My WoW History, Part One
I’ve been a big fan of Blizzard for a number of years. I think I was first introduced to them back in 2000 by my college roommate who had a copy of Warcraft: Orcs and Humans and Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (both excellent games!). Then, a few weeks later, since we’d had so much fun playing Warcraft, we decided to head out to Wal-mart and pick up copies of Diablo. Whew, man…. I don’t think I got more than two hours of sleep a night for the next two months, at least, and I probably skipped more classes those two months than the rest of the year combined. College — $15,000 a year and worth every penny =)
So fast forward to 2004 and I’m starting to hear things about the new game Blizzard has coming out based on the Warcraft series. At the time, I really had no idea what an MMORPG was, but I remember thinking that the idea sounded really cool. Unfortunately, I was still using the same computer that I had in college and there was no way that it was going to run WoW. Plus I was pretty busy with work at the time and I knew that if I got WoW, chances were good that it would take over my life the way that every other Blizzard game I had played in the past had done. So when it came out in November of 2004, I decided not to buy it then.
A year passed. In November of 2005, I had a new computer and a new job situation and I wanted to play WoW. I’d kept hearing about it on gaming shows and websites and everyone seemed to love it. So I decided to take the plunge and buy it. I convinced my wife (somehow??) that this was a good thing and on November 4th, 2005, with something approaching acquiescence from my wife, I signed into the World of Warcraft for the first time.
My first character (because I wanted to be different) was…
wait for it…
wait for it…
a blue-haired female Night Elf hunter! I remember looking through the different options and deciding that the hunter class sounded fun and I figured (for reasons that are unknown even to me now) that not many people would be playing a night elf. So that pretty much confirms my next point:
I was a complete and total noob. I didn’t even know this at the time, but I was. I’d never played an MMO before and I really had no idea what to expect. I didn’t know how to type something in chat. I didn’t know how to return a whisper from another player. I didn’t know what weapons were good for me to use as a hunter(I actually used a +spirit “held in off-hand” rod for a while because I couldn’t figure out what else to put in that hand). I didn’t know you could add additional action bars on your screen – when I filled up my first bar, I scrolled down to the next and started putting things in that bar. Then, in combat, I would switch back and forth between the two bars to pick what action I needed. In a related note, I died a lot.
The list goes on… the first time I tried to make it to Stormwind by trekking through the Badlands… the time I bought a white dagger from a vendor… the time I paged a GM because my pet wasn’t learning the skills I was getting from the pet trainer (the GM kindly showed me how to train my pet ). Needless to say, I was quite the source of amusement for my guild =)
Eventually, though, things improved. I learned how to quest and party up. I started new characters and I even learned how to use a hunter effectively in a group. I’ll tell you the rest of my WoW history in my next post.
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