Nostalgia: World of Warcraft- Part 1

This video is what started it all. January 16th, 2007 is when I purchased World of Warcraft and it’s new expansion pack at the time, Burning Crusade. What led me to this purchase was good friends who had traveled the lands of Azeroth several months before I first logged in. I sat with them everyday of my Sophomore year of high school listening to their tales of might and magic. I, being a fantasy buff, was drawn by every tale and yearned to be apart of this marvelous world.

Sure enough, Christmas rolled around and I was given it. At the time I had access to a  Mac laptop which I quickly downloaded the game. The poor machine was ill equipped to handle the game properly, barely had enough memory to handle it and to make matters worse, I had no mouse and was forced to use the track pad. But it didn’t matter.

I played the shit out of that game.

 Every. Single. Day. I played World of Warcraft. In WoW there are two factions a player can be: Horde, which is a group of more beastly looking creatures and the Alliance which was made up of the prettier of races. My friends all played Alliance, so I naturally went Horde.

I did quest after quest on my Blood Elf Paladin in an attempt to catch up to my max level school mates. Upon leveling I met another player via a dungeon and we chatted quite a bit about the game and our love for it. Soon he actually invited me to his guild, which was a group of individuals who came together as a community like a clan or a tribe.

Not many other players in the guild had actually noticed me, nor did they care for this low level scrub asking questions left and right about the game. this didn’t bother me at all, I mean how could it? I was a Arcane addicted high elf who wielded the power of divine light to punish my foes!

After a week or so my class mates became annoyed at my faction choice. During lunch I would share my tales of slaying the undead in the Ghostlands and they’d all roll their eyes and constantly attempt to convince me that I was on the wrong side of the fence and that I should switch before it was ‘too late’.

At the time, it did not occur to me that they had threatened me. I merely thought they were warning me that I’d be too high level before I realized that I was lonely and wanted to play with friends and would switch. So that night I played as I did every night and I received a call from friends to meet them in a very unique area called ‘Booty Bay’.

They gave me directions and I followed them. As they said, it led me to a place unlike any other I had seen before. A port town that had an actual ship that sailed players to and from it. I was in awe. What I did not know however was that Booty Bay was a ‘Neutral PvP Zone’ meaning that both factions were allowed to visit and violence was also allowed.

Once they got me comfortable, they struck. With a single hit of their max level gear my frail body fell dead to the ground as I heard their laughter through the phone. i was shocked and found it amusing myself as I ran back to my body. the moment I came back they killed me again. Laughter continued as they told me to switch factions otherwise it was going to remain this way for my entire WoW experience.

I though nothing of it and tried to rez but could not do so without being killed instantly. Frustrated, I reached out to my guild for assistance and explained the situation. Guild officers who never responded to me previously answered the call and told me they would be arriving shortly. Surprised, I thanked them and distracted my ‘friends’, allowing them to kill me a couple more times.

Just as they grew bored of the game, my allies arrived. Mounted on their dire wolves, raptors, kodos and undead horses they rushed my friends and slaughtered them. I spawned without death for the first time in the past few hours and chatted with them as they /spit on the dead bodies.

My class mates were in an uproar by the scene, yelling on the other end of the phone as they noticed that these Horde warriors were guild mates. Feeling as though I were apart of some gang, I taunted them as well.

When they re spawned, they tried their best to combat my allies but it was in vain. Unbeknownst to me at the time, my guild officers were actually experienced PvPers who spent most of their time in battle grounds facing real life players.

Defeated and embarrassed, they logged off and hung up on me. the next day at lunch I laughed as they told me that I made a wrong choice and would forever have to watch my back.

This was one of my all time favorite World of Warcraft memories.

Moral of the Story:  Sometimes it’s best to simply accept that your friend’s interests differ from your own. Otherwise you might get killed in Booty bay by players far better than you.