Nalafang’s Tale: An Introduction Into My World of Warcraft Experience.

Over the course of this blog’s life I’ve made references to the fact that I’m a long time World of Warcraft player. For the past 6 years I’ve been an on again, off again player frequently returning to Blizzard’s flagship MMORPG for a fix of their latest offerings. Having spent the last month or so playing through the latest Cataclysm expansion I was drafting up a review in my head when I realised that in order to do a proper review of the current content I needed to give a little background on my experience with this game. Today I want to take you through the last 6 years of my life with Blizzard’s iconic game in anticipation for tomorrow’s review of the Cataclysm expansion.

Going back 6 years puts me as a young university student who’s been keenly devouring any and every detail he could find about Blizzard’s upcoming game release. Although I was still at home out in the country with my only connection to the Internet being a share 56k dial-up I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the game. As luck would have it I managed to win myself a spot in the coveted close beta and managed to convince my boss to download all the client patches for me. I spent a few good weeks smashing my way through the beta as a paladin called Arathar before it was closed down in preparation for the full release.

The day of the release was quite torturous for my friends and I as we’d been out quite late the night before and only managed to sneak in about 4 hours sleep before we hit up the local games store for our copies of the game. We hadn’t pre-ordered the game so getting in early was imperative and thankfully we were able to score a copy each before we all went our separate ways to begin playing. The experience that awaited us was, to put it bluntly, quite tragic as the servers caved under the load of thousands of people trying to login especially on the chosen Australian server Blackrock. We resigned ourselves to switch to another server (Gorgonnash) and began levelling in earnest, most of us hitting level 10 before calling it a night. This is where Nalafang was born and still resides today.

The next few months were an interesting time for our rag-tag bunch of MMORPGers. We spent many hours questing together, running what dungeons we could and basically just soaking up the world that Blizzard had created for us. Along the way many of my friends started dropping out, usually around the level 40~50 area where it really started to get a bit heavy on the time investment. I continued on and started gathering a group of friends with whom I’d run dungeons with almost daily. After a month or so of this my small team of dungeoneers reformed into a bigger and better guild, Aureus Dawn. A couple weeks later saw our GM drop out and had me assume the position giving me my first taste of what it meant to lead a group of people through a virtual world.

Things just kept getting better as my runs got a reputation for actually finishing content and magically dropping one world epic at least once a week. I started talking with other guild leaders and eventually managed to find another 3 to group with for our first attempt at the first ever raid in WoW: Molten Core. Our first run didn’t see any bosses down but it wasn’t long until we were smashing our way through content and our 4 guild tag team had to split into 2 separate raids to continue on. As time passed the lines between the two separate guilds blurred significantly and I was called into an IM meeting between my officers and the other guild. They proposed that we should merge under a single banner and go ahead with running our raid completely independently. The idea was met with resounding support and they then surprised me by nominating me as the guilds new GM, placing me at the top of the food chain in a 40 man strong raid team. I was elated and soon after Ascendance was formed and we began hitting Molten Core in earnest.

Soon after the new raid instance, Blackwing Lair, was released and our guild decided to have a crack at it. From memory we did end up making it past the first boss after a couple attempts but progress stalled after that. The same fate also hit us in Molten Core as we struggled to down the final boss, stymying our progress in other raids. Inevitably this began to wear on people and personality clashes began to escalate from small fights into guild sized dramas that threatened to tear the guild apart. Thanks to the piecemeal nature by which the guild was formed there were several loyal factions and once one of the faction leaders decided to go the rest of them would follow. This lead to the demise of Ascendance as a guild who ultimately merged in with another bigger guild to continue running. Times were good there until I developed a large amount of contempt for the leadership and ended up causing dramas of my own, eventually leaving them for one of my long time friends (and previous 4 guild raiding buddy) guild, Dark Ronin.

I found a good place there for the longest time, finding my niche as the Rogue class leader and spending many hours pouring over my DPS logs figuring out how to be the best I could be. Eventually however the same traits that made those people elect me to the position of leadership previously caused me to develop the same level of contempt for the leadership as I had previously. I hadn’t been enjoying the game and decided that I needed a fresh start on another server. I found myself a top raiding guild, repsecced my paladin to holy and transferred servers. This lasted for all of a month before I quit entirely, vowing to leave WoW behind forever and never giving it a second glance.

About a year passed before I even thought about WoW again when I saw that the first ever expansion was due to be released soon. Remembering the fond times I had had levelling I thought that it couldn’t hurt to give the game a go again. I spent a little time levelling my rogue in the new areas and enjoyed it for the most part. I even managed to meet up with an old friend, Scottdasmall, who was a long time guild member of mine. I eventually joined his guild and played casually for a couple months, getting both my characters to 70. After that however I just couldn’t get hooked like I did last time and resigned to put the game down again but not with the same disdain as I did before. It wasn’t long however until the next expansion was released and I started looking at WoW again.

This time however I had friends I had met outside of work to play with. Problem was they were Horde players and this was long before faction transfers were available. If I wanted to play with them I’d have to level another character. Thankfully this was just after the Refer-a-Friend scheme came out, making the journey to 60 much quicker. I rolled myself another toon and levelled up with them so that I could play alongside them. Wrath of the Lich King made it extremely easy to get into raids with almost anyone allowing me to gear up my character just like I had in days gone by. Eventually my new found guildies wanted to start raiding in earnest and I joined them, spending countless hours in Ulduar and eventually making it up to the final boss before the raid fell apart.

I dropped the game again at that point for a good 6 months although I kept a much closer eye on what was happening whilst I was away. I eventually came back for a few months to play through the Icecrown Citadel instance, even gearing myself up with an exceptional amount of loot from there, but when I saw that Catalcysm was on the horizon I gave it up once again figuring that anymore effort would be almost for naught very soon. About a month ago I reactivated my account after purchasing the collector’s edition of Cataclysm and have been playing it ever since.

There is of course so much more to this story but in the interests of berevity I’ll spare you the details, at least for now. Needless to say that World of Warcarft has been a very big part of my life for the better part of a decade and will continue to be as long as it’s around. This post was more to show you how I’ve been through almost every aspect of the game, from the high points of end game raiding, to the darkest times of guild dramas and finally ending up here today where I enjoy the game in a way that I’d never envisioned when I first set foot in this virtual world. I’ve tried nearly every other MMORPG out there but none of them has kept me coming back in the way that World of Warcraft does, and that’s a testament to just how good Blizzard is at creating a captivating and engaging world.