Ask Lemmy

I would like to start again but just don't have the time anymore. Fuck retail tho

No WoW specifically, never played it, but Runescape had that GRIP on my psyche whenever I was younger. Late nights staying up to make sure I was still AFK skilling.

Now, it seems so dumb to spend so much money on a game that I basically played alone because CoD was the style at the time (and I guess still is), especially since it doesn't feel like I gained anything from it other than a love of the game and its style.

I had fun though, so I guess it wasn't all in vain?

I left because of things the company was doing. I liked being part of a community that aligned with my interests.

I miss being able to play with people like that. The challenge of raids were fun and I took a lot of pride in the progress we were making.

Honestly it's been lonely. I've tried to play other games with people but it felt disconnected and eventually I walked away from that and only played single player games.

It taught me to use home row touch typing. Before that I was fast enough at search and peck that I didn't see the point of home row. But when you're chit chatting in the heat of battle you don't have time for that shit.

Played from a friends and family alpha (October 2003) until 2021, a little before the big scandals started hitting the public. Rather ironic that the mediocre state of the game and not the nightmare culture is what drove me away.

I think about the good times only when I see it in the news for whatever new expansion they're pushing. I was in the same guild for almost the entire time, and stay in contact with a handful of them.

Other than that, just a forgotten relic.

Well I occasionally have the impulse to tell my coworkers "That's Minus Fifty DKP!" but aside from that, I dunno maybe there's something to be said about just knowing your role, doing your job right, and assuming you don't need to micromanage everyone else.

points to username

Man I miss it like crazy and I frequently think about the lost connection to friends who still play.

I've got too many things to do to get back in, but it kind of stops me from gaming at all because part of the allure is being really invested and really GOOD. There's the UI investment, the research, and just the casual play and chat time... I miss it all.

The guild I was in really kicked off at Cataclysm and we were alliance first for heroic end game (server second) for like 3 xpacs. I quit wow 4 times before it stuck. I started in vanilla in 2005 in college and played until... 2014? Pretty sure my main (and I had 3 characters) had about 370 days in /played.

It lives on a pedestal of gaming and I basically have to leave it sitting there until my family is grown, playing a casual chess game or two instead.

TL;DR: When it comes to games I've got no chill now. Even with casual chess I pay for lessons.

Edit:

As an aside, it's wild to me how many people ITT didnt even raid at all, it's like 1/3+ of the game! That's carving some space for PvP, which was also hella fun back when PvP servers and griefing and casual raids of enemy towns was a thing.

No not at all.

I started playing MUDs in the late 90s and moved into EverQuest. That game was a ton of fun but I was never an addict of the game. I never did any raiding in EQ I just didn’t have the time.

I will never forget going to a Wizards of The Coast in the early 2000s. If you didn’t know Wizards of the Coast, It was a chain of a games store that would have a bank of PCs that you could play video games on and a bunch of games for sale.

Anyway I met a guy playing EQ in wizards of the coast whose character had a funny colored name over its head. He got the name color because his character had been logged in for a total of 500 days. I thought it was game days. No that was real life days.

At that time EQ was only 3 years old. He had spent 1.5 years of that time logged into the game……..

I was amazed at his addiction.

Anyway I was a big Warcraft fan so I got WoW the moment it was released and again I was always a casual. I had too much to do.

I played Vanilla for a year or two and I cancelled my subscription and I would come back for every expansion for a while. I didn’t really start raiding until Mist of Pandora. That was after my kid went off too college so I had more free time.

I loved raiding. I was never great at it. But I had my own guild and we had 20 folks who I raided with twice a week for years. The last expansion I played was Legion.

I quit and returned briefly for Dragon Flight and just kind of hated it.

I loved WoW.

The dumbest game I've ever played. Escaped into it as a kid on release and got addicted. Sure the initial journey to 60 was pretty magical. It was my first mmo, and I had played WC3 a lot before.

But my god, the dunning krueger effect, the toxicity, the community. Just terrible imo. And of course the utter unfulfilling time sink.
I've also been quite a competitive gamer, having played a lot of cs, dota and wc3 ladder, some semi-professionally. And WoW is simply not it.

I learned how evil Blizzard is, how addicted I can get to certain games, etc. yeah, the one word that comes to mind looking back at it is "stupid".

WOW helped me learn to cope with a lot of the social anxiety issues I have. I went from just doing shit by myself and not talking to anyone and being timid about getting on the mic to eventually getting running raid groups and getting elected to take over as GM of the 60+ member guild I was in.

Yes, I was way too addicted to it for a long time but a big part of that through the middle to the end of my time playing it was the socialization factor. It was a "safe" means of interacting with people and just have conversations where it was easy to escape or stand up for yourself if someone was an asshole. Unlike public school where I had to worry about physical violence so I avoided people as much as possible except my small friend group. I learned to talk to people and banter. I learned how to manage conflicts and organize events. I learned how to have constructive conversations with people who were falling short in raids. All these things which I was able to bring into real life. It also gave me more opportunities to talk to women platonically which I think contributed to me not becoming an incel because I definitely fit the demo of someone that should have happened to.

As I got more confident I eventually got a job and started doing more stuff in real life and that got me off WOW and video games as a whole are a much smaller part of my life now. Would it have been better to go to therapy? Maybe, but I didn't know where to begin with that. I really don't think I'd have turned out as well as I did without that game.

I don't think it does, or at least not much. I quit before BC, the started working in the games industry years later and had to pick it back up. Quit before the panda thing (I forget precisely when).

I have good memories of playing it with coworkers and friends. I don't think about it these days at all (and fuck blizzard, honestly).

That job had me play lots of MMOs (I worked at one of the community/fan/tools sites (we did not allow account/gold sales, botting discussion/links. Etc)) and eventually I burnt out on them pretty hard. Single player RPGs are more my jam these days

I started playing fellowship. So now, that part of my life has become years of experience to pick up a new game fluidly and have fun with it

So I was 5 when WoW released and it was my first mmorpg followed by EverQuest. I couldnt type, my mom had to do it for me and when she did the other party members were always surprised because i apparently played really well.

Played until my character level was nearly maxed out, but my dad deleted the character to make room for another god damn character for him to max out. My interest sort of died and never picked it back up again, though ive thought about it.

Its what first got me on the computer in the first place and sparked that initial IT career interest.

Feels like a dream, tbh. A period of my life that began 20 years ago now and consumed much of my thought and time and energy. For something close to a decade I played almost exclusively one game. My life was on hold.

I also met my partner in that game. We're still together. I didn't have a lot going on when WoW became my every waking thought. I transitioned that into a life with someone.

I miss those early days. Like any video game, I have fond memories of that experience. I've moved on though. The game itself is recessed, way back. My Druid sleeps.

It was such a tremendous waste of time.

It was a beautiful journey that I won’t ever forget, I listen to the music to this day, but it occupied so MUCH of my 20S & 30s that I could have accomplished so much and done so many more important things if I had even just regulated the number of hours a day I spent on it.

I didn’t, I couldn’t, I just disappeared into it. Textbook destructive addition.

I wasted so much time playing that game, and I don't regret any of it. In theory I could have accomplished so much more but it was my escape, it truly helped me through difficult times and become who I am now!

I'm sure this doesn't count, but my WoW life was utterly ideal, aside from me sucking at being a rogue.

I played in the same dining room as several (4-6) friends and we grouped up constantly.

But I also didn't care one tiny fuck about the endgame grind. I hit level 60 (the max at the time), shouted "I win," and sold my account to a friend for forty bucks.

My current life, I'm not really a gamer other than mobile crap and D&D these days. Too old, tired, busy.

I didn't get a college degree because of that game. So that, I guess.

I lost someone who I thought was a good friend. He was no joke addicted to it (he once let a pot of food rot in his room while he played for days straight) and met his wife on it. I wasn't interested in it (I played burning crusade with him and just didn't have fun), and somehow that drove a crack in the friendship. He was such a good guy, and I wonder what our friendship would have been like if it wasn't for wow.

I honestly don't think about it a ton. I think about Everquest more than WoW. I set up my own Everquest server once upon a time and had a bunch of fun being alone on a server with custom settings.

I did read about hosting my own private WoW server, and I might do that. I'm normally a single player gamer type except when playing with my wife. Had her try WoW and she didn't care for it. We are currently playing Satisfactory together.

I had mostly played WoW because my bro played (10 yrs older) and wanted to hang with him. We did, it was a lot of fun. I was in his guild and made some temporary friends. Went on a date with one of them. It didn't work out.

I do remember spending way too much time playing it. It felt like sometimes I waited more in game than played. I don't really miss it though. I have a large steam backlog I'm working my way happily through.

I figured out I was chasing the dragon of fun that I wasn't actually having. I left blizzard entirely when they dicked over that starcraft player for a political social media post. I don't regret the time I spent because I learned stuff along the way.

I played for a handful of years around 2009-ish

Never got very far, don't think I hit max level, never got super into any particular aspect of it

But I had fun fucking around online with some friends

Probably the biggest source of strife in my marriage is that my wife played for the alliance and I was horde.

And well over a decade later my text message notification sound is still a murloc.

I got my current job through an old guild mate ... so quite a lot.

I played from 2005 to 2009 and it was my first MMO. I learned a lot about my own addictive nature with WoW and MMOs in general.

I got lost in the minutiae of theorycrafting out builds and because of being in one of the more hardcore raid guilds during vanilla (5 raid nights a week), basically every raising resto druid on the server knew me and would cross faction just to hang out and talk builds and strategy. Was a ton of fun, but kept me so invested beyond even my raid schedule and when I quit, my druid alone had 1 year of in-game time.

Quitting WoW was easily the best decision I could have made (during WotLK) for my own mental health and for my (at the time) young professional career. I learned that of all the "close friends" didn't actually give a damn when the game was removed from conversations. I had a lot of fun while playing but I allowed it to take over my social life to the point I didn't realize I no longer had one.

It's funny, the game that got me over WoW was Dragon Age: Origins which dropped within a few weeks of quitting. It felt and played kind of like a single player WoW in a weird way, and I just never felt like picking it back up.

I don't really think about my time with WoW much and usually think about all the great moments, but then if I really think about it, I can remember all the incredibly toxic moments too and that keeps me away even though I'm sure 90% of all those people have moved on by now too.

My winter hat has a horde patch on it. 🤷‍♂️

Pretty well, all things considered. I played off and on for about 15 years (more on than off). Got into an awesome family-friendly guild and made some very good friends. I still regularly chat with and occasionally play other games with some of them.

I became the leader of that guild eventually, but by then it was well into a slow death spiral. It was sad to see everything slowly fall apart and there being nothing anyone could do to resurrect it. That was kind of a painful life lesson.

But I also have some very fond memories playing with both my wife and my son, and with those friends.

Maybe I was to much of a 'filthy casual' to get drawn too deeply into it (I only casually raided sporadically). But even still, it did hook me in for a while. And even now it's left an itch I can't scratch. I miss the Wrath era and how vibrant and dynamic and crazy the 'world' could be.

Overall I feel like it was worth the time and money. But I know that's not the case for many others.

My son still plays it sometimes and is trying to get me to come back for the new xpac. But I have zero enthusiasm for it. The last several months I was playing I would log in out of obligation and then almost immediately log off again because nothing sounded fun to do. I didn't (and still don't) like what they've done with both retail and classic. I guess I've moved on in life.

I played at varying levels of intensity between 2010 and 2015.

I met my first serious girlfriend through the game. It was also a long-distance relationship, and led to the frankly absurd story of how I lost my virginity, which involved a massive snowstorm and a lost passport. The relationship didn't work out, but it was formative for me as a person.

These days, I still occasionally hang out with some of my old guild mates, who still play the game. Not as much anymore, especially after our D&D campaign ended, but I still consider them some of my closer friends.

Not at all... except sometimes I make murloc noises when I'm bored.

I think it influenced it positively. It led me to computer science and taught me team work and online collaboration skills that I still use today.

My WoW career lasted from Lich King until BFA. Every time I hear one of the stock sound effects, or any of the zone music, it activates my brain like that one scene from Ratatouille. Hearing the "level up" sound floods my brain with diapline to this day.

I never did raid content and got sick of it when I hit the level cap on the burning crusade.

I look back on my time playing wow very fondly because the Skinner box endgame ship never appealed to me at all. It was fun and social and when I got sick of it I moved on.

Very happy about my time spent playing wow.

My at the time friend learned WoW would cost Monthly money he swore the game off. In 2005 I picked it up after another friend tried to get me to play lineage. Eventually I got all my friends hooked and we played together for years. I stopped playing in 2012 and never really had any in game achievements. I almost had full tier 1 armor for my paladin. Now I look at that time with regret. I used to spend 12 hours a day in game for a few days in a row. Organized 40 man raids but was a shit GL an RL.

15yo, TBC on a private server. I really loved the game and our small community of 800 players. Quests were broken. World events were broken. Raids and dungeons were broken. But the spirit of the game was there. Never left the server up until it's death.

Maybe playing WoW did influence my grades in school, but WoW was not the only game I have played during late Highschool and early Uni. The wasted time metric is entirely owned by LoL. Other than that, I've met great people, had a blast and kept some friends and epic memories. So much so, I am running AzerothCore single player modded server of 3.3.5a right now. Memberberries are super tasty with WoW.

^Here I went for a rant about how game became worse with each expansion. Rant removed.^

Ten years playing. It was mostly with family as we were scattered across the country and Sundays we would all do quests and dungeons together. But later it got to where you would spend hours just doing dailies. And I had a real life I needed to live.