Hyzanthlay at Level 60, just after the Burning Crusade Expansion

My first thought when I saw the preview was,”Oh, hi Chromie!” as if seeing an old work colleague. It was that easy to step back into the World of Warcraft again.

It’s been about three years since I last signed on and even longer since I stopped posting on the forums. Near the end, I barely interacted with my guildmates at all. All of the other stories about how the game changed has already been written, blogged, or podcasted about so I’ll skip to the two big factors that are getting people (even me) so excited about the Classic WoW servers.

Raiding parties and guilds meant even I could have friends!

Community.  For some people, this is no more than a fun perk. For others, it’s the best or sometimes the only way to communicate with other people. You can blame physical isolation in a remote area, personality disorders, or social awkwardness.

WoW wasn’t like Facebook or other kinds of social media that required you to share the details of your real life. You could play the same kind of RPG games that you played on your own computer or on a tabletop with other people. That’s no longer a part of a game that tried to become the RPG MMO Facebook a few years back in an effort to get in on the burgeoning social media craze.

The push-back against the proposed changes to the Forums that would have required players to use their real names is one way to illustrate how WoW players socialize differently from Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ users.

Heading to QD for the Scryer dailies

The Grind. This is connected to the RPG angle. The “RPG” part of the MMORPG is what brings the game to life for individual characters. The grind is an essential part of your character’s story.

Changing the game to start a class at an advanced level not only took that away but put a serious dent in the lore of Azeroth. If you’re not an RPer, you might not have noticed, but it was frustrating to work on a storyline only to have the people making the game mess it up.

I was so caught up in all the other fantastic stuff the Wrath of the Lich King expansion (my favorite by far) had to offer that I didn’t really notice Death Knights.

It’s still hard for me to believe that Blizzard is actually going to go through with this, as they have shut down the independent servers when they find them. Fans of Vanilla WoW have been starting and maintaining their own servers since 2004, when the game first came online. That trend continued through the BC Expansion in 2007 and exploded with the Mists of Pandaria expansion.

Fire Festival

I wasn’t exactly fond of the fluffy pandas. It reminded me of the first time I logged on to WoW back in 2006. I expected to play a badass Night Elf like they had in Warcraft 3 only to find a lot of moonlight and nudity. My original hopes were shattered, but the ideal environment in which to roll an unapologetic undead warlock neatly presented itself.

And thus, Hyzanthlay.

Blizzard seems to have finally understood the message that the original game has its merits along with a decent following of die-hard fans. Fans like me, who swore they would never come back.

And now I do daily searches for any updated news on development or even a projected release date, all the while whispering,

Take my money!

Glossary of Terms:   

• WoW – World of Warcraft
• Legacy/Classic/Vanilla – all of these terms are used interchangebly to refer to the verison of World of Warcraft that existed until the BC Expansion in 2006.
• Chromie – Her full name is Chronormu, and she’s actually one of the Bronze Dragonflight and not a gnome at all.
• RPG – role-playing game
• RPer – role-player
• RP – role-play
• Wrath of the Lich King – shortened to WotLK most of the time, this is the second major expansion that brought the northern continent Northrend from Warcraft 3 back into the story line.
  

  Ragnaros