This blog is part of the series I am writing because I wanted to participate in the 10 Years: 10 Questions project. I completed some of the questions before the deadline, and decided to finish the rest anyway.
The questions are giving me a reason to do some writing about the World of Warcraft game, my experiences in it, and thoughts about it. Answering the questions is also giving me a reason to put something else on this blog, which is nice.
Question 9: Are there any regrets from your time in game?
I’m going to start by finding a definition for the word regret. The Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines regret as: to mourn the loss or death of; to miss very much; to be very sorry for.
This means that in order to properly answer this question, I would need to identify something that happened in the game (or that did not happen) that I miss, feel sad about, or feel sorry about.
This is a tough one. I’m a super casual player, so I don’t have any regrets connected to the progress I’ve made (or didn’t make) in World of Warcraft. I don’t really care if I miss out on some of the content in the game because my characters are all low level or because I don’t raid, or because I didn’t finish a certain quest chain before it was taken out. I have no regrets about whatever content (or loot) I may have missed out on. To be honest, I’m probably not even aware of most of it!
There are some things that were disappointing, but I wouldn’t say there were a regret. It would have been nice if my brother had not decided to quit playing World of Warcraft when he did. We were going to play together. Unfortunately, he decided that he didn’t want any part of the upcoming Burning Crusade expansion. He quit WoW shortly after I rolled my first character.
This was disappointing, but I wouldn’t say it was a regret because his decision to quit had nothing to do with me. It was entirely due to his dislike of the Burning Crusade expansion. He felt that it ruined WoW, so he was done, and that was that.
He made that decision not long after asking me to start playing WoW, and I got into the game as fast as I could. It’s a bummer that we never got the opportunity to play WoW together. However, my brother’s decision to quit the game has nothing to do with anything I did or failed to do. He just didn’t like the expansion.
I’ve been in two guilds which were each a whole lot of fun… until they dissolved (for lack of a better word). In each situation, the reason the guild fell apart had absolutely nothing to do with me. It’s sad that things didn’t go well. I do miss what the guilds were like when things were good.
My first guild was with a bunch of people who I only knew through WoW. One day, I was taking my low level character through one of those caves that you have to enter in order to complete a quest. I’d finished part of what I was supposed to do in the cave and was hopelessly lost!
Eventually, I ran into a player who was in the cave for the same reason I was, and also hopelessly lost. We helped each other finish the quest and tried to find our way out of the cave together. When we finally made it out, both of us decided to /dance.
He was fun to play WoW with and eventually got me into the guild he was in. There were a lot of fun people in the guild, and we would gather up and help people do dungeons that they needed the achievement for, and do silly holiday quests together.
Then, one day, the guild master quit WoW. Or, more correctly, he had to. It turned out that the person who was the guild master was a teenager and his mother wouldn’t let him play WoW anymore until the end of the semester. This had something to do with poor grades.
The problem was he didn’t have the opportunity to hand over the guild to someone else before quitting WoW. He was the only player who could access part of the guild bank and invite new players into the guild. Naturally, the guild lost members and eventually existed in name only, and then was gone.
The other guild I was a part of was made up of many people who I knew outside of World of Warcraft. These were WoW players who I first “met” via podcasts and social media. Some of them I got to know well enough to consider them to be my friends (and there are many whom I am still friends with today).
The guild was a lot of fun! We had a bunch of casual players, and a bunch of players who liked to raid, and people who did a little of both. From my perspective, it was a guild full of helpful, friendly, people that were all fun to play WoW with.
Eventually, the guild was plagued by “drama”. I suspect that the majority of guilds that end do so because of some kind of “drama” that occurred among some of the players who were in the guild. I know very little about what happened, and that makes sense, because none of it had anything to do with me.
There were two different “dramas” happening that were only very loosely connected to each other. Long story short, it destroyed the guild. It was never the same after that.
I’ve had a couple of situations where I befriended a person who plays WoW, and really enjoyed talking to the person in-game, … until things got weird. In each situation, I thought it best to remove myself from the person I once considered a friend. I do not regret doing that because I know it was the healthy thing to do.
I also don’t regret the time I spent conversing with these people before things went weird. The way I see it, some friendships are meant to last a lifetime, and others are meant to exist only for a certain span of time.