Category Archives: Nostalgia

Fighting your inner demon. Or: Take a Ferris Bueller Day in WoW

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Every generation has a movie or two they grew up with and that was particularly influential to them as kids or teenagers, echoing the vibe of their time, inspiring them to adventure and pushing the boundaries of the society they live in. For the 60ies it was The Graduate, for the 70ies it was films like Grease. I’m not sure what it was for today’s generation of teens, but if I am to believe my students, it’s movies like American Pie or Clueless…them poor souls!

The 80ies were good times: we had films like Stand by Me, The Goonies or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in 1986, to kindle our impressionable imagination. If you’ve never watched Ferris Bueller, then I really suggest you do – it’s not only a great laugh and 80ies flashback with memorable acting and quotes, but a hyperbolic metaphor on getting more out of life if only you dare to “stop and look around every once in a while“. Ferris is one of the big movie cult figures of the 80ies generation because of this.

Taking a day off from the race

Looking back on several topics and bottom lines players are currently drawing for WoW, while turning their eyes on Cataclysm, I feel a little gloomy about the rushed pace the game’s been taking since its latest installment. There’s been an increased pressure to optimize and increase gaming “efficiency” in WoW which has been documented and discussed over many a blog. Tesh struggles with his inner demon, driving him to catch up and optimize in one of his latest blog posts, where he forces himself to take it easy because “efficiency is a natural enemy of exploration and experimentation”. Shintar has written a very thoughtful comparison between applying for a WoW guild and going to a job interview. And there’s been various other posts discussing cookie cutter specs in WoW and the pressure all players feel to min/max and optimize, debating various solutions.

Personally I doubt this trend of efficiency will stop in Cataclysm and I think it’s going to be very hard to stay away from it, even for the more laid-back players. Blizzard’s continued endeavor to make everything as transparent as possible in the game, via combat data, armory or achievements, is furthering the obsession to perfect and optimize every aspect in the game – for no better reason than because you can.
And whether you like it or not, you will find yourself facing situations in pugging as much as guild raiding, where you will be measured by these standards and hence feel pressured to meet them. It’s impossible to turn back the wheel of time.

My new expansion’s resolution: the Ferris Bueller Way

I know that in Cataclysm I don’t want to play the game like that. I want to stop worrying about optimization and explore my own way through the new expansion, making the “newbie feeling” last as long as possible. I want to experiment with gear and specs without reading up beforehand. I won’t join groups or raids that require me to cookie-cut everything or show my achievements. A game shouldn’t feel like a job – it should be an escapism. I don’t want to feel pressured to follow the dogma of efficiency in a game that doesn’t actually require you to optimize in order to experience 98% of its content.

I will take off a Ferris Bueller day, only I’ll make it weeks. I will skip school and create my own adventure, generate my own quests and challenges, exploring at my own leisure and enjoying the little secrets that make a game so much more special.

I know it will take a lot of mental effort and all of my inner Zen to achieve this – I am a very perfectionist, driven and calculating person. It’s been the only way of playing WoW for me the past 5 years. But I do refuse to enter the competition this time around: yes, I will quench my inner demon! When Cataclysm hits, I will ignore everyone and everything around me (lalala!), take a deep breath and do exactly this: play the game like a game. I hope I’ll succeed.

World of Warcraft secrets: Dalaran’s sparkle

“This topic is dedicated to all the special and secret NPCs in WoW, out there serving tirelessly, overlooked and undiscovered.”

There is not a lot that is secret in the World of Warcraft and it’s always made me a little sad. This world we play in is vastly explored, analyzed, documented and datamined all over internet websites and communities. I’ve never played any MMO where such myriads of information were available on every aspect imaginable. This is obviously what you’ll get with an MMO that’s played by ~10mio people, but it’s not just that: World of Warcraft is a very functional, pragmatic game and there’s not an awful lot of superfluous or “useless” content, certainly not on the cosmetic side of things. But some of the best things in life are just that: useless. Or I actually prefer the term “pointless”. Many pastimes and hobbies that we pursue are merely for our own fun and entertainment. WoW is such a pastime too.

Yet, the truth is that inside the game precious little is actually pointless or surprising: most maps for example feature all the necessary posts to make the player’s leveling progression as smooth as possible: You have your inns, your vendors, flightmasters and questgivers stationed at strategic points. Most of them do nothing but repeat generic lines as you click them to open their service windows. The same goes for buildings and shops in cities and really pretty much every other site. This is what we’re used to and we don’t even examine all the NPCs around us closely as we enter a new zone or questgiver camp. And why would we? It’s not gonna be any different from the last 100 times, right?

We can rely on Blizzard to tell us if there’s really anything “special” going on: if an NPC does anything extraordinary, there will be clues and signs to make us aware of it. If there are important places we should go to, we can be sure a series of quests will take us there. It is hard to miss much in the World of Warcraft. Blizzard takes care of that.

I know this is the nature of games that have been played to death and WoW does actually a pretty good job at things like Easter Eggs or non-generic zone design. But for most parts the game is very predictable, with little randomness. Somehow I miss that there’s not more pointless things that are spread far and wide over the world for no good reason, maybe only to be found by those that seek them out.
Why was there never a single questgiver stationed on any of the flying islands in Nagrand? Why is the Darkmoon Fair such a complete letdown when people long for minigames in WoW for years? Why is there nothing going on anywhere under the ocean? Only a few things I’ve wondered about in the past.

Dalaran’s secret

This is why Dalaran is special. Now you see, I don’t like Dalaran, I’m actually with Stumps in this. Nonetheless I will always have one pleasant memory attached to Dalaran forever and that is the memory of one little gnome, one humble, unremarkable NPC that was special. Maybe you know about him, maybe you don’t. I have talked to many that haven’t and that’s why I think he is worth an hommage at this point: I am speaking of Sheddle Glossgleam.

Sheddle Glossgleam is located on the second level of the Threads of Fate cloth armor shop in Dalaran. He is your standard low-profile vendor NPC, selling shoes for emblems of valor without much decorum. If you click him, he’ll open the usual vendor window accompanied by a generic service line. And that’s it.

Almost. There is also the chair. There are chairs all over the city, you say? That’s true, but then they ain’t quite like Sheddle’s chair!

Once you sit down on the chair beside Sheddle, he will walk over to you and polish your shoes, applying a cosmetic sparkle-buff to them that lasts for 60minutes! I don’t know how many times I have visited him just to get my shoes polished before a raid or how many times I got someone whispering me “where can I get that boot enchant?”. In fact “shiny shoes!” has become somewhat of a running line in my guild. Yes I love you, Sheddle Glossgleam!!!
Not just shiny shoes

You see, my friends have laughed at me for this in the past, but the fact that I’m a female who likes to get her shoes sparkled up is only 50% of why I love this NPC. What I really love about this silly trifle is that it’s actually something special and unexpected. If you never bother to sit down on chairs in WoW and don’t chance on this information randomly on a website, chances are you will never know about the little gnome in Dalaran. There is no exclamation mark over Sheddle’s head, there is no other NPC sending you on a quest to get your shoes polished. Sheddle won’t tell you about it either. There is no hint whatsoever inside the game about what’s gonna happen if you sit down on that chair!

Sheddle Glossgleam is a little secret. He is a surprise. One of those utterly pointless yet delightful things in a game that is usually so eager to inform you about everything. Dalaran sparkles a little more because of him.

Who else is out there?

I’m glad I discovered Sheddle because that experience suddenly made me a lot more aware of the world and NPCs around me. They came alive again, like they hadn’t for a long time. I started to wonder “what else might there be that I have overlooked in the past? What other NPCs are there, only sharing their secrets with those that seek to find them?” I sat on every other chair in Dalaran just to make sure.

So where are they?? What special places in WoW have you found that are hiding away secretly to be discovered by those with open eyes and inquisitive minds? Which NPCs have I overlooked on my speedy journeys and never known for their silly, unexpected services? I’d really love to know.

WoW priest outfits!

[For an overview of collectable WoW hats, check my World of Warcraft Hats guide.]

I am a gear collector and very happy with the way most outfits are designed in World of Warcraft. It is not the first time that I play a healer in an MMO and I think our gear is great – I’ve never had much reason to complain. Aside of warlocks, priests have definitely gotten the most love when it comes to Tier sets in WoW, reaching its peak in TBC with the godlike T5 and T6, which are still the most often depicted priest sets in WoW fanart. I have never played another game where the healer archetype is presented with such variety in armor.

I admit that when I was leveling up in vanilla, there was some gear that didn’t look very flattering, but that was the case for everybody: colors were horrendously shrill and mismatched overall. Some of the robes looked just abysmal on males especially. If I think vanilla outfits, the first picture that comes to mind is the male mages in their flamboyant pink or blue robes, quirky crimson felt hat, green satin shoulders and yellow belts. Bless vanilla – the era of circus clowns!

But I never really had to deal with gear that I hated or felt exposed or plain silly in – there are a few more sexy outfits in WoW but I can’t say that I was ever forced to wear anything skimpy as a female priest. Even if you faced wearing one of those eyeroll-worthy “heavy armor bikinis” like some mail- and plate-wearers did, you could still combine them with one of the numerous shirts in the game.

I am used to the way females are often dressed in asian MMOs, and also some western games (the attire female fighters get to wear in some beat’em ups is ridiculous), so I give kudos to Blizzard for giving their players so many gear choices. Their female models are a lot more realistic in terms of body proportions too: the human female for example has an average womanly shape, neither skinny nor big and the curves aren’t unnaturally emphasized either. I would certainly welcome more customization in WoW to actually let you shape your own shape and height similar to Age of Conan, but overall Blizzard has done a good job to present their female race models with a variety of body types. They even implemented an ‘old granny face’ for most, which isn’t something you find easily in other MMOs.

So let’s have a look at priest outfits!

All of the following images are taken from my personal screenshot archives. I’ve documented my entire WoW history rather consistently which is handy for this overview. Let’s have a look at the way priest outfits are designed and also change over the course of the years in WoW! I have to say, looking back on some of the sets below, my wish for a cosmetic gear feature in WoW becomes even more fervent – it’s such a shame we’ll never get to use some of these models again unless we switch gear back and forth manually all the time.

Priest outfits in vanilla WoW

An assortment of priest outfits representative for this era (note that not all of them are priest-exclusive), number indications in the notes as seen from left to right:

Vanilla was rather down to earth when it comes to gear sets and tiers. A lot of the robes and vests acquired while leveling were old fashioned and the very first class sets looked very ceremonial and formal (3rd and 6th image). The names were rather silly too. There was some very shrill ‘disco gear’ around and only a few okay-looking greens and blues, like the runecloth set (7th image). Tiers started to get more interesting and daring between BWL and original Naxx. I still think Transcendence / T2 is the nicest set of this era. Another favourite of mine is the necro-knight’s garb (5th image). Non-tier shoulder pieces were abysmal all across.

The Burning, steaming hot, Crusade!

TBC was awesome for priests: after a very boring dungeon set 3 (2nd image) and a totally EUGH T4, Blizzard presented us with the possibly greatest tiers in the game: T5 and T6. The wings and halo-hood have become a priest trademark – even though I prefer the awesome looking fresco shoulders of T6 personally. The pic in the middle shows a mixture of T5 robes and T6 shoulders and hood model which is my all-time favourite priest outfit in the game. Get a staff of immaculate recovery with that and you got epic win!
Sunwell featured a very nice non-tier set as well – if only I had the shoulders to go with that (7th image)! Speaking of which, there’s an increased effort to make shoulders and headpieces look more interesting.

Priests in Wrath of the Lich King

Looking through this last assortment of WotLK outfits, I feel somewhat reconciled with this expansion. My general impression was that we didn’t get much tier love in this era, partly also because everyone looks the same nowadays. Blizzard have gotten really cheap in their efforts to create unique class gear and we’ve certainly seen the worst PVP sets up to date (3rd and 6th image).
I also felt that this expansion was hideous for headgear – with the exception of T8: I actually love that white set with the ‘rogue-ish’ headpiece and glowing eyes (middle pic)! All in all we didn’t actually do so bad, textures and effects got more elaborate and there was a lot less mix’n mismatch than in WoW 1.0 or 2.0 due to the recycling of so many armor models. I really hope we see unique sets again in Catacylsm though!

My tops & flops

Top 3 best priest outfits in the game: T5, T6, T8
Top 3 worst priest outfits in the game: T1, Dungeon set 3, T4

So what’s your favourite gear era in WoW? Oh, and if you’re a priest, you should visit World of Matticus and let him know your wishes for our Tier 11!

For Keep’s Sake!

Over at Blog Azeroth, Feral Tree suggested a topic that is so perfect for me, I couldn’t resist to join in: “WoW mementos, things you’ve kept over time.”

Oh my…those that know me, have rolled their eyes at me over how bad my bank is crammed with all sorts of useless clutter, old gear, dresses and random goofy things. I can’t part with at least half of them and I actually believe that bag space is something that happens to other people.

For one thing I am a bit of a loot-paranoid: whenever I get special items (like the goblin rocket helmet) or for example a new trinket, I will keep the old one because I might NEED THIS AGAIN FOR SOMETHING! It happened to me once or twice in the past that I dumped an item I had a use for later (and a totally game-altering one too) and ever since I choose safe over sorry. I wonder if that’s just me or whether other players have this eerie feeling about dumping gear too..

Then there’s my outfit spleen: I have kept almost all my old tiers and PVP sets, I’ve also kept my old trinkets from MC, Onyxia, BWL…At some point I decided that “staves are really cool!”, so I started keeping all my staves. And then there is of course an endless number of special dresses, from holidays, vendors, or drops, stuff like the jungle hat and my ‘blue collection’ which is essentially…..blue dresses only (I like the color blue, can you tell?). Of course I don’t manage all this on my main, I have a mule with my own guild bank full of stuff – she keeps extra minipets too, in case my own run away.

So it’s not exactly easy for me to pick my mementos – but I won’t post an endless list of random items here. To be fair, most of these things I keep because I am a maniac shinies collector and not so much because they’re keepsakes. So what I will do is list the Top 5 items that I kept for their meaning rather than just looks.

1) Benediction

Thats right, Benediction is the ultimate priest keepsake. Nothing says “I kept your asses alive in vanilla” the way this staff does. I earned this the hard way, raiding and waiting patiently for weeks (and patience really ain’t my thing) until I finally got Major Domo’s eye for my priest quest. And I did it the first time around too, all by myself, thank you very much! /flex

If there’s a thing like a vanilla-epeen, I think I have just found mine.

In any case, a priest trashing her/his Benediction is unthinkable, disgraceful, blasphemous! You will probably never get another weapon that’s transformable like this one either! There was only two of them and one required you to be a hunter (eugh).

2) Devout Set

Not officially a Tier and not really nice looking, I kept this oogly lilac set because it was the first priest set in the game and also, it took me longer to complete than any Tier set ever after. I think all that went through the same grind for the 8-piece Dungeon sets know the feeling. I don’t remember how many Scholomance runs it took me just to get the crown – one can only take so many “school is in session!” before your sanity’s self-protection kicks in.

3) Gavel of Infinite Wisdom

I tell you why I kept this mace of infinite suck – so that it would always remember who its master is! I GRINDED you, you utter piece of shit, that’s right!! /hysteric laughter

There are not many rep grinds in WoW that come close to the drudgery and torture of getting Cenarion Circle to exalted back in the days. I haven’t done the insanity achievement, so for me this was the single most horrible, tedious and mind-altering thing I ever did in this game. I’d redo all my WotLK rep grinds in a heartbeat instead of this.

For one thing I really hated the insect theme of Silithus and the AQs. Farming in the hives drove me mad – getting lost in Hive Ashi anyone? I spent tons of cash on the AH to buy twilight texts or armor just to speed things up A LITTLE. I summoned more of those stupid lord things together with an equally driven guildie than warlocks can say “succubus”! There was nights when I actually dreamt a giant wasp was chasing after me through endless gooey tunnels.

I will keep this weapon of doom forevermore, like the trophy head of my worst enemy. Also, it was better than Benediction which is kinda outrageous!

4) Grayson’s Torch

LOL I really still have this torch. It was a reward from a lvl 20 quest at Westfall lighthouse and I loved the blazing graphics of it. I have an awesome screenie of standing over Westfall beach overlooking the sea while the torchlight is illuminating the night around us. /emo
What makes this memory even more special is that 1 minute after I took that same screenshot, we were ganked like the utter noobs we were by a group of equally low level hordes because we didn’t know what ‘PVP flagged’ was at the time. Oh, teh memories!

5) Big stick

The Big Stick was given to me for an Xmas present by a guildie and co-healer last year. I dont know if I got it in reference to my healing team often calling me the ‘lady with the whip’ or maybe because I’m a teacher (same thing?) or whether he was trying to tell me something quite different, but it made me laugh all the same when I found it in the mail. I used it in this picture here that I created for our 2nd anniversary’s quiz page.

True memories

These are mementos I will always keep. Most dresses and baubles can be replaced if needed, but these items really can’t. It’s not so much about the item but the story behind getting it.

Maybe it sounds weird to some people but I feel about these items the way I feel about the screenshots in my WoW folder: as if they were real things and real photographs. I think they are too – after all I was there.

And with this I end my contribution to this lovely topic with some very old screenies of mine, because a picture (or two) says more than a thousand words:

1 Minute to go,
enjoy it while it lasts!

/sigh

We remember the hard times

Lately there was quite a bit of discussion on gend……..errr, I mean, there was quite a bit of discussion going on about where the MMO genre is going and also, about people being bored silly with WoW while being unhappy with the increased “dumbing down” of the game by Blizzard these past few years.

I’ll admit that I am one of those that have an issue with the continuous ‘casualization’ of WoW; not because I need to feel so l33t over more casual players and think they shouldn’t experience the same content as I do, but because I feel a sharp loss of ‘authenticity’ and immersion as a consequence of the related changes since WoW launched in 2004. And I don’t label myself an elite player, far from it.

I am not going to pink-glass vanilla WoW here: there was certain imbalances and unnecessary downtimes that were plain annoying and I wouldn’t want those back. However, I feel that Blizzard’s increased endeavor to make the game more and more accessible and easy to play for a mass market audience, ever since halfway through TBC, has killed a lot of what I consider the ‘soul’ of the true MMORPG experience. A topic that has possibly echoed most of my own feelings in brilliant detail was Wolfshead’s article on EQ3 and the future of the genre in general.
Was everything better back in the days? No. Neither was everything worse. It is rather depressing that oldtimers like Everquest and Ultima Online are still regarded as the games with the most content depth and immersion in the MMO genre up to this day.

When I think of how 5mans are being run in WoW nowadays, it seriously makes me cringe. While it’s far from being my only issue, I think it serves as a good example: queue up for an instance, wait a few minutes, zoom into some cross-server party of which hardly anyone will even say ‘Hi’ in partychat, steamroll the instance, cash your badges and leave, rinse and repeat – it’s like the zombie hour of MMOs.

People don’t speak to one another. And if they do, it’s most likely about gearscore or damage meters.

People don’t die anymore. And if they do, it is such an unheard of, outrageous thing that the tank and healer are most likely to ragequit after the first wipe because they got NO TIME FOR THIS!

People don’t even need to travel to the instance anymore. And if they did, they wouldn’t notice the world around them and its beautiful maps, because their super-fast epic mount flies at “ludicrous speed” somewhere up in the clouds.

Some bloggers have actually compared this way of gameplay to a “one-night stand”: no emotions involved, get in and out quickly, mutual benefits, no strings attached. And why would you invest anything more on people from different servers anyway? It’s an almost complete anonymity, even if you behave like a stupid troll there won’t be consequences. Just yesterday Grumpy described a very similar atmosphere in WoW’s battleground PUGs where communication and teamwork are at an all time low.

Now you could say “but this is all optional, you don’t need to use the dungeon finder if you don’t wish to play with strangers”, but that’s not it really. You play with strangers in MMOs all the time, it’s kinda the POINT. And whether I use this feature or not, it is there and it does impact on the community (lolz I said “community”) as a whole. It is also just one symptom of a spreading disease – and I’m saying this as somebody that is still in love with the world of Warcraft.

Of value and cost or: heroes and dragons

The underlying issue of most of my own points, but also those of other players, comes down to a strong disparity between effort (or challenge) and reward. The irony in WoW’s case is not that the game is too hard and frustrates players by rewarding them too little, but that it is on the contrary so fast and full of opportunities that you do not feel rewarded anymore, as there is hardly a challenge.
As human beings we attach value in relation to what a certain item costs us – value and cost being two very separate things in this case. If it takes you a long time to gain a reward or if it was hard to obtain and required you to overcome many obstacles, you value your reward more, as part of an accomplishment. Well, there is no accomplishment without a struggle: there are no heroes where there is no dragon.

So, where is the feeling of adventure and achievement in playing the game in its current state? When was the last time you really struggled questing in a new map, calling a friend to aid you? When was the last time you had several corpseruns in a 5man because communication on pulls and CC was so crucial? How much effort went into collecting your current set of gear? I had to think hard – the last time we struggled in a 5man was in Magister’s Terrace back in TBC. The instances in WotLK make me feel a lot of things, but certainly not heroic.

We are currently over-loaded on fast opportunity and reward in WoW, to a point where cooperation and teamwork isn’t a key feature anymore. You can solo and pug your way through almost everything with little struggle, downtimes or consequence. Even if you don’t pug, the low difficulty level itself is detrimental to any team building effect: you build strong teams over struggling together, not steamrolling together!

The fact that rewards not only don’t feel like rewards anymore, but also don’t look very rewarding, is doubly ironic: we all look the same nowadays, no matter how we play the game. Our gear tells no stories anymore. It seems the more we are given, the less we got. And then there are those goons that do not even know (or remember) what a party is and how instances used to be, quitting raids over a few deaths or failing horribly whenever they visit an oldschool instance.

When times were tough and memories were epic

I don’t know about you, but personally I lose all sense of adventure when the co-relation between challenge and reward, need for cooperation and teamwork, fear of death and requirements of for example travel, become so secondary in a game. There are no essential struggles, no moments of big consequence or fear – these factors being of course all co-dependent. WoW feels further and further away from the classic MMORPG experience and there goes my sense of ‘authenticity’ down the drain together with immersion.

In his article Wolfshead compared his experience of playing a (good) MMO with watching a horror movie – I find this quite a fitting analogy. If I play in a fantasy world, I’d like some excitement, some tension and moments of terror. I’d like to be scared, calling on my companions to beat a challenge together. Or in other words, I’d like to run and scream in terror; because fear is part of adventure. What follows after, is an epic feeling of accomplishment, reward and fun shared with those that assisted you – or alternatively a feeling of shame and embarrassment over being such a chicken. It is those moments we remember in MMOs, not the easy kills, not the fast loot: what we remember is the really tough times.

I remember how my guild beat Vaelastraz after weeks and weeks of wiping in BWL, and the tremendous relief we felt to have overcome this obstacle together. I remember being scared shitless trying to cross duskwood as a lowbie, waiting for my party to escort me. I remember endless hours and corpseruns in Stratholme, BRD and UBRS because those instances were actually hard for any group. I remember grinding my way to exalted with goddamn Silithus, which is quite possibly the worst thing I ever did in this game (I have still not quite recovered), but I DID IT!

It is the times of our worst struggles and the feeling of achievement in overcoming them as a group of heroes set in a fantastic and scary world that make our best memories in an MMO. I want more “MMO-RPG” and less fast food, please. I want times to be tough and adventures to be epic!

I want memories that last.

Elwynn, my lovely

I am a big sucker for atmosphere in games and I have always loved the world maps, soundtrack and the overall graphical style and level of detail in WoW. It was a big part of playing the game for me in the first place and with a new expansion at our doorsteps I like to look forward by looking back and getting a little mushy (don’t get used to it ;D).

Of all the wonderful maps WoW has to offer Elwynn Forest will always hold a special place in my heart. No doubt Outland introduced some of the most nicely designed areas in all of WoW back in TBC – Zangarmarsh or Nagrand being two of the most popular maps at the time. Later on WotLK graced us with the snowy mountains of Storm Peaks and the woodland beauty of Grizzly Hills. But as wicked as glowing mushroom thickets and flying islands might be, as much as I loved the nordic idyll of the current expansion’s maps: there is no place to me like Elwynn Forest. Elwynn with its light, peaceful tune, its soft river banks and silver ponds, Elwynn with Goldshire at its center from where all paths lead to greater adventures. Elwynn where I stationed my quest giver ‘NPC’ for Adrenaline’s 1st Guild Anniversary.

How many times have I taken the Dalaran portal to Stormwind late at night (when raids were over and you weren’t doing anything really but chatting in guildchat or talking to friends on Ventrilo) and parked my character somewhere in the middle of Elwynn Forest. Every now and then a lowlevel player would pass me by, finding that priest geared in ICC epics sitting alone on a grassy hill, and wonder slightly what she was doing. She was taking a break.

I’m sure that we all have a special place in WoW that is ladden with memories and nostalgia. Often players will talk that way of their starting area because it’s there where their first memories of the game were shaped. It’s there where they cast their first spell, handed in their first quest, got lost for the first time (of many more times to come) and had their very first corpserun. And there is only one first time to all things.

Having leveled a human priest when the game was still young, Northshire Abbey, Goldshire and the whole of WoW from there have created my first impressions of the game. I have picked my first peacebloom in Elwynn Forest, bought my first vanity pet from the Crazy Cat Lady (those 40 silver hurt sooo much!), slain my first notorious villain, the ferocious Hogger – though I admit he killed me first. It is also where I formed my first friendships with other players. Whenever I go back there I am instantly cast back into my noobie days and there is a deep longing in me.

I think that’s why many of us look forward to expansions: we look foward to be an explorer again, to be a noob that doesn’t know what to expect around the next corner with the odd ‘whoa!’ and ‘ooops!’ – feelings ever so often. I am sure many are looking at the Cataclysm beta screenshots right now and hoping that the expansion will give them something back of the thrill and excitement of doing something for the very first time, walking down untrodden roads into unexplored maps.

May it all hold true for Catacylsm, may it fill you with wonder and bring back some of those rookie feelings that are so overdue after a long wait. But as wonderful as new places may be, I will never stop returning to my starting area from time to time. There’s no place like home.

Where’s yours?