Pent up Classic Energy

I haven't written much about Classic in recent months, but I'm still thinking about it a lot. Especially in the shower for some reason.

You know how your brain will sometimes form somewhat random but extremely strong connections between things that aren't necessarily related? Like a certain smell instantly taking you back to a moment from your childhood, or a song always making you think of a specific person you once shared it with. I have something like that going on with WoW Classic, specifically the Barrens and Wailing Caverns, as memories of them come to mind every time I take a shower and wash my hair on a warm, sunny day.

I'm not sure why that is - I just know that when Classic launched back in 2019, I binged on it pretty hard for the first few weeks, which included thinking about it basically all the time, even when I wasn't playing - including in the shower I guess? Since I rolled several Horde characters back then, I also must have spent a fair amount of time in the Barrens, including running Wailing Caverns over and over, which logically would then have been something I was thinking about a lot. And I guess it must've still been warm and sunny in September 2019? Like I said, it's pretty random, and it does crack me up a little every time I shampoo my hair and suddenly remember that time I grouped with an undead priest outside Wailing Caverns.

Anyway, that was a bit of a tangent to start with, but I'm generally thinking about how I just kind of miss Classic right now. I find retail fun in its own way, but it simply doesn't scratch the same itch. At the same time, there's no Classic mode I really want to get into right now.

I did log into MoP Classic after the launch of patch 5.4 and checked out the Timeless Isle for a bit, but I was quickly reminded of just how many hours I spent grinding there in MoP Remix almost exactly two years ago now, and I just have zero appetite for doing all of that again, and more slowly at that.

Sometimes I cast my mind towards Season of Discovery and wonder whether I should go back and pursue some more of the goals I originally had for that mode before it potentially goes away... but the feeling just isn't there.

The anniversary servers seem weirdly alluring right now, mostly because I keep seeing people on my Battle.net friends list playing there, and I just miss that Burning Crusade feeling a bit. It's so weird now: I used to say that BC was my favourite expansion, then Classic came and ruined a lot of that for me because of how differently people were approaching it in the modern era, but with some distance I'm once again reminded that there were also vibes and content there that I still genuinely love.

I just don't want to get into the cesspit that are the anniversary servers, so I'm vainly holding out hope that maybe Blizzard will make Burning Crusade era servers this time around when Wrath of the Lich King comes around again. I was so disappointed when there was no interest in that back in 2022, but in fairness, at the time Classic era still looked pretty dead and I reckon there were probably people both in the community and at Blizzard who wondered whether having these era-locked servers at all had maybe been a mistake. But as mainline Classic progressed further into more expansions, the era servers truly came to life and have managed to maintain a healthy population ever since, even if it ebbs and flows a bit depending on what else is going on with other versions of Classic. Plus if it's true that Blizzard is planning to make a fresh set of servers go through the first three eras of the game every few years (as indicated by the leak), having both a BC and Wrath era server as final destinations for some of these characters would simply make sense to me. Or are you telling me that people would prefer to go through anniversary editions of Cata and MoP Classic?

Regardless, the demand for BC era might still not be quite there yet, and even worse, as WillE has suggested recently, it might actually be in Blizzard's best financial interests to not have them. Sure, they'll lose a few subs from people who don't want to progress into Wrath or whatever, but at the same time BC anniversary has apparently been extremely successful in terms of selling boosts, which can probably at least partially be blamed on the fact that there were several years when there was no way to play BC Classic officially and people had time to miss it.

So I know I'm probably going to be disappointed on that front, but I just can't help hoping. If BC era ever became a thing, I'd definitely roll up a character there to see whether I could find a BC-focused community with similar chill levels as the guys and gals on Classic era.

One way or another all the Classic news will be coming out at BlizzCon in a bit over a month, including the reveal of whatever Project Camelot turns out to be exactly - and whatever it is, I'll definitely want to check it out just to see what it's all about. So I'm kind of sitting here, thinking I might as well save that desire for Classic for the big reveals and new opportunities that will become available soon - but that doesn't mean that I don't still miss it in the meantime.

My Most Played Characters

I've been seeing people talk about a new addon called "Account Played" that tallies up your /played time across all your characters and displays it as a neat bar chart broken down by class. I was briefly tempted to get it but ultimately decided that I didn't care that much about the class breakdown, and Altoholic already helps me keep track of my /played time across characters.

It did make me curious where exactly I stood myself though, especially after I noticed some surprises in my own roster, such as the fact that even though I've been back to playing retail for close to five and a half years now, none of the characters I've played during that time had particularly impressive /played times. I decided I'd share my top five characters in terms of accumulated hours:

Shintar - 188 days

I had a hunch that the original Shintar might still be my #1, but I was not prepared for the sheer scale of it, with her /played time still being three times that of second place. This is a character that I created in early 2007 and played until March of 2012. Let's pretend it was a round five years, or 1,827 days. That would mean that during those five years, I spent more than ten percent of my life, or about two and a half hours of every single day, playing just this character. Not WoW in general - I had alts as well, see below - but only this character. That honestly seems pretty crazy to me in hindsight, even as someone who still likes to game a lot. I know that at the start of it all, I was an unemployed student - and a student who neglected her studies at that - so I had a lot of free time, but still...

I haven't really played her since coming back to WoW, and thanks to the Shadowlands level squish she's back to being level 32. And yet still so far ahead. 

Tiirr - 64 days

I was actually surprised to find that my MoP Classic hunter is my second most played WoW character at this point. A good chunk of that can be attributed to the launch of original Classic, as the clone I made of her before the transition to Burning Crusade still shows as having 36 days of /played. But then the rest would've had to be a mix of BC Classic (which I abandoned halfway through) and whatever time I accumulated since I picked her back up last year. I mainly attribute this one to just how bingeable and impactful the original Classic launch was.

Being level 90 in MoP Classic, she's currently the highest level character I have in all of WoW's game modes (since War Within's cap is still 80). This amuses me.

Tiranea - 58 days

This was my first main, created back in October 2006. I'm not surprised that she's still high up, but I was somewhat surprised that she's this high, because from what I remember, I switched to Horde side after around six months of playing. Now, I didn't fully abandon the character at the time, and still levelled her through Wrath and Cata as well, but after those first few months I never spent much time in group content to rack up dungeon or raiding hours. Must have been those first few months when I was super addicted and basically living and breathing WoW.

I did play this one a little bit in more recent times when I levelled her up to do the night elf heritage quest back in 2023, so she's a whopping level 53.

Golu - 54 days

This was one of my major alts on Horde side back in the day, a druid on whom I both tanked and healed. I guess I'm not entirely surprised that she got a lot of play time, considering I was clearly playing a lot back then, but it does make me sweat a little to think that I was spending two and a half hours a day just playing Shintar the priest and also 54 days on this character. And yet! There's even more, such as...

Pukaja - 52 days

The tauren hunter who was my very first Horde character and also another one of my major alts during those days, though there was never much demand for me to play dps in group content when I was also willing to both tank and heal. Like Golu, she hasn't been played since Cata and was squished down to level 32.

It really stands out to me how none of my more recently played characters are even anywhere near close to those numbers. The monk that was my main during Shadowlands sits on 22 days played, my evoker on 27 days and the warrior that turned into my War Within main on a little less than 18 days. I guess WoW is more alt friendly nowadays than it was back then, so my play time is spread out across a larger number of characters, but still - I had alts back then too, and three of those are in the top five!

I guess at least some of it has to do with levelling in the vanilla world (which is why the Classic hunter is ahead of all of my retail characters created in recent years). When it takes about ten days of /played just to get to the level cap, it's just a different ballgame. I never play as intensely at the level cap unless I'm raiding (which I've kind of sworn off in WoW at this point, not counting visiting LFR once per tier), so new characters just don't have as much of a chance to rack up play time when they are capped within mere hours like my Lemix alts were.

WoW Memories #14: January 16th, 2007

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 January 16th, 2007 under the title "Burning Crusade!": 

So today was WoW expansion day! We saw the first Blood Elves being made at midnight¹, but that was about the most exciting thing that happened then. (Though we were all surprised that the servers didn't collapse right away.) I had preordered my own copy of Burning Crusade from Amazon but didn't expect it to arrive on release day, so I was pleasantly surprised when I found a parcel in the hall when I came home from uni this afternoon.

Installing it was quite annoying though. The installer froze up every time it reached the point where I was supposed to insert the second CD, but fortunately for me plenty of other people had the same problem and there was a thread on the support forum telling people that copying the CD contents and installing from the hard disk would circumvent the problem. Of course I had to reinstall two patches after that while my internet connection was extremely erratic and kept cutting off every other minute, so...²

Don't really have that much to say about the new content yet. I didn't much fancy questing in Outland alone, though I did eventually go through the Dark Portal after a friend kept linking me to some of the new items. I hadn't quite believed Mecha when he predicted that there'd be greens in Outland better than the old epic stuff, but it looks like he was right. I couldn't quite believe my eyes when I saw the green wand you get as reward for one of the first quests I accepted...³

Also, Draenei > Blood Elves. From what I had seen of them on screenshots and such I thought that they were both nice-looking races but I didn't have any strong feelings about either. After fiddling around with the character editor for a bit however I really fell in love with the Draenei and their strangely twisted spines and legs (even if they walk funny) while the Blood Elves only struck me as pretty but bland.

I couldn't resist making a little Draenei mage of my own⁴, even if I don't know what I'm going to do with her and only got her to level six so far. The starting area was just so flooded with people fighting over quest mobs and spamming the chat that I couldn't stand it for long.⁵ Will see how long it takes for that to cool down.

¹ By that I meant that I was questing in Ashenvale on my tauren hunter and opening the /who window around midnight, constantly refreshing a "/who blood elf" query (or something like that) and watching the first results appear.

² Ah, the good old days of installing MMO expansions from physical media. Can't say I really miss that part.

³ I think that would've been the Desolation Rod. Doesn't look that impressive now with retail stats, but back then it probably had two or three times the number of whatever blue I'd last gotten in a Vanilla dungeon, so it seemed absolutely jaw-droppingly powerful.

⁴ That's this one!

⁵ This was actually kind of comforting to read because it shows that my disdain for the mega-server crowds that have come to dominate Classic is not just me being a grumpy old lady shaking her fist at the kids these days, but something that does go way back.

---

This seems like a good point to end this series for now, with the launch of the first expansion and the anniversary event in WoW also just having ended. This wasn't the last entry about WoW on my old personal blog, but they did become more irregular over time and also... changed a bit in nature I guess? A lot of posts were just random screenshots, and aside from marking some milestones that I was particularly proud of (such as when my guild cleared Gruul's Lair for the first time or when I got my first talbuk mount), they became more about my relationships with the people I was playing with than the game itself, and I'm not actually sure that would make for great material for this blog.

Not that I never talk about the people I play with nowadays, but a lot of those old posts definitely seem like "you had to be there" material on re-reading, such as when I talked about our GM tanking heroics for us late at night while drunk, or about how I met a shadow priest from another guild in real life and laughed at him while he threw up on the street. I might re-evaluate that at some point in the future, maybe when the Burning Crusade turns twenty or something. In the meantime, thanks for joining me on this trip down memory lane; I hope you found at least some of it interesting!

WoW Memories #13: December 25th, 2006 & January 14th, 2007

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.

Today I'm combining two posts into a single entry since they were both very short.

The following was originally posted on December 25th, 2006 under the title "Christmas Night":

As usual my Christmas Day was very non-Christmassy, cause by then the celebrating is over and everyone's just enjoying being a lazy bum.¹ In anticipation of Benny² forcing me to go to bed earlier than has become my habit I also decided to spend one more long night with my WoW friends before his arrival³, and I didn't regret it even though it involved lots of virtual death. Somehow it was all just too funny, I was constantly worried about waking someone with my laughter.

When I told Benny about this later the following conversation ensued:
Him: So you had like... a virtual stag night?
Me: Yeah, I guess.
Him: ...
Me: ...
Him: That's disturbing.
Me: Well, maybe, but knowing me... I could totally see my real hen night one day also...⁴
Him: DISTURBING!

Heehee.

The following was originally posted on January 14th, 2007 under the title "Moo! I'm A Cow!":

And I like synchronised dancing!⁵

Sorry, really didn't have anything informative to say today. ;-)

¹ In Austria (and many other European countries), the actual Christmas celebration takes place on Christmas Eve.

² My boyfriend at the time.

³ He was from the UK and as mentioned previously, I was still living in Austria myself. We had a long-distance relationship and tended to visit each other during school holidays, as we were both at university. Also, I kind of joke about it in this post, but me staying up late to play WoW was actually a point of contention between us more than once. He was a gamer but had no love for MMOs, and even though I tried to be quiet if staying up past his bedtime, me being on the computer in the same room that he was also sleeping in still woke him up more than once.

⁴ Actually, my real life hen do involved two friends from Austria taking me to an escape room. Not too crazy but good fun!

⁵ This marked the beginning of me slowly switching to Horde side (though I still continued to play Alliance too for quite some time). In the screenshot you see my hunter Pukaja on the left, and the other two are Matje on a shaman and Nemi on a druid. We'd at some point decided to make alts on Matje's main server, Earthen Ring, where he was also raiding as a resto druid. Nemi and I would eventually end up levelling all the way to cap and ended up joining his guild during early Burning Crusade, but I can't recall whether that was already on our minds back then. It might have been on Nemi's, who was always way more organised about these things and actually researching things like which classes were in demand. We didn't last long trying to level together in this setup as she quickly got away from me in levels, and Matje wasn't that invested in his shaman and soon lost interest from what I recall. While Nemi's druid ended up becoming her main on Horde side, I would later reroll as a troll priest (though I did eventually get Puka to level cap too).

WoW Memories #10: November 26th & December 2nd, 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.

Today I'm combining two posts into a single entry since they were both very short.

The following was originally posted on November 26th, 2006 under the title "Strange WoW Moment Of The Day":

Paraphrased, as usual, as I don't have a proper chat log and all the superfluous chat speak would only kill your brains anyway.

In the jungles of Stranglethorn, two adventurers spy a familiar name...

Me: Hi Para!
Parachel: Hi guys! How are you doing?
Me: Oh, we're levelling up nicely...
Parachel: So I see.
Khytez: And how are you?
Parachel: Oh, just running around, killing stuff...
Me: Gotta love WoW small talk. What do you have to do here?
Parachel: Oh, just kill a regular level forty, nothing fancy.
Me: Ah, that's good. We have to find a troll.¹
Parachel: Did you ever kill that level 42 elite in Arathi?
Me: Which one?
Parachel: This giant...²
Me: A giant? No, I'm sure I would remember that.
Khytez: Yeah, we nailed him.
Me: What? You do all the fun stuff without me! :o
Khytez: But you were there!
Me: No, I'm pretty sure I wasn't...
Khytez: Ok, maybe you weren't there after all.
Me: Then again you may be right, I probably won't remember tomorrow what I did today...
Parachel: You two sound as if you're married. :D
Khytez: ...
Me: lol

One word: Awwwkwaaard. :-P³

The following was originally posted on December 2nd, 2006 under the title "Arma Virumque Cano":

Ugh, nobody should have to get up at eight in the morning on a Saturday. The streets were practically empty when I left home, but I had a tutoring appointment at ten.⁴ [...]

While eating breakfast I quickly logged onto WoW just because I was curious whether any of my friends would actually be online at such a crazy time. One guy was, so I started a conversation with: "Haha, I didn't actually think anyone would be online at this crazy time!" :-P I proceeded by mentioning that I'd have to tutor someone in Latin in an hour, to which he replied with "arma virumque cano..." (the first three words of the Aeneid), which made me squee because it's rare enough that I meet someone else who had Latin in school and as it happens this is also the work my tutoring focuses on this time. We continued to chat and as it turned out the guy is actually a German living in Holland. "Warum sprechen wir dann Englisch?" - "Gute Frage."⁵ :-D Knowing me, you can imagine that I was quite pleased to find someone on an English server who speaks both German and Dutch (and Latin). It was only a small thing but it totally made my morning.⁶

¹ Saying that you're in Stranglethorn to look for a troll is such an incredibly vague statement that I find it quite hilarious in hindsight, and yet... considering the rest of the conversation implies that we were probably past level 40 at this point, I'd venture that we were looking for Mogh the Undying for The Star, the Hand and the Heart. Some quests really were that memorable back then.

² This was in reference to Fozruk, the elite giant that patrols a good chunk of the zone and is part of a fairly long quest chain.

³ As someone who's loooking back at these posts with an interest in what I thought of the game in those early months of playing it for the first time, it's mildly infuriating how little past me actually talked about the game itself. Instead you get entries like this, which are just about some banter with a guy we'd done some group content with. Though I guess that is telling in itself, in the sense that at the time, my focus wasn't on the world and its contents (though I did love it) but rather on all the people I met in this strange new online space and how we interacted with each other. I do seem to recall that Parachel was a male human mage.

⁴ I was giving private Latin lessons at the time to earn a bit of cash on the side.

⁵ "Why are we speaking English then?" "Good question."

⁶ And yet, I didn't even record the guy's character name...

Fifteen Years of WoW Blogging

I haven't been very good at keeping track of milestones on this blog. Partially I think this is due to the fact that I'd only been posting for a little over three years by the time that I originally decided to step away from WoW. After this the blog lay fallow for a while, even if it never went completely quiet (I'd still find excuses to occasionally comment on BlizzCon announcements and stuff like that), and it seemed odd to celebrate so-and-so many years of blogging when I hadn't really done all that much for a good chunk of those years.

This year I remembered to make a note in advance though... that today, the blog turns fifteen years old. What a crazy ride it's been. I thought it would be fun to look back on those years a bit.

When I started this blog in July 2009, I was 26 years old, working a part-time job in a bakery and still living in Austria with my mother, though I was saving up to relocate to the UK and move in with my then-boyfriend (whom I'd met in WoW, of course) at the end of the year. World of Warcraft was probably close to the peak of its popularity with its Wrath of the Lich King expansion. Blogging was quite popular as well, and blogging about WoW was a solid niche.

I'd been reading and leaving comments on other people's WoW blogs for a while (many of which have sadly been lost to time since then), and finally figured that it was time to set up my own space to share my thoughts about the game. My very first post was about heroic Oculus, which was certainly... a choice. In those early days I had a lot of free time and not much else going on in my life, so I posted 12-20 times a month, which seems slightly insane to me now, looking back at it as a 41-year-old with a full time job.

It's hard to summarise all those posts in a few sentences as I wrote about a lot of different subjects. I guess one thing I can say is that my posts were perhaps slightly shorter on average than they are nowadays, and I didn't seem to have as many reservations about just how much "meat" there needed to be to a topic to make it worth its own little post. I wrote about random game mechanics I liked and disliked, good pugs and bad pugs (I spent so much time pugging dungeons back then), raiding with my guild, commented on WoW-related news, and talked about pieces of gear I liked. I basically just really enjoyed the game and almost every aspect of it. I wrote about day one of the dungeon finder, which honestly feels like something of a historical document at this point. At the end of the year, I went through with my plan to move to the UK.

I spent most of 2010 unemployed, and therefore continued to have a lot of time to play and blog, maintaining my cadence of publishing a post pretty much every other day. I continued to write about the same kinds of things, though I think if you look closely, you can see a slow decline in the amount of joy I expressed. There were fewer happy stories, and more rants about inconsiderate pugs and changes I didn't like. Plus my guild wasn't doing so well either. Incidentally, WoW did help me get a job in November though - that post was also the first time I heard of reddit, as someone linked it there and I went to investigate the source of that sudden traffic spike.

At the end of the year, the Cataclysm came, and my boyfriend's physical copy of the expansion got lost in the mail. (If I remember correctly, Amazon refunded him but then the parcel randomly showed up in May the next year or something.) The new content gave me a lot to talk about, something that lasted into 2011.

However, somehow things weren't quite the same. I still posted quite a lot that year, but 12 posts a month went from being my lower limit to being my upper one, with the average being closer to 8. I posted about lacking lustre in February, and nostalgia and doubts in July. When Mists of Pandaria was announced, I was decidedly underwhelmed. I stepped down from raiding and focused on my rated battleground team instead, which brought with it a brief revival of the joy I used to feel when playing. But then Star Wars: The Old Republic came out, and my interest in WoW just petered out. I only made 6 posts in 2012, the last of which was me declaring that I was done with the game and retiring the blog. Funny how that worked out, isn't it?

I did indeed not post for more than one and a half years after that, but things changed in my real life during that time. I broke up with my boyfriend (insert some snarky comment about how he was my "WoW boyfriend" so naturally I had dump him when I stopped playing) and started a relationship with the guy who I'm now married to. This included moving house and being unemployed again, which was not so great. As my new love scrambled to find ways to keep me from being too depressed by the circumstances, we ended up realising that he'd also used to play WoW at one point, and we rolled up a new pair of alts at the end of 2013 to check out the changes since both of us had last played. This ended up keeping us busy a few months into 2014, but it wasn't long until we both lost interest in the game again, so I only got a little over a dozen posts out of the whole adventure. In real life, I also got a full time job a couple of months later.

The next revival of the blog came from an unexpected source in mid-2015, as Nostalrius took the private server scene by storm and really made the whole concept of going back to Vanilla go mainstream. I actually never played there myself, as I rolled up on its much smaller competitor Kronos instead. That was super exciting for about a month or ten posts, but then my interest flagged again... though not so much due to lack of appeal this time and more a general lack of time to engage with multiple MMOs at once. At the end of the year I posted about BlizzCon (and shared a video by some medium-sized YouTuber I'd found, called Asmongold) and felt an urge to get back into the saddle on Kronos. I continued to post about my private server adventures at a rate of a couple of posts per month throughout 2016.

By 2017 my enthusiasm for that was starting to dry up again though. I'd left Kronos the previous year since I couldn't stand life at max level on a PvP server, and there always seemed to be something wrong with every other server I tried, so I only made about half a dozen posts throughout most of the year. That November of course was when Blizzard officially announced Classic. I made a few posts related to that in a flurry of initial excitement, and then set in for a long wait until Classic's release, only checking in with the blog occasionally throughout 2018.

The release of Classic in August 2019 is when I feel the blog was revived "properly", as that's when I started posting several times a month again (even if I only made half a dozen posts or less, it was still more and more regular than I'd been for the last seven years before that). I was all in on playing Classic on Horde side for more than six months, followed by me levelling a night elf on an RP server by myself, but I did start to feel the doldrums a bit by spring of 2020 as I didn't have any real friends left to play with.

Through a series of fortunate events, I ended up joining a pug raid in August, and found myself recruited into a great guild shortly afterwards. I also ended up checking out retail again for the first time in more than six years. Hanging out and raiding with my Classic guild - plus an increase in working from home time due to the pandemic - carried me through most of 2021, though things started to go a bit pear-shaped during Classic Burning Crusade as the vibe of the guild changed and Blizzard decided to soft-close the server I was on by enabling free transfers.

I got a few more months of enjoyment out of that expansion in 2022, but my guild eventually folded and when it became clear that there would be no BC era servers, I felt I was done with Classic as it was. I decided to try my luck on Classic era instead and once again fell in with a great guild, though I also kept playing retail on the side and got excited for the Dragonflight expansion.

Throughout 2023, I continued to post about my adventures on Classic era, mixed with posts about retail, which started to gain more ground. Changes at my work meant that raiding with my era guild didn't really work anymore and I had to give up on that, which provided even more of an incentive to focus on retail with my husband and some friends instead. I also tried out Hardcore when it launched, and got excited about Season of Discovery in December.

Sadly, that excitement didn't carry over into 2024 for more than two months, so since then it's mostly been retail with the occasional dip into one of the Classic modes sprinkled in here and there. We'll see where things go from here, but it's certainly been one hell of a journey.

The Power of Song

Just a little random story that I felt like writing down, and this blog seemed like the best place for it.

In my office at work we tend to have a random Spotify playlist playing in the background throughout the day, and it never ceases to amaze me how different songs coming up can instantly trigger all kinds of memories in me. One might remind me of an ex-boyfriend, another one of a place I used to work at, yet another one makes me think of a specific film.

Today a song came on that suddenly made me think of WoW, and for a rather silly reason at that. The song in question is Waterfalls by TLC.

Back in Burning Crusade I remember my guild working on Gurtogg Bloodboil in the Black Temple. I don't remember all the details of the fight, but I know that positioning was critical to it, and people had to make sure to stand in certain places and to move at certain times to make sure that the blood boil debuff would go on the right players. Also, the encounter was set in a room where there was water flowing down the sides of some walls for some reason.

One time after someone had caused us trouble by running too far away from his dedicated position, our main tank chided him: "#Name, don't go chasing waterfalls!" I'm sure it was nothing but a throwaway joke, but to me it was extremely hilarious at the time... so much so that just hearing the song now instantly takes me back to that moment even more than ten years later.

Funny how these things work.

In Dreams

Last night I had a dream in which I was back to playing retail WoW. With me were a couple of friends/acquaintances from my teenage days - who have never actually played WoW as far as I'm aware but in the dream they were avid players - who were happy to see me back.

It was the time of the Fire Festival, and I was running around Stormwind trying to find the seasonal quests/activities, but everything was so different from how I remembered it that I failed utterly. Eventually I gave up and asked one of my friends for help, who flew me around on his super-fast mount to show me where to go and things slowly started to come back to me.

Then we were suddenly in Halaa and I asked my friend why the eff we were suddenly in Halaa, to which he responded that he had used some sort of newfangled teleport that hadn't been in the game yet when I last played.

... I blame having recently watched some videos about the changes to levelling in patch 7.3.5 and going: "Huh, that looks neat, wonder how it plays."

Vanilla WoW on Hold

Just in case anyone has been wondering why I haven't posted an update on here in over a month, I wanted to give a brief explanation for that. Basically, I found that it's impossible for me to play three MMOs at the same time, at least while also maintaining a level of involvement that I'm comfortable with. (That is to say that I'm not someone who's happy to play any MMO for two hours a week.) So something had to give, and WoW was the natural choice since it was "only" a solo project. In both SWTOR and Neverwinter I have other people coaxing me to log in, so those games couldn't be dropped as easily. (Well, that and SWTOR has been my main game for three and a half years now... it was more of a case of WoW vs. Neverwinter really.)

That doesn't mean that I've lost interest in the project or have completely given up on it. Based on experience I would expect my pet tank's interest in Neverwinter to decrease again after the summer, at which point I might be able to give that game a break and get back on the road to Stranglethorn Vale instead.

10 Years :: 10 Questions

Via various sources I've found myself directed to this post on the ALT : ernative blog, which encourages both current and former players of World of Warcraft to answer ten questions about the game, both as a kind of community sharing experience in celebration of the game's upcoming tenth birthday, as well as to serve as a sort of survey of things that have mattered to WoW players over the years. Since it was explicitly stated that the thoughts of ex-players were welcome too, I thought I might as well put my answers up as a blog post here.

1. Why did you start playing Warcraft?

I remember the concept of MMOs coming to my attention when I discovered the website of the back then upcoming but still unreleased (and now shut down) Warhammer Online. The idea of a virtual world in a fantasy setting sounded amazing, however the game wasn't supposed to launch for another two years or so. World of Warcraft however offered a similar idea and was readily available to play. I also had at least one friend who was already playing it and recommended it to me as being a decent amount of fun. I believe that the South Park episode had also just come out around that time, so I got a sort of humorous preview of what the game was going to be like. All these factors combined got me intrigued enough to want to give the game a try, even as I worried a little about the supposed addictiveness of MMOs.

2. What was the first ever character you rolled?

A female human paladin. As someone who had never played a Blizzard game before, the variety of races seemed kind of confusing. What makes night elves different from regular elves? Orcs are not evil then? I was under the highly misguided impression that since the genre was called "MMORPG", everyone would be expected to have some sort of roleplaying background, and I was terrified of being caught unaware of what it meant to be a member of one of the (in my eyes) more eclectic races. Human seemed like the safest choice simply because it was the only species I could actually relate to.

I had also read the little manual that came with the game (I know, right?) and paladin sounded both like a class that I thought I'd feel comfortable with in terms of its character as well as extremely powerful. I had no concept yet of how combat and health bars were going to work and assumed that the only way to heal injuries would be to see a healer. The idea of rolling anything but a class that was able to heal itself seemed foolish.

3. Which factors determined your faction choice in game?

I described the train of thought that led to me rolling a human paladin, but I already rerolled the next day to start levelling with two friends. We were Alliance because the most experienced of them had recommended it to us as "the more newbie-friendly faction" or something like that. About a year later I switched to playing mainly on Horde side, also after having been coaxed into it by the same two friends.

4. What has been your most memorable moment in Warcraft and why?

There are too many to count, but most of them are undoubtedly from my early days of levelling and exploring the in-game world. Being overcome with wonder every step of the way in Elwynn Forest. Falling off Teldrassil. Flying across the ocean for the first time to get to Darkshore. Getting myself PvP flagged by accident and getting ganked by a high level player. Exploring the seemingly endless forests of Ashenvale. Grouping up with people to tackle difficult content together and having a blast. Travelling back and forth across both continents and constantly discovering new things. Getting invited to tag along to a raid, even as I had no clue what I was doing. Rolling on an RP server and getting engaged in random roleplay out in the world.

Experiencing the release of Burning Crusade and levelling a group of Draenei with three friends. (Looking back at that, I have no idea how we managed to stay relatively in sync, seeing how we had no real life connection to each other.) Joining a guild and getting to raid properly. Experiencing many exciting boss kills.

5. What is your favourite aspect of the game and has this always been the case?

This one is a bit hard for me to answer as an ex-player, since I don't have any particularly strong feelings about any aspect of the game as it exists right now. I know I used to love exploring and tackling challenges with other people, but as those things became harder to come by, I also found a lot of enjoyment in activities like levelling alts and engaging in PvP.

6. Do you have an area in game that you always return to?

The cities in which I spent most of my time always have a certain feeling of "coming home" to them. That would be Stormwind and Darnassus on Alliance side, Orgrimmar and Thunder Bluff on Horde side, as well as Shattrath in Outland, as Burning Crusade was undoubtedly the time when I genuinely enjoyed myself for the longest stretch of time.

As far as open world zones go, my fondest memories are probably of Outland, and Nagrand in particular. When I first unsubscribed, I parked my main in Nagrand before I logged out for the last time.

7. How long have you /played and has that been continuous?

I obviously can't check this without being subscribed, but I was continuously subscribed for over five years. I dropped my sub a few months after the release of Star Wars: The Old Republic and haven't really got back into the game since then, even though my pet tank gifted me some play time at the end of last year and we spent a couple of months levelling a pair of alts together.

8. Admit it: do you read quest text or not?

Yes, and I don't think I'll ever really understand why so many people don't, not even the first time.

9. Are there any regrets from your time in game?

I think there was definitely a time when I was more focused on the game than was healthy, and while I wouldn't go so far as to say that I wish it hadn't happened, it did have a negative impact on my real life at the time. I also kind of regret not being more open-minded about other MMOs earlier. While I got several years of genuine enjoyment out of WoW, I think that before I finally unsubscribed, I also spent a fair amount of time playing - and not actually being happy with the game - simply because it was all I knew. I think it would have done me good to become a more informed and selective customer earlier.

10. What effect has Warcraft had on your life outside gaming?

Quite the effect. I made more than a few friends inside the game whom I visited in real life as well, and I met a special someone for whom I moved to a different country. While we're not together anymore, I don't regret where WoW and our relationship has got me.

WoW also helped me secure my first job in the UK, as it came up during the job interview and it turned out that the interviewer (who was also my manager-to-be) played as well. I pretty much knew that I had got that job the moment that came up.

The End of an Era

Today my WoW subscription runs out and I won't renew it. For many people that wouldn't be a big deal, and I'm sure there are a fair number of players around for whom it's completely normal to let their subscription lapse repeatedly and then just renew it again whenever they feel like playing. Not for me though. I've been playing this game pretty much continually for five and a half years. I was devoted to it, and paid Blizzard hundreds of euros for the privilege of continuing to play, but now that I'm done I think I'm done for good. I'm not good at enjoying things in half measures.

To be honest, it had been a long time coming. Basically, I've only been logging on for the rated battlegrounds for months anyway, and ever since I started playing The Old Republic, I'd find myself stalling even then, thinking, "I like my rated battleground buddies, but I'd rather be playing Star Wars to be honest."

However, social ties are extremely powerful. Just because I didn't want to let the team down, just because I have only limited ways to talk to some of my WoW friends outside the game, Blizzard got another couple of months worth of sub money out of me. I really do think they've got their priorities all wrong by not caring more about the social aspect of the game.

Anyway, eventually it became too frustrating regardless, and I decided that I wasn't going to keep paying for what had basically become a fancy chat client for me at this point. I only have so much free time to spend on MMO playing, and I'd rather be spending it on a game where I actually have fun with the game itself too.

So I made a goodbye post on our guild forums, which I tried to keep light-hearted and positive, emphasising that I still wanted to stay in touch on a personal level if at all possible. Most of the people who replied seemed to take it well, but some also seemed to take it harder than I expected - in writing it can be a bit hard to tell sometimes whether someone is completely serious or adapting a slightly tongue-in-cheek tone.

Two days after I made that post, our rated battleground team leader also threw in the towel. I've been assured that it's not my fault, and I could definitely see signs of his growing frustration long before I made my announcement, but it still left me feeling extremely awkward, as if I had personally gone and ruined the game for a whole bunch of other people as well.

Logging in one more time on my last evening also felt very strange. There was nothing different about the game of course, but knowing and thinking about how it's the last time makes all the difference in a person's head. I felt waves of nostalgia wash over me as I looked at all my characters, and I may even have become a little teary-eyed, soppy fool that I am. However, it was telling that when a friend asked me whether there was anything I wanted to do on my last day, I couldn't think of anything. Everything that I really used to love about WoW is in the past now.

I put most of my gold into the guild bank because I didn't see a point in having it all just sit there when it could at least be funding guild repairs for a few weeks or something. I didn't delete any of my characters however. Never say never.

Since I couldn't think of anything else that I wanted to do, I just sat down on a rock in Nagrand and chatted a bit. As it was getting late and I found myself wondering what would be the best time to log out, a call went out in general chat from a little orc who was looking for help with the Ring of Blood. We grouped up and I healed him through it; he thanked me and continued on his merry little way. It felt like an appropriate point to stop, after having brightened a stranger's day a little bit.

Since I won't be playing anymore, I'll also be retiring this blog, though I'll still continue to read and comment on some WoW blogs at least for a while I guess. Thanks to everyone who took the time to read any of my posts and shared their thoughts on my writings over the years. I'll now be adventuring in a galaxy far, far away.

Six Screenshots

Saga kindly tagged me for a screenshot-sharing meme today, and I shall oblige, though in my own way. I find the very premise of taking the sixth image out of my sixth screenshot folder vaguely amusing, because how many screenshot folders do people have? I only have one, with three sub-folders in it called Desktops, Games and Webcam. I'm not sure why I ever thought that it was a good idea to take screenshots of my desktop, I haven't actually done anything with that folder in years. Anyway, in Games... the sixth folder in there is called Grim Fandango, and it only has four pictures in it. Let's stick to WoW I guess.

I take care to sort, resize and rename my freshly taken WoW screenshots at regular intervals, but I still have over a thousand of them crammed into a single folder. Unfortunately Windows 7 doesn't let you save sorting preferences for individual folders, so every time I change sorting method while looking at anything on my PC, all my WoW screenshots get shuffled around as well, so I'm not entirely sure which one should really be the sixth. Let's make it six sixth screenshots, depending on how you sort them!

If we start alphabetically, the sixth screenshot is this one simply called "A warlock and his pet". It shows my first ever real alt, Wilson the warlock, sitting in an inn, possibly even in Goldshire, and I thought that it looked cute how he appeared to be hugging the imp that had jumped on his lap.

On the reverse end of the alphabetical sort, the sixth screenshot is one of our Zul'Aman group preparing for a bear run by transforming into ninjas. The German titles are a reminder of how I used to play with the German client until Wrath of the Lich King, when I got tired of people being either confused or in stitches every time I linked an item in chat.

Sorting by date, the sixth oldest screenshot that comes up is one of my night elf priest jogging through Ashenvale with two friends. I remember this zone being the one where I was first introduced to the term "World of Walkcraft" - keeping in mind that this was back when you couldn't get your first mount until level forty, and Astranaar offered the only Alliance flight path in all of Ashenvale. I remember how scared we used to get every time we had to run past Splintertree, because we had a knack for accidentally aggroing one of the wandering guards and getting ourselves killed. Nonetheless, those were good times. You just made sure to turn on autorun, chatted a bit... and panned the camera around to take screenshots of your characters running.

The sixth most recent screenshot I took is one of a bit of guild chat in which my guild leader, in his own special way, expressed that he misses having me around in raids (or at least that's how I interpreted it).

Finally, let's sort by size - something I pretty much never do, but I want to have a reason to post six screenshots! The sixth biggest WoW screenshot I have is apparently this picture of my Worgen death knight at Light's Hope Chapel. I just thought that the scenery looked cool, and I didn't think of taking any pictures on my first death knight.

Unsurprisingly, the sixth smallest screenshot... is one of the old thumbnails I use to link to my characters' armoury profiles on the sidebar. Heh.

Thanks for this opportunity to share a few random memories! I won't tag anyone, but if you're reading this and would like an excuse to post some old screenshots with commentary, this is obviously your chance.

Fan Club

As if I needed any more reasons to adore the crazy clowns that make up my rated battleground team, I found out the other day that two of them recently created a 2v2 arena team called "We love Shintar".

I was simultaneously very flattered and deeply disturbed. I just had to share that with the world.

In which I come to a nice but surprising realisation

I frequently waffle on and on about how all the best times I've had in WoW happened during the Burning Crusade. If I had to pick one specific event or achievement during that time that had a bigger impact on me than anything else, it would without a doubt be the original Zul'Aman bear run. Mind you, I have a lot of happy memories from the BC days, but working on beating that timer week in, week out, failing over and over again until we finally had those ten Amani War Bears for everyone in the team definitely stood out.

(Incidentally, looking back at that picture of our "Team Bear" makes me kind of sad, as not one of the other nine people still plays with me anymore. They all either left the guild for one reason or another or simply quit the game entirely. I'm still in loose contact with most of them, but at least one guy has pretty much vanished off the face of the earth as far as I know. If you read this, Kordac, I still miss hearing your Irish accent on Teamspeak!)

Obviously I've had other good times in the game since then, but nothing that really lived up to those bear runs... until...

The other night I was thinking about how PvP season ten is ending soon and pondering our rated battleground team's performance over the last couple of months. And it suddenly hit me just how much of a good time I've been having and that I really, really care, in a way that I haven't cared about anything in the game in three and a half years. We've had our problems, sure, and for a while we had a couple of players that didn't really mesh with the rest of the team and who made things awkward sometimes, but looking at our regulars right now, there isn't a single person there that I don't like.

I don't exactly await every rated battleground evening with baited breath, but once we get started I tend to completely forget about the time (which is quite a feat, considering that I'm usually one of those people who look at their watch every five minutes) until someone says "well, that's it for the night I guess" and I realise that it's three hours later. I get completely immersed in exciting matches, and I laugh out loud at the silly banter that goes on during breaks between games. Who'd have thought that Cataclysm managed to bring back a little piece of my favourite expansion after all? That feeling of playing in a team, kicking butt and just having oodles of fun is back. I was honestly kind of shocked by this realisation.

The funny and slightly confusing thing is that I can't even really explain what makes these rated battlegrounds so different from everything else that I've done in the game since those infamous bear runs. The first things that come to mind that I enjoy about rated battlegrounds, other than the company, are the challenge and the pacing. Due to the matchmaking system almost every victory and loss push us to our limits in one way or another, but there's also plenty of time to chill out and be silly - between matches, at the start and towards the end of a game, as well as when you're simply waiting to resurrect at a graveyard.

As a bit of a side note, I've been thinking about challenge in games lately. Whenever WoW's difficulty is discussed anywhere, I tend to side with those who say that it needs to be harder, but at the same time I'm the kind of person who sets all her single player games to "easy", so am I being hypocritical? After a bit of soul searching I came to the conclusion that I don't really need challenge in my single player content (though I don't necessarily mind it either if I have to face it), but I absolutely do need it in group content because otherwise... it doesn't really feel like group content to me.

I mean, if I did a heroic Grim Batol through the dungeon finder right now, it wouldn't even matter whether I did it with friends or random strangers in terms of gameplay; just running along and AoEing everything down is boring. There is no interaction. I mean, I could chat with my friends while doing this I guess, but for that I don't really need to have the game running; we might as well go for a walk. For group content to be satisfying for me, it has to be at least difficult enough to require the assistance of another human being that can think for themselves, so that our goal is only achievable by working together. That is the true joy of having other people to play with, for me at least. And PvPing with a fixed group of people is like that all the time.

However, none of these things make rated battlegrounds truly special. Raids still have challenge and cooperation too! It's an interesting conundrum. Then again, maybe I just like riding around with a group of people who are all using the same mount as me. Vicious War Wolves, hoo!

After four years, I've decided to stop raiding

I've got quite a few people on my blogroll who don't actually play WoW anymore or who have at least taken a step back from it and play less now than they used to. None of them did so angrily, shouting "this is the last straw" and raging about how much the game sucks these days. It pretty much seemed to be a gradual process for all of them, where certain changes to the game bothered them, though never enough to make them want to quit - until one day they suddenly realised that somehow a lot of small things had added up to enough to not make them want to play anymore. All they were left with was a certain sense of melancholia about what they had lost, but they knew that there was no going back.

This is how I feel about raiding right now.

Ever since Wrath of the Lich King, almost all the major changes that were made to raiding have been things that I personally disapprove of: the removal of attunements, all raids having a ten- and a 25-man mode, the introduction of heroic raids, the changes to the badge system, the abandonment of older tiers in order to have all players playing together in whatever was the newest raid, the equalisation of tens and 25s. And yet, every time I just moaned about the changes and kept going anyway. As the Grumpy Elf is fond of saying, complaining about something is not necessarily a bad thing; it shows that you still care... it's when you don't even care to complain anymore that things have gone really bad. I suppose I should have known that something was amiss when the subject of the newest Firelands nerfs came up on our guild forum, and all I could get myself to say was that I didn't think they were a good idea but that I couldn't be bothered to elaborate anymore.

Last night I came home late after having been out all evening. I briefly checked my guild's website and was greeted by a screenshot of a Majordomo first kill, a boss that I haven't even seen yet. I mentioned the sting of missing out on first kills only about a week ago, so there was a brief pang of regret... but it was gone surprisingly quickly. The reason that I hadn't even logged into WoW in two days was that I had been working long shifts, and then spent one evening watching Rise of the Planet of the Apes with the boyfriend (really good by the way) and the other being social with my co-workers. And I wouldn't have wanted to miss either of those things in favour of raiding. In fact, I really enjoyed doing something other than raid on my raid nights for a change.

I've talked about how I generally haven't been that enthusiastic about raiding lately, at least not compared to other activities. It didn't feel like a chore to me, but I wasn't really having lots of fun anymore either. It was just something that I'd been doing for so long that it seemed strange to stop on no particular grounds, not to mention that I didn't want to hurt my guildies by making myself unavailable for no good reason. Ten-man rosters are such a frustratingly fickle thing, and after having helped with the back end of recruiting for one for the better part of the year, I definitely didn't want to be that person - the one who left completely out of the blue and suddenly tipped the guild from rolling along just fine to having to cancel every other raid due to not having enough signups.

However, seeing that screenshot was an epiphany. It was yet another first kill that had passed me by. But you know what? That's a sign of a healthy guild. They didn't need me. If anything, we've been having a bit much rotation as of late, with some people feeling slightly frustrated that they didn't get to raid as often as they would have liked. And suddenly it hit me that if I didn't really feel like raiding anymore, I didn't have to. I could quit without spoiling other people's fun. We have enough healers.

The other day it also really hit home for me just how little I cared about raiding itself anymore when I noticed that I had capped my conquest points without fail every single week since the start of season ten, and that I was in fact getting close to having a full set... but I still hadn't bothered to buy even a single piece of tier twelve. How much of a boon is a raider who cares so little anyway?

Gear has been another little thing that has been contributing to my raid blues in general. I always frown when people say that they don't care about the gear from raiding because I find that strange. It's not all there is to raiding of course, but finally seeing that upgrade drop and winning the roll is part of the fun. Unfortunately Firelands has been absolutely horrid to me as a holy priest. I've seen other people rake in oodles and oodles of gear for both main and off-specs, and the only thing I got after all this time was a BoE off-hand that didn't even drop while I was in the raid, it's just that nobody else wanted it at the time and it went into the guild bank. There is no spirit cloth in Firelands, period. There's something oddly discouraging about a whole tier that drops close to no gear for your spec at all. Completely irrational I know, but it's as if even the developers themselves are telling me that they don't want me there anymore.

And then the recent news about the incoming nerf. Like I said above, I don't even have the energy to be angry about these things anymore, just a little sad. Once upon a time raiding felt a bit like climbing a mountain to me. It was harder on the logistics and it took long to get to the top, but at the end you could look down at how far you had come and feel like you'd achieved something. If I'm still climbing mountains by raiding today, it's only because I'm surrounded by an ever-rising tide and I'm trying not to drown. I'm finding it highly ironic that Blizzard's constant attempts at making the content more accessible to the casual player via nerfs make me feel as if more and more demands are being put on me. Here's the thing, imposing shorter and shorter time limits on people's ability to complete a given task is in fact another way of raising the bar, not lowering it. Seeing tier eleven get nerfed after six months was already hard for me, but as they keep cranking up the pace I'm simply finding it impossible to keep up. Sorry, but I do not have the energy to complete your content within the imposed time limit, and I'm not going to waste my time trying if I won't see half of it until it's only a mere shadow of its former self anyway.

Taken by themselves, I wouldn't even have considered any of these things worth posting about, but without me even realising it at the time, their combined weight has by now become too much for me to keep calm and carry on. I'm not done with the game yet - I still want to quest, level alts and do rated battlegrounds.

But raiding... raiding had me, and it's lost me. I'm sad to hurt my guild leader, because I love him dearly, we've been through a lot together and I know he'll miss me being around regardless. But honestly, I'm done moaning and I think I have to accept that this particular part of the game simply isn't for me anymore. I am glad however to see that my guild is doing fine without me and that my departure from raiding won't hurt its progression. May they kill Ragnaros many times over.

Nostalgia and doubts

My guild turned five years old the other day, which I considered a reason to celebrate. I've always found that "internet time" seems to operate under different principles than real time, meaning that things come and go much more quickly because it's very easy to put a new website up or to take an old one down. It's amazing for me to think of all the forums and community sites that I've been a part of over the years, the drastic changes they've undergone and how many of them have even vanished completely. With that in mind, a guild in an MMO surviving for five years is pretty damn good in my opinion, even if it's gone through a lot of changes during that time as well.

It's not all sunshine and roses however. While working on commemorating the occasion, I went through a lot of old screenshots and blog posts of mine, and it was a somewhat strange experience. Nostalgia is always bittersweet, happy memories combined with the knowledge that those events and people are in the past and gone forever. You can never go back to how it was; I know that. Yet still, looking at those memories captured in pictures and words, I did find myself wondering about why some things have changed.

For example I came across some (what I thought were) absolutely gorgeous screenshots of boss fights in action. "How come I never take pictures like that anymore?" I asked myself. The answer? Probably because I'm a ten-man healer now instead of a twenty-five-man damage dealer. Many of those pictures were taken while I was hugging the floor and people were still struggling to salvage a fight gone bad. I was only one of over a dozen dps, I was expendable for at least a while. This kind of thing never happens anymore. Healing ten-mans is srs business. If I die - or any other healer for that matter - we'll end up wiping pretty quickly, whether we want to or not. No time for distractions!

As much as I do love healing, I'm wondering whether spending some more time as dps again wouldn't be good for my sanity. I've been running random Zulroics on my hunter but no other characters lately - is that my subconscious trying to tell me something? And today a guildie invited me to join a Baradin Hold pug with my hunter and I was thrilled I tell you. Thrilled! Not having to worry about anything but blowing shit up? Sign me up!

But then, raiding as a whole seems to have lost a lot of its luster for me. I found an old blog entry about the first time my guild downed Magtheridon, and I quoted a guildie as describing the reaction on voice chat as similar to a "mass orgasm while trapped in a burning building". Compare that to our latest first kill, Beth'tilac: my boyfriend wasn't in the raid, just occasionally glancing over my shoulder from the sofa, until he suddenly said: "Oh, you got her down then!" He hadn't been able to tell because I hadn't had any kind of reaction to the kill. It's also a world of a difference compared to the nights when I'm doing rated battlegrounds, constantly giggling at some nonsense that's being talked about in chat in-between games, and keeping my eyes glued to the screen at the exclusion of everything else just to keep our flag carrier alive for a couple more seconds.

And the sad thing is, I don't even know why. Out of all the parts of WoW that I believe lost some of their appeal over time, raiding would probably be dead last. Yeah, personally I would have preferred tens and twenty-five-mans to remain separate, but Blizzard still makes some great encounters regardless. Yet somehow... something is missing. There's a definite feeling of going through the motions to it all - and not just with raiding actually.

Again, looking at those really old blog posts about how I used to spend my time in game... wow! No plans, just messing about. Log on, see if any friends are online, then do something together, even if it's just mucking about in Stranglethorn in some way. Nowadays it's: log on, do some solo activity to progress my character, log off again. I could wait for friends to do something together, but all too often that random dungeon or battleground button is too tempting.

I don't know how much of it is simply due to the game itself changing and how much is me, but it's certainly food for thought. I'm enjoying the game in its own way still, but while there is no going back in time, I still can't help but wonder whether I couldn't have more fun with it if I managed to return to my roots in at least some aspects. The problem is that it's hard to break established habits, and you can't be a true noob twice. You can't "un-know" what you already know about the game, such as all the rewards you're missing out on by choosing a less focused approach. But can you still try?

12 days without WoW

So, I mentioned at the end of my last post that I was going on holiday. I did, and I am now back! I'm fairly poor and don't get to go on holidays often, but I was still somewhat surprised when I realised that this was the first time since I started playing WoW that I was going to be away from the game for over a week, as well as from the internet in general. I mean, that's kind of crazy if you think about it, isn't it? Logging on to a game almost every day for over four and a half years! Not even moving to a different country disconnected me from things for that long.

As it happened, my subscription was due for renewal only a few days before I was going to leave, so I decided to let it run out and then renew it after coming back. No sense in paying for the game while I wasn't going to be around, right? The only problem was that since my subscription had been running continuously for years, I didn't know how to cancel it and couldn't find an option on the account management page to do so.

I did some research on this and it was rather... interesting. I found a couple of old forum threads on the subject and they were bordering somewhere on the edge between amusing and insulting. Basically, someone would ask where the link to cancel your subscription was located, and people would respond as if the poster was stupid. "It's right there!" they would say, sometimes even including screenshots, but these certainly didn't match my own screen. Yes, I'm sure that I do have a subscription; I've had it for over four years. No, I don't have any pending payments. And no, I do not have a cancel subscription link! The best theory I saw someone come up with was that Blizzard has been sloppy with transferring really old subs onto Battle.net and that's where this problem originates. I don't know, it made more sense than anything else. Fortunately I realised in the end that I could simply delete my credit card information and stop the payments that way, but the whole thing still felt slightly awkward to me.

You might think that someone who's been playing the same game with such regularity for four and a half years must be pretty addicted to it. However, I'm quite happy to say that my holiday was pretty good evidence of the opposite, because I didn't really miss WoW at all. I had two dreams that featured the game during that time, and I occasionally wondered how some of my guildies were doing (as people, not necessarily in the game), but that was it. I did miss the internet in general however. Not having internet access these days when you're used to it is just annoying. I saw some statues that I couldn't identify while in town and I knew that the internet would have been able to enlighten me, but of course I couldn't check. I actually had to read the newspaper and listen to the radio to get access to any kind of news, and they often only offered limited coverage of the things that I was actually interested in. Outrageous!

So while I had a good time during my holiday, I was also happy to be back home and have my computer back afterwards. I immediately checked my guild's forums to make sure that nothing too bad had happened in my absence, but I actually hesitated a little when it came to resubscribing to WoW. I thought it was telling that I hadn't missed the game for its own sake, and it had been kind of nice to devote more of my downtime to other things in its absence, such as reading. Also, the latest bunch of WoW-related news that I had glimpsed since my return hadn't exactly been encouraging either. (More premium services? Massive raid nerfs? Meh.) However, in the end I also had to admit that spending all my evenings reading had got a bit boring in the past week as well, and I really wanted to play with my guildies again.

So I tried to resub, and Blizz wouldn't let me.

Oh, now you're on! Whatever doubts I had had momentarily, they immediately vanished as I furiously wanted to subscribe to the game again simply because I wasn't allowed to. In specific, it kept rejecting my credit card for no discernible reason, and after three attempts I got locked out of trying again for the day. Who knows why? This morning it went through just fine, and I was actually rather happy to log back in. The graphics seemed crisper than ever, and I even enjoyed slipping back into my guild admin duties, dealing with some of the guild finder requests that had piled up in my absence. Having habits is not a bad thing as long as you remain aware of them.

Hack happens

I always thought that it wouldn't happen to me, but then I also know that sometimes shit just happens... so I wasn't completely shocked when I tried to log into my WoW account yesterday morning just to be greeted by a message that I'd been banned, with an accompanying e-mail about my account being involved in gold-selling activities in my inbox.

There had actually been warning signs: On Tuesday evening I found that my account had suddenly been locked by Blizzard, supposedly due to "suspicious activity". Since this happened just after I had repeatedly failed to log in successfully due to the login servers being down, I thought that it was a probably just a glitch in the system, went through the automated process of account recovery and was back on my merry way very quickly. There were no signs of anyone else having accessed my account, and Real ID confirmed this by stating that I hadn't been online since I last logged off.

I guess I should have known when my boyfriend noted in confusion that his friends list suddenly showed two different Real ID entries for me late the other night. Oh well, hindsight is always perfect.

So I found my account frozen on Friday morning just before I had to go to work and obviously I wasn't happy. I couldn't shake this vague feeling that someone had violated my private space. On the whole however, I was quite calm, and that was actually a pleasant surprise. I mean, I had found myself wondering recently whether I wasn't playing a bit too much WoW, relying on it too much to keep me entertained - but I think the way this incident hardly fazed me is pretty good proof that it's actually not that bad. There's no better way of putting things into perspective than having to go "well, I've got to go to work now so I'll have to deal with this later".

When I came back home in the evening my boyfriend had already turned on my computer and run a full virus scan, which did indeed turn up a trojan (which was promptly removed of course). I still don't know where I picked it up as I pretty much only ever visit the same couple of websites every day, but my best guess is that I somehow got it via the Curse Client. Now, before anyone jumps on me to defend Curse, I'm not condemning them, after all it's only a guess. But rumours about it being a security risk in some way have been pretty persistent from what I can see, and while it might have been a coincidence that all this happened shortly after I installed it, it also might not. I got rid of it either way.

I then decided to call up Blizzard's German customer service - since I'm bilingual I figured that I had a choice and I was hoping that the German customer service representatives might be slightly less overworked. I got through quite quickly and I timed the call - it took less than five minutes to explain my situation and get my account restored. Kudos to customer service rep Matthias for his swift help.

I immediately changed my password and went to survey the damage. Two of my low-level alts had been deleted and replaced with level one alts for gold-spamming. Kind of funny that, why do they shy away from doing it on existing characters? Trying to make a point that while they may be evil, they are not that evil? All my characters had been robbed blind in terms of money, but otherwise the hacker seemed to have been in quite a hurry, as he didn't touch any of my characters' gear, items or guild banks. I hadn't even completed logging onto all of my alts by the time I started receiving in-game mails from support that were returning the stolen money. The GM didn't bother doing this on all of my characters, so I still ended up a few thousand gold short of what I had before, but I'm not too bothered about that. My two deleted alts were back as well.

What is the lesson here? That nobody is completely safe? I already knew that. That someone hijacking your account feels intrusive? Hardly a surprise. That sometimes Blizzard customer support can actually be really good? Yeah, that one was new to me, but I did think it deserved a mention. I was back to playing on the same day of the incident and didn't lose anything but a little bit of potential play time and a bit of in-game gold.