Gamer's confessions: My path to today

WARNING! Wall of text!
And disclaimer! I've not looked over this text so it's definitely full of spelling/grammar errors. I'm sure it's readable anyway, at least.

Some things tend to nag at my mind on occasion and linger in the background over periods of time, brooding over time and when I can relax. It often manifests itself as a flowing text in my mind - where I can read the words and letters infront of me as a recital of a play that I myself directed unconsciously. Such as now - trying to sleep, and instead seeing text flow on in infinity. Get up and write? It sure felt like the only decision to slow down thoughts a little.

World of Warcraft was after the first months I played it firstmost a social game. When it was released, I had just gotten broadband connection in my neighbourhood and those I considered friends and socialized with at school and whatever were going to give it a shot. I had played the strategy games, I had loved and played Starcraft and Diablo to bits, it was made by Blizzard, the same company. I decided to give it a try.

I was completely new to MMO's, and to some extent on personal grounds, the internet. My friends picked Horde and a server, so I followed their footsteps. I made an Undead Priest on Al'Akir at launch - and named it Minella after my Amazon from Diablo 2 because I thought it sounded nice. Why did I pick undead? Not sure anymore. Seemed most interesting and unique coming from having played Warcraft 3 for years. Why Priest? No one else of the ones I knew made a healer role... and I had never given it a super serious try in a RPG before. My favorite class-type had always been archers before WoW, but Hunter just didn't appeal to me after trying it in the beta earlier.

As such I started up the game (I of course bought a collector's edition because I felt like I would regret it later if I didn't), completely clueless about pretty much anything than the absolutely roughest basics. I wasn't hearing impaired yet at this point... and I had very little music stored on my computer aside of the first netradio station I was introduced to during Dreamhack Summer 2004. Still to this day I vividly remember the background music, the ambience, the sound effects and all inbetween of the game. It was incredibly immersive and I really loved it to an extent surpassing that of all other games I had played before.

I didn't really know what a talent was. I saved items that had nice names. I explored the land around me in fascination, I got stuck in stonetalon mountains far far into the zone at like lvl10 due to blindly following a road leading through a beautiful landscape. I also remember doing my first Wailing Caverns instance, the first dungeon I ever did... pretty sure I rolled on green items with agility and stuff because I had never really seen a green item before except a handful from quests. Did I heal? Yeah, and wanded. I thought wands were amazing, magic that didn't cost mana and had cool different elemental types! Surely must've pissed off some MMO veterans if I ran into them... to be fair I don't remember ever being nerdraged at, at least not that early in the game. Had some weird talent choices, and kept healing as shadow up to right under lvl50.

Back here I was really young, 16 when the european realms went up. Naive to the internet (that was still decently young at this point) I kept my attitude towards normal single player RPG's with me - trying to be nice to anyone and everyone. It earned me respect in dungeon groups and random people I met I think, everyone always said "nice playing with you, added you to my friends!" and remember I always felt really happy about it! Game took a kind of fun twist when I got whispered by a complete stranger if I wanted to heal a high level instance called BRD - Blackrock Depths. I had been there once before... and we were lost in the early prison district forever until group broke up for some reason I don't remember. Didn't have to heal that one time I remember, and instead did damage (I was shadow too, after all). I explained to the stranger that I was shadow and wasn't very confident I could heal that place as it. He, in some way, managed to convince me to try anyway and I joined the group there. We managed the start decently, but it was disastrous later on. I stoned back and did my first ever respec. I hadn't ever healed before, had no idea what talents to pick, so I randomly made some holy spec and picked the nice regeneration talents in shadow as well, and got summoned back. It went awesomely well after that! Barely had to use waters, kept everyone alive, we ventured really far in and I saw amazing amounts of bosses and interesting items drop. Blackrock Depths remains my favorite dungeon in the game to this day... it was a true DUNGEON. Nonlinear. Huge. Lots of different ways and directions, a very cryptic interior and (at that time) very interesting and unique design.

I remained holy after that. Reached the last levels, don't remember how long it took, but I spent ages in the plaguelands zones and loved it. When I was 55+, my friends had since long turned 60 on their characters and ran weirdly named dungeons and joined a guild together. They went to this place called Molten Core, a RAID, an even bigger dungeon where you need FORTY players! This was really hard for me to fathom still, I went to read about it and learned of how it worked. I got into the guild they were in - healers were incredibly rare this early in the game. Hell, I even got to join into Molten Core at lvl57! I can't have had above 2500 health with full raidbuffs, died to random things but generally managed to do my part. Saw Lucifron, Magmadar and onward, used voice communication for the first time, and it was fun hearing stranger's voices. But already at this early point, I felt some things were wrong in some sense.

Not sure where things started go in the wrong direction... but I ended up in a lot of disagreement with my 'friends'. One of them, the youngest, had absolutely no remorse about ninjalooting and being incredibly rude in instance parties and made huge fusses over epic loot in MC. Another started to pvp fulltime - which I was incredibly afraid of still at this point (early EU release, Al'Akir's total player population consisted of 40% rogues from surveys, and they all kept ganking me when I was levelling :( ). The others in the guild we were in increasingly became too fussed over the same things, and at some point I just couldn't bother seeing all the disputes and left. By this time I had picked up basic molten core equipment and was presented to easily be able to join any other guilds. I tried what was back in that day a largely slavic guild - Kalevlased, and healed my way through MC again. This was back in the day when T2 were rare drops from MC bosses and Onyxia, I think I got my transcendence robes from Ony... but my memory may fail me.

BWL came out. We did the first stuff there. Halfway through the instance, the guild had started to become very much like the one I was in before though, with crazy loot drama over every single piece we looted anywhere. All this unfriendliness must've gotten to me at some point, along with the fact I just couldn't get along ingame with those I socialized with real life. Most had actually at this point already rerolled, either just character or server. I followed a couple in my class briefly onto Stormreaver, but gave up when they rerolled once again. It was incredibly annoying - how could these people just let everything go just like that? Did nothing they had achieved mean anything, the people they'd gotten to know have no importance to them? Frustrated I decided to just go play by myself somewhere, not restricted by the chains of people I knew - and created a gnome warlock on Argent Dawn, an RP realm. I named it Neimi, still to this day unsure how I came up with the name but it just came to me like that. I knew quite a bit about the game at this point, and also enjoyed experimenting myself forward with unorthodox solutions to cookiecutter ones. Got into some small guild somewhere, via the contact of a person I got to know on a non-game-related forum. It was fun, I was playing the other faction for the first time as well, and knowing how problematic my first levelling experience was I was quick to jump to help others and explain and give directions. The guildmaster guy eventually gave me my own guildrank, Loremaster! I felt kind of proud, because I had made a difference for other players and it was very enjoyable to play with them. In the guild, was a guy playing a gnome rogue called Ellybell that I ended up doing silly stuff with - like running Razorfen Downs with him as tank... a rogue. Yeah.

Small leap forward in time - as everything no good thing lasts forever. The guildmaster got involved in something scandalous that I have only faint memories of and a lot of drama ensued. Me and Ellybell along with some others joined another guild but there was never any real motivation that drove us anywhere at this point I believe. One day, however, he told me about a roleplaying guild project that would be started up on one of the new up-coming RP-PvP realm type; called Second Gurubashi Empire. We registered at their site and joined up with the project pre-realm-launch and the day Defias Brotherhood was started up, September 14th 2005, I, at least, largely left AD behind me.

I had never experienced a true server launch before (I fooled around too much and missed first days at Al'Akir) and it was overwhelming and fresh. And the sense of community from the first moment was great! I had picked a rogue this time, a female troll, I named it Shaorin (after an anime character I thought was very cute back then, shoot me...) and levelled up on a realm where there was an iron fist on the RP concept from first moment. Some were defiant and trying to ridicule it already from start, but they got flattened by the masses striving to protect it.

Ellybell didn't get along with the GM of the guild. Infact, I kind of felt it from the start even before the realm was up. I was around lvl50 I believe when they got into a big argument and he left. He later joined another guild called Burning Dawn; a huge project made by some veteran mofo from AD's sister realm Earthen Ring that had big aspirations of itself.

Zul'Gurub patch had been deployed at the point I hit 60 along with most other people, and after the basic dungeon crawling period it was strikingly apparent that a RP guild alone couldn't manage a raid force by itself and be successful. People got bored, many left, many always complained about it but never did anything real to try fix it. A group of real life buddies I befriended on the way wanted to raid as well - but they weren't too many. Together with them, we reached out to other small RP guilds and tried to unite them for an allied effort into getting some raiding done. The guildmaster of our guild... well, how should I put it. Would be fun if he read this probably. It's just hard to put in words how he was as person - but basically he didn't do much except talking about leadership and was incredibly passive, much to my surprise as he seemed very charismatic in text at first. Later on, many on the realm's both factions got to learn about this as well... but that's another story for another time. We had a lot of disputes. He wanted priority on raid spots, on both tank gear and dps gear (because he was guildleader, of course) and when the small RL friend group's leader, who had done his utmost to get every single best tanking items pre-raiding, got appointed our maintank, he was outraged. He threatened me and the other officers to disband the guild if we didn't make him the real maintank by the time we started Molten Core after he kept winning tanking items inside ZG. Overlord's Crimson Band... the object that would drive him crazy. First, he started to backtalk me and the other officers to the rest of guild and server, blackmailing us in trade channel and similar, ranting about the dirty backstabbers we were. When he received no real sympathy from the guild, he left. He kept raging and blamed us, mostly me, for it. With him gone, we went on with the raid alliance and involved a couple more guilds, including two that got along with together quite nicely - Cult of the Void and The Orphans Grim. We named the raid alliance Ironcollar, and successfully cleared ZG, killed Onyxia, and cleared MC up to Ragnaros. Then the disputes started here as well. Some of the guilds within the alliance didn't get along too well with each other, and in the end CotV and ToG broke up to raid together alone. Looking back, I don't really blame them.

This, however, completely crippled Ironcollar and even after a few valiant efforts to try re-ignite it the glory days were over. People complained about no raiding. I was holding the GM title out-of-character-wise at this time, and it really started burdening me down. It all felt so unthankful - I had tried to do all this organization just for -them- to get a shot at this stuff. And I didn't get any help from them at the end, just whining. After running into drama like that again, which I had gone to this realm to avoid, I proclaimed that I may as well quit playing this game and informed Ellybell, now playing a character called Zo, about it.

He told me to apply to his guild instead. It was newly formed just some days ago, a splinter faction called Last Stand created from people breaking off Burning Dawn after their guildmaster had left them and rerolled alliance, leaving the guild completely taken by surprise and in the dust. The way leadership had been decided and everything related to it created massive disputes and held BD back, eventually leading to some officers leaving and creating their own guild. Most of BD followed and LS had been created. This guild I applied to and got in, my gear had been quite well shaped from the raid alliance sporting pretty much full MC gear and even packing Baron Geddon's Thunderfury binding in my backpack.

Last Stand introduced me to a whole new level of social community. I felt like part of it very fast, and had an amazing time! This post is already ridiculously long, so I'm going to take a massive leap in time.

Last Stand lasted from March 2006 to autumn 2009. I learned and experienced much within this timeframe, and saw my last character reroll at the TBC expansion launch into the paladin I still play to this day. I'll never forget you guys and girls, those of you that stayed to the bitter end, all those we saw come and go over the years, and everyone around us as well. I've just wanted to thank all of you for giving me such a great home for so many years, and even while a lot of you now have quit or are in the same guild as I am now, that's just an honest tribute I want to write down. You know you deserve it.

The original point of this post was about something else, but this is already too long. I'll let the original subject have its own post later on.