I Miss My WoW Friends

Describe a phase in life that was difficult to say goodbye to.

Without one experiencing it for themselves, one can’t imagine how online people you’ve never met can become your friends and take root in your heart just as any tangible friend can. I didn’t set out to make “friends” in a game, at that time, “online friends” was a foreign concept to me, but the friends I made in World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV turned out to be the longest and realist relationships I’ve had in my entire life and also shaped my career.

I began playing World of Warcraft in 2005, when I was about 26 years old and my real life bestie bought the game for me for Christmas, to play with him. Before then, I was just playing God of War on my PS2. He said I just had to play with him because WoW was the dream game he’d been looking for, so I agreed to play with him and created a Night Elf Druid named Xeneca and he a gnome mage named Buddo.

I had never played a PC game before (PC games were still niche then and consoles ruled) so I had to learn how to navigate with a keyboard and mouse. The in-game world was amazing; forests, monsters, a world that seemed to stretch forever. I laughed at all of it because this was the first time I ever played a PC game and an MMO, and never saw a game so immersive, so I thought it was funny how everyone took the game so seriously.

Six months later, I joined a hardcore, end-game raiding guild called <Immix Morality>, and little did I know, this would be the thing that would change my life forever. There were so many good times, like the unimaginable joy and accomplishment you feel after downing a hard boss for the first time or getting that upgraded gear you wanted. Then there were just the human interactions like Todo, our Paladin class lead whose jokes and roasts would have everyone on Ventrilo dying of laughter, as long as you weren’t the one getting roasted. Then there was Beorin, the Warrior and the goth, guild lead who was always trying to be so practical. Moonfanar the female Night Elf Rogue who that was played a by a dude who was the logical dick. Eagleclaws, the class lead Druid who was an actual dick, flirting with every female player, but also turned out to be the closest person in the guild to me even to today. And then there was his brother Stuns, the human Rogue, who was the assassin that just chilled mostly quiet in the shadows. Vestalvirgin the Canadian holy priest, who kept dying even when poked by a murlock, but still she managed to outheal everyone in the raid and was the best in the guild. She was the only other female in the entire 40+ member guild, so we became buddies. Another close friend of mine in-game was Machinshin, who claimed to be a male model in real life, the “other” Paladin who I’d farm dungeons and mats with. Ironically, he would end up years later becoming the guild’s nemesis and bring about its downfall along with his circle of sycophants that came later after some guild drama. There was the OG, gnome mage Rocknrolf who was 70 years old in real life, and would just PvP and merk everyone. Little did his victims know they were getting merked by someone’s great grandpa. Then there was Broknar, another Paladin (Paladins were popular), who was a real life voice actor for games who would enlighten us with all his random character voiceovers while we played and his “twin” sidekick Bromar. Then there was Sedrikk the Rogue who nobody really liked because he was a coward, but we all tolerated anyway. Ironically, little did we know, he’d be the one to rise up three years later and save the guild from complete annihilation. Then there was Searos and Smorgy, the guild hunters who were known server trolls. They’d ninja-pull bosses in pugs, then feign death and wipe raids. I could go on and on about Immix, because the guild played out like some Star Wars saga. We were the #2 raiding guild in all of US-Skywall, but a “mix” of good and bad guys and elitist jerks; looking back in hindsight, we all were just various ranks of douchebags.

I had no friends outside the guild except Grand Marshal Scootercai, the server’s #1 top PvP Night Elf hunter. He lived in Japan, but he farmed the harder materials I couldn’t reach in the battlegrounds and gave me concierge service on crafting my high level dungeon and raid gear, always making sure I had the best in the guild. He even crafted my initial set that got me into the guild in the first place. He did all of this for me while he was studying in college and maintaining his Grand Marshal rank for months in battlegrounds. He was a beast.

I remained in Immix from 2006 to 2007 until it split between two guilds, because Blizzard shrunk the raid member sizes in The Burning Crusades expansion and Beorin had to cut half the guild. A lot of us didn’t take that lightly as we stood in anticipation if we made “the cut”. I made the cut and was able to remain in the guild. But remember when I mentioned my friend Machinshin ultimately becoming the guild’s nemesis? Well, he got cut and he didn’t take that well at all and vowed revenge on the guild. He eventually succeeded, years later. With the axe given to half the guild, and Sedrikk named the new guild lead, Immix Morality was renamed to <Driven to Conquer> and Machinshin made it his life’s work to destroy it and Sedrikk being a weak guild lead, also had his hand in its later implosion.

To put it simple, in Immix if drama were a guild, this was it. There were online “fights”, backstabbings, sabotage, love, hate, blackmail, and even “sex” (some guildie, a Warlock named, Darkdesires or something like that, got caught sending nudes of herself to other guild members lol) and revenge and even real-life death; Stuns ended up passing away years later from a brain tumor. We also had our resident European sick-o Mundis who’d brag about banging his goats. I never talked on Vent, so I had been in the guild for years without anyone ever having heard my voice and then the first time I talked after being in the guild 3 years, I was annoyed Sedrikk was again interrupting another raid to walk his dog, I was pissed and yelled, “Put it in a blender!” (Now you understand why a lot of us didn’t like him, because it happened every raid night). Everyone was was laughing, but in confusion asking, “Who the fuck WAS THAT?? LOLOL” and I said, “It’s me. Xeneca”. After 3 years of being a silent guild member, I gained the favor of everyone in the guild, except Sedrikk, just for that one spontaneous moment of anger. I was genuinely pissed at the constant dog-walking interruptions, but it was priceless.

I was in Immix until about 2008 just about when Lich King released. I gquit because it just wasn’t the same guild anymore, much of the OGs had already left and the guild was spending more time dying than killing bosses. Alliances and comraderies were broken with all the drama, so I switched servers to Malganis, rerolled a Death Knight named Gör, and joined a new Horde guild called <Incursio Varcus Pardis> with more rage than priceless moments because there were a lot of bad players. Then some of us split from that and formed our own new Alliance guild <Dissonance> where we downed bosses, but it became frustrating a lot of times, so I’d just do random dumb shit like jumping off the Lich King’s throne after getting pissed at a defeat.

Or making fun of some of the game’s pointless new cinematics in Cataclysm.

Or just playing solo and some random weird glitch happens in-game.

Or finding out that you’ve been playing with a famous porn star in your guild the entire time and never realize it. Back then, there was a porn star named Mia Rose who was in my Horde guild on Mal’ganis, a female Warlock named exactly Miarose. Not that I cared but I didn’t find out until after we’d be raiding a while and the server would make jokes about it. I’ve been in and out of several raiding guilds, so don’t ask me to remember which one it was, but all I remember is she was an undead female Warlock. She’s likely in my video archives from back then, but the 480p quality using Fraps back then was so bad, the unit frames are blurry, so you can’t even see the raid names.

But after so much drama in WoW, the curtains on the game began to come down and several of us put it on the back-burner for Diablo III in 2012. Nothing beats the feeling of chilling, busting through paragons while blasting heavy metal and eating pizza and Pepsi; the meal of champions. Most of my clique stayed in contact pretty much through that but that was short-lived. As a request from Stuns, in August of 2013, I started playing Final Fantasy XIV with him and that was another immersive world I fell into. While I couldn’t find a whole free company (another name for guild) to join and kill bosses with, we did manage to form a ragtag PvP clique of random players between servers to do Wolves Den arenas and battlegrounds. That group consisted of Cubanstrife, who I’m still in contact with today 12 years later (just talked to him yesterday lol), Hailie Winters, Epistane, and several others along with just server randoms Fuzzylogic (a dick), Bahamut Zero, Saucy Racer and others. That band of merry friends ended when Square Enix nerfed Wolves’ Den arenas and matchmaking became a pain and the class jobs became more watered down. We lost interest and just stopped playing.

All in all, I learned many life lessons in online games and made many tight friends. I think the most important lessons I learned was from World of Warcraft is the world is competitive so accept the challenge and fuck everyone. The lesson I learned from Final Fantasy XIV was to never give up, because there were many times, I thought we were defeated but then we’d come through at the end and win.

Forward to today, I’ve never been able to regain that kind of camaraderie between online gaming friends again. It’s just not there anymore. Everyone just wants to race to the end and quit when it gets too hard or there are too many objectives. Or is just in it to farm for profit, if there’s even a real person behind the avatar at all. We truly were a different breed of gamers back in the early 2000s, that I’m sure exists somewhere, but I haven’t seen it again for myself for a very long time.

Looking back, I think it wasn’t the games themselves that made today’s titles like WoW and FFXIV popular, it was the community. A lot of people will say it was the game that made WoW popular, but now looking back at it, analyzing it with a mature mind than from my 20-year-old self, it really wasn’t. The game was just background entertainment while playing with others, because you could still genuinely have a good time playing while sitting alone in some random desert in the world, picking flowers if some stranger messaged or came up to you asking for help with something. There’s no telling what next new adventure, or who you may meet, just from that one act.

I am still in contact with my cliques from these games and its been 20-25 years now which is wild to me. I’ve been friends with these guys longer than the people in my real life. We’re nowhere near as tight as we used to be though as many were teens or in their 20s (like me) when we originally started playing together and now have gotten married, had kids and just don’t play games period anymore. And then unfortunately, there were those who did die, like my friend Stuns, who passed sometime in about 2015 from brain cancer. I still have the chats with him from random in-game screenshots and it’s still hard to believe he’s gone.

I am now 47 and in my grown up tears, I say I really miss my WoW friends and all the good times we had in old Azeroth. Even though I didn’t catch all my experiences in pics or video in the early days, I’m glad I did catch most of it because I’ve noticed that all the old memories I was able to find online from a Google search, have all disappeared over time. So, if there was any phase of my life I was saddest to say goodbye to, it would be my life in World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV from 2005-2018 when I lived at my PC with my friends during the rise of those games. We had so much fun then. I really miss my WoW friends and if given the chance, I’d do it the same way all over again.

Rest in peace Stuns.