I’m sure this doesn’t count, but my WoW life was utterly ideal, aside from me sucking at being a rogue.

I played in the same dining room as several (4-6) friends and we grouped up constantly.

But I also didn’t care one tiny fuck about the endgame grind. I hit level 60 (the max at the time), shouted “I win,” and sold my account to a friend for forty bucks.

My current life, I’m not really a gamer other than mobile crap and D&D these days. Too old, tired, busy.

I didn’t get a college degree because of that game. So that, I guess.

Feels like a dream, tbh. A period of my life that began 20 years ago now and consumed much of my thought and time and energy. For something close to a decade I played almost exclusively one game. My life was on hold.

I also met my partner in that game. We’re still together. I didn’t have a lot going on when WoW became my every waking thought. I transitioned that into a life with someone.

I miss those early days. Like any video game, I have fond memories of that experience. I’ve moved on though. The game itself is recessed, way back. My Druid sleeps.

It was such a tremendous waste of time.

It was a beautiful journey that I won’t ever forget, I listen to the music to this day, but it occupied so MUCH of my 20S & 30s that I could have accomplished so much and done so many more important things if I had even just regulated the number of hours a day I spent on it.

I didn’t, I couldn’t, I just disappeared into it. Textbook destructive addition.

I try to honor my time spent playing while also acknowledging I played too much of it at the expense of more important things in my life.

I honestly don’t think about it a ton. I think about Everquest more than WoW. I set up my own Everquest server once upon a time and had a bunch of fun being alone on a server with custom settings.

I did read about hosting my own private WoW server, and I might do that. I’m normally a single player gamer type except when playing with my wife. Had her try WoW and she didn’t care for it. We are currently playing Satisfactory together.

I had mostly played WoW because my bro played (10 yrs older) and wanted to hang with him. We did, it was a lot of fun. I was in his guild and made some temporary friends. Went on a date with one of them. It didn’t work out.

I do remember spending way too much time playing it. It felt like sometimes I waited more in game than played. I don’t really miss it though. I have a large steam backlog I’m working my way happily through.

The main thing I have from that time is several large boxes hanging about taking up shelf space and a burning hatred of MMOs. My wife and I got into WoW during late Vanilla. We stood in line at midnight to get the collector’s edition box for WotLK and later again for Cataclysm (we weren’t that far gone when The Burning Crusade released). Shortly after Cataclysm released, there was the Midsummer Fire Festival and as we were playing through it, we hit that wall where any more quests became locked behind “Do these daily quests 10,000 times to progress” and the whole suspension of disbelief just came crashing down. I had already hated daily quests and the grindy elements of the game, but at that moment I just said, “fuck this” and walked away from the game.

I do look back fondly on some of the good times we had in the game. Certainly in Vanilla there was some amazing writing and world crafting. We met some good people and had a lot of fun over the years and I don’t regret the time or money spent. However, one thing it taught me is just how pointless MMOs are. They are specifically designed to be endless treadmills. And this can be OK, so long as the treadmill itself is well designed and fun. But, so many of the elements exist just to eat time. Instead of being fun, they suck the fun out of the game and turn it into a job.

We even tried a few other MMOs after that point (e.g. Star Wars) just because we wanted something to fill that niche in our gaming time. But invariably, there would be the grind mechanics which ruined the game for us. Or worse yet, pay to win mechanics where the game would literally dangle offers of “pay $X to shortcut this pointless grind” (ESO pops to mind for this). If the game is offering me ways to pay money to not play the game, then I’ll take the easier route and not play the game at all, thank you very much.

So ya, WoW taught me to hate MMOs and grinding in games. And that’s good, I guess.

I lost someone who I thought was a good friend. He was no joke addicted to it (he once let a pot of food rot in his room while he played for days straight) and met his wife on it. I wasn’t interested in it (I played burning crusade with him and just didn’t have fun), and somehow that drove a crack in the friendship. He was such a good guy, and I wonder what our friendship would have been like if it wasn’t for wow.

Man I miss it like crazy and I frequently think about the lost connection to friends who still play.

I’ve got too many things to do to get back in, but it kind of stops me from gaming at all because part of the allure is being really invested and really GOOD. There’s the UI investment, the research, and just the casual play and chat time… I miss it all.

The guild I was in really kicked off at Cataclysm and we were alliance first for heroic end game (server second) for like 3 xpacs. I quit wow 4 times before it stuck. I started in vanilla in 2005 in college and played until… 2014? Pretty sure my main (and I had 3 characters) had about 370 days in /played.

It lives on a pedestal of gaming and I basically have to leave it sitting there until my family is grown, playing a casual chess game or two instead.

TL;DR: When it comes to games I’ve got no chill now. Even with casual chess I pay for lessons.

Edit:

As an aside, it’s wild to me how many people ITT didnt even raid at all, it’s like 1/3+ of the game! That’s carving some space for PvP, which was also hella fun back when PvP servers and griefing and casual raids of enemy towns was a thing.

I played for a handful of years around 2009-ish

Never got very far, don’t think I hit max level, never got super into any particular aspect of it

But I had fun fucking around online with some friends

Probably the biggest source of strife in my marriage is that my wife played for the alliance and I was horde.

And well over a decade later my text message notification sound is still a murloc.

I wasted so much time playing that game, and I don’t regret any of it. In theory I could have accomplished so much more but it was my escape, it truly helped me through difficult times and become who I am now!

My winter hat has a horde patch on it. 🤷‍♂️

I played from 2005 to 2009 and it was my first MMO. I learned a lot about my own addictive nature with WoW and MMOs in general.

I got lost in the minutiae of theorycrafting out builds and because of being in one of the more hardcore raid guilds during vanilla (5 raid nights a week), basically every raising resto druid on the server knew me and would cross faction just to hang out and talk builds and strategy. Was a ton of fun, but kept me so invested beyond even my raid schedule and when I quit, my druid alone had 1 year of in-game time.

Quitting WoW was easily the best decision I could have made (during WotLK) for my own mental health and for my (at the time) young professional career. I learned that of all the “close friends” didn’t actually give a damn when the game was removed from conversations. I had a lot of fun while playing but I allowed it to take over my social life to the point I didn’t realize I no longer had one.

It’s funny, the game that got me over WoW was Dragon Age: Origins which dropped within a few weeks of quitting. It felt and played kind of like a single player WoW in a weird way, and I just never felt like picking it back up.

I don’t really think about my time with WoW much and usually think about all the great moments, but then if I really think about it, I can remember all the incredibly toxic moments too and that keeps me away even though I’m sure 90% of all those people have moved on by now too.

I had fun, probably should have touched grass a few times, but it was my only escape from shitty childhood circumstances. The game I grew up with is long dead and going back won’t bring the fun back(i tried).

Well I occasionally have the impulse to tell my coworkers “That’s Minus Fifty DKP!” but aside from that, I dunno maybe there’s something to be said about just knowing your role, doing your job right, and assuming you don’t need to micromanage everyone else.