Five Years

[Jayce]

So, it's been five years since WOW came out.  On wow.com they did a piece where all the bloggers gave a short history of their life and times since starting to play, and I thought it would be interesting to ask the same of the folks here.

Did you start at release, WOTLK, or somewhere in between? What are your most memorable moments? What do you think has been improved and what is worse? How much longer will it last?

This is also a good thread to dredge up doomsayings and other predictions from the early days of this forum and laugh at the folks involved for their inability to predict the future, even though yours is just as bad but not immortalized in a database somewhere.

[Ingmar]

Day 1 of release, personally. (I guess technically open beta, but it wasn't a headstart so...)

I think the biggest surprise for me is either that in 5 years no MMO has even really come close to comparing, or that 5 years later WoW doesn't really feel dated at all. 5 years after release, DAOC was like a relic from the Stone Age compared to newer games; that hasn't happened to WoW and I think maybe that is actually their greatest accomplishment.

[Hutch]

I was logged in within a few days of the vanilla game going retail. I played multiple alts, alli side, and ground one of them up to 55 before burning out. However I ground him out so that I could finally hit the level cap in one of these MMO games. So I was subscribed for roughly 9 months.

When they did the BC expansion, I decided to give it another whirl, and I've been playing ever since. I ended up switching to Horde somewhere along the way. I must be one of those types that likes the ugly/beast races, because I'm going to be belf-free once Cataclysm arrives and I can switch my Paladin to Tauren.

The earliest memories I have weren't even in-game. I saw trailer footage of Ogres and Gnolls stomping around in their villages, and player characters swimming underwater, and I knew right then that I had to try this game.

The biggest improvement along the way has been the way they set up the new zones (in BC and LK) to be collections of quest hubs. If questing is your preferred leveling method (as it is mine), then this is much more enjoyable. In vanilla, I would get lost and miss things. Part of my problem at the higher levels was that the Plaguelands took up a big chunk of that leveling content, and I hated both of those zones.

Blizzard is, apparently, going to apply this standard to the old world after the Cataclysm hits.

I've read that they've got plans to keep making expansions until level 100. If they're going to keep doing it at 5 levels per expansion, then they've got a few years worth to go yet. I still see no signs that anyone is coming along with the ability to compete with them, so their success and domination in the field is going to last at least that long.

[Ratman_tf]

I started within a month of release of vanilla, and stuck with it through Wrath, with varying levels of activity. Thinking back, the one biggest change in WoW since then has been that it feels smaller and smaller. Original WoW had open zones, things to discover, and even though BC and Wrath have added more real estate, that space feels cramped with players and mobs. And as someone who doesn't like to see wasted space in MMOGs, I think that's saying something.
And in that vien, my favorite memories are of vanilla WoW. Seeing Darkshore for the first time, exploring Blackrock Mountain, tooling around Redridge, raiding MC for the first time. Getting keyed for Onyxia, running Stratholme. (Yes, some of those things were cockblocks, even the bad makes for part of the nostalgia)
How long will WoW last? Let me know when they shut down the last EQ server, and we can add a few years to that date.  

[Rasix]

Day one of release, but on and off.  I've normally played with the same 2 guys (brother, one is my ex-roomie) but there are times where it's just me playing (rarely the opposite).

Let me see if I can put together a timeline (I'm bored and no one is at work or even bothering me to do anything):

At launch we picked Cenarius, but I found out later that it was hosting a lot of large guilds.  So after one day of pure catassing, we all rerolled on Shadowsong.  We were in about the second group to hit 60 (just behind the true poopsockers).  2 shaman and a mage.  We formed a small guild to avoid the random cold call, guild recruitment tells.  When we started to get bored, we joined the server's horde uberguild.  I was the only one to stick around.  I got through about 3 bosses into Molten Core before I got really sick of MC and quit.  

Came back, friends didn't.  Did some Molten Core and BWL (server first Nef kill).  AQ40 up to C'thun.  Guild was having internal issues and thought server transferring to a PVP server would be a good idea.  I didn't and decided to quit again.  A growing family life made playing WoW at that level virtually impossible.

Started back about a few weeks before TBC.  Transferred servers to Shu'halo. Joined a casual guild and met my only "WoW friend" in it.   Quit again once I realized I didn't have the bandwidth to do heroics or Kara.

Played some other games, including AoC.  Came back, friends did too (one was secretly playing).  They leveled up, I helped.  Joined a casual raiding guild with my WoW friend.  Quit after getting 2 character to exalted with Violet Eye and obtaining a lot of welfare epics to boot.  Decided that 25 man casual raiding is a bad idea (casual means "bad" in quite a few instances in regards to players).  

Started WOLK 3 weeks late (mostly due to WAR/diku fatigue). Friends joined for about a month, then quit.  Was dumb and did more "casual" raiding, which mostly meant hand holding terribads as they die to frogger. Ragequit guild.  Joined a late night raiding guild, which worked since my wife is an early sleeper.  Out comes my son and I go afk for a month.  Come back to not having a guild tag.

Friends join again.  We reform the "no tells from guild recruiters" guild and my WoW friend adds his alts (he does raid now and then). We do some WG, Argent Tournament, questing, heroics and just mess around with renewed lower expectations.  One of my friend's PCs blew up, so I think he's gone for a while.  I'm taking a break currently and have been playing Borderlands and Dragon Age.

Been a long strange trip, although funny enough, with less join/quits than UO.  I can't recall though quite as vividly, but those stretch back more than 10 years.  

Most improved:
They improve the quest grind and gearing every time they re-do it. TBC was loads better than vanilla.  WOLK was loads better than TBC.  

Worse/remains bad:
There always hits a point where the new raid weapons do double the amount of damage (or double the spell damage) than anything I realistically have access to.  No weapons available for honor was a terrible decision and remains so.  I like playing BGs/WG and it's no fun once some poopsocker starts two shotting me with "Rakdor, Destroyer of Underpants".

Memorable moments:
-Ulda'man: the Indiana Jones scene opening the doors.  Big ass giant comes out.  Virtual pants pooped.
-First times killing Hakkar, Nefarian, Onyxia.  
-Saving a MC raid through the use of an ankh pop + swiftness potion.
-First few times through Karazhan. (Really, as a whole, I didn't care for TBC's endgame).
-Wrathgate.  First time through sholozar Basin. First KT kill. Fun battles in Wintergrasp.  

[Draegan]

I can't remember when I started in the first year of WOW, but I'm thinking 6-8 months after release.  I finally got settled down with a good internet connection and a decent PC and wanted to get back into MMOs since I hadn't played one since EQ which I quit in '99.

I played through level 40 or so the first time around on a Mage.  Met a small group of people and we just PVPd in the open world all day.  It was fantastic fun.  I got bored quickly with my character and quit.  I quickly rerolled a shaman, but didn't enjoy him and finally started a Warrior.  I got a warrior all the way to 60 and raided MC for a few bosses and then quit and unsubbed for a while.

A few months later I came back and leveled a Priest.  I played this guy on and off with the same guild all the way through the first few months of TBC quitting just as I hit 70.  I hated the people that I played with, all the fun people had left.

I came back as a Shaman a few months later and managed to get into a fairly decent raid guild, decent meaning competent but no far into progression.  Though we had a ton of bosses down in SSC.

I quit though due to boredom and the time commitment.  Still single, but I had my own place, though I had relationships through that period.

I cam back again after maybe a 3 month hiatus, many a few months prior to the Sunwell coming out.  Leveled a Paladin and played with some old friends from the guild I had the priest in.  I had a blast but soon grew bored again and left.  I managed to hit 70 and tank a few runs on Kara.

I came back for WOTLK, hit 80 with a DK, raided Naxx a lot.  Quit.  This was last December.  I havn't played since.

It's a great game, but I can't seem to want to play it anymore.  This has been the longest I've been unsubbed for.

Actually I did come back for a month sometime in March or so.  I RAFed a Hunter and a Priest to level 60 but got bored.

[Sjofn]

Started on day one (I fell in love with the game during one of the stress tests). Didn't pick which class would be my "main" until I saw what other people were doing, and settled on (alas!) a paladin. I was ret, even, so of course I was TOTALLY AWESOME. 

My interest died eventually during vanilla because there was fuck all for people like me to do at the level cap. I didn't have an interest in raiding at all (FORTY people? Fuck you!), and the paladin dungeon set was a) ugly and b) itemized stupid, so I didn't care if I ever collected it. To compound that, most of the guild had wandered off for pretty much the same reason, so even that aspect was gone. And forget PvP, the gear gap was too depressing.

At some point, though, Ingmar and I got new computers, and they had added the dungeon upgrade quest series and some other stuff, so we fired it up again to see if we liked it. We finished leveling our druid/priest pair (his druid, my priest) and for whatever reason, enjoyed the game again. Been playing ever since, although I've waffled on my main (paladin, wait no, priest, wait no, druid, wait no, warrior, wait no, death knight! Wait, maybe druid again!).

I have good memories of Dead Strat, even though we did it a billion times. I enjoyed the raider weeping about the AQ event. I liked the leatherworking dude yelling about the FRUIT VENDOR. I have general warm fuzzy feelings towards Karazhan. I have fond memories of Deadmines, less fond memories of Fuckin' Desolace. I definitely have fond memories of proudft blinking into a room full of zombies in Scholomance. And locking sickrubik out of the Baron's room by accident. And locking Fordel out of the abomination gauntlet thing in Dead Strat. And locking any number of people out of Aran's room.

[Musashi]

Started a guild before the game came out.  I know.  I was a noob.  That guild ended up sucking.  But I made a few friends that would help make a guild that server firsted pretty much everything on Akama and opening the AQ gates.  We tried to make it into a competitive guild, but we crapped out about the time we met this guy named C'Thun and realized that too many of our friends just couldn't do content at that level for whatever reason.

Unlike most people, I weep for the 40 man days.  I found them far less serious business.  Even though the administrative overhead of a 40 man guild seems like it would be higher, I find it's just not the case.  I loved vanilla WoW despite its faults.  And it was by far my favorite time in WoW.  Especially Blackwing Lair.  Other than a couple extraneous trash pulls, especially those god damn green drackonids that dumped aggro every five seconds, it was pretty much perfect.  Yea, three greens?  Enjoy your wipe.

Ever since then, the game has basically succeeded in keeping me subbed, but really failed to get my attention for anything other than hanging out with friends and being a huge casual.  I helped lead a 25 man guild of leftovers from vanilla in early TBC, but that pretty much sealed my raiding fate.  The first six months of TBC were horrible on pretty much every level.  A fact not lost on any of you, I'm sure.  And if there's one thing that Blizz has fucked up pretty bad with this game it was helping with the transition to 25 man, and the design philosophy that came with it. 

Since then, I just make dudes and help out friend's guilds here and there.  A friend is toying with the idea of making a ten man guild.  But I'm yet to be convinced that it will materialize.  On thing I know for sure is that I'm going to be a mother fucking Goblin. 

[Selby]

Got the game a few weeks after release (was REAL hard to find).  Was really lazy about installing it, but when I did I played a few characters.  I was disappointed because I was expecting UO-level of immersion and interaction with the world, and you couldn't even read the books in Northshire Abbey!  Figured out that exclamation points meant "quest" which meant "experience" rather than beating on stupid wolves over and over again to level.  Decided I liked it much more.  Played alliance a bit, leveled 8-9 characters to the mid 20's and then got bored with them (the questing progression for alliance I still feel is truly erratic and disjointed at that range).  Then started horde like a year later due to insistence of the other half as she was excitedly questing a shammy in this new guild.  

Played my mage to 60 and did the raid thing, but I really burned out on it due to the things that Sjofn describes: 39 other people, gear grinds, dungeons over and over again with people who I didn't like or who were useless, and general lack of things to do if those other 39 people weren't on the ball.  When the expansion came out I got it, and HATED the first zone (Hellfire Peninsula).  Hated the appearance of my caster in the outfits that were a mandatory choice from the first few quest rewards (looked like a stripper) so I really stopped playing.  Then the F13 people started their own guild and I joined them, and there was talk of Nagrand and how great it and other zones were.  After that fell apart, I went back to my mage and leveled to 70.  Enjoyed most of the content after gritting my teeth through HFP, but didn't have any friends anymore who weren't seriously hardcore, so I didn't do much besides level a bunch of alts (2.3 was a godsend for that, no more elite random mobs or quests that no one would help with).

Once the latest expansion came out, leveled to 80 quickly on 2 characters.  Focused on achievements (I really am an achievement whore) and got into several raiding guilds and have been pretty hardcore about my raiding ever since.  I like the game now more than I ever did, even with some of the stupid (vehicle fights, etc) that came along.  I've liked it enough to get 4 80's and 2 more approaching it!  I really like the BoA items as my warrior went from "total n00b getting pwned" to "leveling quickly and making short work of anything that stands in the way" with just 3 items.

My one big "wow" moment has been how dated the game doesn't feel like it's a 5 year old clunker like Ingmar said.  UO was dated much earlier, EQ as well.  WoW still seems pretty fresh and exciting.  I do express disappointment similar to Ratman_tf as some of those older zones were really beautiful and whatnot (even if the quest system from that era blew) and it's a shame that there is all of 0 people ever there.

I miss the old-world raids as they were pretty neat running the first time, but I do not miss the cock-blocking that came along with them or the difficulties that came along with 40-man raiding.  10 works for me easily, 25 isn't too bad.  40 was just guild killing hard on our server.

[Cadaverine]

I started WoW as part of the stress test people, and actually won a spot in CB by being one of the highest level Paladins at the end of the little leveling contest they ran during the stress test.  And for the record, I leveled legit, not by taking advantage of the off hand item you get from the quest in Duskwood, for whatever that might be worth.  So, for a while, I had the erm... honor of having my name listed on the WoW website.  That one just raked in the chicks, let me tell you.

The sad part is, I got pretty burnt out playing my ass off in the stress test, and really didn't play to much in the CB.  I did get to have some fun doing pvp stuff, though.  Back then, the Pally skills that affected undead mobs also worked against undead players, which made for amusing times in Crossroads.  I actually skipped the launch, and didn't bother playing until six odd months into the game.  And since then, I've been playing in like 6 month intervals.  I'll play for about 6 months, get bored, and quit, then spend 6 months mocking the 27 people playing Vangaurd, then I get bored, and the cycle repeats itself.  Typically with yet another priest.  I gotta learn to stop deleting my characters when I quit.

[Paelos]

Started WoW on release day, got a collector's edition, and picked out a panda cub for my noob warrior. I was fresh off of playing DAOC, so I was rolling with my guild from there, although many of them were heavy pvp people playing a game that at that time had no pvp. Shockingly, after many years the guild is still going strong, and I've never had to change guilds for ~9 years now across two games.

I play for about 6 months, leveling up and getting the warrior to max level while tanking small things. I get a rep in PuGs for not being a retarded tank. I get approached by some people who say they are thinking about creating a guild alliance to combat all the raiding guilds sucking up their members. We establish the Proudmoore Alliance, and call ourselves the PMA. It's about 10 guilds in the beginning, and we all start by raiding Onyxia. It sucks in the beginning. One crazy British btich gets into a shouting match over vent with people and proudly proclaims that the PMA will never down Onyxia. We kick her out, the guild removes her, and we proceed to kill Onyxia the next week.

After two months of farming Onyxia, the MT quits. I get the job. An MC raid starts and flounders after the leader quits. A priest and his pally wife take over and start leading the thing, inviting me to MT there. We proceed to grind over the place for a few months and down Rags. I decide I'll foolishly try to take these people to the next level and volunteer to lead a BWL run. The first weeks are horrible. We can't get people to kite things, people are running in there in blues and green, nobody can seem to actually stay alive, and I'm getting horribly frustrated. Somehow, on the fourth week, we break through the wall and kill Razorgore.

Then, we had to deal with Vael. Good lord. I'll never forget the cheer that went up from the crowd 6 weeks later when he finally went down. If that had happened in today's raiding terms, the raid would have fully folded up and people would have left for good. So after 2.5 months in BWL, we'd killed two bosses. We proceed to clear out the entire place over the next month. Front-end loaded to say the least. We farmed it for 2 more months, everyone gets good shit, I retire as the leader and fade away, wanting nothing to do with AQ40. Some dude attempts that place and they don't kill more than one boss before every declares it shitty.

Enter the long wait for TBC. I spent most of my time organzing fun outdoor pvp raids, or random raids on the old-world outdoor dragons. Those things were fun if you never got the chance to try it. When TBC actually hit, I had quit my old job, deciding what the hell I was going to do with my life, and I catassed the hell of that expansion. I hit 70 in a week. This turns out to be a GIANT mistake as nobody is ready to raid with me at that level, and everyone wants my help. After a long waiting period, we finally get enough semi-geared people to try out Karazhan. Again, it goes poorly early on. The trash is totally obnoxious. Still we pressed on and beat the place, but again well before the rest of our raiding alliance. So it was more waiting to get people involved in 25 mans.

I end up raid leading again with the Gruul's Lair raid, and getting my ass beatdown as the MT on King Maulgar. Then, I end up splitting off the less srs bzns raiders for SSC and lead them there to 4/6 bosses before we got bored. From that point on, it was basically raid leading every major instance that came up with to this point. I've enjoyed most of it, but I do find that once we clear out a place, I get extremely bored very fast. I am not interested enough in gear shiney to make up for the fact that I like a new challenge and a fresh kill.

These days, I'm leading a normal 25 ToC, I love the changes to fishing and I finally got that cool Turtle mount, and I'm looking forward to seeing what Icecrown will be like when we get the first iteration. I do like a lot of the changes they made in Icecrown to reduce travel and reduce downtime. The zones also look very nice, and the dungeons dailies were a great addition.

Yeah it was long, but it's been five years dammit! That's the short version. 

[Numtini]

Did you start at release, WOTLK, or somewhere in between? What are your most memorable moments? What do you think has been improved and what is worse? How much longer will it last?

Got it a month after release? I was an EQ2er. Still am really.

What's most improved? The LFG system *snark* since it didn't have one at launch. Really, though I've belonged to five different guilds, I've never felt really at home in any of them, nor one where I got regular groups, so getting a decent LFG system completely changed the game for me. Other than that, balance I guess. I just can't get over how well balanced things are. The forum people can whine and whine again about how their class is weak, but i see all the classes regularly in instances and raiding and I've watched entire classes completely disappear in other games (EQ2: what's a summoner?). But even more balanced between specs. Every class I play has at least two viable specs, most of them filling two different roles.

Memorable moments? I guess that's my big problem with WoW. I don't have any. I have dozens from LOTRO, a game I've subbed to for all of four individual months, all but the first lasting less than a week before I stopped logging in. But the first time I went into the Great Barrow? Shivers down my spine. EQ2, when we first took down the Overking. All that work. Wow. Or the first time I saw the ruins of Ak'Anon? (I play gnomes.) Just incredible. WoW? Um. Really, not so much. That's probably why WoW is up there as one of the top games I've played in terms of hours and in terms of months subbed, but I still never think of it as "my game." I can't think of a single really wow moment in all of wow. It's incredible crafted and balanced and I enjoy raiding with my friends, but never a wow.

How long will it last? If Cataclysm is the sequel disguised as an expansion I think it's going to be, then I suspect WoW will still be running when they plant me in the ground. It has the potential to be effectively a perpetual franchise.

[Fordel]

I remember trying WoW in the big open stress beta test thing, and just immediately having all the controls click intuitively. Everything worked exactly like I thought it should on a base control level, from the movement to the mouse looking to the hot bars. Smooth and fluid.



The one moment I really remember standing out, way back when at release, was this series of quests:

http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=4077

Specifically the Covert Ops, Alpha and Beta ones. You had to go steal some plans from the Venture Company, and you used some explosives you had made as a distraction. I planted the bomb at the little cart, hid myself around the hill, triggered the bomb and it went off and saw a big explosion BOOM! THEN, Then all the mobs I was trying to sneak past all ran to the explosion to investigate, which let me sneak in and steal the plans and sneak out.

What blew my mind about these quests, is they worked. Perfectly. 100% as advertised. No bugs or half working or complex /use item /use2 cast macros or anything required. I clicked the items, they did what they were supposed to and so did the NPCs involved. (They still work to this day, I do them on every alt I level up  )



I came from DaoC, and there was just no way DaoC was ever going to give me a quest like that, let alone have it work so smoothly and without a hitch. Every quest in DaoC had it's own buggy quirk at best, or was just a broken piece of shit at worst. That quest is what made me go "Wow, this game really is going to be something".

[Jayce]

I started toward the end of the public beta, with the apparently standard night elf hunter.  That ended quickly when my wife went into labor with our first child.

At launch, I got an unemployed friend to pick up the game for me, it being as scarce as some of you have alluded to, and I started a night elf warrior with some friends from my hometown.  Not long after, most of them ragequit, leaving me alone on the server.  Eventually some other friends joined up, and they got to max level while I ended up at 58 before losing interest. I restarted at the insistence of a friend six months or so later.  I immediately got into a friendly guild which was just starting to raid, so I hurriedly got to 60 and joined them.  In this way I mostly missed out on the vanilla 5 and 10 mans and went straight to 20 (ZG/AQ) and 40 mans.

This was the guild I would eventually get my Hand of Ragnaros with. In retrospect this aspect seems ridiculous, as I've never been a hardcore raider nor particularly lucky.  I was the nominal warrior class lead, though I didn't really do much in the position and someone else was the main tank.  In any event, that was a high point of my wow career.

That guild broke up on Vaelstraz, who was known at the guild breaker back in those days for good reason.  After that I leveled a priest to 60 in anticipation of the expansion, then promptly switched sides to play with Morfiend and his guild.  I started from level 1 with a mage, which seems like a dumb idea in retrospect; paying for the expansion without actually really experiencing it. At least he was a blood elf and it was interesting being Horde for once.

After another year or so off to play EVE, I came back recently and am leveling my original warrior to 80.

[Ratman_tf]

I remember trying WoW in the big open stress beta test thing, and just immediately having all the controls click intuitively. Everything worked exactly like I thought it should on a base control level, from the movement to the mouse looking to the hot bars. Smooth and fluid.

God yes. This is one of those ephemeral "polish" things that Blizzard seems to kick ass at. The big reason I quit WAR wasn't any of the game system issues, I quit by level... 5 or 6 I think, because of the controls and interface. After WoW it felt like having my dick hit with a hammer.

[Shrike]

Ahh, my tour of Azeroth. I was an off and on player, but I"ve been "on" for quite a while now.

Initially, I did'nt want to play the game. I was all for EQ2. I ended up in both--until my computer melted down. I still blame EQ2 for this. After the new box was up and running (blown mobo), it was all WoW, but I was about two weeks behind everyone else from my old EQ guild. Also, I wasn't overly thrilled with the classes. I wanted to play a night elf (I like elves, so sue me), but I also wanted to be a shadowknight (there's that EQ thing). This was obviously a no-go, so it's NE warrior. Yay. I was way behind, the class sucked, the gear sucked, and I still wanted to harm touch people. The suckitude got the better of me so I ended up quitting around 3-4 months in at level 56.

So, after about three more months and a warrior patch (yeah, right), I got talked into resubbing again. Yay. I got one more level, saw everything still sucked and my guild had atrophied (they hooked up with some really annoying Whisperwind douchebags), so I pulled the plug after about 3 weeks and another level or so.

Six months later. I think. Couple of months anyway. I get talked yet again to resubbing. Things look a bit better (sorta), but I hook up with a new casual guild forming to do MC and whatnot. This goes better and I'm kinda cooking along as a dps fury warrior. It's fun, mostly. I gear up, cause some guild angst (yay!), and basicaly get lured away by CoH after a few months. Quit again, though, mostly just fade away. Couple of months of CoH has me pissed off and missing my elf so I show up in /guild again out of the blue. This time it's for a good stretch. More MC, we take down Nefarian, hit the bughouse (AQ20/40) and I'm stoked for the expansion. It drops (my Nef axe never did; this is a trend that continues to this day...). TBC is a complete launch disaster. I start my shaman. Warrior finally gets rolling when the server mostly stabilzes, but it sucks--again. Three levels and I'm done with warrior shit for good (well, a couple of years) and it's all enhance shaman from here on out. I make it a couple of months and to level 66 before my account gets hacked. I manage to get it restored, but I"m in CoV by this time and liking that a lot. Goodbye WoW.

I swore I'd never do this again, but about 8 months later, I get talked into this one more time (interestingly, it's the same person that talks me back every time). I'm back in the shaman game and it's a lot better than it was. So I"m golden until today--about two years. My play time is down from where it was a few months ago, but I"m still in the raid scene and really campaigning BG twinks (warrior rocks). I've got 3 level 80s, a 70, a 60, a 50, and threee 30s. I'm a little burnt on WotLK, but looking forward to Cataclysm--alot. I guess I'm in it for the long haul now. Unless they fuck up shaman bigtime in Cat, but I do have those other 80s...

[schild]

Launch to day 28. It was been there, done that except now it's polished from the moment I skipped reading the first quest text. I can understand the sense of community and being part of something huge and having a new world that's polished from the word getgo, but it did absolutely zero for me and cemented an undying hatred towards the same 'ol same 'ol. If anything, short of (real) jobs created (in many places), I firmly believe it made the industry take 3 steps back instead of any steps forward, which was bad and explains why the MMOG industry is in the exact same place it was five years ago.

[Comstar]

Started wayyyy after everyone else, the year before the 1st expansion came out. Got up to 35 or so and hit SVT and quit. Never got in a guild that was alive or cared if you were below 60. I enjoyed the PVP in the battlegrounds as a diversion. SVT killed the game for me. Judging how everyone's maxed out and doing raids, I doubt I will ever return because finding people to do low level stuff was hard enough 2-3 years ago and even then 90% of the players were at 60 by then anyway.

Memorable moments- getting a full set of the leather armour from the pirate ship you do around level 20 in the human lands. Exploring around Darkshire  by myself and finding everything. Being able to do tumble jumps as a nightelf.

[Zetor]

Woo, WOW memoirs. This thread needs a 'mood' and 'current song' field for each post too, imo.  

In general, me and my guild took occasional breaks (from several months up to a year) in the middle/end of expansions when there was just nothing to do for non-raiders like us, playing other games like coh, guild wars, eq2 [ugh], aoc [sigh], war [lol], swg [], and lotro.

I started at day 1... technically more like day 5 because I had to get my US friends to register my account for me (back then there was a pretty strict region-lock on the US version, it's been relaxed since then). Played with my guild who've been playing together since the UO days.

Originally played alliance on Bleeding Hollow, which was a passable server except for the lag and queues and ... yeah. Transferred to Crushridge when the first wave of transfers opened in early '05, which was an even worse server (playing on west coast servers from eastern europe = 600+ ping), but oh well; that's why I shelved my rogue and went warlock, since dots don't care about your latency. Back in vanilla we never raided other than pugging an occasional MC or ony or ZG... we did finish the tier0.5 questline though, Valthalak was quite a feat for having no raid epics. Other than that it was just running scholomance eleventy billion times and bitching that the dreadmist helm never drops (it still hasn't, btw!).

We came back for BC, messed around a bit in heroics and even Kara by teaming up with another guild, but eventually interest waned again. Then when they did the 'heroics aren't useless anymore' patch we were back for a bit to try things out and go to magister's terrace etc. Bitched a lot about the idea of daily quests (at least the qel'danas / ogrila / skettis sort) and how they're like a job so yo can have a job in yo 2nd job, dawg. Some pugging of gruul/mag/kara too, but everyone did that I think. Oh yeah, my shaman got an arcanite ripper.  

For wotlk, again there was a surge of reactivation when the expansion came out, we ran some heroics, then everyone got bored and it was back to pugging again with occasional BGs. Some of us recently reactivated in anticipation of 3.3, maybe those 5mans will be enough to get everyone on board again, woo!

Everyone is looking forward to cataclysm, we'll probably shake things up and go horde gobbo-style. I've transferred my original main [lock] to horde side to act as a sugar daddy... well, as sugar daddy as I can get with the 1.5 hours of playtime he gets per week.

[apocrypha]

Played in beta with a few friends that I'd played DaoC with, but we didn't actually sign up until probably 3 months after launch?

Those same friends however turned out to be unable to let go of DaoC and were terribly disappointed with wow's pvp. They stuck it out on Horde until about level 40 or so then decided they wanted to try Alliance instead. EU-Shadowsong was (and still is) a low-horde population server, and they felt that the economy and community would be better on Alliance side. They realised that was bollocks, again around level 40, and all buggered off back to DaoC.

I hung around on the Alliance side, joined a small raiding guild, got to 60, started doing MC, hated it with a passion and gave up wow for a year. I'd be interested to know just how many people were put off by MC, it was seriously terrible. And healing in a 40 man raid? Really no fun at all I found. So I went and played EVE for a year instead.

Came back to the Horde side some months after BC launched, after getting royally pissed off with all the cheating devs shit going on in EVE at the time. All those people who said they'd quit EVE because of that scandal? I was one of the few that actually did. Anyway, by sheer coincidence I bumped into one of the first "online gaming friends" I'd ever made on my wow server, a guy I'd played Quake with back in the day, which was very odd but kinda cool. Carried on to 70 but went back to EVE briefly because my brother was playing it.

Liked the sound of WOTLK so I went back to wow and then did my back in a month or so before the WOTLK release. Started being able to play again about 6 months ago but the catching up at an hour a day has been slow. Just recently another old friend and his wife and a couple of their friends joined me and my gf on Shadowsong and I'm having more fun in wow now than I think I've ever had in an MMO, just doing guild 5-mans, messing about, enjoying playing it for fun with a completely chilled group of people.

Thing I think they've improved the most? For me it's the 5-mans. I've been behind the levelling curve with both expansions for one reason or another and I'm in a small guild that will stay that way, so I don't see me doing much beyond heroics and the occasional 10-man PUG, and the WOTLK 5-mans are so much better than old world or BC ones. They're fast, they're fun, they look great, there aren't any stupid cockblocks. Only the vehicle crap needs to go imo.

I think wow's biggest strength is that it has something for so many different types of players. I have no interest at all in hardcore raiding, chasing the uber epics or the pvp (wow's weakest feature imo), but that's fine, there's plenty for us to do as an ultra-casual guild and the rate at which the game changes means I don't see us getting bored any time soon. In some respects I see where people are coming from when they say that wow has set the genre back or stagnated it, but in other ways it's also shown how it should be done - there's no need to punish players all the time and games that do (Darkfall?) are destined to fail or remain incredibly niche nowadays, and a large part of that is because of wow.

[Nightblade]

I was a chronic player for three years. It wasn't until the cluster fuck that was Arena and the Burning Crusade that I realized how much time I wasted on something that was 80% getting to the fun part, 20% actually having fun. As time passed, the sense of server community was systematically destroyed by things like Cross Server BGs, heavy instancing, and the trivialization of world bosses. (I remember there being a few world bosses in TBC that nobody ever bothered with because the loot was terrible or something)

I would try a few MMOs after that such as Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, LOTRO and Fallen Earth, but nothing can really compare to the polished and responsive controls of WoW - something that is somehow elusive in the MMO genre... Which is good. If it had not been for this series of events, I would have continued to miss out on a great deal of other quality games due to being busy grinding for [Disgruntled Ruthless Gladiator's Codpiece].

[Jeff Kelly]

I started to play in the US Open Beta in one of the early pushes. i think it was at the beginning of 2004 but I can't recall exactly.

I got hold of a beta invite through some obscure channels although I technically wasn't eligible as a european.

I played regularly and vicariously from then on but switched to the eu beta in november when regular service started in the US. Preorders for the european release got access to the euopean beta, which basically was a test to check if the european branch could handle things and to test the localized versions. European launch was sometime in February of 2005.

My original guild was raid oriented and we did everything including Naxx 40 and we were once the second best horde raid on our server (RP server so big fish small pond). At that time I was heavily invested in the game. I played for 4 to 5 nights per week and even helped to organize and lead our raids.

Shortly before BC hit, our guild broke apart. People didn't want to do Naxx anymore because everything would become obsolete once BC launched. Many people already started to plan for the launch (hoarding materials, planning the race to 70 etc.) and the raid and subsequently the guild fell apart. Which was OK because I was burnt out and didn't mind the change of pace.

When BC hit I changed into another guild, largely because one of my best friends joined with them. That guild was a really great guild. I tuned down my play time but they had such a great mix that you could always find enough people that had to do the same as you or didn't mind to come along anyway. I did a whole bunch of heroics and even Karazhan and Zul Aman 10 but never joined the 25 man raids. because I had been there and had done that and knew that it wasn't worth the trouble. The 10 mans could be done with a time investment of 1 or two nights a week and we had a great group.

About one year into BC at the End of 2007 I quit cold turkey because I simply wasn't playing anyway anymore.

I started again in November of last year, mainly as a means to keep in touch with some really good friends that also play and live a few hundred miles from here.

The game has really come a long long way since beta or even since launch. It has gotten a great deal more casual which I think is great. Playing has become a lot more comfortable - Blizzards own UI is better, the lua framework for add ons is better and a great deal of great add ons exists. All game mechanics have been tuned and largely work great. Hell on my new server there are even pick up 25 man raids up to and including Ulduar.

People haven't changed however. You still have the same drama, the same arguments and the same basic memes you had five years ago. Raiding is still perceived as being to easy, getting 25 people to not stand in the fire is still as hard as telling 40 people to not get breathed on by Onyxia and too many people define the quality of "fun" by the amount of purple pixels they get.

It has been fun so far and I got to know a lot of people IRL that I wouldn't have otherwise and I still find it a bit more productive than just sitting in front of the telly all evening. But sometimes I regret the amount of time that I wasted playing that game and that I could have used more sensibly. (But probably would'tz have anyway)

[Rendakor]

I started 6 months or so after release (played EQ2 first), and rolled on a orc hunter or Skywall (PVE) and got him to 60. The average WoW player was (is) a gibbering fucktard, so I didn't get into PVE at all; I think I ran DM East once and that was it for endgame dungeons. However, I really liked BGs so I started PVPing pretty seriously. I got to rank 12 in the old honor system, before I realized that it would be another month of hardcore, no life grinding before I saw any rewards, so I dropped the hunter.

Rolled a dwarf rogue on an RPPVP server and twinked at 29 for a while. I financed that twinking by selling chanting mats on an alt; when it only took an enchanting skill of 1 to DE anything, I had a level 3 warlock and the Auctioneer mod and made an easy 2000g in two weeks. I eventually got the rogue to the mid 50s before getting bored, again. Played a few more alts before unsubbing for a while.

A month before BC launched, I resubbed and got an undead warlock to 60 in preparation for the xpac. Played through some of BC but didn't really care for it; IIRC I quit around level 66.

Came back again again after WOTLK launched (Feb '09) and rolled a Tauren DK. Once he hit 80 I actually got into raiding for the first time; my guild was only ever a few RL friends so I had to PUG pretty much everything. I geared out pretty good in Naxx since most guilds had farmed it to hell by the time I made 80. I dabbled in Ulduar, but the increased difficulty made PUGing it much harder; to this day I've never even seen General V or Yogg. However, I still managed to stay decently geared: I got a few drops in Ulduar, had all the craftable BOEs made, and a kind guildy passed me Aesir's Edge from XT 10m hardmode. Had some luck in ToC and Ony, but got bored again and resubbed a month ago. I might go back for ICC, or I might just wait til Cataclysm.

[Ashamanchill]

Alright here goes...

I started late to the party. In september 06, I believe. If I wasn't in the army it never would have happened. I was living in the on base quarters, and noticed that a lot of people from my regiment vanished after work into their rooms, only emerging periodically to take their empties out to the collection spot.

World of Warcraft? Wasn't that the game with Thrall? and the peons that when you clicked on them they said 'work, work'? You guys are playing that? A friend convinced me to try it out, and even though he knew I liked paladin style characters, he convinced me to roll horde because he was (the horde didn't have paladins at the time.) I rolled a warlock, although I can't remember why. Then I was hooked.

Got to 60 just as the X-pac came out, but only got to play it for a week before I had to deploy to Afghanistan. Missed out on shit like heroics, and arenas, and rep grinds the first time around, although I got to hear about it from my friends back home when I called them. Came back just after Illidan became raidible. I said fuck the warlock, and rolled a druid, and here I am.

I played all the challengers to the game, but they wouldn't take and I kept going back. Me being someone who prefers smooth, workable, familiar fun over innovation, I guess I'm going to be here a while.

[Nightblade]

I played all the challengers to the game, but they wouldn't take and I kept going back. Me being someone who prefers smooth, workable, familiar fun over innovation, I guess I'm going to be here a while.

Innovation is a very charitable way to refer to this game's competitors. 

[Paelos]

The funny part is they steal the innovations in WoW, weed out the awful ones in a trial by fire, and add to the juggernaught.

The only hope to compete with WoW as I see it is to create a completely different and better MMOG experience beyond button-mashing. If you try to do an MMOG where you queue up abilities by pressing action buttons, you've already failed.

[Sheepherder]

Isn't this thread and the "what class do you play?" thread redundant?

[Ashamanchill]

This thread has the feel of a highscool yearbook, but I guess since wow's been around as long as most people's tenure in highschool, that seems kinda fitting. My best memories to date:

1. Southshore fights
2. My friend and I, chasing a level 60 (we were level 48 at the time) all the way from Arathi Highlands down to the gates of Iron Forge, and killing him right before he got to enter it. (The world really felt big then.)
3. Our first go doing dungeons, and we had a shaman as a tank and our healer. Not two different shamans, the same guy. That lasted all the way up until Stratholme and shit. Oh, and to add to our retarded group composition, we never ran a dungeon with more than four of us.
4. Exploring every hut in Orgrimmar for the first time (my only previous experience with a game of this type had been BG2, and NWN and what not).

5. This is a weird one. On deployment WoW was, after pussy, and how much our current operation sucked, the most talked about topic in my troop. I shit you not. It seemed that important then. Or maybe it was just something from home we all had in common. It's a mighty surreal thing, being stopped on patrol in the middle of the desert of Afghanistan, sitting and talking about desolace, and where to get the best herbs to sell on the AH, and why rogues are so OP. The hardest I've ever laughed in my life was getting back to base and seeing an email my friend from back home had sent me http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B97P0e7ejYw The guys in my troop memorized that thing. Drove everyone who didnt play wow nuts. Shit like this doesnt happen with WaR, or AoC. Not even close.

[Triforcer]

Started playing a week or two after release on Archimonde, which was supposedly the PvP server where "all the hardcore pvpers were going."

Had an absolute blast for a year with my mage, mostly playing solo and with very little raiding.  LOVED world pvp.  There was no better feeling than stalking a zone and being stalked in return.  I wasn't the greatest PvPer, but creative use of engineering gadgets led to some fun times.  I also (as I posted here) got the Gurubashi Arena trinket at level 39 by equipping a Goblin Rocket Helmet and hitting the last 60 to survive the scrum.  That was probably my most fun time in MMOS (leaving out pre-Trammel UO, of course, where every moment was ambrosia). 

Quit right after BGs were released, went back for a short time at BC to level to 70.  MMOs are usually only fun in the first year, before gear inflation and the like sets in.   

[AutomaticZen]

Started playing in closed beta as a Warrior I believe.

Launch day, I rolled up a Night Elf Hunter  on Illidan, played him to around 40, and stopped playing because the people I was running with shot past me.  Tried a paladin, boring as hell.  So I quit for a bit.

Came back a few months later with a brand new 5-man crew (me, roommate, roommate's girlfriend, and another couple) that included my roommate at the time.  Rolled a Orc Hunter on Eredar (PVP) because one of the people had a cousin of some sort on there.  At around 25+, two of the group bailed because they were getting ganked.  Because we were on a PVP server.  One of them being the whole goddamn reason we were on the PVP server.  Such rage.

Hit 60, stopped playing the Hunter.  Roommate and girlfriend became goddamn raiding addicts.  Rolled an Enhancement Shaman.  Hot shit!

Got into BC Closed beta due to some Battlegrounds contest or whatever.  Liked what I saw.

BC hits.  I take my Enh Shaman into Hellfire.  Not feeling it at all.  The character just feels... weak.  So I roll a Blood Elf Paladin (Holy).

The skies open up.  Angels descend from heaven.  Paladins are the shit for leveling.  I do dick all for damage, but my survivability is through the roof.  I occasionally run into mobs that I cannot kill.  I remember fighting a Tree Druid NPC.  It couldn't kill me because of Seal of Light, but I couldn't kill it because it would HOT itself every now and then.  In hindsight, leveling as holy was stupid.

My girlfriend joins me in WoW as an Undead Rogue.

I cap as Holy.  Heal a bit.  Not bad.  One day I'm running Kara with the guild, and they decide that they need me to tank.  I have the gear, so I hearth, respec, and come back.  Been Prot ever since.

Topped out in BC in Black Temple, though I never got to see Illidan live.  Saw Sunwell trash once. 

Wrath.  I CAN HAZ DAMAGE NOW!  It's so awesome that I level as Prot.  Hit cap.  Burn through Naxx.  Maly becomes our wall. 

I leave the game again.  Spent some time playing all the other games I bought that year.

Girlfriend drags us both back in.  Which leads us to today. 

[Sjofn]

I occasionally run into mobs that I cannot kill.  I remember fighting a Tree Druid NPC.  It couldn't kill me because of Seal of Light, but I couldn't kill it because it would HOT itself every now and then.  In hindsight, leveling as holy was stupid.

Hahaha, yeah, that happened to me too. I did most of my Alliance leveling in a duo with Ingmar, so it wasn't until I leveled a horde paladin (she's languishing at level 73 or so right now) that I learned just how fucking awful mobs that could heal themselves could be. Good times!

[Crumbs]

At the time of WOW's release, I was part of SWG's Scylla server and we were really having fun with it.  Sure SWG was SWG, but my idea of fun was endless hours of world pvp, and our server community definitely had that.   Chasing each other from planet to planet, random skirmishes, that was where it was at for me.  Bored of your class?  Regrind over the weekend and jump back into the fray.

The CU bothered us a little, but the NGE resulted in the mass exodus we all know and love (I see it has been discussed here so I don't mean to rehash).  200 of my friends and I went to WOW the next day.  So this was what, about a year after WOW's release?

Problem was, my SWG buddies went to Frostwolf Alliance side, and my brother and RL friends played on Kargath Horde side.  As a result I have maxed toons on both sides.  I bounce back and forth alot, and as a whole my progression is very average.  I was cool with WOW because my friends played it, but it rarely matched the sustained rush of SWG.  Alterac Valley almost does, WG comes even closer.  Raiding as rogue class leader in MC and BWL made me want to kill myself.  Tanking or DPSing Kharazan with people I liked was fun. 

WOTLK was interesting.  I had a blast rolling a DK, taking it to outlands at 60 and sometimes being able to take out the 70s that thought all the nub DK's would be fodder.  I'm what you might call a mouth breathing faceroller, so the insane OP-ness of DK at WOTLK launch greatly appealed to me.

As of now I am very casual.  I got a good guild on Moon Guard that raids but doesn't care if members raid or not.  I basically fill in if they need someone but otherwise I'm waiting for WG or doing the daily pvp quests.   Age of Conan, Warhammer, and Fallen Earth have come and gone for me, and I've pretty much given up hope of any game being as exciting as SWG was.  Like Schild says, WOW runs well, is polished, and is nothing new.  It keeps me resubbing because I have good friends who play and I sometimes need something to zone out with that doesn't involve drugs.

A memorable moment took place on the last midsummer event.  Our GM was being camped in Org, so we put together a little team to get her out.  It took a few hours and we died alot, but we ended up turning things around on some of the more douchier Horde players that thought they'd never get camped back :)

[Kageru]

What's most improved? The LFG system *snark* since it didn't have one at launch.

I swear it did. You used to be able to click a checkbox for "lfg" and it would show up on a column in /who. They removed it at some point though.

For myself the guild I'd been with in EQ (Southern Armada) decided to move to WoW on mass at release. Didn't play beta but enjoyed reading the beta forums and amazed at the confidence having open forums revealed. People seemed so keen and the mechanics were EQ with a lot of the brain damage removed. Used to post on the public forums that their 24 hour day night cycle was dumb (it was, but they just removed the difference entirely) and hoping they didn't have something stupid like the DoT limit that was bugging us in EQ (they did). I remember pulling an all-nighter so I could clear some time and be there when the shop opened on launch day. Guild was formed by scraping together our coppers and silvers while still in the newbie areas. Rolled an Orc warrior, sadly one of 8-12 we fielded, and the guild raided upto BWL and early naxx.

Come the release of BC a combination of boredom, a desire to relive EQ glories and a misplaced faith in Brad led to most of the guild moving to Vanguard. Eventually it became obvious that the game was going nowhere and the guild was fading alongside the game. So most moved onto EQ2 and a couple of others, myself included, restarted the guild in WoW. It's still the best PvE MMO out there, especially for a casual raiding guild, IMO. The developers get it wrong quite often, they're emotionally attached to a lot of stuff (arena, LFG tool) even when it's failing but at least there's a sense they believe in what they're doing and are willing to make changes to try and evolve the game.

Indeed it's sort of sad how little challenge there is from the other MMO's. Being in Champions beta and reading the Warhammer and Aion forums (plus FoH and here) makes me weep at so much effort being spent on MMO's where the central game mechanics are half-baked. I mean I don't think any of them were likely to "dominate" WoW but I'd like them to at least be able to support their own weight without melting down.

[Fordel]

That LFG tool was in Beta, but they got rid of it come release.

[Xanthippe]

That LFG tool was in Beta, but they got rid of it come release.

I could never figure out why, because it's vastly superior to every other method they've used.

Played open beta, got a mage to 15. 

Started on a pve server, Durotan, at launch, horde rogue.  Got to 51, really didn't enjoy the game, and I kept dying. (I didn't know what talents were, and didn't use them).  Quit for a couple of months.

Rerolled the following spring on a pvp server Shattered Hand, alliance priest, joining some folks I used to play on a mud with.  Priest was ok but since I mostly soloed, I started playing a nightelf hunter, which became my main.  My guild was a serious raiding guild, but I was never a serious raider - I was a casual in a raiding guild.  The only time I raided was when I was needed to fill a non-crucial spot, pretty much.  Transferred to Korgath with my guild.  Quit that guild, but continued being casual, mostly pvping, leveling alts and playing the market and crafting games. 

Most memorable - the first time I saw Un'goro dinosaurs, the first time I saw the Barrens - I recall thinking it was so cool, first trip to MC, old Alterac Valley.

What has gotten worse - it's a little too linear now.  Vanilla WoW had some cool pockets to come upon during exploration that don't seem to be in either expansion.

What's gotten better - the many improvements on quest hubs that cut down on annoyances like travel time.  The difference in the new vs old starting zones, for example.

How long it'll last?  People still play EQ right?  It depends upon what Blizzard does to make it last.  If they do nothing, it'll still last at least a few more years.