Some History

For my gaming habits, World of Warcraft changed everything.  Before WoW, I played a variety of games, primarily on the console since I almost never had a PC powerful enough to play the current games.  College was full of PS2 and Xbox games, with friends and on my own.  I’m got to be pretty mean in the Tony Hawk series and my friends feared me when I had a pistol in Halo.  Jody would kick my ass with Jun in Tekken every time, but that was mainly because he cheated.  I would head over to Andrew’s room any time a good new PC game came out and steal his machine for as long as he would allow me.  Before college, it was all about playing Quake against bots or playing whatever new Nintendo 64 or PlayStation game that was around.  But once I got my grubby mitts on WoW, it all changed.

WoW hooked me pretty quickly.  I started playing in early 2005, not too long after meeting Sally.  She was often very busy with her college courses, so I spent a lot of time playing around with my hunter and got that character into the 50s at about the same time Sally started to have some more free time.  She indicated interest in the game so we grabbed her a trial account and started our first pair of characters, my undead priest and her undead mage.  And that was really the beginning of the end.

We had a blast leveling that pair up to 60 over the course of several months as well as some other alts.  We met some great folks along the way and just enjoyed ourself.   The first time we hit the endgame, though, our interest lagged.  We did some of the high end dungeons a little bit, went on one brief Molten Core run, and then pretty much quit.

After quitting, we basically just flailed around looking for things to do.  The first incarnation of this blog was spawned during that time.  We grabbed a GameCube and started up GameFly to try out games on a variety on consoles.   This was partially successful, but we kept missing the experience we had together in WoW.  After a few weeks, we played the EverQuest 2 trial, were somewhat interested, and picked up 2 copies of that.  After playing for two or three days, we immediately cancelled our EQ2 subscriptions and resubscribed to WoW starting new alliance characters.

From there, we leveled some more 60s, decided we didn’t like alliance, and created new Horde characters (on a third new server).  Those are the characters we stuck with the longest and explored most of the end game content with.  We PvPed a ton and raided Zul’Gurub a little before The Burning Crusade expansion came out.  Once the expansion hit, we leveled to 70 very quickly and got into the new end game of level 70 dungeon running, started running Karazhan with some friendly people we had met in game, and eventually became officers with those friends of a then up-and-coming raiding guild.

There are many stories from leading that guild that we’ll share in due time.  The short version is that we did pretty well for a while, but due to a combination of leadership burnout and our move to Boston, we left the guild and stopped playing WoW.  Which brings us to the near-present.  In our lack of things to do, I fired up a trial EVE account for the second time to look into what was going on and got Sally involved for a little while.  As she’s said previously, she never found anything that hooked her into the game while I fell in head first.  I’ve been playing EVE for the last several months on and off (mostly on) while we’ve been looking for other activities.

Anyway, I fell into my/our gaming history rather than talking about what it is about MMOs that I’ve found to like so much.  I’ll get to that in the next post.