So yes, I played world of warcraft, for a couple of years even. I first started when it was in open beta. I had played most Blizzard titles before, starcraft, diablo 1&2, etc. I had also played warcraft 2 and 3, so I was somewhat familiar with the canon. When I had heard they were making an mmo I was pretty excited. I had some experience with mmos before as well. I had played asheron's call for a few months, but I had never really meshed with anyone there and the game wasn't good enough to carry me alone. I had also played Neocron, which I had enjoyed quite a bit, maybe I'll write a post about that sometime.
Anyways back to world of warcraft. Right from the beginning I was stunned. It had looked so much better then any rpg I had played before. The world was stunning, and exploring It would become one of my favourite activities. The game's map started completely covered and the player had to reveal it by visiting each part of the map, a feature which sadly they abandoned in later versions, the maps just starts fully revealed.
Up until this point I had mostly just played the game by myself, but I was getting to the point where I was ready to start running dungeons. Now dungeons typically needed to be run by groups of five, so I had to start interacting with people in the looking for group channels. I ran a few until finally I ran one with a group of people that just clicked with me and we became friends. We ran a few more dungeons over the next few days and eventually they invited me to join their guild. I met even more people in this group and we continued to run dungeons until the majority of us finally made it to the max level. By this point the majority of us had completed the top level dungeons enough that the only really opportunity for a new challenge in the game was to star raiding. This is really where the game took a bad turn for me.
Now I had another friend who also played WoW, but I had originally known them from playing the game counter strike. They had a much stronger mmo background from playing the game everquest, and they were clearly much better at WoW then me. They had a bit of an attitude of superiority about it, and to be fair they were always respectful with me, it was still clear that they had a disdain for people that weren't as good. I eventually adopted this bad habit as well and this is where everything started to go wrong.
The character class I played was a mage, and my guild had one other mage. We never really interacted much early on, in a five man group you don't typically bring two of the same class, so there was no reason for us to ever group. Now one of our, and many other players, past time during downtime was to duel each other. It's just a system for a friendly one on one fight that ends when someone reaches one hitpoint. I had several duels with a warrior in our guild and I had won most of them, not for any particular reason other then the mage class just had a natural advantage over the warrior class. The warrior mentioned how he usually beat the other mage in the guild and how I was much better. This is exactly what I did not need to hear, and would be the beginning of a terrible relationship with the other mage, and it was going to be entirely my fault.
As I mentioned it was around this time my guild started raiding. Now raiding is different from dungeons in that instead of the normal five man groups, the group size is now forty. This means me and the other mage both have to attend these raids or we won't have enough people. Now the rewards from these raids are better equipment upgrades for your characters. Every Time your group defeats a boss a random piece of 'loot' is dropped, and each piece belongs to a set for a particular class. What this means is any time a piece of mage loot drops its now between me and this other mage on who gets it. This combined with my negative opinion of the other mage really started to make my resent them, and apparently it showed.
I remember one night I must have given them enough attitude that they had finally had enough and in front of everyone they told me off pretty thoroughly , and I can't say I didn't have it coming. I reacted the normal way I reacted to conflict, I just shut down, I didn't even say anything back. I don't remember what happened next, but I remember what happened the next day. I started thinking about it and they were right. Why was I acting like this? This person had done nothing wrong to me, I barely even knew that but I had already formed an opinion of them based on nothing of importance. I had decided clearly it was the game that was problem and I should stop playing it. I was wrong though, it wasn't the game it was me.
I ended up taking a solid three months off of the game. It was during this time when I saw the movie Revolver and it had quite a big impact on me. Now for those of you not familiar it was one of the director Guy Ritchie's gangster movies. This one though had a key difference, it delved deeply into the idea of the ego, it even contained interviews with some 'experts' in the credits. I put experts in quotation because one of them was Deepak Chopra, who could be considered a controversial figure today. Personally I found his interview for the film very enlightening. He's on twitter if you would like more context on this.
Unfortunately this is considered to be Guy's worst film, and I can see why. The message is really just beaten over you head. It lacks any kind of subtlety that a finely crafted film would portray the message in a way the audience can learn it through the experience of the main character (Jason Statham, see I told you Id mention him!). Well while this makes for a poor film, it was a time in my life when I needed this message beaten over my head, and so I'm glad it was the way that it was. If you're interested here's the trailer for Revolver, although it feels very disingenuous to the actual subject matter of the movie, probably on purpose. It may be worth watching the whole film, I haven't seen it since so I can honestly say if its still relevant today, but I think it might.
I had realized that it was my ego that was making me resent this person who I had no real reason to resent, not the game, and in my time off I had lost all those feelings. I thought maybe I could come back to the game and give it another shot. For awhile it was all good again, I had fun, people were happy to see me and vice versa. I thought everything was going to work out. Then the first raid happened.
I remember it very clearly, it was Onyxia, which I had never done before (all the previous raids were Molten Core, shout out to the fellow WoWers). The other mage was there, and I attempted to great him in a somewhat joking friendly manner. They were not having it one bit. In the time I had taken off, they had been grinding, getting geared up, and well surpassed me. Now the tables were turned and I was the one on the bottom, and they were just waiting for their turn to treat me as poorly as possible. I had created a monster. Before I met this person they had none of my trademark superior attitude, but now they had embraced it with the sole purpose of unleashing it on me as I had on them. I couldn't even be mad about it, it was clearly my fault this person had become like this. I decided then and there I was never going to do another raid again.
It wasn't long after that I quit the game again. There wasn't much widespread use of out of game communications then so I never heard from any of these people again, which I think is a shame. I have played other online games since then and become part of communities that extend past the game they're created around, and really that's the best part of online gaming. The real shame though is what I did to this person. Part of me thinks I should have stayed, and tried to help them see what I saw, but Im probably the last person they'd listen to at that point, and I can't blame them. In the end they just have to make their own decisions and I wish them the best. I have done you a great disservice and you have my deepest apologies.
I did end up making another attempt at playing WoW after a much longer break, and had some fun, ran some dungeons again, met a new group. However once this group also started approaching the raiding stage of the game I just couldn't do it, and quit before even attempting another raid. At this point in the game the burning crusade expansion was just about to come out next month as well. Many years later I've tried a few free trial weekends again, but the game had changed so much by then. The leveling system was now so much easier, which meant all the low level zones were already empty, and so Id have to play by myself up until the end game content, which frankly just isn't fun. They had also introduced a dungeon finder system that would automatically pair you up with a group to run a dungeon. This was a lot quicker then the old looking for group channel I mentioned above, but it changed the changed the game in another way I didn't like.
I remember seeing a news article about a famous incident at a BlizzCon where some fan asked an executive of the company about possibly adding a 'classic wow' version of the game for fans of the original. He made a snarky remark about how you wouldn't want to go back to waiting around for hours trolling the old looking for group channel, well actually yes, yes I would. The looking for group channel was slow, but it forced you to meet new people and sometimes even build lasting friendships out of the necessity that finding dungeon groups was difficult. The new dungeon finder system turned every dungeon into a tinder one night stand, where'd you never see these people again; mostly because they were from different servers and it was not possible to interact with them outside this one dungeon instance. Well it turns out that questioner will get the last laugh, because wow eventually did make a classic mode, and it came out last month. I've had a few invitations from people in online communities I frequent to try it out, maybe it's time to give it another go. Thanks Guy.
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