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Friday, August 29, 2014

Long road

In November World of Warcraft will be 10 years old. 10 years. Let me put that into perspective for you: 10 years ago the biggest grossing movie was Shrek 2 followed by Spiderman 2, the best selling video game was Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the world was still reading the Da Vinci Code, the Harry Potter series was only on its third movie and half a year away from its sixth book. Now if all that didn't make you feel old already, Facebook was not even a year old, the Nintendo DS had just come out in North America, and more importantly there were NO Kardashians on the tv.



Why the trip down memory lane? Well because 10 years is a long time and to have spent 10 years playing the same video game is kind of amazing. Think back to 10 years ago and what you were doing at the time. I was a Junior in college in Florida when WoW came out. I remember the build up to the release of the game was insane. I followed the beta coverage at the time loosely since I wasn't really sure if I would play the game when it went live. I remember the feeling of amazement I felt when I watched the behind the scenes video of the creation of the cinematic. It was pretty amazing and I couldn't wait to see more!

I didn't play WoW at release though. I was able to get into the beta and played some and thought it was pretty neat but I wasn't quite sure that it was the game for me. It was definitely a cool game but I had just finished playing Star Wars Galaxies and I was trying out different games to find the perfect one for me. Having played in the beta, I wanted to see other MMOs before I committed to just one.

A few of my college buddies were playing Final Fantasy 11 and they wanted me to play with them so I said sure. I played it for a while and honestly if you've never played FF11, you have no clue what a horrible grind fest really is. You could solo until about level 12 and after that you were forced to find groups to grind mobs to level up. About every three to four levels you would have to move on to a new grind location because you'd outlevel the mobs you were grinding. You'd spend hours looking for a group depending on your class and if you were lucky enough to ding, you could lose all that hard work if you died. Did I mention that there was an xp penalty when you died? Well there was. If you died you lost xp. So really quickly I got tired of FF11 and took a break from MMOs for a bit.

Around May of 2005, some buddies at the college LAN party decided to try out WoW and I said why not? I subscribed and rolled a mage on Darkspear named Jedem. Eventually after two months I ended up rolling on a new server named Ursin with the LAN party guys. I made a mage named Jedem and the rest is as they say history. I got abandoned by the LAN party dudes when they went horde and I said the hell with them and made my guild on the alliance, played a crap ton of WoW and met some awesome people.

10 years of Warcraft is still mind blowing to me. I was talking to my wife about the game and what an impact it has had on my life. Had I not rolled on Ursin, I'd never have met all the amazing people I've met. I'd never have met my wife or my best man. I'd never have started blogging, podcasting, or even tweeting. Hell I'd never have visited Anaheim for Blizzcon!

10 years of WoW and 9 years of my guild. Oh come on now, like you actually expected me to not to pimp out my super awesome guild? Well if you did than you must be new here. Either way we're a social adult guild with 9 years of history, a fun is first attitude, our own guild car club, a facebook page, and even a raid team. We're located on the Ursin pvp server which, thanks to server connections, is now a medium to high population server! If you're looking for a home for the expansion or even just want someplace to log onto before the expansion, check us out!

It's been a long road for WoW to get to this point and I don't know about y'all but the last 10 years have been amazing and honestly I can't wait to see where WoW is going to be in another 10 years. So here's to another amazing 10 years! /cheers

1 comment:

  1. It really is hard to believe when you look at how much time we've invested and how long it has lasted. This really is the World of Warcraft that we play!

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