Riffing on a quick back and forth I had on Twitter, I thought I’d wax nostalgic a little bit about my WoW phase.

When I played WoW, I lived alone. I was unemployed and in-between job interviews and freelance gigs I’d spend 20, 30 or even more hours playing each week. These days if I spend 10 hours gaming in a week, it’s a big gaming week.

Because I spent so much time playing, I was in an active guild and knew everyone else in it. We’d be on Vent with open mikes, laughing, talking, cursing, and laughing some more. I knew my guildie’s spouses and kids (tho as often as not, said spouses and kids were in the guild anyway). I knew when person X walked the dog at night, and what time person Y got home from work. These people were my social circle at the time. We weren’t big enough to be a raiding guild but back then doing 5 & 10 man instances had enough of an end-game feel that they felt very satisfying.

When I wasn’t doing something with the guild, I’d hang out in Stormwind. There was a strong role-play community at the time and I spent hours just sitting around in the taverns in Stormwind, chatting with people while drinking real beer in the real world. Not having a job to go to, I didn’t have to go to bed at a reasonable hour and so got to enjoy “late night WoW” which, at the time, was a period starting at 1 or 2 am and stretching until dawn when a lot of the ‘noise’ of the server went away and the people left felt like a real community. We’d chat until all hours. Azeroth became, effectively, my local bar to hang out in. With so much time to play, I never felt pressured to hurry through anything.

Then life changed. I got a job, got a girl, we all were sort of feeling like we’d done everything we could in-game and people started trying other titles. I didn’t have time to keep up. The guild kind of drifted apart and I left the game.

I’ve tried to go back a few times since, but it’s like going back to the places you spent your evenings-out at as a young person. There’re still people there, but you don’t know who they are, and the music they’re playing is different, and the decor is different, and the guy behind the bar sure doesn’t know you…he was probably in diapers that last time you hung out there. You just don’t fit in any longer and it just feels kind of depressing.

And yet today I bought Wrath of the Lich King and now I really don’t know why. I know I’ll log in, feel incredibly lonely because my old friends are no longer there, and log out again. Maybe Cataclysm will change things up enough that WoW will feel like a new place to me.

So at approximately 11 pm last night, I renewed my WoW subscription. And yes, the baby polar bears figured into that decision, more in terms of timing than in terms of the decision to renew. I felt it coming on, now that CoW is moving into WoW, and figured I may as well get the cute little rat pellet while I could.

I logged in a bunch of my old characters to get the bear and to be baffled by all their gear and crap, then rolled a new character on Rexxar, the CoW WoW server (how could I resist that). And I felt an overwhelming feeling of buyer’s remorse.

THIS again? Kobold varmints, kobold workkers, kobold laborers… defias headbands, grapes and garret’s head? It all came back in a rush. And it really struck me how little WoW has changed in the past 4 years, from the point of view of a level 1 character. I was astounded that, for instance, hovering the mouse over gear in your backpack doesn’t pop-up an “Equipped” window to allow you to compare (though this does happen during quest reward pay-offs). I was surprised that the graphics haven’t changed, that there were no new options for faces or hairstyles. That the character voices were exactly the same. It just felt old to me.

I mean I know that leveling is crazy fast now, and I see some interface tweaks like the fact that PvP has its own Tab, and Blizzard put these totally pointless Achievements in. Pets now ride in a tab on your character sheet. People who’ve played WoW all along told me “It’s like a totally new game now.” and I guess I took that too much to heart. Yeah there are some changes but it doesn’t feel ‘fresh’ in any way, shape or form.

I’m just a bit annoyed with myself. I now have subs to EQ2 & WoW and the on-going LOTRO Lifetime. Which means no going back to Warhammer for another month.

At the same time, I’m excited to be trying a PvE game with CoW members, where everyone is pretty much doing the same thing. We’re all rolling fresh on Rexxar and are going to check out all the old instances and stuff. I’m still trying to decide on a class. The character I rolled last night was a Rogue but I dunno if I’m into that experience. I get impatient with all the skulking around. I might start a drenai if for no other reason than the fact that I haven’t run through the newbie drenai experience a dozen+ times, like I have all the original race areas.