Wave after wave of Cata Baby made it impossible to even exist on an official Blizzard product and for the most part we were Exiled.
It is dark times for us and I was reading the general WoW forums when I found this post. If you don't feel invigorated after this I don't think anything can make it so. The game is better as Vanilla, and it will return when there are hundreds of posts like these on the forums. It is a matter of time.
and Nostalrius was the key to it all. God bless you all.
What I was looking for
My husband, my daughter and I started playing WOW five years ago (yeah, we're Cata babies). At the time we were looking for something that reminded us of the fun we had back in the 80's when my husband and I played D&D together. We found much more then that. We found a game that offered us something we hadn't experienced yet, or so we thought. We enjoyed every expansion Blizzard offered us, we were addicted. We had a lot of fun even leveling through WOD. Yeah, there were things we wasn't happy about, but we still had fun. And then something happened, something that made a big impact on this game as a whole. I started noticing the people in my guild weren't playing any more. I remember I used to just type something random into guild chat, just to see it light up for a moment. I would travel through Azeroth and not see a single person. Anywhere. And I'm not just trying to be dramatic.
I did all kinds of things to stay busy, finally I decided to take a break and try another MMO, just for something else to do for a while. I had fun at first but after a while I got tired of being led around like a dog on a leash, doing everything that was "required" to just level. It seems to be the new MMO standard now.
Then, my daughter showed my husband and I a legacy server, a really special one, all though I didn't know it at the time what a huge impact this would have on me. I have always suffered from social anxiety my whole life. I had no idea what WOW could really be. What it once was. Everybody was working TOGETHER, you had no choice but to do it. I found myself grouping with people constantly. I found myself tested to the limit of what I could handle socially, and it made a big impact on me. It was better than any self-help book out there. For me, anyways.
I have so many memories of that experience, I'll never forget it. I got to play in that wonderful place for three months, and in that time, I gained more ground then I have for the past 42 years. I was there when it went down and I cried. Can you imagine? Crying over a silly game??
I used to get angry at people when they came on this forum and talked about their memories of what it was like during vanilla. When they would say, we need to get rid of certain things, I would get upset and take it personally. I could never know what it was really like for them, but I don't get angry any more.
I envy them.
I didn't know it but I was looking for something, all this time. And I found it. And not just in vanilla, but when I leave that world and go to the one we live in everyday, as well. I found my voice as a person, because I found confidence in myself, a lot more than I had, anyways.
This is the toon I started on all those years ago. She was a boy then. I have given this account to my daughter, who still plays Live. I followed my friends to another vanilla server, I go where they go, no matter what. I rolled my Main there.
Will I come back to WOW? If they can find some way to bring that world back, back to its ORIGINAL home! I would love to play vanilla with Blizzard at the helm!
As it should be.
Asha 'falah
I knew I was right all those years but seeing it written so deliciously like this keeps my blood ready to fight for this.
