World of Warcraft

2025-04-12
One night after our 40-man raid of Molten Core was wiping over and over on one boss we finally downed them. The exaltation I felt seemed like it couldn't be topped. And then our guild leader says over the Ventrilo mic "I'm so happy I'm not going to beat my kids tonight!" Even though it was 20 years ago I still remember it because it's one of the hardest times I've laughed in my life.

Its funny I looked up when I subbed to WoW and apparently it was Jan 31 2005. That surprised me because I felt like I was late to the party even though it was only two months after release. I guess two months feels like forever at 13 years old because it's an integer percentage of your total life up till that point. I bring that up partially to date myself but also to date the game, to date the experience of playing your first MMO in 2005. Here was a massive uncharted world to explore with huge vistas, a million quests, abilities and people--real people. Joining you have a whole new world to explore. And I mean really explore. There are no YouTubers (YouTube was founded just 2 weeks after I subbed), there are no guides websites, there are no mods pointing out every vendor, mining node, quest giver, or where to find those boars to kill for your quest. What there are, are people. Stuck? Try the general chat, try joining a guild, try whispering someone you just passed on the road. Some things you learn on your own but most you learn from other people. I was like most teenagers socially awkward and it blew my mind the first time I messaged a fellow Priest player, telling them I liked their gear and asked where they got it, and they responded. They happily chatted with me and took me under their wing eventually bringing me into their guild to go on raids. Raids!

If you wanna talk about people, talk about organizing 40 people--40 strangers--over the internet to complete a raid. First there's the scheduling. I have a hard time in my 30s trying to get more than 4 friends together at any given time never mind 40. Then you have the actual organization of the raid group. We need this many tanks, this many off tanks, this many healers, and DPS. Then each of those roles needs to know their specific job for the fight. Depending on the scope of the raid this can be as simple as "Do your job" + "Don't stand in the lava" = "Success" or as complicated as a synchronized ballet where multiple bosses need to be killed in certain patterns while moving them around the room to certain locations at certain times. Then your reward is Loot. Which itself is another complication. Who gets the loot? Are we rolling? Honor system? Or are we experienced enough to know the former alternatives cause problems and we need something like DKP (Dungeon Kill Points), where people earn points by participating in raids and then trade them in for loot? It's complicated. It's insane. It's wonderful.

I went back to WoW during the Covid Classic revival and I had a good time. But it wasn't the same. There were no uncharted lands, no new discoveries to be made, no server firsts. There was a mod for everything that told you where everything was, where to go to level up the fastest, and even how to win at the Auction House (getting a mount was SO hard for me in Vanilla but trivially easy to corner the market for blacksmithing mats and make 100s of gold in Classic using the mod Auctioneer). Everyone knew everything and if they didn't they'd just look it up online. General chat was dead--yes, even the legendary Barrens chat was a shell of its former glory--and I'd certainly never get random whispers from strangers saying "What's up?" or, because I was a Priest, the perennial "heal 4 [insert dungeon name]?"

And after that instead of feeling maudlin, channeling Tommy Lee Jones in No Country For Old Men, I just felt happy. I think everyone gets one game like this in their life and WoW was mine.