10 questions for 10 years

Over at ALT:ernative, the Godmother is working on a project gathering data from players of WoW, answering 10 questions, in honor of the 10 year aniversary of WoW coming up, and I thought it'd be fun to jump on board with my own answers.  So, here they are:


1. Why did you start playing Warcraft?

The first time I played Warcraft I was a Junior in college, nearly 10 years back, and my friend Anfernee had downloaded WoW when it first came out.  I had seem him play the Star Wars MMO (I can't remember which one was big back then), so when he got WoW, I got to see him play through it a bit, and then I actually made a character on his account (shhh... don't tell).  They had an apartment that everyone would just hang out in, so it didn't seem weird at the time that I was playing this game on his computer.  Given how much longer leveling took back then, I got surprisingly far on that toon.

Several years later, I got the game on my own.  This is a story I'm sure many WoW players can relate to, but it came right after a break-up, and I all the sudden had tons of time.  As serendipity would have it, I happened to stumble across Felicia Day's The Guild on youtube around the same time, which made me remember playing WoW back in college.  So I decided to pick it up again.  

2. What was the first ever character you rolled?

It's hard to remember what the first character I ever played was. As I mentioned, I was in college, and playing on someone else's computer.  There were several characters I started.  One of the first that I really remember was a Nelf hunter. I don't actually remember levelling in the tree,  but I do remember the quest when you finally go across to kalimdor, and how jaw-dropping it was to find out there was such a huge world out there. 

When I finally bought the game myself, the first toon I rolled was a male Draenei Hunter.  Since I hadn't played the Warcraft games, and there hadn't been draenei the first time I played WoW, I didn't know much about their lore, but I thought they looked pretty cool: I liked the wildness of the tentacles and the goat features.    

Even though I've never done any role-playing in WoW, everytime I create a chracter I imagine I might, some day, need to RP, so a hunter was just by far the most appealing class for me because of that.   I loved the idea of it being just me and my pet, matching wits against the wilderness, or whatever creature came our way.  

3. Which factors determined your faction choice in game?  

Faction for me was totally random at first. I really just picked classes I wanted to play, and ended up with whatever faction they were.  I didn't until much later realize how incredibly terrible that dirty rotten no-good tyrant Varian Wrynn was. 

If I were really allowed to choose a faction, the Tauren would leave the horde, and the Draenei and Worgen would leave the alliance, and they'd all create a new faction together.   Maybe in a later patch, the trolls would leave the horde and join as well, since they're fairly wild also.   Oh, also, the Mok'nathal would definitely be part of our faction.  

4. What has been your most memorable moment in Warcraft and why?

I'm trying to think of one that stands out above the others.   There were a lot of really small victories, in my quest to become a decent hunter, and I imagine those were the most important. As I think back, a lot of them involve mastering disengage.  I don't know if it was the most memorable, but one big moment was the first time I got dropped of the ledge by a Valkyr while fighting the lich king, and I actually managed to disengage back onto the platform (sure, we still wiped, but it was a personal victory).  Or there was the first time 

5. What is your favorite aspect of the game and has this always been the case?

I don't really have a favorite.  I really like raiding, I really like soloing, and I really like PvP. At various points in the game, I'll be more into one or the other, but they're all so different, that it's hard to compare one to the other.   

6. Do you have an area in game that you always return to?

Grizzly Hills. Whether leveling as Alliance or Horde, I love the Grizzly Hills.  The music, and the scenery is the best the game has had, I think.  

I also tend to like the funny quests.  When leveling horde, there's that area in the eastern kingdoms a bit southeast of Undercity, where you have to deal with Johnny Awesome, and the main quest giver makes fun of wow players a lot. Also, the Day Deathwing Came is always a favorite quest chain, just for the silly-ness. 

7. How long have you /played and has that been continuous?
I haven't played continuously, and I'm on new accounts, so I don't know what my overall /played would be. My current main is at about 121 days, which covers being my main from Dragon Soul through now.  The next closest is another hunter, which doesn't get played as much these days, but was played during late wrath and early cata.  The closest currently that isn't a hunter is a druid I have sitting at a measly 22 days 16 hours played. 

8. Admit it: do you read quest text or not?Hardly ever.  I mentioned this on my blog recently (a month ago or so), I don't find leveling super compelling in WoW.  I'd really like it if they would make the quests interesting enough that I wanted to read the text, but if it's just telling me I need to collect 10 such and such, then I don't really care why I'm collecting those things.  Every once in a while I'll end up wasting a lot of time not understanding how I'm supposed to collect whatever it is I'm supposed to be collecting,  but generally you can guess quite easily.  

I imagine they'd get too many complaints in a game like wow (since people are used to having most of the game designed toward the lowest common denominator), but I wouldn't at all mind if the quests became more intricate, and there was actually some amount of puzzle to them.   That's a part of traditional RPGs that I miss when playing WoW.   

9. Are there any regrets from your time in game?

I really started getting into playing my hunter well, or at least striving to, from reading Frostheim's posts on the Warcraft Hunters Union, and I suppose one of my only real regrets was not rolling a Dwarf Hunter on Icecrown when they first started the WHU guild and the all hunter events there.  At the time I just didn't have enough time to participate in those and IRL things going on, but I loved watching the videos of those events, and often wish I could have been a part of them.   

10. What effect has Warcraft had on your life outside gaming?

I think playing Warcraft opens you up in a way. This may sound strange, but I think it's a stigmatized enough game, that when you tell people IRL that you play WoW, it opens them up a lot, or brings their defenses down.  In the more recent years, "nerd" has become a lot cooler, but it's in this strange sort of hipster way, where it's really only cool to be nerdy ironically. But if you tell someone about spending your free time slaying dragons and fighting tyrant kings, they're like "hey, here's some dork who plays WoW, I can really be myself in front of them".  

And there it is, my 10 for 10.  If  you're interested in participating, head over the Alt:ernative where she has listed several ways that you can submit your own answers.