Over the last month or so I have been dipping in and out of the World of Warcraft. I lost many, many thousands of hours of my life getting my five characters to level 90. I had the obligatory hunter, Death Knight and Panda. Much of my nights at work were spent, researching on whatever gaming sites were not blocked on the corporate network, to gain an advantage, an edge. I remember spending hours on various dedicated pages that would tell you what the best gear for your character was…
Then, after Mists of Pandaria, I stopped.
I don’t know what made me stop. I can’t remember back that far and I have played years of Counter-Strike, Cities:Skylines and Cities in Motion (1 and 2) since then. I have loved, lost and found since then.
So when World of Warcraft Classic was announced I was excitable. I loved the thought of going back to 2006 or so, just before I started to fall in love with the game, and fall in love all over again. The day before the big launch I downloaded the game ready and the minuscule few gigabytes of game felt considerably lightweight against the 70Gb+ of the current incumbent of the original. The question was, would I enjoy it?
The thing is…. so far…. I have not really been able to get myself back into the troughs of Azeroth and battle the forces like I used to. I have deliberately gone from the PvE servers of old to the PvP servers to try and get an attraction to the sort of thrill that keeps me playing Apex Legends [Level 82 with a 0.31 KDR – I must be bloody crazy] while justifying the £9.99 a month that the World of Warcraft offers.
First – an Admission
I know…. this is going to end one of two ways, but I have also installed the full fat, original, World of Warcraft. My Level 91 hunter Artheria is still there on Saurfang as well as a number of my other toons which I managed to get to Level 80 to 90.
I actually loaded some of them up, Artheria still has some 3500 gold to her name, but it appears in the midst of the updates some of her has been reset. As minor currencies came and went, I had a number of envelopes full of currency and all of her talents had been reset. I will start a new character and get it leveling the hard way while using my other characters only as armor merchants and providing cooking and aid.
Starting afresh
So as I write this, I have put a few hours in. I have two World of Warcraft Classic characters at levels 8 and 9, and the intention was to play one as an offline hobby and the other as a streaming character. This all kind of fell apart as the few streams I started running to grind and level did not really attract any following. The Twitch community know who the good WoW streamers are and my Twitch channel was not really the place to be!
So I continued my push to Level 60 offline. By level 8 I have wondered what the hell I am doing here as I continually harvest Gyromechanic Gear from the Leper Gnomes of Dun Morogh and manage to kill one or two before I am treated to a Gnomish gang bang and find myself at the graveyard.
The thing is, where I used to pile 5 or 6 hours into each Warcraft session, I am now getting bored before I even get to an hour. I remember the grinding, but it is not as gratifying as it once was; maybe the illusion of the occasional victory in Kings Canyon is robbing me of the delights of enjoying the long game.
Either way, I am struggling. There is not a lot of joy coming out of the World of Warcraft Classic, nor can I say that I have any idea what I am doing now in World of Warcraft [original]. I hear of people already making it to Level 60 and for their troubles getting a free upgrade to Battles of Azeroth, currently the only expansion you need if you are a subscriber – everything else is now included as standard.