This post has been in my head for over a year and was supposed to be called “Why I love my guild”. Everytime I decided to write it, some sort of drama would happen and make me not love my guild anymore. So it’s not going to be about a particular guild; I don’t get so attached anymore. Instead it will be about what I like most about WoW: the social aspect.

The background
Two or so years ago, my then-friend, current boyfriend gave me WoW Vanilla and told me to try it out. The sales pitch? “It’s like Yahoo Messenger with characters.” I gave in and installed it.


My first character

The first months sucked. I didn’t know anything, I was utterly lost and I hated the game. I was too scared to join a group, I only talked to the two people I knew in real life and who were helping me level, I was basically playing an RPG not an MMO. However, I slowly started to like it… and at level 47 I joined my boyfriend’s guild. I spent a month not saying one word in guild chat – they were raiders and I was a total noob; I’m ok with being dumb, but I don’t like strangers knowing it, so I kept to myself.

Level 70 hit, and after the high of getting my first max-level char I got to an all-time low: now what? I had only the vaguest idea about gear, no clue about enchants and gems, never thought of finding a blog for advice, and my DPS was horrible (not that I had Recount or anything). Then a kind soul stepped in, dragged me to Shattrath, hunted down enchanters and jewelcrafters and got me all set up. He was a tank and not known for being very friendly, but without him I’d have been absolutely dead. Despite being bad at a class that was already bad, my guild let me raid, boosted my ass in Kara, taught me what raiding was about – and I had a blast in the process.


Naked party before a SSC run

We raided T5 for a few good months… then drama ensued. I came home from vacation to half a guild gone and no chance of getting my Hand of Ad’al (I’m still bitter about that). After that split the guild wasn’t the same, but I stuck it out because most of the people were nice – some I could call friends. Slowly but surely, people started leaving; the management of the guild changed; I was an officer for a short time and I had the ugliest arguments in /o; it got to the point where I got angry even seeing certain people log in, so I left. A few social guilds later, I got back to raiding in the guild I’m in today… ironically (or fittingly?) created by a member of my first guild during one of the splits.

Despite all the drama, I never left the game and never considered a server change. It’s just pixels, but there’s real people behind those pixels, and too many of them are on my beloved Alonsus.

The now
One of the reasons I’ve always loved the internet was people. You can have good friends from your hometown and be perfectly happy, but I discovered that having friends with a different view on life is much more interesting. There’s the downside of not being able to go out with them every day… but I love being given reasons to travel.

So the best part of WoW, for me, is being part of an international guild (and server). I couldn’t imagine playing on a same-nationality server. My guildies and WoW friends come from England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Switzerland, Spain, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, South Africa, Denmark, Russia, Belgium, Korea, Portugal, Finland, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Germany, Ukraine – almost every country in Europe and some beyond.


I’m the tree on the right

For a lover of travel and different cultures this is a small paradise, especially when I can find someone who allows me to pick their brain about cultural difference and languages. I love my Vent with a dozen different accents, I love listening to the Scottish guy when he – rarely – speaks, I practice my British English and I can actually understand most of it now, I spoke Spanish with the rare Madrid girl who rolled on our server, I got used to hearing Romanian accents, I had raid leaders from at least 5 different countries. I learned 2 sentences in Welsh which I promptly forgot, I learned that “hello” in Lithuanian sounds very dirty in Romanian, I learned to swear in Finnish, I replaced my “fucking” with “bloody” (but I still hate “mate” or – ew – “m8″ with a passion), I learned where some countries were on the map.

The cows

And I met the people behind the screen – a day in London, running after the Eurostar on the way back, a week in the Netherlands and Belgium, a couple of hours in the mall down the street, and a long weekend in Ireland the coming April. Everyone was nice, everyone had social skills, I drank lots of international beer and had a blast.


My friends probably don’t want their faces all over the internet, so here’s me and a random kitty from Amsterdam

I lost touch with some people, I kept in touch with others. The friend in Netherlands calls me while getting drunk with one of our Russian ex-guildies; I call a friend to Ireland to tell her my net is down and I can’t raid, we rant online about games and boyfriends and clothes and jobs; the friend in Portugal spends 2 hours with me while I’m trying to fix my computer; I bitch at the Korean living in London about PuGs, guilds and real life. Sometimes I see my boyfriend in Dalaran more than in real life, because a log on screen takes 1 minute and getting to his place takes 45. We can make WoW jokes about real things and laugh our asses off – we raid the fridge or quest to the supermarket or learn new cooking recipes, he says the stupid “grats” joke to the microwave and I ignore it for the tenth time.


Boosting my boyfriend’s newly dinged shaman. Draenei power!

Even the bad is useful. I learned that adults can act like children, and that teens can be very mature. The biggest asses I met in-game was in their late 20s, some of the best raid leaders I had weren’t even 20 yet. I saw people quitting guilds over stupid reasons, arguments about purple pixels and people forgetting some might have real lives. Lessons in human nature, let’s call them. Pugging taught me patience, expecting the worst and enjoying pleasant surprises and fun with total strangers.

The future
It’s easy to say that World of Warcraft or the internet, in general, kills social interaction. Wrong. They only kill social interaction if you let them. I would argue that WoW is actually a great way of meeting new people. Why would it be any different than getting to know someone through your local knitting club or through a penpal network?

So thank you to all my WoW friends – for drunken nights on Vent, for first kills, for boosting my alts, for traveling, for showing and telling me about your countries, for stealthing in front when you know I’ll follow and ninja pull on my healer, for knowing that I lose focus and need to be smacked across the head, for helping me with professions, gear, specs, glyphs and weird achievements, for analyzing grammar and vocabulary in dozens of different languages, for supermarket mammoths, for endless summons when I get lost and for letting me bitch at the world. See you tonight in game.