As blizzcon hits down soon, a place at one point I wanted to go. Now, not even once.
Imagine recovering from cancer, on like your second round of chemotherapy and you are reading about world of warcraft as you are playing diablo 2, you get excited for it.
You also have a co-worker (David “Spammer, MrEmail” RIP man). Knows one of the founders and not only get you into the private beta access but you are now playing it early.
I get to rip it up as a human warrior, learning how amazing this game is and since I have access to play this at work, I get to build a second rig from used parts so now I can play it both at home and at work since at the time I was also working 18 hour days, from 8am till like 11-12pm every night. So I get to multi-task with gaming while I work.
This game was amazing; I bought the collectors addition using my own money I would get from the government SSI at the time while I was still not getting a pay check from the ISP. Instead of rerolling as another warrior, I became a druid.
At this point in my life, I should have been standing up for myself instead I went deeper into this game, to a point I never left anywhere when raids happened, I made sure I was dedicated to it at work or at home.
A year after the game came out, I farmed endless nights for stuff that was like elite to get (2005 my first video created in fraps is on YouTube now from my endless of farming of the Winterspring Frostsaber.) I was in one of the top guilds at the time for the alliance on Archimonde, I joined Archimonde because I had a few people from IRC joined with me at the time from /root on efnet and people from AppzNgamez on dalnet.
I used this game as a buffer from all the abuse I was getting, verbally from my own family, the drugs my own family was doing, and my own job and its abuse from verbal, mental, and even some physical. I was using this game to hide in, while there was so much shit happening at my job, I was being fucked royally. I paid no attention to it.
The moment I told Marty from the ISP to go fuck himself, as I found a new job. I attempted to use that instead of paying attention to what people was telling me. It was my tauma I was running away from; I had so much unfolded around me. I didn’t want to deal with it as I didn’t know how to. When I seek for helped, I looked for World of Warcraft to hide behind. I even attempted to use it to communicate with other family members to but when no one listened.
It was around 2009, I had too much going on and instead of waking up I hid behind it but when it became too much, I almost ended my own life because even in the game I felt alone because at this time game has changed drastically, I lost any guilds who was left and it started to become hard to catch up on.
After the move to Oregon, I really stepped away from playing as often as I did, I logged in to level up a little but I spent more time with the car culture, learning drifting and autocross and so much more. I was picking up life for once and I enjoyed it until my business partner decided to attempt to murder me because I was not who I used to be for him as he used to be a client for the ISP and I white gloved his business back then, He also attempted to ruin my own career.
I came back to vegas, I was already losing touch with World of warcraft, it became more of a chore at this point to play. It wasn’t fun, nothing really to do other than play with a few friends.
Game has changed so much at this point around 2013-2014 to a point it’s not fun at all, game was nothing like it used to be, it even lost that social touch. Elitism is pretty much the way at this point; game was built for it. Moment that you hit end game, you have to work even more to get a gear level now which could take a month or two to obtain solo. How is that fun now?
2018+ now the game implemented more of diablo 3 stuff into it with the mythic dungeons and when legion came out, it actually started to feel cool at least they introduced a lot of good features like leveling your weapons or gear instead of farming them.
2020+ is when I said I had enough, the moment they sunset all the features from legion and gave more to waste your time on and no one to play with and trying to figure out why did I spent my time in it? It is when I learned I played this game to hide from life and how much hurt everyone has caused me. Shortly after my mom passed away suddenly in 2019, I was getting that grasp on it already, so I wrote a book or starting it then. I finished it up end of 2022 after learning of Marty’s demise with the federal government. I wanted to be sure to include all the pain he caused me in that book because if it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t have spent years of my life using World of warcraft as a shield and would have lived a life post cancer, I would have obtained everything I have now sooner in life and wouldn’t have attempted suicide just to learn how bad it was for me and my neglect of my own life.
World of warcraft ruined my life because it enabled me to escape a world when I shouldn’t have. It was my addiction, because I needed to talk to someone while I wrote angry blogs (archive way back machine, wonderingraven.net and g-funk.net around 2003-2009) in the early 00’s about my job. I used it to hide behind it, as I had no one. The endless of misc content locked away with hours of hours of work, it hooked me in and helped me to escape when I shouldn’t have and let my mental health decline even further. No one seen it coming, no one wanted to help me they just kept on enabling it. I even played FFXI (final fantasy 11 too at the time), it had hours of content but I was done after a month easy even with the new content.
It’s hard to play a game when it’s no longer fun to play, knowing how much worse it has became and the people, it turned people in to these weirdo elitists.