exited the instance, my hearthstone was still on cooldown, so I thought I'd take a look at this apparently cross-faction-friendly Orgrimmar, but I had barely taken two steps away from the instance portal when a guard ran up and one-shot me. So, uh... so much for that.

Nonetheless, I thought this was a very educational experience. I can see now why no Alliance players are queueing for RFC, and I'm not sure why the game would list it as a "recommended dungeon" when you're supposed to walk all the way to Org as an Ally. Considering my encounter with the guard, it seems unlikely that a full Alliance group would even be able to make it there without a lot of corpse-running.

The mage was a weird character because I could kind of understand their complaints (my pet mishap wiping the group was definitely worthy of some disdain I thought) but they were just... so angry about everything. It's RFC, man, and maybe that warlock is someone's kid or a complete newbie or whatever, no need to get quite so wound up about it.

Meanwhile, the druid tank was an absolute saint, organising the summon for me and also telling me "no worries" after I'd caused the wipe. The best and the worst of most Classic environments in a nutshell. 

So, Incursions.

With my Season of Discovery main in her high forties now, I've reached the part of the game that made up SoD's phase three, which - based on what I heard about it at the time - was widely lambasted as even worse than phase two. One of the phase's main new features were so-called "incursions" around the Emeral Dream portals in Duskwood, Ashenvale, Feralas and the Hinterlands. What I'd heard about those was mainly that they were simultaneously too good (in terms of rewards) and horrible (in terms of gamplay), which both hurt the economy and frustrated people who felt that they were being shoehorned into levelling from 40 to 50 by doing endless laps around one corner of a zone.

I was very curious to check these out for myself, if for no other reason than to see whether they were as bad as everyone had said.

I initially got a bit lost, because I thought they were all level 40-50 content, but when I got to the Feralas portal the NPC there didn't want to talk to me. It was only on reading up that I found out that actually, incursions start as low as low as level 25, and different zones are targeted at different level ranges.

I eventually found out that the right place to be at my level was the Ashenvale incursion, so I made my way over there.

I've got to admit, talking to the quest giver immediately had me horrified in a number of ways. Remember that in Classic, the quest log has a limit of 20 quests at a time... and here this night elf was offering me no fewer than eighteen missions to do in the local incursion, which meant I had to almost completely empty my quest log of everything else. The quests were numbered for convenience ("Ashenvale Mission I: Defeat Satyrs", "Ashenvale Mission II: Defeat Treants" etc.) and flavour-less copy-and-pastes of each other that just told you in the most minimalist terms where to go.

It was easy to see what the pattern was: The incursion was active in three nearby sub-zones of Ashenvale: Forest Song, Satyrnaar and the Warsong Lumber Camp, and each one had five quests tied to it: one to kill mobs, one to kill a boss, one to pick up an item, one to gather a field report from an NPC, and one to escort another NPC out of the area. The three remaining quests were profession-related, asking you to collect Emerald Dream-flavoured herbs, ore and skins.

I figured with such a high density of quests it would be hard not to trip over any objectives, so I just bumbled into Forest Song and started killing dreamy whelps there. In what turned out to be a stroke of good luck, a nearby orc hunter threw me an invite almost immediately. I warned him that this was my first time doing one of these, and he reassured me that it was the same for him. While he obviously had an addon running that was showing him details about where to find each quest objective, he wasn't exactly trying to speed-run the area. He was also a skinner and therefore paused all the time to skin the various dragonkin we'd killed.

I've got to admit I was happy to defer to him in terms of setting the pace and let him take the lead. All I had to do was follow him around and focus on healing him and his pet, while occasionally throwing out small bits of damage here or there or pausing to pick a herb. Priest and hunter make for a pretty good duo, and I found myself recalling happy memories of my night elf priest questing with a hunter friend back in Burning Crusade.

I didn't look at the time, but even with the two of us it took us some time to fully clear out all the objectives in all three areas. I wasn't sure whether we'd be able to do the named boss mobs with just the two of us as they showed as level "skull" but we ended up being able to duo them just fine. At the end I traded him some spare herbs so he could also do the herbalist quest, and he gave me some of his skins in return so I could complete the skinning quest (neither of us got the mining one done, obviously). I gained more than two levels from this adventure, though I'll admit that I was rested for a good chunk of it, which undoubtedly helped.

For a different perspective, I also decided to take my level 28 mage to do the lowest-level incursion in Duskwood (questing in Duskwood as a low-level Horde character felt very weird by the way). The quests there followed the exact same pattern, but since I didn't find a friendly helper over there, it was a lot less pleasant. (All I got was Alliance players spouting gibberish at me in /say and doing incomprehensible emotes.).

I couldn't do any of the bosses by myself, and one of the field report missions was also out, as the NPC was placed literally at the feet of the local boss mob, nobody else was around to kill him, and I was unable to even have a quick chat with the NPC before the boss flattened me.

Waiting for the escorts also turned out to be a waste of time. These are not classic-style escorts where you get an NPC walking from A to B while you defend them from exactly three ambushes; instead you talk to the person and they then follow you around. This is much more convenient in many ways but has one important downside: because there is competition for the spawns and people want to be efficient, whoever sees the escort NPC up will immediately talk to them to "claim" them... just to then proceed with their other dailies until they are ready to go back to the portal themselves. The problem is that this means it can take a veeery long time for the escort to reset and respawn. My mage didn't see a single one of these NPCs up and I grew tired of waiting.

What with being able to do fewer quests by myself and not being rested, I think I only gained about a level from this particular incursion, maybe even less, though I'm not sure as I'd spent some time fighting my way through two crypts in Raven Hill Cemetery for rune stuff before starting on the incursions.

Ultimately my conclusion was that I did like the conceptual idea of incursions - going into the Emerald Dream to fight off invaders - but in terms of execution, I'm not sure I've ever seen content in any version of WoW that was created with such a seeming lack of love, with not even any attempt at lore, flavour or interesting quest text. It's like the devs figured: hey, nobody cares about that stuff anyway; Classic players just want a way to efficiently grind levels outside of dungeons, so let's give it to them.

As it stands, with the rewards supposedly nerfed considerably compared to what they were at launch and the quests being dailies instead of endlessly repeatable, I can see incursions being a fun little diversion every now and then, especially if you find yourself running low on other sources of XP in a certain level range. My team-up with the orc hunter was good fun, and I can imagine it being even better with a group of friends. When you're by yourself, it feels a lot more lacklustre though.

And I can definitely see why people hated these. When they were endlessly repeatable and also gave ridiculous rewards, they must have felt like an absolute "must-do" for a while, but who wants to spend all day grinding the same fifteen quests over and over in one corner of the same zone? I'm not surprised people were put off by that. It was also very noticeable that whenever I looked up incursion-related things on Wowhead, I was lucky to find even one comment with two upvotes on anything. People just did not care about this content at all, not even enough to complain about it in the end. They just stopped playing.

I don't expect to see the Sunken Temple raid, so I suspect I'll be moving on to phase four content pretty soon.

More Levelling in SoD

I mentioned last month that I was getting back into Season of Discovery with the goal of eventually seeing the Demon Fall Canyon dungeon. Over the past couple of weeks, I got a bit distracted by some things in SWTOR, but I haven't forgotten about this project, so I wanted to jot down some notes about my most recent adventures.

In general, I've continued to be surprised by how not dead the SoD servers have remained after the launch of "Classic Classic". According to my census addon, there are pretty consistently about 1000 players online on Wild Growth Horde side, which is actually pretty close to my personal sweet spot in terms of server size: enough people to keep the auction house replenished, make it easy to get into a group for most dungeons and see plenty of activity out in the world, but not so many that you can no longer gather or quest without perceiving other players as a constant competitive nuisance.

The economy is a bit less good and feels quite inflated to me. People trying to charge one gold for a single Green Hills of Stranglethorn page feels quite ridiculous to me for example. I sometimes see complaints that prices on the era servers are inflated due to the servers' age, but at least on the PvE cluster, most things are pretty fairly priced even after more than five years. Occasionally someone will try to drive the price of certain goods up, but the thing with era players is: they've got time. If you charge too much, they can always wait and/or go farm for themselves. On seasonal servers there's more urgency to get stuff now and it's noticeable.

I also remember hearing that certain activities in earlier SoD phases really cranked up inflation (incursions awarding lots of gold or something?) and that's probably part of it as well. Either way the end result is that as someone returning after several months of absence, I find a lot of things on the AH quite unaffordable. If I find one of those lost supplies boxes, if I can't fill them with my own gathering and crafting skills, it's basically a no-go. I have managed to make a bit of gold by occasionally flogging some goods for (to me) rather silly prices as well, but opportunities for that are somewhat limited and partially luck-dependent so not really a reliable solution.

I think there's also bots? It's probably not as bad as on the anniversary servers, and I've stated in the past that people are way too quick to cry wolf about people supposedly botting, but sometimes you can definitely tell. (I remember one time in Elwynn when I saw a whole stream of low-level humans leave the village zig-zagging along the exact same path; that was eerie.) I haven't come across a lot of such cases on SoD myself, but definitely at least a suspicious number of hunters with unnamed or scrambled pet names.

As for myself, I continue to rotate through all my alts to use up some restedness and try to have them quest in different places for variety. My priest also healed a Razorfen Kraul and my mage did a Wailing Caverns and a Shadowfang Keep. The latter was a bit funny to me because I actually used the group finder tool for the first time and saw a group that was just missing a tank - with the three dps being a warrior, a shaman and a warlock, all three of which can tank in SoD. I sighed and just listed my mage by her lonesome... but within less than five minutes the other group had invited me anyway and we were off to the races.

It's also been fun to do more "discovering" of content and mechanics that are unique to SoD. The other day, I was in Stranglethorn Vale during the Blood Moon for the first time, and while I had the immunity buff on me, it was still a slightly odd experience. I didn't actually see any fighting for example, but lots of max-level allies running around killing my quest mobs. Does that give them rewards? I couldn't be bothered to do any deeper research on it. I did also run into this boss-type mob that was yelling and taking a swim in Lake Nazferiti for some reason.

In terms of questing, my hunter has offered the most interesting experience. I only noticed the other day that it's possible to place traps in combat now for example, something I'm pretty sure wasn't possible in the earlier phases. She also kind of struggles with the massive XP bonus, since it doesn't apply to pets, meaning her little tiger is currently three levels below her. I've tried to get him caught up by focusing a bit on mob grinding while unrested, but then I hand in one quest and bam, suddenly I'm another level ahead again. It's a bit annoying to be honest.

Another questionable adventure she had occurred around the AQ gate opening event. I mentioned previously that it worked a bit differently in SoD compared to normal, with the war effort completing automatically on a timer, but apparently the ten hour war - or at least the events tied to it - were extended significantly as well. I kept running into giant floating Qiraj crystals in levelling zones for days, which I think made farming Brood of Nozdormu rep a lot easier for people, but I'm not sure Blizzard fully took into consideration what this would mean for levellers. For example one of these crystals spawns right in the middle of Camp Mojache, so when I tried to pick up the flight path there, I swiftly got stomped into the ground. I couldn't even res and quickly click on the flight master, as I would instantly get put into combat and killed again. I think in the end I had to accept a spirit rez and use my hearthstone.

The other day I saw a video by WillE about what's new in SoD, and he mentioned that there are now vendors that sell all the runes for one copper each. I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, I was a bit concerned about how much of a grind it would be to find all the runes at this point, and this is definitely a nice solution for people who want to level more alts to raid. But I'm not looking to raid, and finding more runes was kind of part of the journey I was looking forward to? I mean, I can still gather them myself over time, that hasn't been disabled as far as I'm aware, but it does make me a bit worried whether people will be shirty in dungeons if you haven't just bought all your runes. Then again, so far everyone I've grouped with since my return has been very chill, so one can hope.

WoW Memories #11: December 3rd, 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 December 3rd, 2006 under the title "Another WoW Tale":

This entry is a bit anachronistic since this actually happened on Tuesday, not Sunday, but I think it works for a Sunday entry. :-P

So, Khytez and I were in Booty Bay for one reason or another, and our friend Excelior¹ complained about not being able to find the second Stranglethorn troll legend², even though I had told him where it was. Since I was already in the area, I said I'd just show him myself. Upon my arrival at the underwater ruins, he's just about to be beaten into a bloody sea lion pulp and I can save him just in time, aggroing all the elite Murlocs in the area in the process. As I blast and whack them like mad, Excel swims up to me and... just stares. My health bar goes down pretty low, prompting a worried "Tira???" from Khytez (cause nothing says "What the hell are you doing?" like three question marks) but I survive. At least the Murlocs are out of the way now and Excel can get his legend. "That was well-hidden!" he claims. I roll my eyes. ;-)

As we bound along the beach afterwards he complains that me and Khytez being fifteen levels ahead of him now makes him depressed.³ But you know, maybe I want to help him anyway? With finding the remaining legends? Sure, why not. Immediately the level 34 kitty rushes off right into the middle of a level 35-37 troll camp, and of course I have to follow in hot pursuit to save him from being killed. As I step over a dozen troll corpses I tell him not to do that again... "But it's fun!" he yells and runs off again. His health goes down faster than I can run, so I try to cast my shield on him... and get the message that his level is too low. D'oh. He dies, all the remaining trolls attack me, and I barely survive with the help of a health potion, while Khytez is yelling something about wanting to jump off his gryphon to save me.⁴ How heroic. ;-)

"Okay. Let's try this again." I resurrect Excel, he runs off, just to get killed again by another dozen trolls. I fight them off, resurrect him again, he runs off... can you see where this is going? I actually felt kind of bad about him dying over and over again, but he thought it was absolutely hilarious and eventually I was in stitches too. It was just too silly. Just as we find the last troll legend, Khytez finally makes an appearance too. Obviously we should have waited for him, then Excel wouldn't have died as much - or so he claims. "Oh yes, he would. He's very talented." As if to prove my point, Excel runs off right into the middle of a patrol and before I can blink he's dead again. Comment from Khytez: "... amazingly talented." I was laughing so hard by that time... and Excel claimed that all those deaths had been the most fun part of his whole evening.⁵

Also, being in Stormwind just before server shutdown was an interesting experience. General chat got spammed with goodbyes and goodnights in a dozen different languages, not to mention comments like: "In 2:45 you'll have to get a life. Nooo!" People were running around like mad, trying to get things done at the very last minute, and the usually empty beds in the inn were all occupied.⁶ Yay for patch day!

¹ Excel was a male night elf druid and was introduced to us by Khytez. To this day I'm actually not sure whether theirs was just another random friendship struck up in game or whether like Nemi and I they actually knew each other from outside the game.

² To be fair, that quest was brutal and another one that I think really stood out in people's memories as taking a lot of time and effort back in the day.

³ I mention in the next sentence that he was level 34, which means our own characters were around level 49 by this point. I do seem to recall Excel losing interest in the game soon after since he wasn't motivated enough to level by himself and we were just too far ahead to do anything useful together anymore.

⁴ The implication being that he was travelling towards us on a flight path and was alarmed by my rapidly dropping health bar.

⁵ I do think there's something very sweet and innocent about this story and it's a good representation of how none of us were really worried about things like efficiency at the time. We just had a good time goofing around with like-minded people in a virtual space.

⁶ Ye olde server shutdown experience is admittedly something I do look back on with fondness nowadays. It really made the server as a whole come together in a strange way, as we were all sad that we were forced to stop playing. That said, I'm not sad that maintenance windows tend to be much smaller now than they were back then.

WoW Memories #9: November 18th, 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 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

Anyway, in Darkspear news: We have now reached a level at which encounters with Horde members are becoming more or less regular, and I find them quite interesting personally. Officially we're supposed to be enemies and can't really interact with each other in any other way than fighting (when in PvP mode). We can't trade or anything, and speech gets garbled by the filter. However, just like in real life when you don't understand each other you can always resort to body language. Yesterday I watched two Horde warriors duel on the road and jumped around to cheer them on. An undead rogue in PvP mode taunted Nemi and our friend Kites once, which promptly made them kick his behind. Another undead guy saw Nemi and me fight a whole bunch of enemies in the ruins in Stranglethorn and actually joined in to help us. I saluted him and he bowed. Who needs words?

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...

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.

WoW Memories #6: October 29th, 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.

(By the way, if anyone's wondering how many installments of this series there are going to be, the answer is: I don't know either. Last time I tried to eyeball it, I figured there was material for at least 15 parts though.)

The following was originally posted on October 29th, 2006 under the title "Rez Plz":

I actually did some university work today but... really, what is there to say about that?

So, some more WoW tidbits:

I spent some time on the German server again today and made the discovery that English chat speak is running rampant among German speakers. I stood out like a sore thumb by saying "danke" when someone helped me among all the "thx" and "cu"s of other people. For some reason that made me sad.¹

Nemi keeps getting me into larger quest parties. I have to admit that this is actually loads of fun, even if I sometimes couldn't tell what the hell was going on, with eight people squished into a tiny chamber hacking away at a whole bunch of enemies...² I barely managed to keep track of my fellow party members' health by looking at the little pictures on the side.

Health? Yes... I don't think I mentioned it here before, but my Night Elf character is a priest.³ It's an interesting class; I'm not sure yet whether the good things outweigh the bad for me yet. You can feel really big and important when you resurrect people - not that it's really such a big deal, seeing how people can resurrect themselves in this game, but people really appreciate you saving them some time.⁴ And you can have big moments such as I had today - Nemi and I were in this ridiculously underpowered party with only one reasonably strong tank.⁵ Everyone died except him and me, but as I saw the enemies try to get me too I cowardly made a run for it... and it worked! As soon as they let me off I ran back and kept healing the remaining team member so he could finish off the remaining baddies all on his own.

The bad side is that you're weak, weak, weak, and some monsters have an affinity for spotting that even if you try to stay behind.⁶ And the rest of your party usually has other things to think about, so it can happen that they let you get killed, which, strangely enough, soon results in their own deaths - how come? Have to give Nemi credit for not doing that though - but then we are friends outside of the game and have to look out for each other, right?

¹ I'm kind of surprised by past me's emotional response here, probably because nowadays I'm much more open to the concept of languages intermingling I guess.

² Once again I didn't call it out by name, but I can deduce from context that this was about doing the elite quests in Stonewatch Keep, still in Redridge. The specific mention of eight people has me raising my eyebrow a little since I don't think we would have been able to do those quests in a raid, but I think what's more likely is that we were two groups of four loosely working together. In those days we weren't really worried about losing out on XP due to only one group being able to get a tag at a time; we just wanted to work together and survive!

³ Actually, I literally mentioned that I was playing a priest in the previous post. My past self's lack of continuity is maddening to look back on.

⁴ Looking back at this close to twenty years later, it seems funny that resurrecting of all things seemed like such a big deal to me, but I guess in other, non-MMO multiplayer games I'd played before, if you were dead, you were dead, so it was a kind of novel concept to me.

⁵ "Only" one tank? I can't fathom what kind of party composition I expected to have back then. I can only imagine that from my squishy point of view I considered every melee a tank in those early days.

⁶ I had no concept of threat yet, and thought that the mobs were just a lot more intelligent than they really were, honing in on the healer in the back as they were.