[You probably should read My Love-Hate Feelings For MMOs – Part I first, if you haven’t already, just so you can get context on this one.]
Jumping on the World of Warcraft Hype Train
When we left off, dear reader, I had just decided to drop Puzzle Pirates (due to a lack of anyone playing who I knew / chatted with) and follow them to World of Warcraft. This version was what has now come to be known as “Vanilla”, which is to say, the very first public release of the game. The player level cap (the maximum level of advancement you could attain) was 60, and there was still some significant separation between what the two major factions offered. For example, the Alliance players (Humans, Night Elves, Dwarves, and Gnomes) were the only faction with access to playing a Paladin class, while the Horde (Orcs, Trolls, Tauren, and Undead) were the only faction who could play the Shaman class.
Since everyone I had played with before was on the Horde side, I, of course joined as a Horde player.
At the time, it was a common saying / joke to say, “Horde – We’re not evil; we’re just misunderstood.” In fact, this statement persisted in being said (and, arguably, even being valid for many expansions of Warcraft).
The Allure of WoW
One of the absolute strengths of World of Warcraft (arguably) is the flexibility of the User Interface. Warcraft has always permitted “modding” (loading externally written code – in the LUA programming language – to change elements of the UI). These mods ranged from simple visual changes to outright data “scraping” for analysis to on-screen suggestions of things to do. I know that many other MMOs have since adopted this approach, but I will tip my hat the the original WoW for being the first one there.
Another is, of course, a fairly compelling history and storyline for where (and when) the events in the game take place, especially if you were “there” for them as elements were added.
Wow – The First Toon
The first character I rolled was a Tauren shaman. Tauren are basically anthropomorphized cows who walk on two legs. Although I had finally joined WoW to play with those I’d known from Puzzle Pirates, many of them were also in the process of deserting this game for Guild Wars. (Yeah, if it weren’t for bad luck in this regard, I’d have none at all.)
Also, given this version of the game, leveling up to the cap of 60 was, in some ways, non-trivial. For one thing, it was almost required to do some of the dungeons (5-man content which was just about impossible to play if you weren’t part of a 5-man team). Additionally, there was no in-game LFG (Looking For Group) mechanism. All you could do, if you wanted to play a dungeon was go to the location and spam the zone chat channel to see if anyone else wanted to do the content. [Or, alternately, respond to others who were spamming the channel.] And then, finally, there was no mechanism to “fast travel” to a dungeon. Yeah, you could take the flight routes of your faction to get “close”, but then, you had to walk (or ride) there. And riding was only if you were at the right level and had enormous wealth to be able to afford a mount.
With increasing difficulty (for me) of actually playing with others and not nearly being “social” enough to comfortably reach out to others, the MMO had, suddenly, become very much a single-player game. Add that the shaman class (in Vanilla) was much more of a “support” class and – it had become not a lot of fun overall.
One thing I hadn’t gotten into at all was Raids. A Raid is like a super-dungeon, and, for Vanilla, required 40 people. Typically, these were run by large guilds who could get that many people to commit to playing several days (because you couldn’t finish a raid in one night / day). Yeah, you needed a large guild for this.
I still generally liked the game, but…
Dipping a Toe into Guild Wars
Since one of the last people I knew (from Puzzle Pirates) mentioned he, too, was abandoning WoW to try Guild Wars, I figured I’d give it a try as well. One notable aspect of it was, unlike WoW, there was no subscription fee.
So, I gave it a very short attempt …
And didn’t like it one bit.
To this day, I’m not quite sure why, but having spent a bunch of time in WoW, it just “felt” wrong.
And, thus, I decided to return to Warcraft (still in the “Vanilla” version).
Wow – The Second Toon
Wondering what the world of Azeroth looked like from the “other side”, I decided to try an Alliance character.
Honestly, I don’t recall anything about this character other than I just didn’t like the Alliance side of things.
There was (and I think, to a certain extent, still is) a very noticeable biased set of feelings regarding Alliance players – in the sense that Alliance players are seen as “n00bs!” who probably only picked alliance because they’ve got the “prettier” races. While later expansions gave the Horde some “pretty” races, I’m not entirely sure this is an incorrect perspective.
And so, Toon #2 went into the trash.
Wow – The Third Toon
For #3, I went back to being a “faithful” Horde player, and rolled a Troll Mage. This was back when Mages could be massive “face-melting DPS (damage per second)” dealers. Yes, we (Mages) were fragile as hell, but if you wanted sheer Glass Cannon damage-dealing, this was it! And, oh, boy, was I absolutely loving the game again.
I still largely had no one to play with, but I was generally able to level through content even solo. And I also now had a serious “reason” to reach level 60. The reason was … the first expansion, The Burning Crusade, had been announced. And it looked to be something exciting! Aside from a whole new set of zones to play in, the level cap would be pushed up to 70, and, in addition to “normal” (ground) mounts, there would be flying mounts – with some content only reachable by air!
Yes, I was one of those who was the first through the Dark Portal to Outlands when tBC released. And it was great … up until, that came around.
WARNING! If you played Burning Crusade the first time it was released, this may very well still give you PTSD flashbacks. Hell, when I was writing this post, even I got a very small bit of tremoring. And if you look at this video (assuming it’s still up) and read the comments, you’ll see how everyone reacts to it.
Basically, the monster generating this noise was a GIANT robot (called a Fel Reaver) and it would sneak up on you and then, suddenly … **SPLAT**, you were dead. But that sound!
Aside from that, the expansion was just plain fun to run through, and I happily leveled up to 70 through all of the zones.
There was also an (initially rather “broken”) automatic LFG tool in-game. You could try to find other players to run a dungeon, but who joined would be a random selection. The typical “loadout” you’d want would be 1 Tank, 1 Healer, and 3 DPS. Most times, you’d be lucky if you got a Tank or a Healer. Usually, it would be 5 DPS trying to burn EVERYTHING down before they all died.
Late in the expansion, I happened to be in a dungeon group where one of the players was from a raiding guild. Burning Crusade had introduced “smaller” Raids which could be done with 25 people. Somehow, this guy liked how cleanly I was playing (since I’d actually researched the dungeons and knew what to do), and invited me to join his guild.
They weren’t an enormous guild, but they were running the 25-man Karazhan raid weekly. I joined in for a few weeks and was certainly capable of holding my own.
The ultimate problem (I later realized) was this was a “hardcore raiding guild” – which meant they demanded your attendance for raid nights – several nights per week. I was working full-time (remotely) and was also a relatively new parent with two very young sons. Eventually, the load of all of that plus gaming became too much and I missed some raid nights – and I was unceremoniously ejected from the guild.
While the next expansion (Wrath of the Lich King) had been announced, it wasn’t out yet and I didn’t feel like hanging around yet again, and decided to cancel my subscription and leave the game. [Spoiler: I did return later, but that’s a much later chapter in this saga.]
Next – Continuing MMO “fun?”
In … Spaaaaaaace!
Continued in My Love-Hate Feelings for MMOs – Part III.
