I've never liked WoW. It's always been such a generic looking game where they try to make everything seem more epic than it really is. Every object in the world is made in a way that it looks super freaking large and your character looks tiny. The enviroments are garbage overall. I could go on forever on why I hate this game, but that wouldn't be all that interresting to myself writing or you reading. So instead I'll go into what I did enjoy during the time I played the game.

First off, I started this game about 3 months after it first came out. Originally my only goal was to greatly annoy one of my old managers. He played an orc hunter and he would always talk about how much he freaking hated night elf rogues. So I bought the game and made a night elf rogue. I got to about level 25 or so before I got annoyed and just quit the game. A few months later my brother got into the game and I started a night elf hunter with him and another one of my friends. Of course we tried to continue on the Team-Rose Legacy of former games but neither of us could really get into the game. We tried pretty much anything and everything we could to get into the game but sadly it never worked out for us.

   

After awhile my friend quit the game and I tried playing a bit more with my brother and his friends. Nothing really seemed to do it for me so I quit the game shortly thereafter.

   

   

Some extremely long time later my brother convinced me to give the game another try. Previously I had kinda enjoyed playing a priest, and it also happened to be my highest level character, so I decided to level that one. Sadly my priest was originally made as a long running joke and so the character had always looked pretty retarded to me. But either way I spent several months grinding the hell out of that character before I finally reached 60.

By the time I reached 60, so many people had already experianced so much of the end game that it was mildly difficult for me to really find a guild that was near enough to the start of end game progression. So I never really got the opportunity to really experience the World of Warcraft pre The Burning Crusade. And I knew it was going to be very difficult for me to really work my way into the relationships that many people had already developed over the course of several years of playing. So when the expansion came out, I made every effort I possibly could to be the first person on my server to level 70.

   

   

After 4 days and around 12 hours, I finally reached 70, not as the first person (7th place though!) but as the first priest to hit 70. And in fact it was 2 days before even another healer managed to reach 70. So for at least a week or so I was one of the most popular people around as everyone needed a healer for anything.

   

   

Time went by and I eventually lost interest in the game again. I never really truely enjoyed playing a priest. However one day while talking to my brother about how cool most of the end game gear looked on different classes, I eventually decided to try out a Warrior. I wanted to name my character rabbit, however the name was already taken so I ended up using the name Rabite in reference to the Secret of Mana character. My character kinda had what looked like rabbit ears so it was kinda cute at the same time. At the time I was only working on the weekends so it was pretty easy to make my way to 70. Somewhere around level 56 I ran across another player that I eventually ended up grouping with every day as the 2 of us made our way to 70. Running into them was probably one of the best things that could have happened to me. From playing with them I really got to learn a lot about the Warrior class that I never would have come to know otherwise.

   

   

Having had a character that I actually liked the way they looked I think helped in giving me some sort of attachment to the game. Sadly I did quit playing after awhile but I didn't want to give up Rabite. As some more time went on I eventually decided to take my priest off of my main account and put her on a second account. Once again dual boxing had saved my interrest in a game. Having the ability to both tank and heal allowed me to do a lot of things most people wouldn't normally be able to get around too.

   

However I was pretty horribly geared. So my brother got me into his guild where I played through most of Tempest Keep and Serpentshrine Cavern.

   

   

My first mission was to see all of what I had missed in the Vanilla version of WoW. But I had no idea where to begin. I belive all of the madness in my World of Warcraft Career begin when I was inspecting a player whom apparently had a shirt that was labeled as Bind on Pickup. As far as I had known, all shirts were crafted by tailors. The idea of a shirt that had to have been obtained as either a drop or quest reward was very confusing to me at the time. So I searched for where the shirt came from, Scholomance, and decided I would try and obtain this shirt. After a few hours of not obtaining it, and having been alone to just sit and think about random stuff, curiosity got to me and I started searching to see if there were more Bind on Pickup shirts. Many hours later I had come to find out that there was a lot more to World of Warcraft than I could have even imagined.

After that I searched high and low for all sorts of mysteriously rare items. By the end of my career I had actually ended up with 4 Royal Dangui's from my obsession with the unknown. For those of you that don't know what that is, it's considered the second rarest item in the game. It comes from a vendor way out in the middle of nowhere and supposedly only is purchaseable under unknown conditions. Some people speculate it has a respawn timer that can take up to a month. Some speculate it only stays up for minutes at a time every week and then dissapears until next week. Either way it's one of those items that you only see a very small amount of players with and generally they camped it for several months before obtaining one.

Another mission I had during this time was to complete a full set of Dungeon 2. This questline was one of the largest and one of the most complex questlines at the time it was implemented. It was also one of those things that only a few players had actually fully completed as it was not only very time consuming but it was pretty expensive to do at the time. I spent somewhere around 2 months working on this quest every single day before I finally managed to complete a full set. I remember walking around various places in the gear and people laughing because I was not only someone that had completed the questline but I was a Draenai that had completed the questline and they didn't even exsist when it was around.

Anyways after awhile I left the game again only to come back a couple months before the Wrath of the Lich King expansion was coming out. My goal for that expansion was to be the first to hit level 80. Not only because I wanted to say I had done it, but they had just added the new achievement system and originally the first to hit 80 was going to recieve a special title for doing so. However, I was no where near as geared as some of the other people I was going to be up against so I spent whatever time I had trying to get whatever I could to catch up with some of the other players.

I remember one day my brother yelling at me from the other room to come over to his. I went in there and he points at one of the characters on his screen and is like "He's back." During Vanilla WoW only one guild on Firetree managed to actually clear Naxx, and their leader, Flatfeet, had just come back to Firetree after having mysteriously dissapeared for several months. And not only had he returned but he was the best geared person in all of Firetree. At that point I knew that if I wanted to make any progress or do anything worthwhile in WotLK, that I was going to have to make it into his guild. So for the next few months I tried to associate myself with any of their members as much as I possibly could. Luckily I had actually befriended some of them during the start of TBC on my priest and getting into the guild proved to not be all that difficult.

During TBC I had been a DPS warrior the entire time. There was like 2 weeks that the guild I had been in wanted me to be protection and so I had some protection gear but for the most part I was in full fury gear. Which proved to be pretty helpful during the treck from 70 to 80. I ended up getting really sick during the race though and accedentally fell asleep for 6 hours one morning. While I was no where near 1st, I was at one point in second and lost a few places during my rest. Sadly I lost server first to 80 to Flatfeet, server first warrior to Gim, and server first Draenai to some shaman, and ended up in 5th place alliance and 9th overall.

   

When asked what role I wanted to play at 80, I decided it was time I try out tanking. I'd always been told I was an amazing fury tank so I figured actually tanking as a tanking spec wouldn't be too bad. However I was given about 2 days to figure everything out and was a little worried about how my first impression would turn out tanking stuff in the guild. Luckily as my guild made it's way to server first Naxx clear, I was able to help out our main tank figure what gear he needed since I had already researched it all. So even though I may not have had the experiance, I did have knowledge needed in order for us to succed and was brought along. Since most of the members in Chosen had already cleared Naxx at 60, clearing everything turned out to be pretty easy. I did however end up having to sit for the last 2 bosses so that someone that had been a part of the guild since back during the 60 days could recieve the title. I was a bit sad but it was understable that they had actually worked pretty hard back in the day and not recieved any recognition for it then. Either way we got to where we could clear all of Naxx, Sarth 3D, and Malygos in 2 days and I once again ran into having too much spare time to do absolutly nothing.

At this point I really didn't want to give up on the game since I had just made a bunch of new friends and eventually I became the guild's main tank. And I really didn't want to affect an entire group of players by quiting on them at that point. So with the help of a couple of newfound friends of mine, Cayte(priest) and Statiek(paladin), I went back to trying to see what all I had missed out on the game.

With the new achivement system going on I decided to pick some of the rarer and more bizzare achivements in the game to finish out. I managed to get exalted with about 36 different factions, 70 pets, 83 mounts, and completed about half of "The Insane" title achivement. I hadn't really completed any of the harder achivements but I had gotten pretty close. I even managed to get one of the 2 parts for the Thunderfury along with all the items needed to craft it. I also managed to do most of the AQ gates questline. But my playtime became more and more spread out.

   

Eventually Ulduar came out and my guild managed to achieve the server first kill of Yogg Saron. Sadly we quickly got back to only raiding 2 nights a week. Which ment I was once again left with nothing to do for 5 days. I slowly started logging in less and less and finally reached a point where the only time I logged in at all was for our 2 raid days. After a few weeks of that we started working on hard mode kills. We got through all but Mimiron, Freya, General Vezax, and Yogg Saron before I just got so burned out I couldn't really take it any more, and at the begining of July 2009, I quit the game.

I had never really liked WoW, so I happily gave all of my accounts to my brother. What all he did with them now I have no idea completely. I do know that he completely stripped all of my characters of all money and any money making items (tokens, etc.) I had. I stopped with around 150 days of played time on Rabite and like 6500 or so achivement points. I had seen things that only a handful of players may even know exsist. I went to places and did things that I'm sure even fewer people will even get to experiance. And sadly the only thing I missed about that game is the friends I made.

About a year later my brother came to me and told me he was starting a guild with a bunch of people we both knew in real life. He really wanted me to join with them since I actually had end game experience and could help him to lead the raids. None of our friends had even stepped foot in a raid before so I figured it might be a fun learning experience. I did not join his guild and in fact stayed with the same guild I had been in before but I helped them out anyways.

It was a nightmare. After spending so many years dealing with so many experienced players in so many other games it was like getting punched in face over and over again by a 5 year old kid and not being able to fight back or tell him to stop. Since I knew them all in real life it was really hard to tell them just how bad some of them were. I tried my best to teach who I could, but I was 2 patches behind in gear, and I was able to put out more damage and take less damage than the entire raid combined (minus the tanks) for some fights.

At the time, Icecrown citadel was already going on and had been for some time. My brother figured since everyone was already on par with the gear in ToC that we should start there. It took us like 2 months to clear all of it (on normal) and eventually we moved on to ICC. We only made it past Saurfang before most of our friends got tired of dying over and over again for weeks straight (lolprogression deaths) and they all quit. I can't say I don't blame them. I realize a lot of people aren't used to the way end game progression works and it came be really fustrating.

Anyways eventually I cleared all of ICC with some other friends of mine in my guild and basically just worked on catching up where I could before Cataclysm came out.

Also during this time, my friend that somehow I always play mmorpgs with for a least a little while (aka Team Rose) decided to play the game for a bit with me. We did the recruit a friend thing and started 2 characters together and leveled to I think level 67 before she stopped playing.

Also again randomly right after I came back, someone in my guild decided to do the Herald of the Titans achivement and was looking for people. Since I was still in all my tanking Ulduar gear and actually had the exact gear needed, I pretty much was a shoe in. We spent about a month and a half getting everyone geared and then another couple weeks working on it before we managed to be the only Alliance guild on our server with the title.

Eventually Cataclysm came out. I tried my best to get as prepaired as possible to aim for server first level 85. But when the game went live, they forgot to turn on experience points and then all hell broke loose. With the server I was on being predominantly Horde, and with nothing for anyone to really do, all the Horde just started killing everyone. Then by the time they did turn on exp again, it was so much a nightmare to do anything that I pretty much lost the desire to try for first anything. After a couple of hours I noticed that I kept randomly running into another person from my guild named Noxychu. I had never actually meet them before and really had no clue who they even were. I asked them if they wanted to group up for a few quests and then 20 or so hours later we both hit level 85.

Most of what went on during that time is all kind of blured together for me. I do remember though that during that time the only conversation we had whatsoever was "ok done with this quest". I didn't know that guy at all going into the group, and even after spending 20 or so hours with him, I still have no idea who they are. After we hit 85 we split up and never really saw eachother again.

While I wasn't server first anything, I did end up being server second Warrior. It only took me about 23 or so hours to go from 80 to 85. Which compaired to a lot of other servers was a really really long time. I had taken 2 weeks off work so I spent all that time working on gear and such. After about a week or so I convinced some friends to try all the heroic achivements and everyone of them except for me managed to get the achivement before my 2 weeks was over. I was actually only missing the one from Stonecore where you have to kill 60 of those disciples. It's actually a really easy one and I was just to lazy to actually queue specifically for Stonecore to get it and figured I'd just wait till I got it from the random dungeon finder (which I eventually did).

After raiding for a couple of weeks my guild ran into the problem of having 7 warriors trying to raid. So eventually I agreed to play my priest instead. It was terrible and I strongly began to hate the game and I was only logging in because my guild really needed me to show up. I eventually couldn't take it anymore and decided WoW really just wasn't the game for me. So 3 or 4 months after the expasion came out I canceled my account and threw away my authenticator. So at this point it's pretty much near impossible for me to ever go back to that game.

Something I learned from the entire experience would be that players really make the game. Even though gameplay wise I never enjoyed WoW to the extent I have other games, the community I was with really helped me to at least enjoy the overall experience I had with the game.

Even though I don't play the game any more, I still read the books. And I recommend to anyone that can, to check some of them out. The lore behind the game is pretty awesome and adds a completely new element to all the stuff that has gone on behind the scenes in game over the years.

Since I used to keep a WoW livejournal I happen to have quite a few more pictures than I probably should. So for anyone interrested, here's a few of them for your enjoyment.