ALL, I’ve opened a forum requesting that original poster’s of threads like this one can REPLY personally to each of you in this post. I was astounded this wasn’t a feature… Support it here if it’s something you’d like to see on WoW forums. Forums - Allow OP’s to replies to replies, please - Community / Events and Fan Creations - World of Warcraft Forums (blizzard.com)
I was used to console games on things like the Master System, Mega Drive, Dreamcast, Saturn etc. The Saturn really got me into the idea of a RPG. Eventually my parents got my siblings and I computers of our own after we had been sharing an Apple Mac Performa 450. We found out about WoW and it looked good. Our parents got us a standard copy of WoW each and so myself and my two brothers started playing WoW together.
No there is little left of what WoW was to what it is now. That’s a mixed bag - some aspects of original WoW I don’t miss, some I do miss.
WoW really isn’t a social game anymore and it’s barely got any RPG elements left.
1 Like
Battletag is: Wornox#1612
1 Like
I started during TBC because my (then Boyfriend, now) Husband played and he introdcued me to World of Warcraft. I never stopped playing (beyond taking breaks here and there) and he rarely visits WoW and tends to play a large variety of games.
2 Likes
Was absolutely hooked on warcraft 3 as a kid. Finished the campaigns loads of times, played loads of skirmishes by myself, and had plenty of fun online with silly games like Footman Frenzy!
I was actually really annoyed that there was no warcraft 4 planned and instead they made wow. Resisted it loads for the first few months. Then I realized that if I want to play new warcraft content looks like wow is the only way… Gave it a shot… I use to really like the Tauren hero unit in W3, so I started a Tauren as my first character. The game just felt absolutely enormous! Seeing things I recognized from W3 made me think just how cool this is. A true sense of wonder! First time I walked to Thunder Bluff and met Cairne Bloodhoof I was like “noooooo waaaaaaaay it’s hiiiiiim”… Some time later, walked into Orgrimar for the first time and was like “daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn it’s thraaaaaaaaaaaaaall sooooo cooooool”…
Simple joys back then, now it’s all like “eeeeeeew this damned mythic raid loot doesn’t have the right stats, this games is ***** uuuuurgh”
I think that sense of wonder remained all the way until WoTLK, from then onwards, the combination of starting to explore less famous villains and, well, growing up, some of that magic went away. A little bit came back in Legion and we had all these cool connections with our old enemies, and awesome thematic order hall content but it’s been going downhill pretty quickly since.
That’s just my thoughts as an old school W3 player.
2 Likes
Friends got me into it. The first thing I saw in WoW was a irl friend running around Ratchet as an orc looking for the Inn so he could log out in rested area. Then we got down to our Pen & Paper D&D session.
Before WoW I had played Ultima Online on a 56k dial-up modem. I had to upgrade to 1gb Broadband to play wow.
My first character in 2005 was an Orc Warrior (I chosse warrior as usually Warrior is a good introductory class in RPGs, no spells to memorise etc.).
My brother played wow vanilla BETA.
I was jelous but all i could play is the trial/ free mmos.
Tbc is when i got control over my money.
Back then mmo was booming. New one came out every friday… so i was bound to get to wow.
I also hated runescape 2. Still do.
Im rs1 beta player.
1 Like
We as a group had been playing D&D table top and various RPGS like Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter for years, we all started in the EU open beta early 2005, queued up outside a game shop at midnight on a COLD Friday night to get the install disk and key for the beta. Played the hell out of that beta and we all had the game ready to go on the official launch day.
Now I’m the only one left and even I’m only messing about with alts waiting for something good to happen.
1 Like
I grew up on a lot of different games, Blizz games being one of them. When I first heard of WoW, I thought it a fantastic idea to play Warcraft as a sole Hero, so I gave it a spin and made my Paladin.
Damn.
1 Like
Was already playing online games with several friends and we all wanted to play this together since most of us had enjoyed the Wacraft games that came before it.
That was it.
No; it was just looking forward to this releasing, back then.
Working up the hype over months (I got lucky and got into early beta).
Nope.
1 Like
I had been waiting for Final Fantasy on the PS3 in 2007 and was sick of Heavenly Sword. I had had this Warcraft disc for ages but never felt comfortable putting it on the PC. By April 2008 I still had no Final Fantasy for my shiny new PS3 so I bought a new NVidia and stuck that in the PC and installed WoW. Didn’t work and I was about to uninstall when I got an incredibly helpful email from tech support about how to configure the internet hub. Yes in those days we got emails and yes you had to set up the hub to allow the game to play. You may recall the interface on WoW where you could actually see the IP addresses of players transferring files to your system.
I launched the game and was dropped into Northshire Abby and I fell in love there and then and I have been playing it ever since.
2 Likes
I began playing back in Vanilla because my ex-husband played it back then and it looked like a lot of fun. I had many breaks throughout the years though.
1 Like
I came from Diablo II and had played that a lot, but I had started fairly late with the online multiplayer part, so I really wanted to get in on “the next big thing” from the start and ride that wave of popularity that surrounded these big titles. Really get invested in a big game for a long time. Which I felt I had missed a little bit out on with Diablo II.
And for some odd reason I was confident that Blizzard were the company to make the next big game and that it would be WoW.
So followed it since its announcement and played Beta and midnight release and all that stuff.
And it did turn out to be the next big thing. And it has become a massive game that I’ve been able to spend a lot of time on over the years.
So all worked out according to plan.
1 Like
I had a patch of ill health and realised I didn’t have any low-effort hobbies… and some of my friends played. A casual game seemed appropriate.
Many years later, it is a lifestyle, but that’s a different story.
1 Like
Underneath modern WoW the old WoW still exists, however with every change Blizzard makes you have to dig harder and harder to find it.
What attracted me was that I had played the RTS games a lot and really enjoyed the maps where you got a small band of units and had to fight your way through, uncovering lore all along the way. There used to be these maps for TFT with all of Azeroth and 40 levels for 12 characters running around, fighting, grinding mobs. I loved the Founding of Durotar, too.
Furthermore I loved he Elder Scrolls series.
So you can just imagine how I felt when I saw the World of Warcraft Town Hall. I went completely and utterly ballistic. My excitement simply knew no bounds.
And WoW delivered. It took me a long time to “figure out” the game. I spent over a year levelling and I loved it. I will never forget the guild I made, the friends I made, the adventure, the locales. Azeroth really was something else, blowing away its competition with its variety and many perspectives.
I got this feeling of community and place, wonder and excitement, exploration and experimentation in the extreme, a sense of danger from enemy camps. A sense that things were happening all around me, not always because of me, and that I could be a part of it and work my way up.
As a kid I got bullied a lot, but here was a chance to escape my IRL perception and try again, and I seized it and gained friends all over Europe, and I still have many of them. 6, to be exact.
When I look at modern WoW, I see very few zones with very compacted and irritating design, overwhelmingly fast combat, “convenience” features that take away the travel, the exploration, surprises of just running. I see a huge obsession with multiple characters and chores and grinds. I see no persistent world, smothered by Warmode, phazing, and CRZ. I see PuG’s where people never talk, nobody ever learns. A world where exploration expires in a matter of weeks because everything is easy, after which everything just scales up forever.
Everything I loved is not gone. If you focus very hard you can find it. However, it’s buried in an absolute avalanche of poorly considered trash.
4 Likes
at the time, i actually thought the game will flop big.
1 Like
I played Impressions (later Tilted Mill) historic City Builders from about 1998 - Caesar 3, Pharaoh, Zeus, Emperor (the best) and those that followed after. I joined HeavenGames website and forums. One of the friends I made was starting a Stronghold Heaven and asked me to help so I did.
In about 2005 he kept wittering on about this wonderful game he was beta-ing. How it was a bit like the City Builders (really?) but the world kept happening even if he wasn’t playing. I ignored him and carried on with my City Builders.
Then WoW was launched in Europe and he still kept going on about it. Finally I gave in, think it was January 2006, bought WoW, made a human paladin and we started playing together and have done ever since. At the moment our pairing to play SL are the characters we made when TBC launched, both Draenei, him a hunter, me a SP.
That’s a short (
) version of why I started to play WoW in 2005/6.
TLDR: Started playing to make a friend shut up.
2 Likes
wasn’t the most complicated of games but it was a lot of fun and a great introduction to community gaming, was gutted when they shut the servers down…
came here from Neverwinter Nights, it didn’t lose it’s appeal but it was a little limited and everyone i knew moved on, i didn’t want to play a subscription game but tried it and was instantly hooked, it was huge 
1 Like
Was a good game, and I enjoy good RPGs so I eventually convinced my mom to pay for a subscription and all that. Good combat system that wasn’t super click intensive and about ‘dodging/rolling’ like tons of other online RPGs did.
Just about every aspect of the game was fun to me, and with it being a ‘newer’ game and it being back then there was a lot more room for people that didn’t know what they were doing in group content and playing a game in general.
1 Like
I had played a lot of both WCII and WCIII and I had just moved into my own flat when WoW launched so I played it on an old potato of a computer and dial-up internet which was great until I reached crossroads and then the PvP there would send my latency through the roof.
Due to work I was never going to be at the cutting edge of raiding or any proper end game activities so for the most part the game has changed relatively little for me other than the introduction of LFR giving me an insight into the awesome raids. As it stands I have not logged into the game for quite a while now as I am now in a proper job and don’t seem to have the free time to put into the game at the moment.
1 Like