you know what today is?  it’s the 5th anniversary of me having sold my soul to the dark overlord of world of warcraft.  ya, it’s been 5 years since i started this cocaine of mmo’s.  i’m not sure who could’ve guessed back then how big it would get.  people anticipated the game to be a massive success…but, yea…i’m not sure they knew just how massive.  prior to wow coming out, everquest was considered a success at a “whopping” 400,000+ subscribers.  wow currently sits at over 11 million subscribers and counting.  and given that it’s shown no signs of letting up, i thought it’d be fun to celebrate this 5th anniversary by giving a thorough historical recap of my time with the game, for all two of you out there who give a fucking shit.

VANILLA WOW
so the year was 2004, and the world was different.  the “horseless carriage” had just been introduced, and there were talks of “flying contraptions”….just kidding.  it was a different world tho.  the economy didn’t suck, but we did have a halfwit for president. as a result, the world was pretty bleh, so it was the perfect time to introduce an mmo where people could escape to.  fonz, mike, and i jumped on board on launch day, along with a few bajillion people around the country.  we were tossed onto the realm “khadgar”, where i rolled a perky human mage and went about toasting hapless sheep with fireballs.  then the server (along with a couple others) promptly shit itself under the strain of a thousand nerds.  damnit.  we got a message saying that the server would most likely be “shit” for a while, so we headed to another server, “llane”.  this was a brand new “second day” east coast server, one of a couple they brought online to handle the crush of people apparently trying to escape the real world.  i rolled a night elf hunter this time, slapped on the name “moya” (my last character in morrowind was moya, hence i reused it as legacy), and off i went.

that’s moya attempting to navigate the subway between ironforge and stormwind.  shit was complex, k?  after a few months power-leveling on my own, i hooked up with my first guild on the server, emperor’s thousand.  it was a relatively small, casual guild…noticeable given that i was the highest level toon in guild at the time i joined.  the people were cool, and we had fun.  i however eventually got a bit bored (i was part of the first group of 60’s on the server), and joined up with a hardcore raid guild called ‘rapture‘.  i bailed on them however after a few days after i deemed the hardcore lifestyle “retarded“, and went back to et.  the boredom lingered however, and fonz and i ventured off for a brief period of time to the doomhammer server to run with ars discordia, an ars clan guild.

i rolled another hunter named “northern” and took him to 60 relatively fast.  that’s the guild above getting the main tank burley his thunderfury btw.  oohs and ahs.  the guild didn’t seem like a fit tho, so we found ourselves wandering back to llane and et.  some time later, the guild had a bit of a meltdown (partially instigated by fonz, mike, and i), and we reformed into ‘orichalcum‘ with me as the guild leader (kek!).  shortly after that, we began successfully running molten core with an alliance of guilds. a few months into that with a couple boss kills under our belt, we decided to merge into one guild called ‘etherion‘.  riveting shit, isn’t it?

i forgot to mention too.  back then, everybody and their fucking sisters was a night elf hunter, so i had at some point rolled a priest named “jema”.  nobody wanted to be a healer, so i figured shit…i can do that.  the priest pretty much became my main throughout the entirety of “vanilla” wow.  i spent my nights playing healer “whack a mole” with people who liked standing in the proverbial “stupid shit”.  i had also leveled a paladin named “soja” to 60, but shelved her because pally’s sucked massive.  then came the burning crusade…the first expansion.

THE BURNING CRUSADE
i went back to my first toon, moya, for the duration of bc.  that last image was near the end of bc and during the beijing olympics.  we got spiffy limited edition tabards and a pet dragon…word.  bc for me was summed up with one word…alts.  a fuck-ton.  maybe it was something to do with what the game became.  but in the interim that was bc, alongside my hunter and priest, i also rolled a draenei shaman (sonatine), a draenei warrior (murata), and brought over my second hunter from doomhammer (juno) and took him to 70 also.  i was nearing absolute boredom, so the upcoming second expansion, wrath of the lich king, was a godsend.

WRATH OF THE LICH KING
the top picture is of me graduating with the first class of death knights…wooha!  the aforementioned alts of bc probably burned me out on all the ‘classic’ classes.  so when the new death knight class came out with lk, i rolled a night elf named “veil” and never looked back.  at this point tho, the guild had evolved into something “shit”.  i had stepped down as guild leader and officer during bc, and thought i had left the guild in capable hands.  leadership however eventually made its way into the hands of what i would term “retards”, and their direction and mine gradually shifted apart.  fonz had already left for the pvp server chromaggus and another ars guild, ars brute squad before the expansion came out…he had similar reservations with the guilds direction long before i did.  so when the 3.1 patch hit, i said “fuck it” and left the server, along with a few friends that were still on llane, for chromaggus to rejoin fonz.

chromaggus is where i currently reside with my new blood elf death knight sonatine, and my transferred characters jema (horo) and moya (juno).  word…i’ll see you in-game.