In our seventh installment of our weekly World of Warcraft Wisdom feature I begin a series looking back at the various expansions and their patches - today we look at the impact of the original MMO on a new player.
When I was in middle school in the 1980s I played pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons. I am not sure how many of you out there have played a pen and paper RPG, but it is rather different than the MMOs we have today. The pen and paper games could go on for days, usually depending on the Dungeon Master. We would gather at a friend’s house and usually get a game started on Friday after school and play well into the night, drinking soda and eating all sorts of junk food. We would break around midnight and rejoin later on Saturday to finish the adventure.
The game was set up much like any instance group. We had a warrior, some damage from wizards, help from rogues, and of course the cleric for heals. I liked playing the rogue. There was something fun about the sneaky guy who could move in and out of shadows. The skills were a bit different than the rogue in World of Warcraft, but he was in many ways the same character. He could pick locks and was able to move ahead of the group. As the rogue moved ahead of the group, I rolled the dice to make sure my stealth held, and if my skills were high enough, in parallel with the roll of the dice, I could hear what may lurk behind a closed door.
Dungeons and Dragons is still around, though it has fallen to the wayside in favor of MMOs and other RPGs. It still lives in books, online, and groups who gather to roll the dice and bring their characters to life. Though I haven’t played the game since my freshman year of high school, I have always harbored a love of fantasy.
I have been in Azeroth for about five years now. I think when I began, there were only 9 million users. There was so much for my eyes. I had taken a serious hiatus from technology for many years, but then bought a new Mac. Shortly after that, I heard about World of Warcraft and signed up.
Like so many, I was amazed. Like so many, I came close to addiction level and spent many an hour in Azeroth. I had made friends and was having a wonderful time escaping/avoiding life. What amazed me, and still does to this day, was not only the detail of the world - but how it all operated. I am still baffled at how an MMO works, how when I hit a button, a signal is sent through the air to my wireless router, from there a wire carries that signal to the modem, which sends it via wire to God knows where through God knows how many switches to arrive at a server located in some bunker in California; once the signal of my keystroke arrives at the server, a signal is bounced out and around to (potentially) many, many people, through many, many wires, including myself - through the same channels from which I had originally sent it, the signal returns to my house, and the resulting action from my keystroke happens on my screen and all those around my character. Go figure.
