One constant thing in my life has been World of Warcraft. Since the game is currently having a 20th anniversary celebration, I decided to reflect on how the game has been a part of my life. To those who are somehow unaware of World of Warcraft, it is the largest Massively Multiplayer Online game that has an uncanny staying power. It is a game that is a lot of things to a lot of different people all over the world and I enjoy it for the world, the gameplay, the competition and collecting aspects.

I started playing when my dad got a new laptop when I was in middle school and he bought a copy of the game. It wasn’t anything like the comparatively highly pixelated Warcraft: Orcs & Humans game he remembered playing on his old Power Macintosh that sat disassembled in our basement. He wasn’t very invested in it and got bored of the game quickly and handed it over to me, the consequences of which could hardly be foreseeable in that moment.

I was completely hooked. The Burning Crusade (2007) expansion was in its final year when I began playing. When I wasn’t playing I would read the physical strategy guide, search online databases about items in the game, and watch funny videos made by people online about the game. My first character was a Draenei Shaman, this large blue skinned alien creature that used elemental magic. I think I was drawn to it because it was the only Alliance faction race that could be a Shaman at the time. I still play that same character to this day.

The game began to bleed over into real life. I had learned that some friends at school also played and so I had to make a character on their server and faction. I played a Tauren Warrior, a big minotaur character for a while with that group of friends until we mostly parted ways when it was time to go to different high schools. Upon learning that my last name is LeRoy, many people I’ve met over the years have said “Oh like Leeroy Jenkins”. It ended up being a really easy way to open a conversation when I was able to respond with something along the lines of “Yeah funnily enough I play too”. I made an animated video using game characters for an English class project. By my senior year of high school I was well known enough for playing World of Warcraft that my senior plaque said “Most likely to be addicted to WoW”. The school admin kinda just let one kid write all of them without approving them and that was not nearly the worst one that was given out.

All of this time spent in the game really helped the development of my social skills. I was always a quiet kid and I liked to keep to myself, but World of Warcraft is a game that requires you to interact with other players to achieve goals and I wanted to take on the game’s biggest challenges. I started as a solo player, then joined a late night raiding guild, always quiet and polite until I realized I was a really good player and I let it get to my head. PvP was a good outlet for this and I ended up experimenting with arenas. In time, I moved on and began my own guild with real life friends during Mists of Pandaria (2012) and tried to achieve things together, but it never really took off.

I took a break from the game for a while to focus on college. I would come back and play through the story casually in Warlords of Draenor (2014) and I ended up skipping Legion (2016) altogether. Just before the pandemic lockdowns hit, I was interested in playing again as an adult and I was once again captured by this world that I already had such a history with.

It was the end of the Battle for Azeroth (2018) expansion this time and I joined a random guild on my server and quickly became an officer and we were having so much fun clearing heroic difficulty that we pushed ourselves to see if we could do mythic raiding, the games biggest challenge. My ability to identify and address problems and organizational skills was one of the keys that led us to defeating 11 of the 12 bosses on offer in Ny’lotha. I was elated that we had made it that far on our first attempt, but I wanted more. In Shadowlands (2020), I had moved on to the top guild on my server because I had different goals than the people I had raided with during the last tier. I achieved my goal by killing the end boss in Castle Nathria twice. I also got to the highest rankings I’ve ever had in PvP and I started to fall in love with the highly repayable Mythic Plus dungeon system. But the time investment into playing at that level had to come to an end and I stopped playing for the rest of Shadowlands.

In the Dragonflight(2022) expansion, I became a Mythic Plus focused player and tried to push myself in the seasons where I was having fun. I got into the top 100 shaman damage players a few times during those years. I have also always been somewhat of an achievement hunter in this game since I was a kid, so during downtime I liked to fly around and catch up on lots of old achievements and in-game collectables. World of Warcraft has a lot of different activities for a lot of different types of players and I try to enjoy the game as fully as possible. I gained a solid group of people to play with by chance. I was attending a wedding of a friend I met online and one of his friends had heard I played World of Warcraft and we instantly connected. I was absorbed into their group when we realized we enjoy the game in similar ways and had similar goals and we’ve been playing ever since that chance encounter.

The game is in the War Within (2024) expansion as I write this and I don’t think I will ever be done with the game. I’ve learned that in the competitive aspect of the game there is always some way to improve yourself and make optimizations that are still possible year after year. I also like that I can log on whenever and or just do some casual collecting by myself in this world. I’ve become a patient, knowledgeable, helpful person in this game and I try and make interactions with others as positive as I can.