“Oh no you play WoW”
Yes I did. Yes I enjoyed it. Yes call me a freak, a geek, a no-lifer, etc. Do your bidding as I do mine. If you don’t like WoW, this is not the place to be. Flip the page.
So where do we start?
I never touched an MMO. Heck, I never knew WoW was an MMO. I was looking for a game after ‘A’ Levels. I did (finally) put in some self discipline with my studies at ‘A’s and kept away from games and relationships which ruined my PSLE and ‘O’s. Suddenly there was life again at the end of exams, and as some would like to put it, life vanished almost immediately when I stepped into WoW.
Before I proceed. Note: I have no regrets about WoW. Zero. None. Zilch’
Did I have goals before I played? Nope. I never had. I never knew what I was really starting on when I rolled out my character and picked a Warrior because it looked the easiest to play (How wrong I was). My parents are religious people and never liked the Orc I brought home. So I rolled a Dwarf Warrior. Nice, decent looking and no magic (magic = evil). Just my sword and me. And so it began.
Quests. That’s the way you progress in your character advancement. Find this person. Kill that troll. Give me 4 pieces of wolf meat. 8 rugged fur patches from bears. Simple. Go to target and click or go to target, kill and click. Sounds boring ain’t it?
But, I’m a graphical freak. What pleases my eyes secures my soul and I LOVE Blizzard’s art direction (hell, call me superficial). Nice landscapes, nice animations. Nice pretty cartonny pixels colliding cohesively around my screen.
Level 10. New lands, new monsters, new skills. Feels good. And it kept going till Level 44. Now this is where things turned. You see I play solo. (“What you play solo in an MMO? Isn’t that being anti social in an product already responsible for causing such behavior irl?” – If you don’t know what irl means, you shouldn’t be reading this post) I had help occasionally from Joel, the chap who introduced me to this game. He was max level capped at 60 at that time and was telling me about big raids, big monsters called bosses and (wtf) shiny epics. I didn’t care much, I was happy slashing around. Till L44.
The Burning Crusade launched. This big bad demon (Illidan) yelling “You are not prepared” became something close to a Christmas jingle on every gaming website. “Want to come for the launch?” – Joel.
And so I did. I met Joel’s cousins and more from the same guild. Big bunch of friendly people. Well educated (almost all in uni) and not the bengs I expected to meet. (You know gaming = life wasted = bengs) So good people played this game. Not as bad as what others made them to be. (Some of them were tanned. Yes they did get the sun). Big massive snaking queue for the game at Suntec. I was caught up in the excitment of a launch. Actually, I was just there to feel how a game launch felt like. I never saw a launch of this magnitude. Call me a nub but it was epic.
Went home. Installed the expansion (wth for? I wasn’t even L60 yet – It’s the excitment of the launch thing you see). Server crashed expectedly. At least 7 million around the world was like me doing the same thing at the same time. Kaboom. Took a break. Had dinner. Tried again. And then I got a…
Guild Invite
That’s best left for Part II.