When did you buy World of Warcraft, whats your story?

Community General Discussion
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As the title says when did you buy World of Warcraft, whats your story?

My story is as follows, I remember when I first got World of Warcraft seeing that big purple elf followed by that dwarf sitting in a game shop on a shelf and being completely lured to it and asking my father if he could get me it for my birthday or Christmas which was around 4 months away to my dad saying.

“Sure son I’ll have a wee look into the game to make sure its suitable for you”

To sitting outside the shop with my mum with a hot Greegs sausage roll “when you got served them warm and not cold” to having my dad shaking the game from a distance to going home with it in my hands and being amazed at the size of the box never seeing something like this before and looking at all the photos on the back to getting back home and putting it into the computer asking my dad if it was ready yet while he slowly downloaded the game with AOL Broadband, to being completely amazed and mesmerised by the game itself when playing each click on the customisation tool only making me more excited seeing all these things I’d never had the choice to do before to then getting in the game and see this massive vast world in all different ways shapes and sizes hitting squirrels and fighting these monsters panicking dying and finding myself all ghost like and having to run to my father to help me as I couldn’t do anything stopping him from having his dinner while my dad laughed at me and said don’t die next time or stay alive till I’m finished while laughing.

:sunny: This was my story, whats yours? :sunny:

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I first TRIED WoW back in 2008, but back then I was more into consoles and other games, and I only really tried it because a friend was always asking me to and not because I’d really heard anything special or great about it.

My first impression wasn’t that good, and I really didn’t care about it. It wasn’t until a few years later that the -same- friend (he was very persistent that I play WoW with him!) asked me once again, if he could recruit me as a friend, and this time I said I’ll give it a longer try and level some, so since the standard WoW wasn’t that expensive, I believe it was something like £5 or £6 just to get to level 60.

Since then… I haven’t stopped since. :smiley: When I got to experience the later levels in the game, and run through group content I was just taken in and it didn’t even take me a moment to decide to purchase the other expansions at the time. Moving onto today, WoW has so many memories attached to it now, made so many friends (whom I talk to regularly for years now) as a result of this game.

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I was already playing a few months before the end of TBC. I think I was around 12 or 13 (now I’m 24) And even though I bought the game, I’ve played it only on weekends because then I was going to my dads house and he had PC that was good enough with just as good internet speed. And I’ve spend WHOLE weekends DAYS AND NIGHTS in front of that PC playing WOW xD First was undead warlock but around lvl 20 I decided to make a new char and it was blood elf warlock. At that time in my country 2 months of sub costed around 90 zł (around 21-23 euro) And my pocekt money for a month was 100 zł xD So yeah, every two months I had to spent my whole pocket money for the 2 months of sub… Good times.

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some friends pulled me in a private L2 server (i wasn’t much of a gamer at that point), i binged for some months until a vendor exploit went public and everyone ended up being ridiculously rich so the admins decided to delete everything.
after months of dedication i was like “$# this, never again on private server”
since i decided to go “official” i wanted to try guild wars because it seemed better but the store didn’t had a copy
the store employee told me “but we have wow, i play it’s good”
i’m like, ok whatever bring it

690 days played later

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I had had the World of Warcraft disc for yonks. I just wasn’t into PC gaming being a console gamer. Anyway in preperation for the release of Final Fantasy XIII… announced in 2006 I purchased a new PS3 in 2007 and just waited. I played Heavenly Sword till my fingers fell off and got tired of Timesplitters and God of War on the PS2…

By April I just had had enough. I was mucking around with graphics cards in an old Windows 98 machine and thought about upgrading the graphics on my main XP machine. So I got a NVIDIA card. I didn’t have anything to try on the PC to test the card and then I remembered that Warcraft disc that I had bought from PC World. I dug it out and blew off the dust. Installed, couldn’t get it to work and uninstalled. Before I did though I emailed Blizzard and told them of my problems.

The same day I got a reply telling me how to set up the internet homehub so that I could access the game. I was utterly amazed that I got a reply so quick. And it worked… Been playing ever since.

By the way Final Fantasy XIII came out in March 2010 so its a good thing I didn’t wait. It was also dreadful. Whereas World of Warcraft was and still is brilliant.

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I bought it in 2006 it was good times, many deaths lol… murlocs in stv damn them

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Well, I started playing properly about 11 days ago. I did however play for a brief spell with one of my friends a couple of years back, and I had tried it several times before that, but I never really understood the appeal and barely made it to level 20.

Youtube randomly started ramming Asmongold down my throat every time I loaded the home page so I started watching him a little, and despite how polarising people find it, somehow it made me wanna pick up wow again, but I had a small issue, in that, I have made probably 30-40 email accounts across the many years I’ve been using the internet and I only remember about 10-15 of them, and I couldn’t remember the email I had used.

Only hope I had was to message someone I know to message my old best friend (who had me blocked due to irl issues) asking him to unblock me so I could ask him a question, he did and despite his lack of PC, he was able to tell me the realm we used to play on, and he logged into the bnet app on his phone and managed to find my btag!

But… This didn’t really help me, because you need the email to log in, so I hit up the live chat support and they were not only able to find my characters, and rescue them from the depths of the void, but they also hit me up with 14 days of game time, so I could test out ‘the new changes’!

Obviously I’ve been playing daily since then, cause free sub is free sub, the only thing that is annoying me a little bit is that all the veteran players whine and complain about things in the game, and on the rare occasion, the devs listen, and remove artifact power, just as an example, sure, the vets are happy, because thats how they wanted it, but us newer players… We have a weapon with traits we have never and will never be able to use, sure, those guys have it hard with the RNG on top of RNG and slow boring incremental progression in BFA, but people that aren’t at BFA yet, or don’t have it yet, have zero progression… The most progression you get is in the leveling phase, which if you happen to have an existing character, you probably have heirlooms, so that removes that level of progression completely, then you finally get to Legion content, and you’re like, well, heirlooms are still the best armour for me, but at least now I get progression with my wea… Oh… Wait… They removed that…

As someone that has spent more time watching wow content that actually playing it, and hearing various views of various different youtubers/streamers, and their chats etc, all I hear is there’s no sense of progression for vets… Well there’s no sense of progression at all for the newer players aside from hitting max level, at least when you’re already fully geared at max level of BFA and in a raiding guild you get SOME progression…

Sorry, that went from a sincere story of how I started playing again, to a ramble, and into a rant.

I need some coffee.

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Oh, I forgot to add, me and my old best friend who had me blocked are now friends again purely because I asked him to help me get my WoW account back, and he loves wow, so we got talking again lol, that was supposed to be my main point then I went off on a rant, oopsie.

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Well i bought mine (after being heavily persuaded by friends) at a local store (Elgiganten) at noon approximately, on the first of july 2006.

I remember that the weather was great that day.

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Just on this narrow point, the removal of artefact traits in Legion was not because of people complaining. People didn’t ever complain about traits, and the complaints about farming artefact power were only in 7.0 and maybe 7.1; by 7.2, the complaints were gone.

Blizzard removed artefact traits for their own reasons. I presume they just didn’t want to deal with any ongoing maintenance or balance in an old expansion, like they way they removed effects from previous expansion tier sets, or the quest like for the Pandaria Cloak.

I do think it’s a pity they removed it, because it does remove a source of progression, not that there’s much of that left in the game anyhow now. But don’t pin that one on complaints.

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I started a few days before tbc was released. I went troll holy priest and i lvled by questing. I never played an mmorpg before so i didn’t know what a dps specc or healer specc was. I still remmember my days in the barrens, made two freinds there and we started lvling together An undead Rogue and a bloodelf holy priest Both of Them were as noob as i was. We started doing dungeons with double healer combo and it was fun. It took us the entire expansion to reach lvl 70. Best time i ever had.

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Since September 2004 - Persuaded by my work colleagues to try it and I am still here now - I am still in touch with them and do have a gentle go at them for getting me addicted to this game!

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I don’t know, I was bored as a kid and just played browser flash games on my parents laptop and one day I figured I’d try this game out since it looked interesting and I had heard a lot of positive things about it. I got the trial version and made like 20 level 20 characters (I was hooked) and managed to convince my parents to buy the whole game for me (I also “tricked” my mom into paying my sub). I’ve been playing since then hardly ever taking breaks. I think I stopped for a short period during WoD and that might be the only time where I actually “quit” the game, but I came back for the last tier of that expansion.

I also remember that my first account I played on was on a completely different email and password (I have no clue as to what either could even be anymore) so I’ve stuck to this one instead and made this my main one.

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Where to being? From the start, I suppose.

First time I heard about this wondrous game was when my schoolmate told me that his brother had gotten to beta of this brilliant new game back in '04, I was around 12, which peaked my interest. Then forgot about it for a bit until my cousin started playing this game around 1.10.0 (2006-ish, I think), I got to play a bit on his account and got hooked, but my parents didn’t want to pay a monthly subscription for a game so I had to start playing this game by other means. Kept playing until this new expansion called the Wrath of the Lich King came around… I just fell off from the game around that time.

Officially I started playing in Cata when Firelands was the new hot thing since I was finally able to pay for the game by myself. From then on I have been playing this game on and off again.

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Around october 2006. I “bought” the 15 days free time in a retail shop. I dont remember why. Maybe i read somethin about a “sequel” online of warcraft 3.

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They removed the traits for the Artifect weapons as allot of them are reworked into the baseline abilities or as talents points now and they didn’t want to deal with ppl stacking the new talents/abilities with the traits.
Then they made it lore canon by using the weapons to purge the sword that is sticking out of Silithus.

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I had some friends who really were into pc gaming, as was I, but I didn’t had a good pc at home and barely any games. So we’d often meet up and play games like W3 1 by 1. In February of 2005, when we were 14/15, they stopped with meeting up as now they were playing together from their homes on this new game called World of Warcraft.

When I first saw it at one of my friends house I asked him if I could play some as well. He then explained that this wasn’t like Morrowind with a safe file, he went on to explain the vast online world where your character is, dying has consequences (the run, the repair bill) and he was very protective of his character, so no playing for me.

Another friend did however allow me to goof around on a self made character, as long as I didn’t touch his main. I made a gnome something, they looked funny and all I did was running around, hence why I can’t remember the class.
We ended up making a deal: we’d split the bill and make an agenda to see who gets to play when on the same account.

After hitting level 48 on my Tauren hunter I decided it was time for my own account, and so it was ment ot be. Me and my buddy got online at the same time, I made my character exactly the same, he deleted “me” from his account and I was reborn anew. He also joined my server (we played on diffrent servers while we were sharing) as I had a stable guild and some friends. We both leveled up together, but this reset of ours ment that we missed the level 60 mark just before TBC, I remember vividly hitting 59 the day before launch of TBC…

Aaah, good times. And now I’m here 28 years old, still playing the same game from my teens, still got my trusty hunter with me, although he’s an alt now, and enjoying the raiding content.

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At the end of TBC. I used to play Metin 2 and was looking for a replacement. I found WoW’s ad and decided to try it. My english was so bad back then i didn’t know it was 7 day trial. When it ended i begged my mom to buy me the game and have been playing ever since. Time flies :’)

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Some good stories here, I like it :grin:

As for my own story, well, it’s a long one some people may want to skip, but here it is for people interested in these stories:

About 6 months before my GCSE’s I was quite bored, and as an avid gamer I had heard a lot about WoW. This was late 2009ish time and my mother had seen a lot of those ‘gaming addiction is rising!’ news stories and was always on my case about it, and me not buying the whole addiction thing would always argue against it. This inevitably lead me into looking at these news stories myself so that I could better argue my case against it, and of course, what game was called more addictive at the time than WoW?

Eventually this passive-advertising got to me. The game looked good and I was bored, so why not? I had my own money from a good old-fashioned paper round, so I head out at bought the vanilla game (at the time, you still had to buy the physical boxes) and came home to convince my Dad to put the subscription on his card, as he didn’t seem to pay as much attention to the gaming addiction panic. He agreed and presto, there I was in the world of warcraft.

I started on a Human warrior (original, I know!) but eventually tried a Dwarf hunter and liked it a lot more, who would then become my main for the coming years. I remember trying out the dungeons - how fun that was! Funny to look back on too - dying in the deadmines and getting lost on the corpse run back (back when you used to have to run back to dungeons) and rolling need on everything because I didn’t fully understand the loot system - thought every item was mine and I was just throwing it away if I didn’t press need! Eventually someone in one of the runs simply said ‘ninja hunter’ and shortly after I got kicked. I ended up googling the phrase and learning from my mistake :sweat_smile:

Eventually I hit level 60, and although I did have the money to buy TBC I knew my GCSE’s were creeping up on me. ‘I won’t play the game too much longer before I have to stop so that I can study’, I told myself. ‘No point buying it now’. I remember looking at the old lvl 60 raids and, being a bit arrogant, complained a few times in Stormwind about how more people should do them to ‘show new people around them’ :rofl: needless to say most people didn’t take my attitude well. I did however find a new friend who was stuck in the same situation as me through doing this, and the two of us played together. I remember grinding the black dragon whelps together in the wetlands for the pet, doing hour-long blackrock depths runs and grinding out some of the old reps like the Timbermaw clan with him as we chatted about other games we’ve played. good times.

And then eventually one day I was back in Stormwind making the raid complaints again and someone (rightfully) started mocking me for not knowing how to use the /who function. Turns out that there’s a whole bunch of level 60’s raiding Molten Core right now! It turned out my friend was also in Stormwind watching the chat and started whisping me about it, and eventually we found out that the group who were raiding were all in a guild. We started to whisper the group, and eventually they confirmed that tomorrow they would look into recruiting us - and then they did! It turned out that a majority of the guild were people with the full game who were just bored with the end of the expansion, and so had started the new characters to freeze their levels at 60 and partially re-live the vanilla experience on alts. Regardless, it was a nice experience to have a full guild of friendly people to do semi-casual raiding with, and to run dungeons and chat with.

My GCSEs eventually came and went, and I didn’t end up leaving the game as I thought I would (I got all As and Bs anyway, so I guess I didn’t turn out too badly from it all) and continued on raiding. Eventually people started getting tired of the level 60 experience - even before the cata revamp, playing a frozen level 60 was still a completely different experience from playing a level 60 in vanilla. So instead people started talking about advancing the guild to level 70, and after some time we did. I went out and bought TBC and used all of my extra-long post-GSCE summer break to play the expansion. But as the Cata launch started to grow closer the guild decided to cut the 70 experience quite a bit shorter than they had played at 60. Most of the alt players had enjoyed the guild so much that they now wanted to make these characters their main, and almost everyone agreed to start raiding in Cata with these ones. As such, we quickly moved up to WoTLK for the final few months of the expansion so that people could prepare their characters appropriately and give the people like myself who hadn’t fully seen the expansion a chance to do so. When Cata did hit, there was a slight controversy as the GM wanted us to stay at 80 until we had downed the Lich King, just so we could stay true to the guild tradition. He allowed us to go into the new zones, level professions, and play new alts, but not the characters in the guild. However, the core of the guild stayed together, and after finally downing LK we advanced to Cata. At this point I didn’t raid much because I was finding A-level more difficult and my parents mandated that I spend more hours reading and doing independent school work, and because I wasn’t good enough to make the teams, only filling in when there were open spots. This tied with me gradually getting more bored lead to me leaving not long after the release of Firelands. It was kind of a fizzle out really, as I didn’t really make a grand good-bye or anything - I felt a bit like I had become detached from both the game and the guild, so that was it.

Skip forward about 4 years and I decided to go to university. A guy in my dorm and a friend of ours used to play WoW, and had seen all of the advertisement for WOD. The three of us all agreed to play together, and on the day before launch I signed up to a new account after tragically forgetting the login info for the old one, ‘pre-ordered’ WOD, and then used my level 90 boost on this here Priest. We kicked around a few Pandaria dungeons for the evening and then made our way to the portal just as the countdown to launch began. And when the WOD launch came we sat around and took selfies with the load screen. #WODexperience, we joked. We levelled together for a while, into the early hours of the morning, and then we continued playing together for a while. The 10 year anniversary rolled around soon afterward, and as I was studying in London, the three of us managed to get hold of the tickets and went to the London celebration. It was a great atmosphere, and I even remember entering the lore competition and winning a manga book as a prize (It seems I was the only person who knew what the abandoned memorial in Elwynn forrest was for). I still have the glasses and coin they gave out to atendees somewhere too. Unfortunately my friend’s fascination with the game fizzled out after a few months and they stopped playing, and with WOD’s lack of content I did too just before 6.1.

Fast forward again to the beginning of this year. I’d been going through a rough time, and somehow I had found myself listening back to some of the WoW soundtracks. Doing so lead me back to looking back into the game, and before I knew it I re-subbed. In a similar fashion to back before my GCSE’s, I told myself that this was only temporary, that I wasn’t going to buy legion, but instead just play old content for the completionist value in it. Grind old pets and reps, that kind of thing. But in the same fashion, I ended up buying Legion and pre-ordering BFA when they got tied together. Had a blast playing through Legion, and still having a blast today, even though I’ve now got a lot on my plate and don’t play quite as much as I did a few months ago. So overall, I’m pleased that I did.

So yeah, that’s my probably-too-long story. Thanks for reading.

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Mine is a simple tale…
While visiting my step-daughter in January 2008, she was playing WoW - a Christmas present from her then boyfriend, now Husband - when we arrived & I was either shown the game or I enquired what it was (details) but I was given the chance to have a look at it.
I created a character & for the next 30-60m, I was lost playing the character. I was lent the game discs & given her trial code to use to create an account & that was it - hooked.
A while later, I was informed I was being bought my own copy of the game for my birthday, which was only weeks away.

Close on 11 years later, here I am…

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