The best part is, I shipped out in January! It was actually pretty okay until a blizzard hit, but even then it was cool because there was a guy from Georgia in my division who had never seen snow before. His childlike wonder at the falling snow and biting winds, even as we were marching through it, made me feel so happy for him.
And hey! You can keep the muggy humidity in the terraformed swamp lands, with your tollbooths every two miles and used boat salesmen 
I was young. The only other Blizzard game I had played was Diablo II. I watched the trailer with my dad and we were both excited for the game. A couple of years later when it released in November 2004 I asked for it as an early Christmas present. Because of this, WoW was my only present that year. It was the deal I had to make.
But I didnât care - it was like 100 Christmases worth of presents all in one. And I would do it again if I had the choice, knowing that launch was like any game was back then - laggy, busted and constant server crashes.
I played religiously throughout high school. Iâd sneak down to the computer when my dad was asleep just to play. I even had to hide in the closet one night because my dad came storming down the stairs yelling at someone on the phone. He didnât know I was awake, let alone hiding.
I remember falling asleep in math class, which I somehow still passed with an A, because of sleepless nights playing WoW. Again, Iâd do it all over again if I could - whether it was late night raiding, duels, battlegrounds, or leveling alts.
Though the live version of the game is much different now, I am still thankful for the times and endless hours of enjoyment this game has brought to me. And even though I am an adult with responsibilities, a full time job and bills to pay, I am so glad Classic is coming.
In 2001 I finally got a computer and an internet connection that could handle online gaming and I played Everquest with my friends. I was late to that party so I was always playing catch up in levels and gear compared to my friends who raided the Planes.
In early 04 I got into the Everquest 2 beta and played that, intending to move over there to be on the ground floor of a game for once. But WoWâs beta dropped not long after and I had friends that tested it and everything they said about it sounded better than what I was playing with EQ2.
My friends came to the decision to go all in with WoW and we all bought copies the day it released. We rolled Horde on the Stormrage server, created our own guild and I left EQ1 behind with barely a look back. I never touched EQ2 when it went live.
I played Horde through Cata when I quit to play SWTOR. I was gone until Legion was almost over so I restarted as Alliance. Iâm looking forward to playing Alliance in Classic and seeing that side of the game I missed.
I started playing WoW sometime in the beginning of 2006, I was originally playing Guild Wars at the time. I had so much invested in my characters on GW that I almost didnât make the switch.
My friends had started playing WoW and they told me to start playing too. Well, my first character was a NE priest and I forget what level I was but somehow I got stuck north of Splintertree outpost. I kept dying to the guards.
I finally got tired of dying and deleted that toon and made a dwarf priest. I guess I was lucky as dwarf was a good racial for priests in vanilla. I didnât know that at the time. It was odd being able to jump in WoW because I couldnât do that in GW at the time. I didnât know about talents too till one of my friends told me about it, and using rank 1 smite on everything.
Ahh, the memories, good times⌠good times being a noob in vanilla.
I played EQ for maybe 20 min once in a terrible computer and a horrifying internet connectionâŚand I knew I wanted more. Fast forward a couple of years and I had bought a new computer, had âhigh-speedâ internet and knew I wanted to try again. Iâm in the store and I see WoW, and SWG. As Iâm standing there trying to decide, and if Iâm honest Iâm leaning SWG, my buddy calls me up out of the blue and tells me to buy WoW as he and some of my other friends just got it.
I log into the game, in Tirisfal, do one quest and decide that I could spend/waste a fair amount of time playing it. Understatement of the yearâŚ
I woke up dead. A rude awakening In Tirisfal Glades. They were ready to toss me into the fire with the others. But I made it.
Now: to laugh in the face of death has become second nature.
Lost in a world of suck.
I played EQ prior to WoW coming out with a group of friends from the military and Europe. Got a invite for Beta and have played ever since, at the high point of my playing I had 3 U.S. accounts and 2 EU accounts and keep them active until Legion came out.
Yea. People were far less tolerant of gamers back then. Truth was that all 3 of us were really interested in playing it but were afraid of showing interest, lest we were made fun of for our nerdiness.
I grew up playing strategy games on the PC like Age of Empires, Age of Mythology, Empire Earth, Total Annihilation, and such. It was only natural that I would get into Warcraft and WoW.
I started MMOâs with Meridian 59, UO beta pulled me away, the Asheronâs Call beta got me hooked. Was playing Star Wars Galaxies and when it was looking like it wasnât taking a turn for the worst. I jumped ship for WoW.
I was introduced to Blizzard through Diablo and Starcraft. Played online and over LAN with friends in high school. Didnât get into Warcraft, but I remember watching a friend play WC3.
My introduction to the MMO genre was Earth and Beyond, a small MMO published (and abandoned) by EA. It was like EVE-lite. It had a similar trade and exploration model to EVE, with a more direct and simpler combat system. I played that until EA shut it down to âallocate resources to other gamesâ.
Enter my freshman year of college, and my best friend at the time played EQ. As strange as it sounded, I would sit in his dorm room and just watch him play. By the time I had decided to give EQ a try, this new MMO was announced based on the aforementioned Warcraft games I never played. We got beta access, and instantly fell in love with the game.
On release, we went to our local mall and all bought collectorâs editions. I had a crappy custom Pentium 4 system with like 512MB of memory, and the game ran at like 15 FPS, but man I had some fun. Too much fun, actually.
I started out as a gnome mage, because I thought gnomes were hilarious, and I loved the fact that I could turn things into sheep. I got to level 60, PvPâd a bit. Got destroyed by a shaman 1v1, and kinda lost interest after realizing what it took to get geared.
After a week, I got the itch to play again, so I made an orc shaman alt on another server. Gave it a joke name, made it as ugly as sin, with the intent to play around. I fell in love with the class, and when my friends decided to jump to Dark Iron to get involved with the Penny Arcade and PVPOnline thing, I made the switch to shaman permanently. I pretty much stayed shaman until the end of MoP, occasionally swapping to paladin to switch it up.
I started in 2008, my older sister and brother in law played so they showed me WoW while I was on vacation at their place. I had just gotten divorced and it gave me something to do. We started a family guild with 5 of us, all dwarfs by the way and sadly I am the only one still playing even though I took a 2-3 year break after cata I figure I will until they turn off the lights on this game besides I am to old (53) to learn a new one lol
I wasnât really interested in WoW, i was trying to play EQ2 when it came out. But my video card on my laptop at the time wouldnât run it. So i took it back and decided to give WoW a try but i was thinking it was going to be more of an RPG type of game like a first or third person Baldurâs gateâŚwhoa was i wrong.
I started 2 weeks after the game went live in 2004 and i almost instantly fell in love with it mostly the art style of the game which i still love. That anime/disney type of art always gets me, the color palet and of course the class play which was different than almost anything i had played prior. And the rest is historyâŚhere i am almost 15 years later with 46 toons and an almost full account of characters 45 of which are 110-120 and along the way almost 1000 days played.
The best investment in entertainment i have ever made by a LONG shot and i have a feeling i will be here until the end, although classic/vanilla doesnât really draw me in since i lived it and it was good for then but it had a great many issues.
I loved wc3, and warhammer fantasy was a dying breed. Seemed like a decent compromise
I tried starting in EQ in 2002 when I got a computer that could run it, however I was late to the party. Not having an established group and being in my late teens, I was a liability to take in. The jokes start about how âgames are for kidsâ but in reality its the adults that pay for subscription based games and given the time and effort required to do anything, the last thing groups wanted was some kid.
So I went back to Warcraft 3 thinking I would never pay to play again, then I got a beta Invite to WoW since at the time I kept the system survey for betas updated, I wasnât especially impressed at the time, whole lot of hype and jumping in to the beta for stress testing made me feel like an outsider in an established community scenario again. Christmas 2004 I went an visited my cousins house as per normal, he had WoW loaded up on his laptop and insisted I played it, I was reluctantâŚbut made a random character, random appearance and name. It was a Female Night Elf Hunter (I flipped coins on faction yes it was normal to have coins in your pocket back then, gender and did that enie meanine miny moe thing on the class, Hunter.
He had Nice headphones so he had me use them and entering into the NE start zone, the immersion was real, there were still tons of new players running around not knowing what to do. I realized that I still had a chance with WoW, doing the first few quests and talking with players in-game, was quite the experience. The amount of polish from that beta to Dec 2004 was incredible in comparison, I was sold on that roughly 2 hour session. The next day I went and bought my own copy.