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).

More Levelling in SoD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WoW Memories #11: December 3rd, 2006

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

The following was originally posted on December 3rd, 2006 under the title "Another WoW Tale":

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin

Right, I know I'm quite late to the party in writing about this, considering the movie came out close to two months ago now, but I still wanted to jot down some thoughts about it.

Fun fact: The first mention of this film I recall seeing was this post from the WoW Bluesky account, and at the time I was totally confused and thought that it was just some strange meme that I didn't understand. (In my defense, posting one random meme every three months was about all the effort they put into that account at the time.)

Later, I saw someone yell in Dornogal that we should all buy the "Revan" pack and support a good cause, to which my reaction was 1) what does Revan have to do with WoW, and 2) why are people trying to get others to spend money in the cash shop now?

Yeah, I'm not always the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to making sense of unexpected new information, but I got there eventually.

In case you also still don't know what I'm talking about, "The Remarkable Life of Ibelin" is a movie that was recently released on Netflix and documents the life of Mats Steen, a Norwegian WoW player who died at a young age but also became famous posthumously once his parents found out about his "second life" in World of Warcraft and how much of an impact he'd had in that virtual world, which was such a stark contrast to his real life and how he was largely housebound there due to a severe disability.

The BBC actually printed a long article about him five years ago, which I read at the time and found touching then too.

I actually resubscribed to Netflix specifically to watch this film (though knowing that Arcane season two was meant to come out shortly after helped with my decision as well) and it definitely felt worth it. I wanted to show it to my mother too (since I was visiting her at the time and she really dislikes everything to do with "online", so I thought it might be useful for illustrating what it means to make friends on the internet) but she didn't feel like watching something so sad and I can't blame her for that. You'll definitely need to be armed with some tissues, especially for the beginning and end, but it's not all depressing; don't worry. 

I was obviously familiar with the basic "plot" from the BBC article, but where the movie really expands on things is just how much Mats got up to online, as the RP guild he was in saved a lot of conversations on a forum somewhere, and the film-makers used this to reconstruct some scenes and had them animated using WoW models, which adds a lot to the storytelling. You really get a much better idea of everything he got up to and how he interacted with his guildies, and that was quite enjoyable to learn more about.

The devs also erected an actual memorial for him in Elwynn Forest that resembles his real-life gravestone. I visited it in game afterwards and lit a candle.

Oh, and that "Revan" pack is actually called "Reven Pack" and gives you a pet and backpack, with 100% of the proceeds going to the non-profit Cure Duchenne, which is dedicated to battling the degenerative disease that cut Mats' life short. I bought one of those as well.

I think everyone who's built real relationships with people they met in an MMO will be able to relate to Ibelin's story, but I've got to admit that beyond that, it also got me wondering whether I've met people similar to Ibelin without even knowing it. For example there's this one guy with whom I've been playing for many years who's often made us wonder... things. We know nothing about his real life other than what country he lives in, and he's never once spoken on voice chat, even though he's always happy to come on and listen. He does communicate by typing, but rarely even that, and when he does, it's often very slow and deliberate. He never seems to have any obligations that keep him away from gaming. He's extremely good at what he does while playing with us, yet also accepting and tolerant of other people's failures and faults to an almost inhuman degree. We used to joke sometimes that we can't really know for sure that he's not an alien, a robot or a hyper-intelligent cat, but I've got to admit that the thought has certainly crossed my mind that he may simply be a person who has some bad stuff going on in real life, from which he's intentionally escaping online. It'd just feel kind of rude to press the issue when it really doesn't matter to our relationship.

Anyway, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin is an excellent movie and I can recommend it. If you can't or don't want to pay for Netflix, reading the BBC article will still give you at least the basic gist of the story. And remember to cherish and look after your online buddies. You'll never know what tomorrow will bring and how much of a difference you might be making to someone else's life hundreds of miles away.

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...

Housing Comes to WoW: Some Educated Guesses

I've been meaning to write more about the prospect of housing coming to WoW. We've had a few dev interviews that cleared up a couple of questions since the Warcraft Direct stream, but overall, we still don't know a lot, and I'm probably not the only one who's wondering about both the possibilities and potential problems. Overall I'm still excited about the prospect of housing, but I can definitely see some issues with it too.

First off, I'd like to quickly address a few things that I've seen people bring up and that I actually don't think will be problems.

Will housing be a one-expansion feature?

I can't blame anyone for being cynical about Blizzard's intentions, but the people whom I've seen express this fear usually haven't played retail in at least a couple of years and are a bit behind the times so to speak. The devs have since acknowledged that players didn't like the pattern of them constantly adding new features just to discard them two years later, they've vowed to do better, and we've seen them live up to that promise in Dragonflight and War Within so far. Everyone can have their own standards for how much it would take them to be convinced, but I've seen enough to believe them on this.

Plus, by all indications this housing thing has been in the works for at least three years, which to me indicates that this isn't something that Blizzard is taking lightly. In fact, the addition of Warbands retroactively makes additional sense now, as purely character-bound houses would've been a logistical nightmare at this point and they clearly needed to sort out how to make more things account-wide before giving us housing.

They're just going to put all the housing stuff in the cash shop!

Again, I can't blame people for being cynical, but I just don't think this assertion fits Blizzard's current MO. Housing is likely to introduce a huge number of new items into the game (or at least repurpose a lot of existing items so they can also be placed inside your house too), and considering that the WoW cash shop is relatively light on direct sale items (at least when compared to other MMO cash shops I've seen), suddenly stuffing it with microtransactions for every possible piece of furniture would seem rather out of character.

I'm not claiming that the Blizzard devs are too "good" for this either, but they simply don't need to do it that way to make money off housing. They'll just need to make it a gold sink, and since the WoW Token exists, people buying tokens to finance their new furniture addiction will generate extra income for them automatically. I mean, I could see them putting one special house in the shop for launch or something, but I think in general they'll be happy to let the extra cash roll in through WoW Token sales.

Isn't this likely to just be Garrisons 2.0?

So I think this isn't likely to happen either, mainly because Ion has outright said that they've learned their lessons from Garrisons and won't repeat the same mistakes. He's categorically stated that there'll be no player power tied to housing, and that Garrisons were never really meant to be housing anyway, just a riff on classic Warcraft base-building. The latter made me raise my eyebrows a little but I can't be bothered to go back and try to research whether it was the devs or fans who first referred to Garrisons as WoW's version of housing.

Anyway, I believe Ion when he says that housing won't be tied to player power, and just based on the short teaser trailer, I think the devs also understand that proper housing needs to allow for far more customisation than Garrisons did. However, there were other things wrong with Garrisons, and I'll concede that we'll need to wait and see whether the dev team has really learned all the lessons from Garrisons' mistakes. After all, they are very prone to over-incentivising new features in some way to make sure everyone engages with them (*cough*delves*cough*) and there are ways other than player power that could make housing feel mandatory as something to have and spend time on, for example if there's too much convenience tied to your house that you can't get elsewhere. I'm not yet convinced that the WoW devs are truly brave enough to just add housing and let it be like transmog, something that people just engage with for fun and because they enjoy looking at pretty things on their screen.

Is WoW housing going to be instanced or not?

I've been surprised to see people even ask that question. Wasn't WoW one of the pioneers of making instancing for dungeons and raid bosses commonplace? A lot of MMOs have housing, but the number of them that have non-instanced housing is comparatively small, and it pretty much always seems to cause issues. I have no doubt that WoW housing will be instanced, though how these instances will be set up exactly (e.g. whether there'll be something like neighbourhoods) remains to be seen.

How could they possibly satisfy everyone?

I think the biggest challenge that Blizzard is going to face with implementing housing at this point in WoW's life is that they've never been quite so behind the times with adding a desired new feature, which means that players have literally had several decades of building houses in other MMOs and developing expectations based on that. Not to mention that WoW itself has had decades of its own content that should all be integrated into the system somehow when it launches.

No matter how much effort the devs put into housing's launch, I think it's pretty much destined to feel lacking in some way at first, because people will want different houses and furniture in the style of every playable race, they'll want to be able to collect trophies from every dungeon and raid in the game, they'll want to display each and every one of their hundreds of mounts and pets, they'll want new professions that gather wood and craft furniture... you get the idea.

Free-form or hook-style?

One thing opinions are already split on is how placement of furniture should work. Many people will want to be able to place things completely at their own leisure to fully unleash their creativity... but to be honest I think there'll be some limitations on that. I can see the devs opting for something like the flexible hook system used by SWTOR's strongholds, mainly because like Star Wars, Warcraft is a pretty strong IP with a unique visual identity, and I don't think they'll want people posting pictures of their WoW house containing a giant dick built out of chairs, or having to deal with reports of oh so funny players painting swastikas on the floor via strategic placement of candles (and you just know that WoW players would absolutely do both of those things if left entirely to their own devices).

What else can go wrong?

Finally, and this is a point that I have to admit hadn't occurred to me until I saw someone else mention it: there are practical risks to trying to retro-fit such a giant new system into an old game on a tight schedule. I think I mentioned in a previous post that Blizzard seemingly decided recently that it's better to release content on a quick cadence and let a bunch of bugs slip through, rather than to stick to polishing things until they're as bug-free as possible and make people wait for next patch. To be clear, they'd already lost their reputation for "Blizzard polish" some time ago, but it's definitely gotten worse with The War Within.

And I've got to admit that so far, that trade-off has felt worthwhile to me personally at least, as I haven't run into any major issues myself. When I see stuff like a shaman's totems floating off into the distance during the Dawnbreaker dungeon, it just makes me laugh, but not everyone's been this lucky. The introduction of Warband banks led to some people losing the contents of their guild bank for example, to which Blizzard's ultimate response was basically "too bad, so sad". That's something that may technically be covered under their terms of service, but it's also led to some pretty unhappy customers, and I can't blame anyone for worrying what's going to come next, now that they've established a precedent for accidental data loss on a large scale being something that players just have to put up with.

All in all, I remain optimistic and interested in seeing WoW's implementation of housing, but let's just say there's a lot of room for things to go wrong and it remains to be seen whether the launch will be an unequivocal success or end up being more of a calamity.

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...