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 #12: December 19th, 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 19th, 2006 under the title "Gender-Bender":

In my WoW guild there's been a trend to create alternate characters¹ lately and I decided to join in...² and do something different for a change by creating a male warlock called Wilson. I had read this interesting study about gender-bending in MMORPGs in the past, and while that was about EverQuest I figured that the basic principles would apply to WoW too.

Playing as a male did feel different right from the start...³ no random people hitting on you for example, and I automatically found myself trying to restrain my use of emotes and such - too girly.⁴ Still, I'm afraid I can't really report more interesting experiences yet since I soon switched to questing with guild mates who knew my real sex anyway and now I'm mostly spending my time cracking jokes about my manliness. "There's nothing as unmanly as failing to pick a flower." (Herbalism for the win!) "Let me give you a manly hug!" "Just look at my manly ponytail sway in the wind!" etc. ;-)⁵

Of course Wilson's current outfit doesn't help me take the experience of being a male more seriously:⁶

Let's just say that I wasn't the only one who was in stitches when I put this on... just goes to show that the makers of the game don't discriminate against either sex as far as ridiculous outfits are concerned!⁷

¹ I'll be honest, until reading this, I'd kind of forgotten what "alt" is actually meant to be an abbreviation of.

² This series is approaching its end, and it's worth noting that after this post about alts, there are no more entries about me levelling my main. In the previous installment it sounded like my priest was approaching 50, and then I just didn't mention anything I did on her ever again (or at least not for a while, until after Burning Crusade had come out). This is interesting to me because it seems to match my vague recollection that I didn't particularly enjoy what counted as endgame in Vanilla. Obviously I was still invested enough to finish levelling and keep playing, but I remember finding the zones unbearably dreary and the dungeons increasingly difficult (I think the last instance of which I saw the final boss was Sunken Temple. I did join runs for places like BRD, Stratholme and Scholomance several times, but didn't see much success in any of those places at the time.)

³ Eighteen years later... I did write a longer post about my strange struggles with playing a male character in Star Wars: The Old Republic, which you can find here.

⁴ The "emotes=feminine" idea is something I haven't thought about in a long time, but I suppose I still see it as true to some extent. It depends a bit on the type of emote I guess... I don't tend to think that anyone who uses a friendly smiley face in chat is a woman these days, but I do remember it still feels a little strange to me to be more openly friendly to strangers while playing a male character, because there's some deeply tainted part of my brain that thinks males aren't "supposed" to behave that way for some reason.

⁵ I've got to admit this whole paragraph makes me cringe heavily nowadays. Not so much because of the bad jokes themselves, but because I clearly thought I was being incredibly clever and hilarious making them.

⁶ I believe I've identified the main pieces that make up his ensemble as a Barbaric Linen Vest paired with Ancestral Woolies.

⁷ I was at least partially wrong about that in the sense that these particular pieces were the exception rather than the rule for looking equally ridiculous on both female and male characters. A lot of other armour pieces that looked like normal shirts or vests on males actually turned into tank tops with exposed belly buttons on female characters (or worse).

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 #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...

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 #8: November 13th, 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.

This post is a bit different from previous ones as it doesn't actually talk about my experience playing the game itself, but rather contains a collection of links to WoW fan videos that I discovered at the time. In the original post, every single link was broken by now (some of them didn't even go to YouTube yet, but to the old Google Video site) but I was pleasantly surprised that I managed to locate re-uploads of all but one of videos (so the links work again). Get ready for some stamp-sized, 5 frames-per-second, incredibly cheesy nostalgia!¹

The following was originally posted on November 13th, 2006 under the title "Billy Maclure Has Got Some Trouble...":

For once I have to thank my brother for introducing me to a great source of entertainment: World of Warcraft music videos. On Sunday he asked me what kind of character I played and such, and when I told him that I was a Night Elf he told me that there was a video on Google of Night Elves dancing to YMCA that I should definitely check out.

My brother's taste and mine don't always overlap, but I decided to humour him and have a look... and ended up finding this. Not the most well-made video ever, but the sheer silliness of it still made me laugh, not to mention that I was amazed by how well the dancing was synchronised. And of course there's the fact that these people actually named their characters Tha, Vil, Lage, Peo and Ple...

But this was only the beginning. I soon discovered that there are a lot more WoW music videos like that out there, such as this version of Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy" or this vid to the Pet Shop Boys' "Go West". I watched, I giggled, and the more I searched, the more creative the work I found became. I mean, if I were to make a WoW music video, Weird Al's "Hardware Store" wouldn't exactly be my first contender for the song to use... yet someone still pulled off the amazing feature of making an excellent vid out of it (made in the EU, I'm also proud to say). And there's just something strangely right about Al's part being played by a troll... *snerk*

And yet the best was still to come, namely videos for which people had actually written and performed their own songs too, such as The Ballad of the Noob and my absolute favourite Billy Maclure, a parody of Michael Jackson's "Billy Jean". I have to admit that I've watched that one over and over again and still laugh at some of the jokes... cause yes, I also killed legions of hogs and swine for those damn pork pies. Not to mention that it's simply amazingly well done. If I read correctly, the guys who made it were later also involved in the making of the South Park WoW episode.²

And finally, honourable mentions go to two German contributions I stumbled upon by accident: Dwarves dancing to Dschinghis Khan's "Moskau" (nothing really special, but nicely synchronised and Dwarves are funny, period) and the plainly named WoW Song³, which doesn't even have a proper video so I don't know why it was uploaded to Google Video, but the sheer geekiness of the singing still cracked me up. Now if someone could only tell me which song it's based on, cause I know that I know the tune but I can't remember the original title and lyrics...

¹ I do miss the days when people made this kind of silly content for no other purpose than to have fun, and others also enjoyed watching it. These days it's hard to find WoW content that isn't guides or news trying to capitalise on clicks.

² I don't know about that, but I do know that Terran Gregory ended up working for Blizzard that same year and still works on WoW as Cinematic Narrative Director to this day. To think it all started with a humble quest in Elwynn Forest...

³ This was the one video I couldn't find, probably since "WoW Song" is not a very unique search term and my description of it is kind of vague. I did find this entry on the Wayback Machine, but it doesn't appear to contain a copy of the actual video, and the video title stored there, "Der neue Deutsche WoW Song" didn't yield any search results for me either.

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.

WoW Memories #5: October 28th, 2006

I'm celebrating WoW's upcoming 20th anniversary by looking back at my own early experiences with the game 18 years ago, as documented on a personal blog that I was keeping just for myself and some friends at the time.

The following was originally posted on October 28th, 2006 under the title "Another Lazy Day":

... another day of playing with Nemi. Sorry, I wish I had something more interesting to talk about, but I've simply been enjoying a lazy weekend.

As for WoW, Nemi made me travel a lot today, and we did our first quest in a larger group - as in, about half a dozen people. It was fun, even if we died a few times and the NPC involved was quite weird. (He would complain about being hurt while moving along at snail's pace, spot an enemy, run and fight it, then run back to where he was and go back to walking really, really slowly.¹) We even repeated the whole thing three or four times, once because we failed and another time just because we wanted to be nice and help the other people doing it.

It was a fun experience all around, death and all, because everyone involved was very nice and fun.² There was this guy from Poland who fought until his weapons disintegrated, a level ten warrior who insisted on following us around even though he kept dying and talked about wanting to buy a horse for a few silver coins... it was rather endearing. I also liked being the priest in a group of close-combat specialists³, because I got in relatively little trouble (except when all of us died). I need to work on keeping track of where people are though - it's very annoying when someone dies and you have to send out the whole party to look for the corpse to be able to resurrect them.⁴

¹ I can tell from the description that this was my very first escort quest: Mission In Action in Redridge Mountains, which involves escorting Corporal Keeshan from being imprisoned at the back of a cave all the way back to town. You can tell I was not yet familiar with the tropes of the genre.

² And thus, my love for pick-up groups was born...

³ Imagine if this had become the common term to describe melee dps... LF CC would have a whole different meaning!

⁴ It may be that I was just being dumb, but I do seem to remember that in those early days you indeed couldn't target someone for resurrection via the unit frames (at least not if they had already released) so you had to find their corpse out in the world to cast the spell on them... which could sometimes be challenging if the death had occurred during a bout of absolute mayhem involving fears and the like.

WoW Memories #4: October 27th, 2006

I'm celebrating WoW's upcoming 20th anniversary by looking back at my own early experiences with the game 18 years ago, as documented on a personal blog that I was keeping just for myself and some friends at the time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

⁵ This linked back to my second post about WoW.

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

WoW Memories #3: October 22nd & 23rd, 2006

I'm celebrating WoW's upcoming 20th anniversary by looking back at my own early experiences with the game 18 years ago, as documented on a personal blog that I was keeping just for myself and some friends at the time.

Today I'm combining two posts since they were both very short.

The following was originally posted on October 22th, 2006 under the title "Socialising In The Twenty-First Century":

Yesterday was full of quite a lot of socialising of different kinds.

[The first two thirds of the post talk about me playing Neopets¹ with other people, followed by me throwing a karaoke party for my real life friends in the evening.]

And because that wasn't yet enough to make my day, I got back online after all my guests had left and made a new WoW character to play with Nemi² on an English server. She said she'd want to be a Night Elf, so I said I'd be one too.

Can you guess who is who?³

Either way, things really are more fun when you do them together. Certainly there are still tasks you'll want to take care of on your own, but when it comes to things like venturing into a cave or attacking a particularly strong monster it's definitely nice to have someone who watches your back and can help you out when you get in trouble.⁴

---

The following was originally posted on October 23rd, 2006 under the title "*shuffles uneasily*":

Don't really have anything interesting to say about today. Went to uni, cleaned the piggies' cage⁵ and generally didn't feel too hot.

The only fun thing I did was play WoW with Nemi again, and this time Mechanichamster joined us too.⁶ Do I sense a new addiction?⁷ I sure hope not, because my Sims deserve better than that.⁸ Still, at the moment I can't help it I guess, after all the game is all new and shiny to me.

¹ I played Neopets for about five years before getting into WoW, and I tend to think of it as my "proto-MMO" nowadays. While it was a simple browser-based game and the world of Neopia only existed as a bunch of flash images, it did invite people to think of it as a virtual world, there were "dailies" to do and I ended up interacting with other players quite a lot, which included joining a guild, signing up for multiple forums, and contributing to a Neopets fan blog for a while.

² I've mentioned my friend Nemi a couple of times before. In a nutshell, she's another person I met on an online forum around 2001. She was from Sweden and we met up in real life a couple of times. We ended up playing WoW together for something like a year or two, though our association became more loose over time, as she was more progression-minded than me. She also came back for Classic for a couple of weeks, though quickly lost interest again.

³ On the left we have my priest Tiranea and on the right Nemi's druid Elentiel. I think either her or Matje recommended that I should roll a priest because having a priest around would be handy for getting into groups. I had no idea what that was going to mean in practice, but I didn't mind filling the role. I ended up enjoying it enough that Tiranea stayed my Alliance main for several years, until I stopped playing in Cata. It wasn't until last year that I finally dusted her off in order to do the night elf heritage quest.

⁴ With how much railing I've seen against "forced grouping" over the years, I've occasionally come to doubt my own commitment to it. Do I just love group content because that's simply what I got used to over the years? This post shows that the answer to that question is no. I had barely been playing WoW for a few days when I concluded that it was much more fun with other people than to just play by myself.

⁵ I was still living with my mother at the time and we owned two guinea pigs.

⁶ Matje created a night elf warrior called Dantaniel to play with us, but from what I remember we didn't actually end up grouping that often. He spent most of his play time raiding with his guild on his mage main on another server and would just log in every so often to level his new alt a bit. Being a much more experienced player, he had no issues keeping up with us even with less play time, but our schedules just didn't seem to align that often.

⁷ I'd mentioned the subject of addiction previously, and it would come up again later too. I think it's easy to forget for how much hype there was about WoW at the time, there was also fear-mongering about its addictiveness, with the news reporting on people who had got so lost in WoW that they lost control of their real lives. I don't think I seriously expected it to have that kind of effect on me, but I was definitely a little worried about potential negative impacts it could have on me.

⁸ It goes to show again just how much I was into Sims 2 at the time that I was worried about "neglecting" my characters in the game in favour of WoW.

WoW Memories #2: October 21st, 2006

I'm celebrating WoW's upcoming 20th anniversary by looking back at my own early experiences with the game 18 years ago, as documented on a personal blog that I was keeping just for myself and some friends at the time. Since there was never an intent to have these posts be read by a wider audience, a lot of things will be lacking context (which would have been obvious to me and my friends at the time) so I'm adding footnotes to make things clearer, and to judge my past self's choices.

The following was originally posted on October 21th, 2006 under the title "More WoW Fun":

Ah, the bizarreness of the human condition.

Yesterday I logged on one more time to see how many Germans would be online in the middle of the night.¹ Unsurprisingly the place was pretty dead. Except that I ended up running right into the middle of a commotion.

As it turned out Goldhain², the village next to the starting grounds, was suffering a two-(or-three)-man invasion by an Orc huntress and her pet lion and some other Horde guy I couldn't identify.³ He had a staff and made himself invisible a lot.⁴ Now, they couldn't actually attack any players without being attacked first, so they started slaughtering NPCs instead, which caused a lot of "OMG, the village is under attack" messages to pop up in the chat.

A few brave souls actually ventured forward and tried to take them on, but they were killed almost instantly. It was really sad. After that everyone else made sure to not attack the Horde players anymore, but they kept following them around, jumping up and down and yelling for help. I thought it was quite sad and funny at the same time.

I guess that was the revenge for everyone making fun of the Orc corpse that lay on the town square all day long.⁵

¹ As a reminder, I was still living in Austria back then, bought the game in German, and rolled my first character on a German server.

² Goldhain is the German name for Goldshire. I was using the German client and while I was writing about the game in English, I didn't immediately realise that some places had different names in German and English.

³ I think it's interesting that even though I rolled on a PvE server and had no interest in PvP at the time, literally the second post I wrote about the game was about an instance of world PvP. In the starting zone. People are not exaggerating when they say that it was happening everywhere back then.

⁴ The only class that would fit that description would be druid, but then I'm thinking that if it had been that, I would have made note of the giant bloody minotaur instead of "a Horde guy with a staff"? I think it's more likely that it was something like an undead mage or warlock whom I simply struggled to keep track of.

⁵ That last sentence is fascinating to me simply because the notion that a dead orc in town would keep general chat talking all day is kind of incomprehensible to me nowadays, but I guess those were different times and it took a lot less to get everyone excited and chatting.

WoW Memories #1: October 20th, 2006

As mentioned about a month ago, I'd like to celebrate WoW's upcoming 20th anniversary by looking back at my own early experiences with the game 18 years ago, as documented on a personal blog that I was keeping just for myself and some friends back then. Since there was never an intent to have these posts be read by a wider audience, a lot of things will be lacking context (which would have been obvious to me and my friends at the time) so I'll be adding footnotes to make things clearer, and to judge my past self's choices.

The following was originally posted on October 20th, 2006 under the title "[My RL name] Goes WoW":

I saw the German version of Pets in a store here today.¹ For sixty Euros (a little more than seventy-five dollars). Hrglnglrgl. And people ask me why I prefer to buy my computer games abroad...² to be fair though, I then saw it in the store across the street for only half of that. Which in turn made me wonder what possessed the people in charge of the first store to think that sixty Euros would be a good price. Crazy.

I also got a completely different computer game in the post today³: World of Warcraft. I know I said I wouldn't⁴, but those were just the last fragments of denial from someone who was just too curious to resist the temptation any longer. Especially after I talked to Mechanichamster⁵, who's been playing for a while and assured me that it was all good fun.

Unfortunately he wasn't around today to give me any guidance, so I just started by creating a Human Paladin on a German server and ventured out on my own.

This is Isadora.⁶ She's even decently dressed and everything!⁷ Though I'm sure I'll end up finding some more revealinguseful armour soon enough.

Being a newbie was fun, starting from the moment that I entered the realm and was hopelessly confused because I couldn't see myself, having merged with a bunch of other characters that stood in exactly the same spot as me. A lot of exploring, general stupidity and annoying death followed. And I almost laughed myself silly when I found the corpse of "Dumbledore" in the forest.⁸ I can kind of see why people find this addictive, because the world is huge, and as you enter it for the first time it seems as if the possibilities must be endless.

Still, I think that all on your own it's bound to become a bit boring after a while, especially with all the running around you end up doing as you level up. I haven't really interacted with any other players yet beyond helping each other out at defeating the occasional monster, and I'm a bit worried about making a fool out of myself due to my noobishness. I haven't even figured out how to make my character wield anything but that giant hammer thing yet, and I'd really like her to have a different weapon. Not that there's anything wrong with it in terms of functionality, but there's just something very ungraceful about clubbing wolves to death with a giant mallet.⁹

If any of you've been secretly playing WoW already, feel free to let me know - or if you've been thinking about giving the game a try but haven't yet, now would be just the perfect time to keep me company! *looks at Nemi...*¹⁰

¹ This is in reference to the Sims 2 expansion of that name. Before WoW, Sims 2 was my gaming addiction for a couple of years. While a single-player game, it had a very active community around things like custom content, storytelling and community challenges, which meant that I was always sharing how things were going for my Sims and talking to other people about it.

² Funny to see me complaining about video game prices back in 2006. To be fair, sixty Euros was a lot more back then that it is now.

³ It feels kind of weird that even the mere notion of receiving a new PC game in the post seems incredibly quaint and outdated already.

⁴ This linked to a post I had made about two weeks earlier, in which I expressed interest in the subject of MMOs after seeing a lot of friends and acquaintances talk about WoW, though I noted at the time that "I wouldn't trust myself with something as addictive as an MMORPG" - girl, you had no idea.

⁵ Mechanichamster, also referred to as Mecha or Matje later, was the first friend I ever made online, about four or five years prior to writing the original version of this post. We met on a message board about the Transformers cartoon from the 80s and actually ended up meeting in real life in the Netherlands (where he lived) too.

⁶ I actually posted this screenshot on this blog before, in this post from 2014, in which I answered some questions about my early/formative years in the game.

⁷ In hindsight, I'm not sure why I was so surprised that my character got to wear "decent" armour. I think my image of fantasy worlds at the time was still strongly influenced by the kind of materials I had found in my older brother's room while investigating the subject... which tended to feature very skimpily dressed barbarian ladies.

⁸ I was easily amused back then. I still am now, but that example seems like a low bar even by my standards. Then again, Harry Potter was actually super relevant back then, as we were still all anticipating the release of Deathly Hallows.

⁹ Fun fact: I tend to prefer swords to maces to this day.

¹⁰ My friend Nemi responded to the post with: "I'll install it tomorrow."