*** When did you start playing? What brought you to Azeroth?**
Fall-ish 2005. My boyfriend let me make a character on his account. A night elf druid. He was playing Alliance, because his brother was playing Alliance, therefore I had to play alliance. (We eventually got married by the way) The elf lasted one day before I made a Tauren. I got my own account before BC started. And Kinarra was the first character I made, different name of course. She’s been on 4 different servers I think.
*** Did you start on WRA or a different server? If another, what brought you here?**
WRA didn’t exist yet, so no. I don’t remember what server it was. All I remember was faction balance was awful. All the little kiddos were Ally, and the server was dominated by Ally from around 3pm (when they got home from school) to around 9pm on school nights. It was 6 hour griefing and gankfest. I joined WRA around March 2009 ( it opened January 2009) because some forum friends I had made suggested I try RPing and they were here.
*** What are some of your favorite memories?**
Too many to pick one. Most of them have to do with the Earthspear Tribe. I’ve met so many awesome people here and had a lot of fun.
*** Funny moments?**
When Earthspear Tribe was doing Story Circle in Thunderbluff and there was a raid. Borgg and his guild where in attendance - this was back in the day when you had to have RP gear. They beat back the Alliance raid in their RP guild, while the event carried on. Then a new guildy suddenly logged on and asked in guild chat if he was in trouble for missing the event to be in the Ally raid group.
*** The one achievement or item you’ve never managed to get / get to drop?**
The Headless Horseman Mount. I’m still bitter. My husband has it drop a couple of times each season. I hate him sometimes.
I joined sometime before March 7, 2005 because I vividly remember the outrage about Meeting Stones being added, wild to think that was contentious.
Started on the Stormreaver server and came to WrA sometime during the start or middle of Cataclysm, I’ve always had an interest in the Warcraft universe, and seeing people take it somewhat seriously can be fun. Reading character profiles is also very fun.
There are some world PvP moments that I still fondly remember, most of them involve Tol Barad and either fight against or along side Against All Odds. Them being arguably more polite than other PvPers really changed my perspective.
The Legion Mage Tower challenges that I managed to complete still give me a small dopamine rush whenever I transmog or turn into one. The tanking challenge has made me irritated at Prophet Velen at all times, still.
Very slow at tanking, I’d take longer to mark targets and typing out what I wanted CC to be on each symbol, when really the pack of mobs didn’t do anything special and could’ve been face pulled.
Headless Horseman Mount, I run it on multiple characters almost every year and still haven’t gotten it, that and the Love Rocket.
Neat to read these and find out how everyone ended up here!
I guess I’ll post mine too:
When did you start playing? What brought you to Azeroth?
Late BC. I’d been a fan of Lost Vikings, Orcs v Humans, played Evercrack, D&D tabletop. Warcraft was a natural progression. I’d been busy with RL but my older daughter heard about it and wanted to play. I used her as an excuse, since I wanted to play too. She originally wanted to be Horde (Blood Elves!) but I wanted to be a Dwarf. When she saw the Night Elves were available, she fell in love and we rolled Alliance.
Did you start on WRA or a different server? If another, what brought you here?
Started on Madoran in the guild Sad Panda, since that’s where some offline friends were. I got deployed again in the summer of 2008 and met my fate in Afg that August. I picked WoW back up while in the hospital. Most of my friends had stopped playing, except for a couple who came to WRA in the fall of '09. So, I too came to WRA and never left.
What are some of your favorite memories?
Wintergrasp was boss on WRA. I’ve talked about it before. I’m not sure any gaming experience I ever had or will have will come close. Servers still mattered. AAO, Thane and Xara brought Alliance back from the dead. Keithoo giving his Horde pep talks before WG was hysterical, even though I knew it meant trouble for us on Team Blue.
Those trails of Horde flying into TM from UC when we would hit TM from SS, amazing sight.
I remember some guy offering legacy raid runs that always ended up spilling onto the forums with blistering arguments (Ralph? Maybe?).
Forum drama back then was legit and as an RP server, we would have DRAMA.
We had Gnomes v Goblins PvP match out in Shattrath one year. I miss Forbs leading the charge for Gnomes everywhere. (RIP)
I remember arriving in Wrath Dal for the first time and it felt legit. Wrath was just an era. Cannot say enough about it.
I remember the “Victory for Sylvanas” thread caps too. Page 25, every time. Sometimes the entire thread would be one massive argument and out of nowhere the last post, “Victory for Sylvanas”. Always a laugh.
What achievement or moment in all the time you’ve been playing, have you ever thought MAN, I ROCKED THAT!
Not an achievement but during Wrath I was leveling up Norman and was out near Bladespire Hold when some lvl 80 DK came zipping along. I was flagged for some reason and I guess he felt like as an EPIC HERO CLASS DK he was going to take advantage. I really have no idea how I managed it, but I killed him. I think I was level 67 or 68.
Funny moments?
RP wise, nothing will touch the Dk giving birth in the Cathedral during Wrath. There was chaos in chat for weeks afterward. I was so happy to be online and in SW that night. Tears from laughing so hard.
Gameplay wise, nothing will top when I was in an epic failure of TM vs SS BG and I convinced everyone on Team Blue to hide in the basement of the inn, hoping that Horde wouldn’t find us. They all followed me and we spent the rest of our time hiding until someone from Horde finally came down and found us, at which point we all ran upstairs to the Townhall. I have the chat screenshotted. What a proud moment for me…lol
What were you like as a noob?
Rogues are supposed to be cunning and smart. We stack intellect, right?
Embarrassing moments?
I was the last one standing in a raid taking down Ragnaros and had enough going to probably get the last shot in to take him down but I didn’t realize it until everyone was yelling HIT HIM HIT HIM. By then, it was too late and I died. Fortunately, many of the ppl there were friends but HOLY hell did I take grief for months afterwards.
The one achievement or item you’ve never managed to get / get to drop?
I really would love to get some PvP titles but I have some physical issues that prevent me from being an asset to a team, as opposed to a burden. I am not the type of guy to earn things by being carried, so unless I can hold up my end of gameplay, I will likely never earn them.
Remember when Sharding was brand new and they decided to splice together Moon Guard and Wyrmrest Accord’s Goldshire? Which proceeded to speed run the Birth of Slaanesh in terms of degeneracy until Blizzard literally stepped in and turned off Sharding there.
It’s also amusing someone tried to act shock when Loh just immediately boo’d Baine in his story since they show Baine running right to Anduin and Jaina for help.
Like… yall understand how characters work? Hiveminds people are not.
Late 2005. I was looking for something to do for a few months until Oblivion launched.
I started on Shadow Council, which I picked because the name sounded cool. I also vaguely remember hearing that RP servers had a better atmosphere. I moved to WrA when my RP group imploded/transferred/quit around the end of Cata.
The old Warlock quests where you had to run around Azeroth to learn demon summoning. I did those with friends and we had a blast.
When my RP guild finally got Arthas in ICC. The last attempt was just flawless and everything finally clicked. Also the green fire warlock quest in MoP when I finally figured it out.
Headless horseman’s mount (and it seems I have a lot of company on here).
I think a lot of this stems from people wanting to be on “the right side of history” sort of whether consciously or unconsciously. Which isn’t BAD to have characters like that, because like you said people are not hiveminds. But it feels like a lot of people do not want their characters to be “wrong” about things.
Fall 2005. My friends started playing and listening to them talk excitedly about WoW was like listening to a different language. It piqued my curiosity and soon I was nerding out with the rest.
I was on an RP-PvP server early on called Twisting Nether but TN had horrid hardware issues that kept resulting in mass disconnects that Blizzard IT couldn’t fix, so my friends and me re-rolled on RP servers. (Anyone else remember that bizarre period on TN from about 2005 - 2006?) I eventually came to WrA in 2021 because RP populations had coalesced into either here or MG.
So many. Princess runs in Vanilla. Heroic Shattered Halls without proper CC in BC. Portal diving ToC in Wrath. Two simultaneous IC LFR RP raids in Cata. Seeing the Jade Serpent destroyed for the first time in MoP. That feeling when you unlocked garrison building levels in WoD. Seeing book/manga characters on screen in Legion. Boralus being my old server’s final RP hurrah in BfA. Taking a break in Shadowlands because it didn’t feel like WoW anymore. Playing DF Alpha and feeling the spark anew. It was 2005 again.
45-minute Vanilla Scholo runs, the warlock felfire quests, Lucid Nightmare labyrinth, and early on Mage Tower achievements stick out to me. I love doing things like that.
Pretty much any time with my guild or friends, such as when a hunter friend infamously bounced a trap off a pillar and missed their target entirely. The absolute silence on VC followed by their resigned “…efff meee” still makes me giggle to this day.
A Vanilla Ret paladin wearing cloth and being cleanse bots in raids because well, it’s what we had to do for meta back then. But I should have been Holy. I just didn’t want to because I thought I was bucking the trend but all I was doing was running out of mana faster.
This is ancient but one of my characters was running some kind of server event and after her speech, I wrote that she “slipped” down the stairs instead of walked. Why I used that word to this day, I don’t know. My intent was for her to unnotably walk down the stairs and mingle with the crowd. But it was hilarious and I ended up rolling with it. Give epic speech, slip down stairs, fall on face. Perfect.
Baron Rivendare never dropped my Lightforge pants. I had this guy on farm for months in Vanilla and came back for many revenge runs before he was revamped. Still no pants. What the heck.
I think I eventually got it after the Cata revamp but it didn’t feel like a victory. It felt like a sad consolation prize.
Unsurprising. I think most of the arguments that involved him were him (or his friends) master looting everything while the rest of the raid carried them.
God, I was in Harvey Normans, looking at games and trying to get some of the happy brain chemicals after yet another round of emotional water-boarding from the family, saw Warcraft and went “…Oh. I remember that series. Huh.” and leaned down to pick up the box to have a closer look …
And here we are, 20 years later
From memory, we started on Cenarion Circle, I got suckered into Stormrise Warband, back before egoes started rubbing up against each other, and the Guild wanted a fresh start on a fresh server, and like a barnacle, I weathered it all and am still rolling about like an empty can in an abandoned sports stadium …
Oh, God, where do I begin? Raiding Stormwind with Stormrise Warband and being party to the absolute nonsense that was the Ventrillo Chat certainly ranks up there, and the Wintergrasp tomfoolery, and dozens of RP events where I’ve met some long term friends who even now suffer my existence with grace, but my fondest?
Dropping Ragnaros with my Original Guild, <.Rampant Stupidity.>, and the deafening cheer as we dropped that giant flaming dooker even with a Raid Team with six Warlocks because we would not leave anyone behind … and then one of our officers proposed to another one, and we realised why they’d nearly been late every week for a month and a half, because they’d been waiting to drop Ragnaros, the boss the propose-ee was absolutely mad to get done with, because the propose-er had been plotting with the propose-ee’s neighbour to set it up. As soon as Ragnaros was dropped, he rushed over, headset still on, jumped the fence, let himself into the house, got down on one knee and proposed, to which propose-ee burst into tears and said yes and now we’re all cheering like mad because screw Ragnaros, this is glorious.
They’ve been married for nearly seventeen years now, I was the best man for one at their wedding and the best man for the other at their renewal event, and they’re genuinely two of the nicest people I know.
Second Favourite would have to be getting Invincible to drop, and then within a weekly lockout, Mirmiron’s Head dropped. And I went into Guild chat squealing madly because holy shizzlesticks, what are the odds … and one officer in that Guild was a little too fixated and went down a rabbit hole over me ‘hacking’, another just went sour because they’d been farming ‘longer than I had’ and shat on me for it, but the guildies? Oh man the whole “Check your windows and locks, buddy.” and the Monty Python-like chases through Stormwind and Ironforge to ‘beat’ the mounts out of me will never not make me giggle-snort.
Healing a Raid Group who’d brought me on as a +1 for one of their members, I was significantly undergeared compared to the rest of them, we’re up against Gul’dan, two of the main healers DCed within seconds of each other, their ‘good’ healer rage-quit because he’d gotten blocked from a healing trinket because he already had a better one and there was some PvP meta with the trinket, so when he rage-quit, he’d taken his pocket-tank with him, and a good chunk of the raid had died because that’s kinda the thing that happens when you kill peoples’ enthusiasm and motivation?
So my nubblet behind is healing the off-off tank, we’ve got a vanilla-flavoured huntard, a demon huntard and myself squaring off against Heroic Gul’dan, the Hunter dies but Gul’dan is down to 5%, the Demon Hunter dies at 4%, and its me and the Death Knight and a Gul’dan who is panting “I didn’t hear no bell!”, I’m nearly out of mana, the Death Knight is on death’s door, we get Gul’dan down to 1%, the DK disconnects, I pop Earth Elemental and just go H.A.M. because I didn’t hear no bell, and manage to get Gul’dan down with only a sliver of my own health remaining.
And the cheering. Oh my God. I have helped deliver a child into this world and that moment of thirteen random strangers and a friend all going off their bananas because my poorly-geared and schlubby self pulled them over the line for their first ever Heroic Nighthold nudged into the top 10 moments in my life.
Getting chased around Thunder Bluff for about an hour by a pack of Druids and Shamans on my Warlock because I had a Succubi out and in the Pools of Spirits. I had forgotten to dismiss her before entering a city. They assumed I was letting a Demon bathe in a sacred pool.
The Great Kazzak Rampage when we drew that demonic chad into Stormwind. The Great Azurgos Revenge when the Alliance did the same to Orgrimmar and we had a pitched battle trying to save the Warchief from this damn dragon.
Soup Nights, Story Circles, most Horde RP events are fond memories for me, a lot of the Alliance ones too for that matter, but for a while, a lot of Alliance events got plagued by window-licking Horde PvPrats and spotlight-hogging Alliance RPers and I dropped out for about 2-3 years. I need to get back into it.
I was annoying, aggravating, ignorant and demanding. I am so grateful so many people were willing to use so many crayons to help me be better.
The really embarrassing ones I cannot go into on this board because I am deathly allergic to hammers, but back before we had transmog, and you had to use the actual items, I got roto-rooted in front of people I greatly respected and wanted to respect me in turn more times than I care to think about by PvPers in Silvermoon, Thunderbluff and Orgrimmar.
Being utterly ignorant of other classes’ abilities back in Vanilla and BC and may have been the impetus for me to have at least 1 of every Class so I wouldn’t humiliate myself like that again.
I could never get into the Naxxramas raid when it was current, both in Vanilla and in Wrath, and especially Wrath, because I was harder than adamant for that Black Proto-Drake, and I so wanted the Timeless Proto-Drake … and then we got Dragonflight and I could use the Walmart version of both mounts.
The thing that really irks me is that I had loaned close to two million gold in the closing days of the Battle for Azeroth and desperately needed the gold back to buy the Brutosaur mount, but the people I had loaned it to had stopped playing, and despite multiple attempts to get them to log back on and send me back something, or even offering to pay their account for a month just to get them to give me the money back, I missed the deadline and never got my opportunity to get a hecking big dinosaur mount, and somewhere deep inside me, the mummified corpse of my inner child crumbled a little bit more into dust.
We ran BRD last night. I think what was fun about the raid is it did feel like an old vanilla/TBC raid before mods, strats, youtube videos, stuff is just broken and wack etc. Just gotta go in and mess it upppp lmao. I had a lot of fun!
