jen
Critter
Posts: 72
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Post by jen on Mar 8, 2010 10:36:24 GMT -5
My insignificant other was playing WoW.
By which I mean this guy I knew bought me the game. He claims he just did it because he thought I'd like it. I say he did it because he wanted to hook up with me. Either way, both worked - I've been playing WoW and been with my boyfriend since 2007. I resisted it very hard, I wasn't interested and I didn't want to play, so I only installed it because I felt guilty he'd bought me something pretty expensive.
Rolled a warrior because hitting things with swords sounded easy, he helped me figure the UI out (I was looost), then I hated the game up to level 40ish when someone told me about QuestHelper (seriously, without that addon I wouldn't be playing today). In the 50s I joined his guild, leveled to 70 and then raided with them as fury in TBC and Wrath until Ulduar. Massive amounts of dickery from an officer made us both leave the guild, and I got the opportunity to switch mains - first to my mage, then to my druid. He's still playing the moonkin he made in 2007 and barely got his second char to 80 (with copious amounts of boosting) - I'm the altoholic, 4 chars at 80 and still leveling more. He always likes reminding me how much I hated the game in the beginning....
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Post by jakkru on Mar 8, 2010 11:01:56 GMT -5
My ex-girlfriend got it for me one christmas, think it was '05. Only good thing to come out of the relationship
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Post by ruhtra on Mar 8, 2010 11:46:32 GMT -5
I was drug in around 06. I worked with some guys (who later formed a guild together) and they always talked about this game at work. They found out I use to play EQ and started bugging me about it. I didn't admit at first I got it (which I should have) and rolled Ruhtra as a Dwarf Paladin on a PVP server. I told them about the toon around mid 20s and they fell apart laughing as they were Horde. Sadly, I deleted Ruhtra only to reroll him when BC launched as the sexy Belf Paladin that he is today. Been playing ever since and have managed to drag almost all of my friends in, as well as my wife.
Which true story for Eusy real quick. She always use to make fun of me for playing. When the in-game voice chat first dropped we would use it periodically and she would just laugh uncontrollably. Four years later, she is addicted with multiple 80s and has three accounts to her name....who's laughing now?
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Post by boris on Mar 8, 2010 12:14:32 GMT -5
I discovered WoW and by extension MMOs with the WoW beta. Loved it, and read about it a lot, but didn't buy the game until well after. Had a son to take care of already. Bought it on eBay, couldn't justify the full price to myself since I knew I wouldn't have enough time for it. Got my younger brothers into it, and had lots of fun, but they have gotten much further in the game than I have. One of them had to go cold turkey to get it out of his system, was the Druid officer for a raiding guild in BC. I haven't maintained a regular subscription since I didn't play enough. Would play a month or two at a time. Am back to try and see more of the old world before Cataclysm. With Frocke, I now have... 8 characters? across 4 servers, and not one of them over level 19. Altophilia has definitely had an impact there! Hmm... Definitely wouldn't make it as a blogger. Too terse! ;D Doesn't help that I should be working right now. Boris
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len
Ooze
Posts: 24
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Post by len on Mar 8, 2010 12:51:28 GMT -5
I began playing pen and paper D&D with some friends, and got really into the whole 'fantasy world' thing. Started looking for a computer game that would be similar to the D&D style of play and found WoW! That was back in... hmmm 2006 maybe? I started my first mage character based on my D&D wizard (who later became a Bladesinger - man I wish we could dual-class!.. sorry... /end geekout) Anyway, a few months of pootling around and I found my current guild on DMF, here I am three years later as GM! Contrary to the 'usual' I actually got my (then) boyfriend into playing, he was actually quite resistant to it at first
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Post by theanorak on Mar 8, 2010 13:19:10 GMT -5
OK. This time in reply to the right thread...
Oh lordy.
Towards the end of July last year (2009) I was at a barbecue at a friend's house, making food and chatting with with the friend's sister's boyfriend. Sis and her boyfriend had just arrived from Australia for a visit and we were having a fairly typical we've-just-met conversation: jobs, interests, etc. He was an eLearning specialist at a university in Melbourne and was very interested in using virtual worlds for education, so we ended up talking about Second Life, Habbo Hotel, the failed Google project "Lively" and finally, WoW.
I'd never played, but as a committed gamer I'd read plenty enough about WoW and decided that it wasn't for me. Although I'm omnivorous in my gaming, I particularly love a good plot, dialogue and a bunch of other things not notably well done in MMOs. I'd tried two or three hours of Everquest (yawn) and Eve Online (pretty, but double yawn) and found them severely lacking. Plus, why would I pay a monthly fee to play a game?
A week later I was poking around in HMV on Oxford Street looking for something new to entertain me that evening and found the Battle Chest on a shelf marked "Sale: £10" and decided to try it, so that the next time I had a conversation with someone about virtual worlds I could tell them why WoW was a waste of time from first-hand experience.
It took *hours* to install and patch -- I foolishly allowed vanilla WoW to patch itself before installing BC, so ended up repatching all over again. I decided enough was enough and went to bed without playing. The following day, a new patch was released (3.2) and so when I arrived home and went to sign in, there was another interminable wait while it downloaded and installed. Not a great start.
Long before the end of my trial period I already knew that a) I was wrong, and b) I'd be subscribing. From the achievements list I know I did my first instance a couple of nights later (Deadmines, inevitably) but only a further five before hitting 80.
I've no idea how much time I've put in now as I'm too scared to type /played. I've an 80 ret Paladin in t9 who can do very little else until I find some way of raiding (my guild keeps teetering on the brink, then running off to do something crazy like creating a copy of itself on the other faction), a late 60s gnome mage I'm levelling almost entirely through LFG, and a serverful of low level bank and storage characters. My Google reader account is jammed full of feeds from your blogs, and I even have an in-development wowblog of my own.
And now I have a fresh healy belf paladin called Anorak on AD.
TL;DR: I'm newish and a converted skeptic. Also, babblemouth, I haz it.
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Post by aleanathem on Mar 8, 2010 13:30:58 GMT -5
Well see I had a job...really a job!?! Yes, a job. Where the money from that job has gone is a memory now. Well one of my co-workers began talking about beta. Now I had played mostly Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Playstation, etc for my life. I had bought Starcraft, but never got into it computer gaming past Oregon Trail. He mentioned WoW was going to cost a subscription fee to which I told him I'd probably never pay. A few weeks later he brought in a copy of WoW's first strategy guide. I read it and ended up purchasing my own along with a copy of WoW. Remember how I said I would never pay a subscription fee? I must have forgotten! I ended up my first time booting up to find out I could not play at home because I had no internet connection. I get back to college and it is blocked by their internet so needless to say I could not play. When my senior year came about some genius guys decided they would open up the internet connections to WoW. Soon thereafter I was reintroducted to WoW and the joys a Night Elf hunter on Moonrunner-US! ;D But I truly did not start to play until I rolled on Shandris-US with some friends. We started a guild and I picked up the druid class. So there's my start. All of two years after originally purchasing Vanilla I was in TBC and completely addicted. Aren't we all??
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Post by hadawako on Mar 8, 2010 13:43:48 GMT -5
I first started playing WOW shortly after the UK launch. At the time I was playing EQ2 and at first I hated the "cartoony" (as I saw it at the time) graphics, but a friend of mine convinced me that it was worth a go. I was amazed by how much better WOW was as an actual game - the starting levels were incredibly good fun and, although it seems silly now, quite challenging for a newcomer. I loved the fact that you were actually doing something important for your faction early on, rather than just killing rats.
After a while the graphical style grew on me and my views have reversed - I now prefer it to the "intended to be realistic but doesn't quite work" style.
My first significant character was an Orc Shaman. I'd played around with Alliance characters & initially couldn't see why anybody would want to play the "bad guys". Again, the story line was a revelation: these weren't crude "me evil, me smash" thugs, but simply a different culture in conflict with the "good guys" who, from their perspective, weren't all that good. I love Blizzard's refusal to reduce the game to stereotypes of good & evil.
Until WOW came along, I'd really only played three computer games to a significant extent: Elite, Civ & Tomb Raider. I'd tried others, but got bored within a few days. I still don't think of myself as a "gamer" in the general sense - more of a roleplayer who happens to do so online, rather than with pen & paper these days.
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Post by kiryn on Mar 8, 2010 15:56:10 GMT -5
I was a mac gamer growing up, only computers I'd ever owned were macs, and as such, when I became interested in this "MMO" phenomenon, WoW was one of the only ones I was actually capable of playing. Everquest didn't count, I tried it once and the mac servers were kept separate from the PC servers, so all those bustling cities you heard about were nothing but ghost towns on our side of the fence. Uninstalled it after 5 minutes.
I resisted WoW for a long time, because I thought it would be like Warcraft 2 and 3. Don't get me wrong, I loved those games, but I'm *terrible* at them. Back in 2005, I clearly remember going to a game store with someone as they bought a copy of Guild Wars (which had just come out), and the guy behind the counter was trying to convince us to give WoW a try. We said no, but later I looked it up to find out more. And my god, it's like the game I've always been waiting for.
The computer I was using at the time was old and weak and didn't meet the minimum system requirements, but I had already been planning to get a new powerbook. I looked up as much info as I could and did all my research so that I wouldn't look like a n00b when I started playing. As soon as my new computer arrived, I had a copy of WoW running on it.
My first character was a troll hunter on Dragonblight (chosen because I love dragons and I had no other ways to choose between servers other than "as long as it isn't PvP"), though I didn't get her past 40. The server was crowded and my latency there was bad, and I found that Garona was much better. So my first real main was a tauren hunter named Tamanda.
I was the leader of a small-ish social guild there for a year or so, called Saiko Sages, we were part of a guild alliance that ran Molten Core and later Zul'Gurub. Being a guild leader was too much for me, though, so when BC released, I left Horde and started over in my new home on Silver Hand Alliance side.
I had played a shaman to 60 on Garona recently, and discovered that I greatly enjoyed healing, so on Silver Hand, my main was a draenei priestess named Kalya. I joined a raiding guild once I got to 70, and made it halfway through Hyjal and Black Temple.
Raiding was too stressful, and I was tired of people misspelling my name, so when WotLK released, I left my guild and rolled a night elf druid named Kassari. Ended up PuG raiding Naxx with that character at 80 until I got my full tier 7.5, and then pretty much abandoned her.
Now I've got a nice (a couple of years ago I would have called it kickass) gaming PC, and I spend my days wandering between one character and another. I've got another five high level characters that I haven't mentioned here, but I don't tend to play characters for long after they've "beaten the game" so to speak.
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Post by littlebark on Mar 8, 2010 20:22:51 GMT -5
Hmm. Mr Littlebark played WoW for about 2 years, then his 70 troll warrior got hacked. He was so disappointed that that happened to him, he quit the game. In 08' one of my best friends sold the game to me with pretty cinematics and a bunch of other stuff and as soon as Mr Littlebark came home from work, I told him we HAD to get it.
No objections from him!
I leveled up a hunter to 70 but soon found out that pew pew was not for me. I re rolled a druid in September 09 - a couple months before Wrath hit- and leveled Littlebark up. She was originally supposed to be Feral Tank but my guild needed healers so I played Resto.
I do not regret it.
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gameldar
Ooze
Gameldar of WoW in an Hour
Posts: 14
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Post by gameldar on Mar 8, 2010 22:40:17 GMT -5
I used to mud (Xyllomer for those in the know) and so moving to a graphic MMO was the logical next step. However it wasn't until I left my old job and they gave me a gift voucher that I decided to spend some cash to do so... I was toying up between WoW and Guild Wars and having played pretty much everything Blizzard had released settled on that... and the rest is history - although I did eventually go back and play guild wars while I was on a WoW break... I'm glad I made that choice originally!
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Post by istarian on Mar 8, 2010 23:29:50 GMT -5
I was playing Asheron's Call 2 with 2 co-workers and one of their wives, when WoW went into open US Beta. We downloaded the client and set off. I went Alliance to see what all the fuss was about and played a Druid. I'm not sure what they played, as we scattered ourselves all over the place.
Then we waited for the EU Beta and went Horde. This time we all went Tauren and had fun and japes running around exploring.
When the game went live, we decided to start on an PvP server as Horde. It was great fun, and we explored and hunted down Alliance in our way; my mate's wife had a motto - "Red is Dead" - if you came across us whilst she was there, you were going down. I particularly remember one dwarf we hunted down, only for him to call in his guildies. We, naturally, called in our guildies and we had a warzone erupt right in front of us.
Ah fun times.
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Post by indecenthealer on Mar 9, 2010 3:34:23 GMT -5
Right.. how did i get started on WoW ? I actually came very late to the party (Sometime in 2008, maybe early 2007 - i am not really sure.
Thing is, i actually tried it out with one of those "run privately" servers with a bunch of friends, and was generally laughing at the fact that you could just waltz through clouds of humans with odd names like "defias wizard" or such, who were 3 levels above you, and just.. you know.. kill them ? That was, until a friend of mine (who played regularly) told me to try that on a "real" server. A whole lot different that was.
No real surprise that i was hooked, considering that Guild Wars (which i had been messing about with after everquest got boring) was loosing its appeal, and i was sort of looking for something new.
Nothing really special about this - but - There is proof that the world is small, because that magic word Xyllomer rings a bell - i did spend a couple of years there too.
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Post by Passiflora on Mar 9, 2010 7:37:18 GMT -5
How did I get started on WoW.
Before we get to that, I should probably set the scene. I'm an fps player. No, not one of those with an e-cock the size of Big Ben. I'm one who enjoys freindly banter and the occasional bit of gameplay. Being an fps player, all things MMO were soul destroying and equal to the devil. I lost many a fps friend to MMO's and was sworn against them.
Not long after (see how much my will controls my actions) I sampled Guild Wars. In my honest opinion they did everything WoW should have but better, other than open areas instead of instance like areas.
Anyway, having a small love affair with that, I re-kindled my connections with lost fps'rs to see what they were doing whilst not fps'ing.
I was introduced to WoW by those people. We actually went and met at a gaming lan, sat in a caravan, and mainly got very drunk, and have since become great friends.
Annnnnyway.
We created a guild, played in it on and off for about 2 years, and have since started getting it's activity back up having come back from a minor break. (within which I was purely reading blogs).
There, that wasn't so hard.
Next my life story....
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Post by larisa on Mar 9, 2010 9:59:26 GMT -5
My little sister talked me into it, and it was because of her that I rolled ally and picked my first server. However we never came to play anything together more than meeting up in game once or twice. She quit playing very soon. But I got stuck.
I think I've written about this many a time before though. Don't write lengthy stories about your first steps in wow here in the forum. Share it on your blogs!
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