We’d been building up to this moment for months. We’d been so close the previous week, only to come up short in the final battle, but this time everything was going our way. Everyone was still online, Tati was on top of her healing game, Banu and our off-tank had everything on lockdown, and we the DPS team were cranking out damage like a crack UFC beatdown team. The year was 2011, and my guild was finally taking down the Lich King.
My initial exposure to World of Warcraft came way back during the beta period in 2004. At the time, I wasn’t particularly impressed. I was part of a dedicated guild in Star Wars: Galaxies (SW:G) that had most of my focus, and was part of the development team for The Matrix: Online (TM:O) in my day job. WoW’s cartoony graphics, swords & sorcery world, and themepark questlines didn’t appeal to me like the open world creativity of SW:G. Meanwhile, TM:O was going to be the next big thing in the MMORPG space, featuring canonical stories that expanded the Matrix universe, a world that naturally lent itself to the virtual setting of MMOs, and a classless design system that allowed players to build and rebuild their characters however they wanted.
Prepping for a big raid, back in the days of the Mistweavers. (Screenshot credit: Cindy Bartelt)
Then World of Warcraft arrived on the scene, and dropped a nuclear bomb on the way MMOs were done. Even SW:G went full themepark, after a poorly conceived combat revision which led to a full rebuild of the entire game atop the old bones. That was when I finally left that game, when Jedi went from a rare and difficult path to achieve, to a base class that any player could start with. Of the various other MMOs I tried out in the next couple of years, only one – EVE Online – is still around today. But I couldn’t devote the second job level of effort required to be a serious EVE player, which left me casting about for a new MMO fix.
Meanwhile, my brother, a game developer in his own right, had been playing WoW almost from launch. He’d met his girlfriend (now wife) through his guild, and the both of them had been trying to convince me to jump in and give the game another chance. And so, sometime around the last days of the Burning Crusade expansion, I jumped in on an RPPvE server and rolled up a Blood Elf Warlock named Kaelisse.
Something about playing a ranged class with a tanking pet clicked for me in ways that none of the other classes had. I found a guild – The Mistweavers – populated largely by a bunch of other fun loving, mature RP players. I wasn’t the most dedicated player in the guild, but I held my own.
The Mistweavers turned out to be a pretty close-knit bunch. We started raiding together, slowly building our way up to the Lich King himself. They were also a great support team for my first Extra Life gaming challenge. Something about logging with Kaelisse and always seeing someone in guild chat to talk to and cheer me up made the twenty-four hour run feel a lot less lonely and solitary than it otherwise would have, in the days before livestreaming Extra Life days became commonplace.
There was a lot of RP fun too. One particular event, an in-game wedding between our guild leader’s main character and one of the other guild members, turned out to be almost prophetic, as a couple years later, the two would wed in real life.
As it happened, though, defeating Arthas was the high point for our guild. When the next expansion (Cataclysm) released, we never quite got back to the pinnacle of end game raiding. Lots of RP was still happening, but so was a lot of burnout.
Working, raiding, dailies, and sleeping ruled my life for a while. That wasn’t sustainable. When my job real went away, so did my desire to play WoW, which had become like a second job that didn’t pay me. It had become so intertwined with a work life that I just wanted to leave behind that I simply couldn’t boot up the game without feeling some combination of anger, pain, and loss at my old company.
New battles, and new enemies, are coming soon.
Once again, I was adrift without an MMO to play. Perhaps it was for the best. With four kids at home and a new job, I didn’t have the time to devote to raiding, and The Mistweavers were slowly drifting apart due to other personal life demands. I recently spoke to my old guild leaders, and they don’t play anymore at all. The demands of married life, jobs, and a new baby simply don’t leave enough time for WoW.
It’s probably been six years since I’ve launched World of Warcraft on my PC. But maybe that’s going to change.
To Be Continued…
