My WoW Story
Ten years ago today I started playing World of Warcraft. In truth that is a bit of a misnomer since I technically started as of ten years ago 11 pm last night. When World of Warcraft launched there was so much excitement surrounding it. This was not my first MMO by any means and I had already played significant amounts of time of both Everquest (roughly 3 years), Dark Age of Camelot (roughly 2 years), Horizon (6 months) and City of Heroes (6 months). Between those four games I had already amassed a large group of friends that all intended to play Warcraft at the launch. That is the hard thing to explain these days, but World of Warcraft was this one game that every single player that played it… wanted to play more of. I remember getting into one of the stress test betas, and that one weekend of playing the game completely destroyed my enjoyment of City of Heroes. Just a few hours of play showed me that these games I already loved could be so much more.
When it came time for the game to launch, the GameStop in town was having a launch party. I originally intended to get in line with the rest of the folks and wait it out. This was in the days before I actually preordered games. To some extent I liked the thrill of the chase, of having to go out and forage for whatever new game release was the new hotness. So World of Warcraft was no different, and I had intended on just picking up a copy like always. When I go there that night… the line wrapped around from Gamestop and all the way down the shopping center to Panera Bread and around the corner… so half a shopping center for the sleepy little hamlet I lived in. I was showing up moments before the game was set to go on sale… so I would have been waiting behind hundreds of other players waiting for the game.
Wal-Mart to the Rescue
On a wild hunch I decided to pop into the Wal-mart just down the shopping center instead. Sure enough when I got back to electronics I saw a pristine display full of copies of World of Warcraft. I noticed that a handful of players were doing exactly the same thing as me. So there I had my game in hand ready to head out, and by the time I got to the parking lot I noticed that not even a quarter of the line had been served at GameStop yet. I found out later that they sold out, and did not have enough copies to serve the demand. That in itself become a running theme, as you quite literally could not find copies of the game anywhere after those first days. I remember spending my lunch hours going out to stores that I had not checked to see if I could scrounge up a copy for this or that guild member who had yet been able to get in. It was probably a good three months before copies actually became obtainable, and unfortunately a good month before the game was really playable.
I remember spending the next day with my friend and co-worker Vernie leveling a night elf character that I had no intent of ever playing. We sold every item that dropped all of the purpose of getting that single gold needed to buy a guild charter. At that time it seemed like an insurmountable amount of money. By mid-day on the first day we managed to get the money and got all of our friends to create level 1 Gnomes or Dwarves and collected signatures in Coldridge Valley. By noon House Stalwart was born on Argent Dawn and at launch we had around fifty people that we knew from a combination of the other games we had played in it. Shortly thereafter we got a charter started on Silverhand and the Burning Scar was born there as well. Our original plan was to Alliance on Argent Dawn and Horde on Silverhand… the two role-playing servers that were available at launch. Over time and the inability to get logged into the game… folks self sorted into playing the faction they liked the most, and the vast majority of us ended up in House Stalwart and the Alliance faction.
The Hunter Phase
My intent was to play a tanky paladin, because I had so much fun playing one with my friend in beta. I would debuff the target against holy damage, and then he would come in and smite the hell out of them. It made an amazing synergy and was absolutely fun to level together. The problem being when I installed the game and created Exeter for the first time… that was the moment I realized they played a last minute bait and switch. While I was not on voice chat at the time… this predates those days… I quite literally said a verbal “What the eff” when I wandered around Coldridge Valley I could not figure out what the hell the seal system was doing. This was strike one against the class. Strike two was that not long after the launch of the game I had a pretty traumatic death in the family that ended up with me being completely gone for a long period of time. When I got back everyone had shot ahead of me in level, and quite frankly the paladin just could not solo easily at that point in the game.
As a result I ended up rolling a Dwarven Hunter, Lodin because they could solo phenomenally well and it would allow me to catch up to my friends. I am just not by nature a hunter, and there is a whole series of time I attempted to play a melee hunter through the use of the survival tree. Yes I was one of those guys, but it worked well enough to level my way to 60. Which for reference took me about six months to get there finally. During Cataclysm I leveled a Worgen Druid from 1 to 85 in less than seven days of actual time, so a lot has changed in both the game and proclivity for grinding up alts. One of my friends who started in House Stalwart went on to found one of the most prosperous non-guild raids on the server… the Late Night Raiders. He happened to be in need of a hunter to replace one, and I happened to be interested in raiding having done some of it in Everquest. As I started getting geared, I felt obligated to play Lodin as my main and keep it in tip top shape for the sake of the raid. The problem is I never really felt like a hunter, in spite of just how amazing the LNR hunter crew was. Many of those folks I still talk to on a weekly basis, and even the ones I don’t… it is always a happy occasion when I see them.
Birth of Belghast
The problem is that the hunter just didn’t fit my personality, and I had intended on playing a tank when I started World of Warcraft. Originally the intent was to play Exeter my paladin as defensive, but there were just too many problems at that time with the whole “Seal of Rage” debacle as a way of holding aggro. A good friend of mine had expressed interest in leveling a priests, and I had wanted to level a warrior… so we decided to go for it and Belghast was born. The character Belghast originally came form when we were playing Dark Age of Camelot. He was my Celt Champion and I played the role of dps and occasional off tank. It felt fitting to recycle the character name, and since Human warriors had both mace and sword specialization I made the choice for aggro generation reasons. Leveling as a team was awesome, I learned to trust my healer because it allowed me to focus entirely on making things mad at me. I looked up to the LNR tanks at the time, especially my friends Rakrul and Giulietta and I feel like I learned tanking from the best.
It was not long before I was tanking regularly the LNR “fun” raids like Zul Gurub and AQ20. When The Burning Crusade expansion launched, I took it as my opportunity to switch to the role I felt more natural playing. The gear reset was a point of frustration with many in our raid, but for me it was a golden opportunity to switch focus to Belghast and not be years behind the curve. Switch focus I did, and I got a reputation for being willing to tank for almost anyone that I knew. I spent my evenings helping folks get the bits and baubles they needed to gear up, and eventually lead a Karazhan run. While LNR was a casualty of the expansion, I moved into a tanking role with No Such Raid another non-guild based raid on our server. When it eventually died as well I helped to found the Duranub Raiding Company that stuck around through both Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, ultimately dying off when the changes coming with Cataclysm shifted the focus away from non-guild raiding.
A Fitting End
So there is something fitting that I am back playing World of Warcraft again, and playing Belghast once again. When I first set foot on Draenor, it was this grand opportunity to finally be a “real tank”, and as I set foot on Draenor again I am feeling overcome with nostalgia. While I doubt I will be a raid main tank again, I have been enjoying relearning how to tank in World of Warcraft. There was a time at which I knew all the tricks to keep mobs from doing stupid things, and much of that knowledge has faded away. However as I enter the phase of tanking Heroics I am looking forward to relearning it all. There is something sublime about returning to the warrior after tossing him aside with the release of Cataclysm. Cata was the expansion that killed World of Warcraft for me, and since then I have played for a few months at a time before fading away again. Maybe playing the character that my name comes from… will ultimately be a source of revival.
World of Warcraft
For those who might ultimately find this post through means other than my regular readers… during the month of November I have been posting something I am thankful for each day. Today I have to say that I am very thankful that World of Warcraft exists, because through it I have met so many awesome people. If I think about it, there are so many people that I love having in my life that I never would have met were it not for this game. So many of those people I talk to on a daily basis, and if not daily… weekly or monthly. My life had been enriched by hundreds upon hundreds of people that I have encountered through this game. While I have had a complicated relationship with it… going through periods of love and periods of hatred… it is much like a family member now, and I am thankful that it has existed and continues to thrive in its own way.
If you really think about it, this blog would not exist were it not for World of Warcraft. It originally started as a Warrior Tanking blog devoted to my thoughts about tanking and raiding and over the years has morphed into a blog a bout “me”. Similarly all of the people that I podcast with weekly, I would never have known were it not for World of Warcraft. Kodra and Tam were both members of the Late Night Raiders, Ashgar I met as a friend of theirs… ultimately through World of Warcraft, and Rae while she is now a co-worker of mine… I originally met her through raiding. These are all folks that are extremely important in my life and every single one of them ties a lineage back to this one game. To take a step further, I likely would have never joined twitter, or google plus, or any of the other social connections I have now… were it not for this game and the blog that I created about it. I feel like this one game has acted as a fulcrum to enable so many awesome people to meet other awesome people, and if nothing else you have to give your utmost respect to that. Thank you Blizzard for creating World of Warcraft.