World of Warcraft: Then and Now

There is a thing going around twitter right now where folks are posting pictures of themselves back in 2004 around the launch of the original World of Warcraft, and then a more modern picture to show how they have changed in the fifteen odd years that have passed between. This is somewhat challenging for me, because of two points. One I was an early adopter of Digital Technology and swore by my trusty Mavica… which was an early digital camera that recorded 640×480 images to Floppy disks. Second I was generally the one behind the camera and as a result not in any photos that I have access to. I am sure my mom who is constantly taking fake composed group shots has a plethora of photos of me from that era… but we never actually see any of them after she has taken them.

At the time of the release of World of Warcraft on November 24th of 2004 I was 28 and at that point had been married for 6 years. I lived in the same house that I do now that we purchased and moved into in 1999. I was working with Vernie (pictured) and Socar (not pictured) at a handheld device company where we worked on applications for Palm Pilot and Pocket PC devices mostly. I worked primarily as a web developer and wrote some very early services infrastructure that allowed the mobile devices to remotely synchronize with our servers. Vernie and I shared a cube and worked together with him doing all of the heavy lifting on the front end, and me doing the back end stuff.

Shadoes and I went to the same college and wound up working together at a previous employer along with Mannax. In the above picture you can also see the original House Stalwart tabard featuring a golden tree instead of the crusader cross that is more common these days. The other members of House Stalwart were largely folks that I had met through my sequence of games to that point so a mixture of people from Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, Horizons and City of Heroes. Not pictured in the photo but part of this Scarlet Monastery group was Shiana, who we met through City of Heroes and would ultimately leave the guild to found Cerulean Sanctuary and the non-guild based raid Late Night Raiders where I did most of my Vanilla raiding.

The character pictured was not my first character, but ultimately became my Vanilla main. Lodin the Hunter was who I raided in Late Night Raiders with and Djagun was my trusty white cat pet that I picked up in Dun Morogh. I feel bad that I don’t have the original Djagun anymore on that character, but instead swapped the actual pet out for a Wintersaber when I became big enough to train one of those. Part of me wishes I had stuck by my original pet however. From late Vanilla all the way to present I have never played this character as a main again. I was a bad hunter and kept trying to make melee work, so I briefly explored that when it became a viable spec in Legion.

We scan forward to 2019 and I am largely playing Horde with my Blood Elf Demon Hunter as the thing that most closely represents a main. I am playing with Facepull, which is largely a group of players that I met back during Vanilla through Wrath of the Lich King on the Argent Dawn server forums. There used to be an IRC server associated with the forums and we all hung out daily both Alliance and Horde characters. It was the sort of Utopian existence that I hope eventually comes to game when both sides can play together freely.

For years I had this other family on the Horde side but never really played much with them apart from the occasional alt. Starting with Warlords of Draenor I started spending a significant amount of time on that side of the fence and with Battle for Azeroth it was the first expansion where I planned form the start to main horde. While I have bounced off of this expansion pretty pathetically, it has been nice to spend time with this other side of the family. Over the years I handed House Stalwart off to various other friends… first Elnore, then Rylacus and now it rests in the hands of Kylana.

The truth is House Stalwart doesn’t really feel like home, because enough time has changed and the names and faces with them. Kylana brought with him a focus on raiding first and guild second, which is a decision I always fought. I consider Cataclysm to be the real moment that House Stalwart changed for me, as we made the transition from non-guild-based raiding to raiding as a guild. With this we wound up consuming a bunch of the smaller satellite guilds that were part of the Duranub Raiding Company. With that caused a culture clash and a bunch of strife… and also around this time is when I first checked out of the game for any length of time with the launch of Rift.

I feel horrible that I dumped this all in the lap of my friend Elnore, and then chastised her as she made a bunch of changes to make the guild more raid focused. I tried for years to juggle the whole raiding and guild leadership thing, and probably did a poor job at it. The raiders were the most dedicated players, but I wanted to keep the guild as a sort of casual friendly place for everyone. Elnore, Rylacus and Kylana all made shifts to support the raiders above the random casual players, which rubbed me personally the wrong way… but ultimately were probably good for the long term health of the guild. I mean for a guild founded on day one it is pretty magical that it is still alive 15 years later.

As far as an image goes, this is the best I could come up with. In December of 2003 we took a cruise, and this is one of the photos taken with a Mavica, and as a result looks pretty potato quality resized up from a 640×480 image not framed as a head shot. As far as me personally… I am still living in the same house I was at that point and really see no signs of moving. I’m now 43 and have been married for 21 years. I’ve changed jobs several times, some for the better and some for the worse… but have currently been at the same place for 11 years in October.

I’m no longer actively developing apart from occasionally troubleshooting or patching something when it breaks and I have no other developers on hand. These days I manage sixteen people in a multi-disciplinary group that includes five application developers, five geographic information system specialists, five data analysts and a business analyst that sorta floats between the three teams. Each team has a super visor that serves as a discipline lead… not entirely different from the composition of a raid and having a dedicated class lead.

I credit my experience raiding and leading raids for helping me feel comfortable enough to transition away from being a pure technologist and move into management. I try my best to be the sort of manager that I always wanted, which may or may not be the manager that all of my employees want. However I do regularly have people transfer into my group, and the only time folks leave really is to move on with their career and find another gig that can pay more than we can. I consider that a win and the general sign of a functioning ecosystem.

That is another lesson that raid and guild leadership taught me. Occasionally someone needs to move on with their life and make some changes, and that is a perfectly natural part of things. I learned through gaming not to burn bridges someone needs to leave, and as a result many of those people eventually make their way back into my sphere of influence. The same goes for employees. I feel like part of my job is a manager is to mentor them along their career journey, and when that leads to them taking another job… you wish them well and do your best to keep in touch because at some point your paths will probably cross again.

So now we sit on the cusp of a brand new vanilla experience. Time has passed and I have changed a lot along the way. However I feel like I am interested in trying to reclaim some of the things that we lost through this new retro experience. While I played a lot of MMOs prior to it… World of Warcraft is the game that I imprinted on the hardest. I will be around playing Belghast on Bloodsail Buccaneers, and if you find yourself on that server say hi. I will be doing whatever it takes to get the one gold needed to buy a guild character so that I can get a guild up and running, but I have a feeling it will take a few days. It is going to be interesting stepping through the wormhole and seeing a version of the game similar to what I played fifteen years ago.