The Art of Diplomacy III
There were no two ways about it. World of Warcraft was a drug and I was addicted.
I was first introduced to the game when one of my roommates, Ryan acquired it upon release and I became rather intrigued by the game. Prior to World of Warcraft, I never played any massively multiplayer online games. Not even the quintessential Runescape, which is an incredibly popular game that is often played in school computer labs incessantly during my middle school years. Prior to World of Warcraft, I never really saw the appeal of these sorts of games.
I think what ultimately sucked me into the game was the combination of the license and the gameplay. For one, Warcraft was a series of games I had been playing since my first computer. The creators of Warcraft, Blizzard Entertainment, was probably one of the first computer game developers that I became a fan of. It was the first company that when they announced a new game, I was rubbing my little hands together because these games sounded great to me.
World of Warcraft was the transformation of my first real-time strategy game (RTS) into a role-playing game with the entire world fully realized. And so, when I first played the game on Ryan’s PC under his good graces, it was pretty well the freebie that got me hooked.
Fast forward to August 2006. After being clean for about 3 months, I started twitching. At least mentally, I felt a twitch. I would watch old videos of my idol, “Laintime”, a player who actually made the warrior an extremely impressive and viable character in the unbalanced world of player vs. player combat. I would watch the gameplay, think about conversations with guild members, and with the long awaited expansion, the Burning Crusade on the horizon, I started developing a strong compulsion to play. Eventually I broke down.
I returned to my computer, restarted my subscription and went through the long, drawn out process of reinstalling the game client and then downloading all of the patches, including the ones that had been added since when I quit in April. Finding a new server that had popped up only a few weeks ago, I jumped back into the World of Warcraft. I had relapsed into my addiction.
“This time, things were going to be different.” I reminded myself as I logged into the Sentinels server. I then began to carefully craft my new persona. There was no way that I was going to stop playing the warrior class. After two years, I finally knew what I needed to know in order to play this class well, not only in going into dungeons, but also in playing on my lonesome. With the previous incarnation of Moraz, I was constantly getting my butt kicked by monsters because I was often dealing barely enough damage to bring them down before they took me down. This time I experimented with playing a more aggressive version.
Like every other time, I named this character “Moraz” (This can be done because character names are not universal, and so there can be many characters with the same name, provided they are on different servers.) and made him an undead character. For one, this was a major story shift for the mental image I had for Moraz’s character. I always preferred to see each incarnation of my character as being a more advanced case of his overall story. And for me, the second half of Moraz’s story began when he died.
Choosing to play an undead character also placed me in a completely different faction than what I was used to. Humans were part of the Great Alliance, made up of various canon races such as dwarves and elves. The undead, were members of the Horde, which comprised the classical adversaries such as orcs and trolls. However, Blizzard does a very interesting dance when it comes to the politics of the Horde and the Alliance. These two factions were hostile to one another, but not completely at war, but the problem was that both sides could not see eye-to-eye. They both are similar in their perspectives on things, but saw each other as aggressors and threats. I was especially annoyed and at the same time impressed, when I was still with that ‘villain’ guild with a human Moraz. We were often told by others: “If you want to play evil, join the Horde.” I am very sure that the most these people never played a Horde character long enough to understand their background before making up their opinions on who was good and who as evil. This could be used as a case of propaganda that we find in the United States after September 11th.
Needless to say, it wasn’t easy getting used to play a Horde character. For one, they seemed a lot more powerful with racial abilities and the overall territories that were available to explore. However, it was often difficult to determine where the dungeons were that were geared towards Horde characters instead of Alliance characters, plus having to find obscure characters and quest givers in the various cities and towns.
Eventually, my abilities as a warrior started developing a reputation as it always had. I was good at my job, and people appreciated that. At one point, I was running through a dungeon with a group of players who were also good at their jobs and were impressed by my capabilities. Finally, at the end of the dungeon, they asked me if I was interested in joining their guild. Seeing as how well they played, the fact they were friendly, and were of an equal measure of power compared to me, there was little reason I wouldn’t join. As such, I became a member of the Bleeding Hollow guild.
This group of players was extremely supportive and diverse, coming from various places. I eventually got onto voice chat when playing with them, simply because they preferred to talk vocally. Hearing a human voice while playing not only meant better coordination with a group, but it also brought a more human component to the game that is missing when just using text. When school started though, I began drifting away from this newfound circle of friends. Not because of disinterest but because of keeping my marks up. Eventually they started moving ahead of me and I would struggle to catch up. Finally, it got to the point where I just wasn’t seeing them online anymore, and so I imagined that they had ditched me.
This is the low that follows my highs. These are the points when my whole world comes crashing down. At this point I am too far gone to form a relationship with anyone else, and so I am pretty well stuck in neutral. When the guild I am in disbands, it is often the end of the current incarnation of my character and I am forced to move on to my next dose. By dose, I mean heading to new server and repeating the process. And just like a drug, I would falsely believe that at some point, I would get the ultimate high and wouldn’t come down. My last dose, would be the greatest one I ever had, and was incredibly close to the ultimate high, that I remember weeping when I failed to reach it.
