Nyndra's University Dissertation

[Nyndra]

Hello,

I am currently writing my final university paper, my Disertation. I look into the "Immersion in World of Warcraft", and I would kindly ask for your help, to gather more data for my analysis.

The only question I have for you is: What does "World of Warcraft" history and game-play throughout the expansions, mean to you and your life?

[Irediel]

So...

World of Warcraft has been in my life since I can remember.
My dad first introduced me to it at the age of 6, and at the time, I was going around as a Night Elf Hunter killing everything in sight.
I later got my own account as I started in school, and it was basically the most phenomenal thing ever. I could go to school, come right home and start playing the game with my dad. We had the greatest time ever.
World of Warcraft meant a lot to me and still does as well as for my dad. We learned each other better to know by playing the game, we became close friends and grew a better relationship and started understanding each other better.
In a way, World of Warcraft and the many expansions it had, saved me and my dads relationship. I was never really close to him, as he left me and my mom when I was three, and seeing my mom cry because of him, made me hate him.
Until we started playing World of Warcraft.

As I said, I started "playing" around the age of 6, and I am currently 16, turning 17 this year, and I've only ever had a break after my dad stopped playing the game due to acquiring a new job that switched his schedule around.
I've now come back after a years break, and I'm still enjoying the game even though my dad never plays it anymore. Even when visiting him, I can still come up to him and show him new cool features that are happening and so on, and he wishes he could still play with me.
He still enjoys the game for the same reason as I do, even though he may not play it anymore.

Hope this helps you Nyndra. Good luck. <3

Kind regards,

Irediel.

Normality is a paved road: It's comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.

[Aralisha]

World of Warcraft? Both affects me bad and good in my life.

Bad? Well, Ive started playing in TBC with my father when i was allowed to walk around with his main in duskwood... we were killing low stuff because obviously i didn't knew the game at all... Sitting next to him while watching him play made me interested so i asked my dad, what if we play together? My dad said sure and bought me an account. Together we sat, hours and hours at the Pc, doing raids and dungeons... Comming from an abusive past due my father and his addiction to the game, this was the only time i was able to have normal contact to him... Talking to him trough the game even though we sit next to each other, both with headset on and staring at a PC screen.

5 years later, my dad is divorced with my mother due him leaving for someone he met ingame. I became depressed and tried to find shelter ingame by becomming something great since i thought i wasn't anything inreal. Hours and Hours (sometimes up to 18h a day) i sat at the screen... I didn't care for my self at all, grades at school became worse, my body just got *** up and the depression became more and more... One day i realised WTF i'm doing with my life and knew this had to change.

this is where the good part came,
The game taught me alot actually, My english language had improved ALOT! both in writing and vocal, I met alot of friends online wich i am still friends with after 6 whole years, and I also learned that with teamwork you will gain more than doing stuff alone. After my i realised that WoW is just a game and not real life, i tried to reduce my game time, from 18h to 1h a day, wich worked perfectly well! I became better in school, my body felt better again and my depression got less and less by the day... Even though i still play it today with as much love as i did back when i was around 11 years, I will never forget what this game actually did to me, And I hope that no body else falls so deep as I did.

Regards!
Elisa


I'm the best Hunter, fight me

[Vouchery]

What does it mean to me? and my life? Well...

Lets start at the very first moment I saw World of Warcraft, I was always intrigued by fantasy based books and this game revolved around fantasy and i was Extremely hooked to it watching my cousin play,
this was the years where I didnt have any friends and the only nice cousin I had was the one playing World of Warcraft, and so he made a character and leveled it for me and let me play on it when hes not on.
This was basically my only chance to interact with other people as i'm constantly locked inside the house as a Kid and my only agenda was School > House >School >House, and basically this made me anti social and depressed, but it made a diff when I finally got the chance to play World of Warcraft because i get to interact with a lot of new people most of them were nice but you can never avoid rude people even in Video games,
but alas I had to still focus on my studies, but World of Warcraft taught me that not all people are bad and not all people are good either, it taught me that being different is ok.

I had to stop playing world of warcraft for years until I finally came back to it, I discovered they released an Expansion named Pandaria and I was instantly hooked in PANDAS! And because of my culture theyre seen as an auspicious symbol of peace, harmony and friendship, also I loved that they look like fat ninjas, I went on to discover Private Server's such as this one and I played on a PVP server for the first time in Pandaria and I had no friends at first but as time went on I met 2 wonderful people who conveniently lived nearby and we've been friends ever since, these people helped me when I was depressed or just needed an outlet to rant.
This goes to show that sometimes your True friends are not the people you meet in real life but who you accidentally meet in games. I hold World of Warcraft close to my heart because you can do a lot of things in the game, you will never get bored of it and you will get the chance to meet new people, meeting people in the game you never know what they look like, their age, what their job is, all that left is their personality and that makes it great because you will know that friendship isnt about how they look but rather how they act towards you.

And lastly the meaning of wow for me is relaxing with my friends. Having a laugh with friends, even when your Raid Leader is yelling at you, the feeling of accomplishment when you finish a raid or get an achievement together with friends and kill other people in PvP!

Your loving Panda, Cho ｼｮﾎﾞｰﾝ(´･ω･`)


Cho's MW Guide
Class Campaign Guide

[EscapeTheFate]

Honestly, It's been a rollercoaster of emotions when it comes to WoW. So story time begins.

When I first heard about the game being released, I instantly"fell inlove" with the game. I've been a huge WC3 fan, so MMORPG version of it was like a wet dream. I just couldn't wait to play it, but my PC wasn't strong enough to handle the game. So I had to wait 4 years until i got a PC that can handle WoW. Of course, the first thing I did on the new PC was to download the game, and find a good enough private server to start my journey through the game. I started playing on a TBC server, few months before WotLK came out. Turned out, most of my new classmates in high school already played on a server called WoWscape, so I immediately started playing with them. We bonded alot through the game, had alot of fun, until we got better at it and things went down a bit. Moving onto a WotLK server, as we got better at the game, we started to play arenas. Not casual 10-20 games per week for the arena points flush. No, no - we went full tryhard on it. We were playing atleast 30 arenas every night to improve and get on top of the ladder. We eventually became really good at PvP, being in the top rankings of 2 private servers (one being the old Arena-Tournament), we took pride in our achievements in PvP gameplays. And of course, with so much time spent on playing pvp comes the frustration from it. The 2 friends of mine that I played arenas with slowly started to become arrogant and toxic both ingame and irl. Every arena match we'd lost, I was the one to blame(The healer is always to blame). Being always a quiet kid, at first I took the critism to some extent, but of course I have a boiling point. I'm okay if I get blamed for a loss, but doing it everytime and translating it irl on totally different matters, was a breaking point. I never believed that people I considered my friends could bully me both ingame and irl just to feed their miserable puberty ego. But I guess I had poor judgement of people in my early-mid teens. Eventually we all stopped playing the game on 4.3.4(Cataclsym), around early 2013, as we were preparing for the final school exams to graduate. After the graduation we completely lost touch with one another, or atleast me with them. It was tough 5 years of highschool, but it's highschol for a reason, to suck. Taking a few years break from the game, I got invited by a college classmate of mine to start playing on Freakz, a couple of months into MoP. I was thought bad of MoP because I thought pandas as a playable race was legitemately the worst thing that happened to the game(coming from a guy that likes Cataclysm LUL), but I was like "meh fk it" and decided to roll back into the game, becoming an entirely PvE oriented player, to avoid the toxic adventures that I've had in the past. I wasn't really fond of playing in a Romanian populated server, as I thought that striving for the top would be impossible due to lack of communication with 90% of the server, but I had some hopes. I started with that said friend into a non-romanian guild that surprisingly wasn't doing bad in terms of progress compared to the "top" romanian guilds in the server. I decided to take upon playing new classes in the game, to explore the game more. With time I started to get better again and moved into newer and better guilds, which kinda satisfied my "hunger" for being on par with the newest content released. I made new friends, both from my home country and foreign, my communication skills improved irl aswell, thanks to this game, as I've had some tough time during my WoW break. I've never told that college mate about it, but if it wasn't for him hooking me back into WoW, I might have not been able to write this story right now. As dumb as it sounds, this game is what kept me alive at some point, just being able to dive into it, and forget about everything, not being left alone with my thoughts. But that kinda took a wrong turn. The game basically became a drug for me, not being able to get away from it. I failed my final university exam because of Legion's release on Freakz(I retook and pass it few months later). I even met a beautiful girl in WoW that became my girlfriend later, and dumped me because of my obsession with the game, and also treating her the same way I was treated by my highschool "friends". I became the very thing I hated.

Moral of the story is - play the game, but don't devote your life to it. Don't let the game take over your life, like I did. It both destroyed my life and it's saving it ironically. I lost all my irl friends due to it. Despite having a shitty low wage job, WoW is the only thing keeping me from ending my life. It's the only thing I can do to escape reality when I get from work, not being alone with my thoughts and think about how my life got ruined.

[Artofshadow]

I have been playing alot of mmorpgs (i could even say i tried them all) but none made me feel more accomplished then wow and made me happy everytime i logged in.

I played alot on freakz as you know, since the end of wotlk(though i've been playing since tbc on other servers) until today and hopefully i will play it for a long time still. Wow was a really good time killer in the first years without many goals regarding the game, just having a good time with my friends was enough. Once cataclysm came, i knew it was time to start reading and watching lots of class guides and boss encounters, hours and hours a day so i can perfect myself into playing any class and role this game has to offer. Once i discovered damage meters i knew i was designed to be a great dps one day, regardless of the class i was playing, from maining a hunter in tbc to maining a warlock the next 4 expansions and having alot of geared alts. The craziest thing i ever did in a week of wow was 8 raids, 2 on friday and 1 on each of the following days. During this journey i met a lot of cool people, made new friends online and even irl, and hopefully will keep doing so. I could say that the only reasons i'm playing the game right now is the sense of continuous progress and the potential competition between the players, otherwise, it would be like any other game for me.

On the long run, wow helped me be competitive irl, made me manage my time better, i did take breaks when it was necessary to progress irl and taught me to take things in moderation(even World of Warcraft as Blizzard says).

Hope this little piece of my wow experience helps you with your disertation. <3