Reflections on times past

I've been playing WoW since 2006.  I got my account and rolled my first toon, a human paladin, in May or June, sometime around there, and have been playing off-and-on ever since.

At first, I was playing with friends and housemates of mine.  We had a guild together, a nice coterie of characters, we ran instances and made some in-game allies and contacts.  And then autumn came and everyone lost interest.  School had started and we all got busy, got girls, got obligations, got into EVE.  As far as I know, none of them ever came back to WoW.

I did, though.  BC launched in January 2007, if memory serves, and I missed playing.  So I started up again.  Got my girlfriend at the time involved, too.  We played together, rolling new toons and keeping old toons, for quite a while.  Couldn't say how long, but a few months at least.  Then stuff happened, money was tight, the guild we were in collapsed, so we let WoW go.

We dug back in on my birthday in 2008.  We were having a party and I decided that it would be fun if we all rolled new toons and tried to power-level our way to being able to run an instance together that night.  That was the genesis of our new core group -- we didn't quite get to level 15 (the minimum to run Deadmines) that night, but we got pretty close, and we kept getting together every week after that to play together.  There were only four of us so we usually had to grab a fifth, but that was okay.  DPS are easy to come by, after all.

We had gotten our start on Venture Company, and had made it all the way to 70 there.  One of my friends, however, had contacts and a friendly guild over on Runetotem, so we all made the move.  I switched mains from my mage to an old, old druid, because I wanted to give tanking a try and bear tanks were finally becoming viable (again, this was in BC).  We put together a raid group from within the guild and ran Karazhan, week after week, still gathering at our apartment to do the job.

We recruited other players from our local circles, eventually having seven or eight total who would gather and play.  Eventually we decided that making our own guild was the thing to do, so that's what we did, and the first <Arete> was born.

Wrath launched in late 2008.  During the launch event, I decided it was high time I had a max-level paladin, so Bob became my uncle and it was done.  <Arete> gathered enough players to take regular whacks at Naxx-10, and then we absorbed another guild and had enough to run Naxx-25.  I was running as DPS then, leaving the tanking to others.

Then Ulduar launched.  I was still DPSing in 25s but had started tanking in 10s, and was really loving it.  We were running two groups of Ulduar-10 in advance of going into Ulduar-25, and then something happened.  I made a bad call, I guess, inadvertently saving too many healers to my group's Uld-10 run so that the other group didn't have enough.  The other group's raid lead, a good friend of mine, got very angry with me over this.  Drama ensued and the guild broke up.

I haven't really enjoyed WoW as much ever since then.

I still love the game, don't get me wrong.  It still draws me in.  Calls to me.  I've played other MMOs but none of them grab me the way WoW does.  I'm still having fun, but ...

It's not the same.

I miss having a group of friends to play with.  People I spend time with out-of-game, people I know, like, and trust.  People I would want to go on a real dungeon-crawl with, so to speak. 

I miss my in-game time being an extension of my real life.  I miss the blurred boundaries, the people I know in person by their character names.  I miss getting together every Friday night, putting on bad movies, ordering a pizza, and hitting the raids until we're too tired to continue. 

I've tried raiding since then, and while I still love it as an activity, it just doesn't have the same appeal for me.  I can't make myself commit to being on WoW at a given time and place if there aren't friends of mine there waiting for me.  I can't get invested.  And raiding with a bunch of strangers is just unpleasant, which is why I never did get around to finishing Dragon Soul.

I've tried to recreate the circumstances.  When I started going to a different school I tried to make a guild of locals, but there were only ever three of us, and only two of us who were committed to making an honest go of it.  And these days, it seems like everyone I know either plays Horde (blech) or is all established on their own realms and unwilling to move.  (On that point, I suppose I can't blame them -- fully moving again would cost me over two hundred dollars.)

I'm going to keep playing, of course.  I'll probably even start raiding once I hit level cap, even if it's only forays into LFR.  WoW is a great game, a great second life, a great distraction, a great place to be.

But for nine months, I had lightning in a bottle.  I had magic in my apartment every Friday night.

I haven't forgotten.  I still want that back.