The Beginning
I can’t tell you how many times while playing world of warcraft that my friends and I will reminisce about things that happened several years ago in older expansions. I like to think I have the best memory of these times and events and can recall things others can’t. However not everybody was around for everything and as I’m getting older its becoming more difficult to remember everything, so throughout the course of this blog we may jump around from one time period to another but I do intend on keeping it as chronological as possible. In the first entry I talked about Warcraft and my knowledge of the games and universe before World of Warcraft. Today we’re going to jump right in.
I was unemployed at the time of launch and also did not have a credit card in order to get my subscription (I had just turned 16, give me a break). By the time I had saved up enough money to purchase it, knowing the first month was free. I couldn’t find it anywhere. In reality, the servers filled up so fast they actually stopped selling new copies of the game until the servers could handle more players. It wasn’t until February of 2005 that I got a text message from a friend saying they had just seen World of Warcraft in stock at the local Future Shop (RIP). It was snowing wildly but I was able to find a friend willing to drive me to the store, we spun out a few times in his moms mini-van but we got the game. After purchasing, installing and trying to play I was devastated to find out you could only redeem your free month after purchasing a minimum one month game time. I rounded up all the change I could find and caught the next bus back down Future Shop. I told some friends that I had finally got it and called it a night.
The following morning I had an email from a classmate advising most of my friends were playing Alliance on a realm called Deathwing and some names of people to whisper for a guild invite when I got on. The dwarves were the most appealing to me of the initial four alliance races and the fact they could be Paladins meant I could follow in the footsteps of everyone’s (or maybe just mine) favorite Paladin Arthas.
Just over 14 years later, I can still remember my first day of WoW quite well. It was a superbowl Sunday 2005, my dad had some friends over for the game so we had plenty of snack foods throughout the day, and me not being very interested in football took the opportunity to sink as many hours as I possibly could into my Day 1 WoW experience.
Right from the initial login and the narrator begins to describe the story behind your race was freaking epic! I spawned in Coldridge Valley facing some gnomes and dwarfs. There was an NPC mechanostrider and a guy with a quest to collect six rabbit pelts or something along those lines. I set out on my way to collect these pelts. I knew this would be the first of many quests my paladin would go on in the world of warcraft. After killing and observing the loot of six rabbits. I went back to find out I hadn’t actually looted anything, I had only been opening the window but not picking anything up. So I killed 6 more rabbits and learned how to properly loot things! Such noob mistakes looking back now but the learning experience is part of what made WoW as fun as it was.
It wasn’t long after that I was invited to my first guild <The Hombres> which was full of people from my school and some of their other gamer friends & family. Although most of my first day was spent alone on Coldridge Valley, I was on Ventrilo with my friend Ben who had initially created a Night Elf hunter named Klodie. Unlike me, who had spent most of the day trying to level up. His goal was to explore the world, and his first mission was to make it to me. If you never played back then you may not realize just how long of a journey it is to get from Teldrassil to Dun Morogh, especially as a level 1 getting experience strictly from discovering new parts of the map. Well it took him most of the day, and I got to listen as he was escorted by higher level players through certain zones, about his boat ride from the continent of Kalimdor over to Eastern Kingdoms (the boat may or may not have actually been implemented yet, I don’t recall 100%) and eventually he came strolling through the tunnel at the top of the hill leading out of Coldridge Valley. Much to my surprise, his Night elf was capable of randomly doing front flips whenever he jumped. For some reason this made me believe my dwarf could also do front flips if I were to jump a second time at the peak of my first jump. Unfortunately I couldn’t have been more wrong.
I’ll cut this off here for now, thanks for reading! Until next time.