Due to an incredibly bad post last week, Gaston has been fired and his weekly spot will be filled with a segment called "Tales from an Old WoW Player". We at Notaddicted apologize for allowing him to work here for so long and hope to maintain the level of writing that our loyal readers have come to expect.
Tales from an Old WoW Player
by: Some Old Guy
So, you fancy yourself a WoW player, eh? You think you’ve seen everything there is to see in that world, have yeh? Well I tell ya here an' now that a greenbottom like you ain’t seen nothin’. You just sit yer keister down and prepare to be amazed.
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| A picture of me playing the World of Wacraft Alpha in 1986 |
I’ll start with the time I was in the World of Warcraft Beta. Yeah that’s right, I was trapsin around the lands o' Azeroth before the game was even available to the general public. The download wasn't available on CD, so I had to download the entire thing off of the intranet -- yup, I said intranet -- onto my 486 P90. It took me 5 days to download the dang thing. I had to sit in front of my computer the whole time to make sure downloader didn’t drop me-- which it did every few minutes. Yes indeed, I sat for 117 hours in front of that screen and I didn’t blink once.
Anywhays, once that game downloaded I started my first character. By that time every good Christian name had been taken, so I had to name my character in all computer symbols and punctuation marks -- something that was still allowed back then. Come to think of it, I was probably the first person to have a name with the number 3 replacing the letter “e”.
Mind you, back then we didn’t have servers like you do today. People would have to individually host the game from their computer and the only way to play with anyone else was to invite them over to your server. Usually, you'd have to go to a website out of the game in order to arrange these meetings. Once a match was made between two players you would dial into his (or her) server and play WoW 'til the game would drop you -- which usually wasn't longer than a few seconds.
Now this was all before the new level cap, and when I say that I mean the level 60 level cap -- I’ll be dead and buried before I recognize no level 70. So at this time, no one could pass level 10. As you can probably imagine this made raid dungeons pretty durned difficult. Matter of fact, in order to beat any end game dungeon you'd have to organize about two thousand people.
I remember being there when we downed Nefarion for the first time. We were twelve thousand strong and the fight took just under 3 months. Players would fight in shifts, rotating out every twelve hours or so.
It was a long fight, but we eventually got her down. The celebration went on for days -- mainly because killing her caused the gameworld to break and none of us could logout or reboot our computers. Unfortunately though, after all that none of us could loot her corpse. You see, the game designers had originally thought that beating these world monsters would be reward enough on their own. And it was.
Another thing 'bout those times was that there were no Auction Houses. Players would have to hock their wares over the chat, or use a third party website distributor, or take out a classified ad. Magic items weren’t created yet either, so the only way to make items with a quality rating better than "grey" was to put an enchant on them, and only one enchant existed back then; minor fishing to gloves.
Of course, fishing hadn't been put into the game yet -- but that's a whole 'nother story.
To hear other boring rants from Some Old Guy, please tune into his podcast titled "This Old WoW"
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