Why did you start playing WOW?

[Tinuthien]

I'm just curious how everyone else got into this mess...
So my husband is a gamer and his game of choice is WOW. I'm a reader and my books of choice are Harry Potter. Neither of us could see why the other could stand playing or reading over and over. Completely baffled and frustrated one day I made him a bet, If he read all 7 Harry Potter books I would play WOW (notice I did not specify for how long or to what extent). He held up his end of the bargain reading all 7 books (not the spark notes) and actually enjoyed them. I, then, had to play WOW. 2+ years later I'm still playing and he's watching Harry Potter movies.

[Mehetabel]

My story isn't far off from that actually.

I'm a total bookworm and my boyfriend used to get so fustrated when I got "lost" in a book so he wanted something that he could do when I was reading so one day he came home with WoW (this was a couple of weeks after TBC launched). I remember watching him create his first character, a little dwarf warrior, and being rather facinated. I knew nothing about mmo's at the time and when he explained that you could play online with other people I was definately intrigued.

He let me make my own character on his account, a nelf hunter (who I still have to this day), and I ran around with no clue what I was doing (I remember dying constantly to the spiders in the starting area! ). After a few levels on the hunter I rolled a human paladin and that's when I was really hooked. Even though we were sharing an account, my boyfriend also rolled a human rogue so we could play in the same starting area. We even joined our first guild when we were level 12 or so and it was really funny because for ages I think people were convinced we were the same person because we couldn't be online together

Then the inevitable, we obviously had to buy a 2nd computer! And a 2nd account. That's when it became really fun, we wandered through all the leveling areas together, slowly making our way to 70, with plenty of encouragement from our GM as he wanted us for the guild raid team that was about to start in Kara. I made lots of good friends in that guild, some of who remain good friends to this day.

We've now been in our current semi-hardcore raid guild for almost 5 years and we are truly home. We even have some of our friends from that very first leveling guild with us here now. I'm just as addicted to the game now as ever, and really can't see us quitting anytime soon

[Tinuthien]

That's awesome! I hope your boyfriend benefited from the "recruit a friend" when you finally got your own account. I think that was the main reason my husband agreed to our bet - he had a hidden agenda! It's really neat that you have made so many lasting friendships. My husband and I joined a guild started by our friends and they have since deserted us for Diablo. We have found a new guild (even changed realms to do so) and we are working on building friendships. It might help our cause if I raided more and collected pets less.
My first (and favorite) character is a blood elf hunter since I was fascinated by the whole pet idea. After reaching level 10 I went on line and mapped out every hunter pet I wanted. Then he tells me there are little companion pets you can collect too (and shows me Mr. Chilly). My first pet was Core Hound Pup. That's when I passed the point of no return. I saw you started during Children's Week; were you able to get one of the Children's Week pets right when you started? I have sadly missed out on that event the last couple years, but I am not missing this year!

[Gendou]

My wife and I were looking for an MMO to play together.
Eventually the choice came down to City of Heroes and World of Warcraft.

World of Warcraft had the ability to play as an undead Shadow Priest.
That decided it, and seven years later, my Forsaken Shadow Priest is still my main.

Pet collecting, for me, started the first time I saw someone with a Dark Whelpling in Orgrimmar.
I knew I had to have one, and I started farming. Pet Battles just added another layer of complexity to the obsession.
Amusingly, I've managed to convert a lot of our long-time guildies to Pet Battles.
Seeing the theorycrafting discussions about different team comps is amusing, to say the least.

My wife still plays, but she doesn't enjoy pet battles as much as I do.
She helped me farm Naxx for my Raiding with Leashes achievement though.

[Wamonge]

we are working on building friendships.

[Oceanaia]

My boyfriend at the time (back in 07) used to play WoW religiously. I, on the other hand, was into Anime/cosplay as well as surfing and had no interest in any sort of MMO type game. His WoW playing eventually got to the point to where it interfered with our relationship. After close to a year of just fights related to WoW, we were on the verge of just calling it quits.

One day we got into a huge fight because I wanted to see a movie and he had a raid that night (Sunwell I think it was). He told me that we should make a bet. The bet was if I could play WoW for 15 minutes with him then he would respect our date nights and not just have me sit around bored. I jumped on the opportunity to finally have my date night back and took the bet.

Later on that night after his raid, I agreed to jump on his other computer and use his 2nd account. I made a hunter only because the idea of having a pet that could fight by my side sounded cool. When my Belf hunter was made, I started questing. The questing, or playing, which was supposed to only be for 15 minutes turned into 6 hours! I didn't even realize what time it was till I noticed it was getting lighter outside xD

From then on I was hooked. I bought my own copy and made my own account and played as much as I could. This did not help my relationship and we broke up shortly after. Why, you ask? I was playing too much WoW and wasn't spending the time with him he wanted lol.

The moral: Be careful what you wish for, and IF you manage to get your significant other into WoW there's a possibility it may replace you xD

[Feathered]

Wow, alot of similar storys. Mine reasoning was somehwat similar but a little different.

My childhood friend of, at that time, 21 years moved a ways away from me and we were trying to find ways to stay contected that didnt include a long drive on eithers part. They had a renter at the time renting out a room in there townhouse that got them started on wow. I was aware of the game due to a colleague. I liked the idea of the game but refused to pay monthly for a game when I had free ones to play (an action I now regret...so many lost pets that I can no longer obtain). So anyways, while I was out at my friends place they were showing me their toons and this renter they had showed me his lock and its firey horse of doom! I was hooked. Being a horse person I HAD to have one.

So that night I started looking into purchasing a decent gaming computer, as all my current games were console, and within a week had a brand new Laptop (for portability if I was to go to my friends to play) and purchased all the current expantions of wow (which was up to Wrath). I started a Human warlock got it to lvl 20 and found that I hate playing lock >.<

Shortly after I started a Bloodelf Spriest. Zaiysa, I still have her to this day (even though she's been moved to Alli). I've met a bunch of awesome people who are very dear to me since I started. Which is why I no longer mind 'paying to play' which Ive rationalized as cheap all month entertainment O.o

My original friend that got me hooked left for SWToR, which was fine cuz we no longer are on speaking terms, and I have my 2 bestest rl friends to keep me company. All in all I <3 wow and its capability to feed my need to collect things.

[Spyone1]

I started after a friend of mine of about 8 years standing looked at my computer and noted I was playing Diablo2, Might and Magic 1-10, Heroes of Might and Magic 3 and 4, had played Bards Tale 1-3 to death.

He told me I would enjoy WoW, and set me up with a trial account. This was in vanilla, about 3 months out from the release of Burning Crusade. I started with a Tauren Warrior. After about six hours, I rang him and told him he was full of "it", this game was garbage, I was about to quit. (I used somewhat stronger language, but you get the idea).

He told me to dump the warrior and roll a hunter, which I did, Tauren again, and called it Ferendul. I am still playing and Ferendul was my second toon to hit 90, it is still around. It has a lot of company these days, with a total of 12 horde and 10 alliance toons on Aman'Thul alone (2 accounts). I eventually did get around to levelling a warrior, but not until the last 3 months of Cataclysm.

My wife, like most wives in the start, was a WoW widow. After 12 months of our discussions about me not paying attention, and me saying "at least I am home", I made her a bet. She had to try the game, and if she didn't like it, I would cut back to two nights a week. She now has three level 90 toons, although she cannot raid due to quite severe epilepsy which is triggered by all the flashing during a boss fight.

My oldest son and oldest daughter both play also.

[Velgana]

I started playing because my boyfriend and a ton of his friends played. They kept bothering me to make a character and join them. I was hesitant to do so, because I had never played a game like WoW before. I'm sure glad I did because here I am 6 years later... still playing even though most of my friends aren't anymore!

[Bollomfro]

I think it is very interesting, you can have your own ideas. Playing with a very exciting game

[Gwen]

I played WC3 religiously, but I didn't have a stable internet connection at home, so I convinced my then boyfriend to start playing WoW, so I could at least WATCH him play, when I was there. Eventually I got an internet connection able to maintain WoW, so I started my own account. I rolled on Moonglade, because that's where my then BF was playing. I made a nelf hunter, that doesn't exist anymore and I spent a good deal of time being a complete noob. My hunter was lvl 42 when I rerolled to my warlock, I've been playing since. This was in the end of Vanilla, my beloved Gwenn was lvl 17 when BC came out.
I've been playing on and off for ages now, I even met my current BF through WoW.

[Aingealwroth]

I found the site for WoW way back in Vanilla days. Thinking it was an RPG like D&D, I looked it over, curious. At the time, I was using a friends computer (cause I was visiting her) and had a common friend between us who DMed for me regularly. Once I started reading, I couldnt seem to stop, the thought of a character having 'professions' was, at the time, what really hooked me. Done reading the site (keeping in mind I havent evern read the D&D site all the way through at that point), I ask my friend if I could download something on her computer. She shrugs, reading herself, and says its fine.

Of course, this is when I learn it is a pay to play game.

I've never run into one of these before (at the time I'm a 14 yo in hs), so I am stunned and sad. When my mom comes to pick me up, I tell her about this cool game I found, and how much I want to play it. She is skeptical, especially since it is p2p, and ends up saying 'no'. Later, as life moves on, that 'no' turns into a 'lets try other mmos first', because mom is nothing if not logical. Many mmos later, even Evercrack via my dad, I have started to forget about the game I read so much about, at the very least, I forget the NAME of it and cannot look it back up.

Ironically, then, it is my DM who asks if I have heard about this game WoW, because he thinks I would really like the new races they just added in the latest expansion... He did not have the expansion yet, but was happy to let me see what WoW was the next time I came over. (NE Hunter) His toon ran all around in SW, showing me everything he could, then he finally relented and let me make one myself. (NE Priest) Because healing sounded like a good thing to be able to do, I stepped into this new world and went 'Wooooow'.

As of 5m of playing, I was a level 2, looting kitties and figuring out (so I thought) 'Hey, these sparkles heal me!'. Turns out, sitting makes you regen things faster. To this day, many people do not seem to know this, lol. Mom and I ended up sharing an account for a good long time after this, but we lean horde (not that we dont play allie too!) and were amazed by how many of our friends played without us ever knowing!

Since then, have gotten my own account, and have far too many toons to be reasonable. Mom was also originally the pet collector, but them becoming BoA changed that for me! Longest break from WoW to date is about 3 weeks... and since everyone else seems to have 'BF' in their reason, should likely add, all my serious BFs have been met via WoW, cause I'm that much of a Geek, lol.

[Amuneta]

I started wow because of my boyfriend, technically he got me playing d2 first. I bought that to mess with him. Message him ingame with stuff like nice butt, before he realized it was me, just to toy with him. Then that progressed to wow, which I was stubbornly refusing "why should I pay to play I game I already bought" but in the end I got suckered into it lol. Granted all this was in the first year we were together (9ish years now) .

[Chasmyr9922]

Well I have alwaya been into RPGs since I was young. A friend if mine in college got me started on EQ and that drifted into EQ2. I eventually got burned out and quit playing. I met a couple of awesome friends through a local games group. We started talking and my current guild mistress convinced me to give it a shot. 7 months later I am raiding as a Resto Shaman in Arathor. Pet battling came in December. I view it as a way to relax. I am up to 383 and 22nd on my realm which surprised me.

[Prettyfly]

I started because of my friends. My 2 best friends started during vanilla and prompted me to start with them. At first i didn't really like the graphics etc. but eventually i got hooked Now i still play and they have stopped

[Saasan]

I used to watch my brother play video games, and the one that looked the coolest to me was WoW. I had watched all through the Warcraft games and seeing how you could become a hero yourself, and have MOUNTS was way too cool. Unfortunately, I was young and had no computer of my own. Years passed and I went to college. I had my own computer, and a fine young man I had my eye on that played WoW. It was the end of BC, and I was hooked. I limited myself to playing during summer and school breaks, but then came along a much finer young man (my husband!) who had always wanted to try WoW. We were going to be long distance for a while, so we thought What better way to "do" something together while apart? Three years of long distance made for lots of WoW Date Nights and crazy fun. He was soon kicking my butt at all things WoW and here we are, four years later, happily married and with many, many alts!

[Tiggindy]

I'd always been a gamer, PC games, Intellivision, Nintendo and so on. I played MUDs in college. A friend's husband was in the EQ beta somehow, but I thought it looked kind of clunky compared to single player games and lost interest (the real game ended up looking lots better than the beta). Flash forward a few months and another friend's roommate was playing EQ and got her started, and she roped me into it and I was hooked. Not only was I having a lot of fun as a bard, but I'd "met" so many fun/interesting people in the game.

I played EQ for years and through most of my time in EQ I stuck with a small guild of friends rather than get into a raid guild. Over time friends got burned out and the guild kept shrinking and then kind of petered out. So I joined a raid guild, and ended up playing the game like a second job (4-6 hours of raiding every night after work, weekends were devoted to getting AA before it was raid time). I did that for about a little over a year. Then came the release of WoW.

I'd played the first two warcraft games, but didn't get into WC3, so I wasn't that interested in WoW. A lot of my EQ friends and guildies were jumping ship for WoW, so much so that we were sometimes having trouble fielding peeps for raids. However, I stuck with EQ since I'd been playing it for so long, even though it wasn't really fun anymore.

A couple of months later EQ had another expansion (Dragons?), but the same old same old annoying problems persisted. IIRC I was doing a quest in an area (an instance?), and I had to kill X number of a certain type of goblin, which was fine. I was pretty well decked out equipment-wise and bards were OP when played well. The problem was the last goblin for the quest, as I got it to low health, it started to flee. Snared and low HPs, trying to run away. It managed to aggro the next group, which had healers, so I had to kill them to finish my quest mob. Except one of the healers fell through the world, so I couldn't target it, and couldn't kill it, and my quest goblin just kept slowly fleeing, getting healed just enough to stay alive til the next group, which I would then kill. I think I chased it for 20 or 30 minutes before I got so frustrated that I logged out, canceled my account and drove to Best Buy to pick up WoW.

And they didn't have any copies.

So, I lost interest.

However, I wasn't going back to EQ (I'd gotten that annoyed with SOE). I still kept in touch with many of the friends from EQ, and found that several of them had migrated from EQ to SWG, and were now in WoW. So, a couple weeks after I had stopped playing EQ, I went to Best Buy again and they had a copy of WoW.

Once I'd loaded up the game, I found gnomes too adorable not to play one, despite being told that I should make a hunter. I wasn't a fan of necromancers, wizards or mages in EQ, so that left out lock and mage. I found EQ rogues to be a bit boring, which left fighter. My sense of humor being what it is, I liked the idea of a cute little girl running around killing stuff with a honkin' big sword, so warrior it was.

Shortly after I got in the game, I found one of the friends online. He mailed me some gold (5g!!!) which I picked up once I finished the newbie area. His wife had come on, and ran me into IF and showed me the tram (and /train, too cute!). Outside SW she told me about cooking and fishing (I'd like doing the tradeskills in EQ, despite how aggravating they were).

Then she took me over to the crazy cat lady... and my real obsession began.

I pestered the friend that had gotten me into EQ until she started playing WoW, and she's been playing since Vanilla too.

[Opallena]

One of my dad's co-workers got him into the game, and after a while us kids started playing; i was the last one to start, and now look at me; completely addicted to pet battles and mount collecting lol

[Pot8ohead]

I started out playing Warcraft II and very quickly got hooked. The expansion was great and if I got bored with the regular game, there were a lot of really good mods floating around the web to try out.

I wasn't really crazy about Warcraft III, particularly when I tried it for the first time in one of it's beta stages and it looked far too much like a cartoon (to me, anyway). I don't know how long it was out before I finally gave it another shot and even though I still didn't like the differences in play style compared to Warcraft & Warcraft II, I enjoyed the storyline so I kept playing.

When WoW was announced, I was thrilled. I signed up to be a beta tester (along with millions of others, no doubt) and forgot all about it until I got a beta invite in my inbox one day much, much later. I'm pretty sure I nearly peed myself.

My first character was a Tauren druid named Gryphonclaw. Unfortunately, I was in the last batch of beta testers selected and we were testing the final couple of patches before the game went to open beta. I managed to get Gryph to level 38 (sooooo close to getting Plainsrunning!) before the closed beta ended. I met some great people in that short time, though, and we all got back together on Uther once the game went live.

Sadly, I've lost touch with all but 1 of that group from beta. The guild we'd put together fell to pieces (I blame Molten Core and the fact that we seemed to have too many "leaders" and not nearly enough followers) and there was a lot of animosity between some.

In any event, Gryphonclaw is alive and well and I'm still playing, though not nearly as much as I used to (for which my wife is extremely grateful; she has absolutely no interest in this kind of game).

[Worgenbait]

I got into it because my brothers kept insisting. They were practically shoving it down my throat for weeks and months. Finally, I gave in, because with my whole family playing (other than my mother and grandmother, EVERYONE in my family plays) I figured at $15 a month, it was actually a cheaper form of long-distance calling with a game attached.

Now, I'm the hardcore gamer in the family. None of them can even really touch me. lol