I've never paid to play WoW so many will say that I have never truly experienced it but Azeroth is a world I know as well as my own. It's somewhere I've made many memories - I even got married in-game once - and even now, even though I don't play I find myself immersed in the world on a daily basis. This is the World of Warcraft.

I've been playing WoW on and off for 14 years. It's been such a fixture in my life that honestly, I'm not even sure it's only been 14 years, it feels like forever. The man I married introduced me to it, he had beta tested it before we met. We'd spent many an hour slaughtering the legions of Baal et al (Diablo 2 FTW) and were after something new to occupy us. I'm not going to tell you how to play WoW for free, it's bad enough that I've even admitted it's possible as far as I'm concerned. I've never felt particularly guilty for stealing from Blizzard for all these years mainly because I think the sub fee is expensive although aside from making it free to play (with paid for cosmetics) I don't have any solutions on keeping it running without one.

Dancing on the mast of the NElf ship was something of a right of passage for my characters

Back when I first starting playing in The Burning Crusade the server I was playing on was fairly small. There was never more than 300 people online even at peak times and the Horde seemed to have a three to two ratio on us. Yup, proud member of the Alliance here as you probably guessed (unless you know nothing at all about WoW) from the above picture. My Hubby and I leveled from 1 to 70 over the course of a few weeks making friends in the Alliance and enemies of the Horde. Both of us played Paladins - Ironbrewer the Dwarf and Firenze the Draenei.

Iron liked to argue and soon enough there were a subsection of people on the Alliance side who were paying horde friends to find us an kill us. After refusing all guild invites, when we finally hit lvl 70 "Terrorstorm" was created. People we had been friends with over the levels jumped ship from their guilds and joined us. One guild, the Sylvanian Shadows (pretty sure that was it) was devastated by defectors disappearing daily, we'd even gained the favour of some of their founding members.

By the time we left that server we had the strongest guild there. This was despite the entire guild being deleted by the GMs - we never had any proof it was them but unless my husband did it there was no one else it could've been. They did it by deleting our characters, both of them disappeared presumably because they wanted to make it look like we'd left. I however had a second account and was able to rebuild the guild and as we had donated to the server they had no choice but to reinstate us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JghEFAcH0WM

This is me singing. I made the as a goodbye to the server.
I never expected to play again after this. How wrong I was ...

It was not long after this that we had our first break from WoW. The servers were moving on to Wrath of the Lich King and were all as buggy as fuck. It was about a year later that I came across a server called, of all things, Spermik. It was said to be highly populated with most of the available content working and best of all it's rates were Blizzlike[1]. I persuaded Iron to play and we set about leveling ourselves once again this time as Paladin and Priest, Janeway and Moonwatcher.

We played together on Spermik for three years. It wasn't quite the same as the fun we'd had with Terrorstorm, we didn't make our own guild, just joined up with one's already in operation. Eventually Iron got bored and quit. I had always been happier leveling so I stayed and leveled three more characters to level 80. I lost myself in the places that had been inaccessible to me during the Burning Crusade - instances and raids that had never properly worked had been expertly coded by people passionate about the game.

Say hello to the ladies, from left to right we have:
Organdonor lvl 19 Dwarf Rogue Twink, Pao lvl 68 Draenei Hunter, Apocolyptyca lvl 80 Gnome Warlock, Janeway lvl 80 Human Paladin, Clawdia lvl 80 Night Elf Druid, Maurier lvl 80 Human Priest and finally Belana lvl 70 Gnome Deathknight

I solo'd all the raids we'd never had the people to do - Molten Core needed forty guys back in TBC, now in WotLK just me and my little Paladin (and my Priest I'd leveled on a second account) stormed round for half a day to collect parts of the Tier 2 set which was worthless apart from for bragging rights. I became "Salty Janeway" by completing all the fishing achievements, got Ambassador of the Alliance at level 33 and as my final act on that server finally completed Loremaster with my Priest - 2843 quests in total.

Howling Fjord: The best place to go for those early morning Shoveltusk Steaks

And eventually I got bored of it, again. I'd done all the raids to death and the only content I hadn't done would've required me joining the Horde. I didn't play for another couple of years. I did keep up with the news though, I watched Youtubers doing runs of the new area's Blizzard created for the Cataclysm. Occasionally I thought about finding a new server to play on but the reports of how the Cataclysm had turned WoW to easy mode kept putting me off. I was constantly told by friends who played on the Official servers how all the classes were practically the same now and how even there the new phasing system was causing problems.

Eventually I did find somewhere to play, the scripting was good but it was too easy. I found WoW depressing now, I mean, they gave me what had been a level 50 spell at level 10 when I chose my specification. I stuck at it because I wanted to see the new stuff they'd brought it, what they had done with the world I'd inhabited years before. I enjoyed most of it, the new versions of the classic dungeons, the super long CSI style quest line they put in Westfall, even the much derided fight versus Deathwing but it still wasn't the same.

If you don't know who this is, drop me a comment and I'll happily tell you which book to read that tells the whole sorry story

I finally gave up and uninstalled my two versions of WoW. I told myself that the books and Warcraft 3 were going to be enough for me and for a time they were. I'm still piling my way through the books, the authors have not let me down yet - honestly if you love fantasy worlds I could not recommend the Warcraft books more, I even managed to get my grumpy old Step-Dad into them despite him never having played it. Warcraft 3? Well I'm unashamed to say I never completed it RTS games never being my strong suit. But WoW? It's back on my PC now, I found a MoP server which was supposedly great but I'm just not as drawn in as I used to be. Instead, when I get the itch I scratch it with WotLK.

So why do I still love Warcraft? Because it's enduring, even whilst the in game world has gone downhill the stories are still engaging. In fact, it's not even the world, it's Blizzard trying to uncomplicate something that wasn't all the complicated to begin with that has distressed me so. For the future of WoW, I'll probably never get past MoP it just doesn't have that same hold on me anymore but I for one can't wait for the next film, the next book, the inevitable[2] single player Skyrim style RPG Blizzard with make one day to come and turn my life upside again.

Thanks for reading my rather long rant about my time in Azeroth. I feel I have to reiterate that I do not condone stealing the game AT ALL however there are probably enough clues in this post to get you well on your way to playing for free. Have you ever played WoW or did you stop at Warcraft 3? What did you think of the movie? My only complaint is that it wasn't animated, I mean seriously, they were talking about a Warcraft film way back when TBC was the new thing.
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[1] If this list provokes you to try out WoW for the first time please find a Blizzlike server - anything above x1 xp and x1 drop-rates is just cheating and you'll miss so much.
[2] It's not inevitable, I'm just hoping if I say it enough it will happen ...