HARDCORE CHALLENGE ON
CHROMIECRAFT
I got bored playing my main hunter, Nachocheese. Though I love her very much,
I'm just not a fan of TBC content aside from certain reputations, quests, and
dungeons (Zangarmarsh, Kurenai), and you basically can't run dungeons on
Chromiecraft without waiting 1-4 hours. It's just not fun so levelling is all I
can do on there until Wrath comes around and hopefully the population spikes.
Thus is born Byblos, my blood elf hunter who will be undergoing the hardcore
challenge, meaning if she dies she's permanently deleted.
Level 1 to 15:
1 | 2 |
3 | 4 |
5 | 6 |
7 | 8 |
9 | 10 |
11 | 12 |
13 | 14 |
15
Notes: I'm playing during the Halloween event but not participating in it
for free candy bucket xp because it sounds too cheap. I want to make it to 70
fair and square. So far nothing noteworthy happened except the Murloc quest boss
Mmrrggll almost killed me around 8 because I didn't know he could heal. I came
back with a pet and decimated him. I'm not going to do the big elite quest in
Ghostlands until at least 25 to be safe. Not sure yet but I could play very safe
and fully complete every level range of zones before moving on (Eversong +
Ghostlands, Tirisfal + Stillpine, Durotar + Mulgore + Barrens). I have almost no
memory of horde quests because it has been at least 9 years since I did them
with my pals Lorenzo and Cameron. If you guys somehow stumble onto
my website, I hope you know I will never forget our friendship!
MY WOW STORY
I first tried WoW as a free player some time in 2008 when my parents bought a new
iMac. The old computer was a purple PowerPC Mac that couldn't watch simple videos
let alone play modern games, so the new one was an incredible upgrade that threw
me head first into the internet at age 14. I was not ready but now's not the time
for that story. I had no idea how to control the game, being used to
consoles, so I quickly gave up on the trial account, which is lost to time. I was
a Human Warrior.
Later in high school, a lot of friends and acquaintances were playing WoW while I
was into Runescape. I felt like I was seriously missing out! So I tried it again
and actually bothered to learn movement and basic stuff. I wasn't really hooked
and I constantly made new classes to try new mechanics, not knowing that you
don't get a good snapshot of what a class is like until a ways past level 15. My
friend Austin tried to help me but gave up and I just played on my own. This was
around 2009, some time into sophomore year.
I actually had to force myself to stick to a character and just level so I
finally did, and that's when I got hooked. From grinding crocolisks in Loch Modan
to my first dungeon in Mauradon, it was over for me. No escape. I spent summer
vacation before 11th grade furiously levelling to 80 as fast as possible. As a
dumb noob, this was difficult but fun. I remember dreaming about what Outlands
looked like before hitting 60. I didn't want to spoil anything so I put my
blinders up and just levelled.
It was around September or October of 2010 when I finally reached level 80 on my
gnome mage, Crushkist (named after the sodas Crush and Sunkist), on the Stormrage
server. I joined a guild called Hardcoeur, hardcore with heart (after the French
word). They were really nice people. I remember the GM Rodenar (alt Curaja), a
druid. He left for Japan a few years later and disappeared forever, right around
the time the earthquakes happened. I hope he's still alive somewhere. Then there
was Kika the Paladin who took Rodenar's place (this wasn't until late in Cata).
Athra and Centra, husband and wife, mage and paladin; Malamar the hunter. I
think Malamar was a 19-year old girl and I was intimidated from trying to
flirt with her even though I wanted to. Chat
was active and friendly and I felt real belonging but still, I was nervous being
so new still.
The end of wrath and the pre-patch was a magical time. I remember skinning some
of that leather, whatever it was called (savage?), from a mob before Cata came out and
selling it for a huge premium! What a crazy bug. There were crocolisks I think
on the coast of what was the Twilight Highlands. I never got caught. I was
ditching school nearly every day, sleeping on my porch until my parents came home
to let me in so I could play WoW until 2-3am. My body fell apart, I grew fatter,
my hair thinner, I pissed and sometimes shit myself out of laziness, and I would
drink nothing but soda and eat Lean Pockets. Stuff happened at school that got me
kicked out and sent to a group home, which ended my WoW journey for a long time.
But before that, let's discuss Cata. At midnight, mom drove me to the
Gamestop to buy it. I had a special cup for it to drink soda and a mousepad too
with Deathwing on them. I loved it! Yes, to many it ended the game for them, but
I admit, I was a stupid noob still and was basking in the hype of a new expansion
for my first time. Servers were utterly fried and I couldn't do anything in
Vashjir for nearly 12 hours. I stayed up for, I counted, about 42 hours playing
the game, soaking up quests and lore and I still only made it to level 83 before
sleep took me. I had only started Uldum. My favorite zone was definitely Deepholm
because it was so vast but enclosed, like a blanket fort. Just thinking about it
makes me want to roll an alt and go through these zones again! I ran tons of
dungeons and right around the time I was being kicked out of school, I was doing
heroics with my guild.
Then I was sent into a group home. As of writing this, 2/2/21, that was 10 years
ago exactly. There were no computers or internet allowed in this remote ranch in
the mountains, Milhous Children's Services, so I was cut off from my drug and it
was hell. But my body began to heal and soon enough, my mind. I started getting
with the "program" and putting my time in to just go home and see my old friends.
I logged into my account during a trip to Oregon to see my grandparents, and the
hotel wi-fi must have flagged Blizzard because they promptly banned my account. I
was devastated but couldn't give up, so upon subsequent allowed home visits, I
started over on a new account, making another gnome mage Crushreborn. Actually, I
tried playing a Blood Elf hunter on Darkspear, where my fellow group home friends
Lorenzo and Cameron played, but I wanted to go back to my old guild on Stormrage.
I had missed the first and second raid tier of Cataclysm by the time I came home
and I hated the third one. The time dungeons were okay though. I'm not sure what
my opinion of Cata would be had I been home the whole time. Perhaps I'd become a
full-time raider, high school drop out, and end up hating the game. Perhaps I'd
be a stupid casual, increasingly deranged and fat without the guidance of
Milhous. Wait, that's how I ended up! Haha. I'd rate Cata a volatile 7/10 while
Wrath was 9/10. I didn't like the changes to hunter but playing gnome priest was
a blast that would never be replicated again. DKs also sucked because I couldn't
be Blood DPS like in wrath.
Mists of Pandaria rolled along while I was going to college for the first time,
now home for good after Milhous. My dad was an alcohlic and constantly provoked
me and tried to fight me so I was stressed to say the least. I retreated back
into WoW, forming all of the bad habits I'd shed going to Milhous. Back to
business. The zones were unimaginably beatiful and quests were... okay. Too much
linear tracking rather than the classic hub questing of TBC. I have deep, fond
memories of listening to The Residents, Stereolab, Yellow Magic Orchestra, The
Buggles and Annihilator while levelling to 90, all recommendations from my now
departed friend Torrin. It was a terrible but wonderful time, very similar to
Cata launch, emotionally. I quit college, mom and I left my dad to live in an
apartment, and I was shitting myself and eating junk again. Psychiatrists were
pumping me full of ultra high dose antipsychotics and it made me so tired and
apathetic I'd just sleep 18 hours a day with shit in my pants.
The dailies in the first tier of MoP were the only thing keeping me playing. My
guild, Hardcoeur, fell apart and couldn't do the raids so I was alone again. The
Klaxxi were so cool. The dungeons sucked HARD and I hated the reworks to
old dungeons. The numbers were scaling to stupid heights, the talent changes were
a nightmare, but the classes stilled played well and were more intricate
mechanically than I'd ever seen, and would see again. They sacrificed the RPG
number aspect of WoW for complex mechanics, which made it impossible for me to do
raids because I was and still am a huge brainlet. I took a long break in the
middle of MoP and came back when my friends from Milhous, Lorenzo and Cameron,
had graduated and come home.
This was a new era now. My old guild was hanging on to dear life, no longer
raiding while my group home buddies wanted me to play with them. I chose my good
friends from Milhous and well, strange but memorable stuff happened. I became a
powerleveller for money! Yeah. I only did it twice I think because the burnout
was harsh. I was playing 20+ hours a day for two weeks to keep the pace and only
made $19 or something like that. I started to "ghost" Cameron and Lorenzo and
that's when the dark ages started.
The Timeless Isle was really cool and then... WoD. The servers were the worst I'd
ever seen them (although not as bad as stories told of vanilla). Levelling to 100
was a chore, the story sucked, graphics sucked, music was okay, and the dungeons
and raids were just too mechanically demanding. I had nothing to do but level
alts and the garrison was the worst idea ever implemented into WoW. I quit and
rejoined, off and on, for awhile and the only thing keeping me interested was the
Twitch streamer Goodideagaming, Gig, the Gigger. He was mostly into Diablo III
but he was playing WoW awhile, farming gold and skinning and stuff. Watching him
motivated me to just dick around and have fun in different ways. Sadly, he was
banned and I've never truly enjoyed a streamer since then (I did enjoy
Alkaizer and Staysafe a bit). MoP, by the way, I
would rate at 6/10 and WoD, a whopping 3/10. It isn't lower because I still had
Gig to look up to and I was watching Asmongold (before he streamed) and Preach a
lot.
Legion. Eh. One step forward, two steps back. Classes were pruned hard and not a
single class felt fun to play except, what do you know, Demon Hunter. The self
healing and burst DPS is insane for that class. I really enjoyed it but it felt
like cheating. It didn't feel like playing WoW. It was like a weird private
server. The story was utter trash nonsense garbage by this point and I was just
hooked on memories of the past. I was mostly playing private servers, actually.
I put in good time at the last patch with Argus. It's a tragedy what they did
with the place. It was a stupid daily hub when it should have had its own
dedicated expansion. I mean, Sargeras! Come on. And Illidan shouldn't have been
redeemed. The whole thing was taking the awful fanfiction of WoD and dialling it
up.
Little did I know, BFA was even worse. Whereas Legion improved content-wise,
bumping up to a 4/10, BFA is a stinker at 2. It's not 1 because it's technically
playable but has nothing else going for it. I put a grand total of 20-30 hours
MAX into this expansion and I'm absolutely glad I did. Let's leave it at that.
Finally we get to Classic WoW. I had never played real vanilla before and was
excited. I mean, I'd been on private server but half the quests were bugged or
I'd get ganked and camped so
this was a trip back to when I was levelling to 80 in 2010 but to 60, and a bit
harder. I'd played on Emerald Dream, Warsong, Nostalrius, Elysium, Kronos, and a
bunch of hard to remember Polish servers (Theater of Dreams?). Classic wasn't
exactly what I wanted and I was disappointed by the layering system. Servers have
no right being more than 3000 players. Yes, I'd rather have queues because queues
don't effect the actual in-game economy unlike layering exploits. I don't care if
I have to wait 6 hours to get into the server, it's better than layering. Oh
well. I tried to make friends but it just didn't work out. I was watching the
streamer Staysafe a lot and he's certainly a cool fella but I just grew bored
without anyone to play with. My old friend Daniel wanted to join but I was
already levelling on one server and couldn't be bothered to switch. A sad, missed
opportunity. I'm sorry Daniel.
This leads me to where I am now. I couldn't possibly care less about Shadowlands.
If I ever play it, it will be to level 50 (they capped at 60) just to experience
old quests from Cata and MoP. As for Classic WoW, I just don't have the attention
span anymore. I've tried getting into it. Maybe when Classic Wrath of the Lich
King comes out, if I'm still alive, then I'll give her another go. Until then, my
journey with WoW seems over. It was a purely destructive force in my life and I
for one am glad that I am (mostly) rid of the menace.
UPDATE 2024: I am shocked Blizzard is still alive. It weathered a predatory buy
out and some unbelievably bad press. They are openly and consistently
preying on their sunken cost whale playerbase but no one seems to care or call
them out for such unethical behavior (probably because that's just the MMO
business model, and it has been predatory from the beginning). 2 expansions are
now here since I wrote above and I honestly don't even know what they're called.
Dragonforce? And some void elf looking lady villain?
The biggest tragedy has been both Classic WoW and the private server scene.
Classic servers were doomed from the start but here we are with gold tokens,
openly endorsed botting and gold selling. Blizzard obviously runs the Chinese
gold selling ops (remember, Blizzard has been employing veterans and former
defense contractors/feds for years, and people like Steve Bannon ran actual
Chinese gold farming sweatshops). I wouldn't be surprised if they are running or
at least taking a cut from the biggest private servers like Turtle, Ascension,
and Paymane/Lolten. In exchange, they DDOS upcoming small indie servers.
Chromiecraft is nice but pretty dead with a population between 100 and 500
depending on time and day. That's where I'm at now. I'd like to quit playing
forever and am closer than ever before once I have my fill on Chromiecraft. I
think there's a World of Runescape server in development I might check out
someday.
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