>> This is a copy’n’paste job from the “How did you get started in WoW?” thread on the Single Abstract Noun forums as it would make sense to include it on my own site somewhere. Phew, link-fest.
Oh lordy.
Towards the end of July last year (2009) I was at a barbecue at a friend’s house, making food and chatting with with the friend’s sister’s boyfriend. Sis and her boyfriend had just arrived from Australia for a visit and we were having a fairly typical we’ve-just-met conversation: jobs, interests, etc. He was an eLearning specialist at a university in Melbourne and was very interested in using virtual worlds for education, so we ended up talking about Second Life, Habbo Hotel, the failed Google project “Lively” and finally, WoW.
I’d never played, but as a committed gamer I’d read plenty enough about WoW and decided that it wasn’t for me. Although I’m omnivorous in my gaming, I particularly love a good plot, dialogue and a bunch of other things not notably well done in MMOs. I’d tried two or three hours of Everquest (yawn) and Eve Online (pretty, but double yawn) and found them severely lacking. Plus, why would I pay a monthly fee to play a game?
A week later I was poking around in HMV on Oxford Street looking for something new to entertain me that evening and found the Battle Chest on a shelf marked “Sale: £10” and decided to try it, so that the next time I had a conversation with someone about virtual worlds I could tell them why WoW was a waste of time from first-hand experience.
It took *hours* to install and patch — I foolishly allowed vanilla WoW to patch itself before installing BC, so ended up repatching all over again. I decided enough was enough and went to bed without playing. The following day, a new patch was released (3.2) and so when I arrived home and went to sign in, there was another interminable wait while it downloaded and installed. Not a great start.
Long before the end of my trial period I already knew that a) I was wrong, and b) I’d be subscribing. From the achievements list I know I did my first instance a couple of nights later (Deadmines, inevitably) but only a further five before hitting 80.
I’ve no idea how much time I’ve put in now as I’m too scared to type /played. I’ve an 80 ret Paladin in t9 who can do very little else until I find some way of raiding (my guild keeps teetering on the brink, then running off to do something crazy like creating a copy of itself on the other faction), a late 60s gnome mage I’m levelling almost entirely through LFG, and a serverful of low level bank and storage characters. My Google reader account is jammed full of feeds from your blogs, and I even have an in-development wowblog of my own.
And now I have a fresh healy belf paladin called Anorak on AD.
TL;DR: I’m newish and a converted skeptic. Also, babblemouth, I haz it.