Where did I come from?

I’m sure that many of you have a different reason for playing World of Warcraft, and even following Blizzard’s dealings at all, but for me, it is really an ongoing epic that has changed its media format several times over the years, and continues to provide an extremely lush and intricate storyline that is matched by none other. I know that Benziez feels the same way, and perhaps some of you do too. Some people express their opinions of the game as an addictive, poor waste of time, but these are the same people who would sit on their couch and veg out in front of the TV. MMOs in general are a strange breed of game because of the social environment coupled with partial anonymity, and many don’t understand them. The Raid is a documentary that is being shot to combat that and actually show the rest of the world what we're doing playing this game (http://jointheraid.com/site/).

Following the first post, I'll go into what makes WoW fun for me and how I got roped into this whole thing. Warcraft started out with a semi-weak story in the “Orcs and Humans” game (which I played back in the early/mid 90s and loved), but it quickly evolved into something amazing over the next 10 years. I remember playing on a 56k Modem with my friend in the original Warcraft, and then on Battle.net with Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. Finally I played Warcraft III and The Frozen Throne because I love Real Time Strategy games. I think they're challenging, ever unique, competitive, and require quick reflexes. After the epic storyline of Warcraft III ended, I left Blizzard's games and went off to play through the Gamecube generation and then Xbox 360's early years. I didn't enjoy the "Hero" system of Warcraft III and there was no matchmaking back then so I didn't stand a chance of playing online. My loves went to Halo and Super Smash Brothers instead with a smattering of other great games in there too.

It was December 2006, my sophomore year in college, where I went to our annual Christmas party back home in Pittsburgh. For some reason our friend decided he wanted to have a "secret santa" this year and I agreed to it. It was fun because we were all off at different colleges and didn't get to see each other very much anymore...or at least I didn't see them. They all went to various colleges in Erie, PA. I should have known that something was up because to this day that is the one and only time he had a Secret Santa. I went about getting ammunition for my one friend, another got a blanket for his girlfriend...and then I opened mine. It was World of Warcraft. I look over at another friend - World of Warcraft. Another one - World of Warcraft. My "friend" was grinning sheepishly. The secret santa was rigged so that the 1/2 of our friends that played WoW got matched up with the other half who didn't play so they could get us into it.

I refused to play it. I actually even refused to install it.

So they did.

And I played.

And I played.

And I went back to college and told my roommate not to hate me, but my friends had installed WoW on my computer and that I kind of enjoyed it. Now, to set things straight, me and this same roommate were picking on people who played the game the previous semester because we thought it was dumb and we didn't understand it. He admitted to me that he actually had played several years beforehand whenever the game came out and would try to reactivate his account so we could play together. He played Melbu, the Gnome Rogue, and is now playing Midhir on the Terenas server. One day a friend walked into our room and saw us playing. He immediately started cursing us out and was pretty unhappy and I asked him what his problem was. He admitted that he had also played several years ago and needed to go reactivate his account now that he saw other people playing it. He did and he was Carretta, the Human Warlock who is now Benziez, the Orc Warlock on Terenas.

We leveled all that semester (before XP was changed to be easier to level from 1-60) and made it to the 50s by the end of the semester. Over the summer we continued to play and found ourselves in Burning Crusade. We progressed the whole way to Shadowmoon Valley where I hit level 70...and then asked Melbu - what now?

He laughed and said, "Now, we raid my friend. Now we raid."