Jan 2004, the week the game came out in the UK. It was all downhill from there. RSI, broken sleep patterns, random pains down my left side. Should really get that seen to :/

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I got hooked two years ago this week. The holidays right before I got into WoW. I was home visiting the family. My father's retired, we were at Best Buy picking up a few parts to do some projects. My mouth dropped as he caught up with me in the Audio / Video department and he was holding a copy of World of Warcraft. I do mean literally my mouth dropped. He'd never played a video game outside of the game he got in support of his model raid road hobby.

A month later, speaking to my mom she told me she was baffled he's been playing that "warcraft" game all the time. I was compelled to go pick up it as soon as I heard that, I jumped on his server and we've been playing together ever since. Although I have gotten more into the end game aspects than he has, we still have so much more to talk about now, definitely brought us closer together...

Java

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About 1 year ago. I was at that time playing Knight Online, which was having huge server problems. So much that I decided to download wow and try the free week. I hated it. First thoughts were "to cartoony" "very kidish" "PvP sucks".

But as I was thinking and saying these things, i noticed that I was still playing. I finally admitted to myself that I was hooked about 2 weeks later. I ended up selling my Knight Online player and went full wow by around May.

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I was hooked by a friend talking about the awesomeness of a mob that, as it happens, appears almost nowhere else in the game - the Harvest Watchers in Westfall. I'd never seen the game before, but the aesthetic that produced the Watchers - and, I admit, Dwarves With Guns and Elves With Zeppelins - attracted me almost immediately.

Added bonus: for two people I know, including my now-wife, the attractor was fishing. They decided they wanted to take over fishing since it looked exciting (in a Punch The Monkey kind of way; neither of them had really played any sort of video games before), got into combat while they were fishing, demanded to know what the little bars at the bottom were for, and went looking for more mobs so they could /try/ the abilities on the bar... and had their own accounts within 24 hours.

(Added added bonus: despite starting more than a year after I did, my wife has more total character levels than I do - and I'm the one with more alts! She also beat me to the level cap by more than six months...)

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Got hooked twice, really. First was after Star Wars Galaxies and Final Fantasy XI, when I wanted something more complicated than the former and more fun than the latter. Second was after a year break here at law school, when friends here started to play.

What point exactly for the first time? Despite my generally disliking 25-man raids now for the # of people, the first successful run of Deadmines was like sealing the deal.

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I "got it" 3 years ago I was in the low 20s on my main (warlock) in SFK. This was my first real instance run as RFC and WC were gimmes by guildies. We ran it at least 5 times in a row, trying to get all the sweet blues.

This being my first time with actual group dynamics, I leared a lot about my class and what not to do. Learned on 1st run, do not soulstone myself. Learned on 2nd run, melee is not optimal damage for my class. Learned 3rd run, after 2nd lesson, aggro management is serious business.

4th and 5th lesson: profit!

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It was in Dun Morogh after rolling my first character a dwarf hunter, and seeing how big the environment was...and then that almost haunting music of Dun Morogh....it was good nite I am hooked!!

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I created my account in June 06 and played all of possibly 3 days before going back to UO which was already beginning to slack in terms of community, then about 3 months later I ended up selling my UO account as well. Fast forward to 2 months ago. I'm currently unemployed and living in a tourist town, so job opportunities as well as entertainment options are quite slim in the winter months, and I needed something to fill the time. I didnt feel like starting up again with UO and its dying or possibly dead community for all i know, and more and more people i know from various forums I frequent were playing WoW so i decided to pick up a 60 day game card and give it another go. About a week later they had me, hook line and sinker. It took rolling one of almost every class and playing through a few levels before I found one that I enjoyed (Warlock, now level 66.) after reaching Outland it became apparent to me that I didn't want to spend hours in LFG so I rolled a prot pally and I'm enjoying it even more than the lock now, and of the 2 the pally will most likely be the first to level 70.

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Started playing WoW in last january, didn't catch me at first, after about a month of playing on my friends account I stopped playing for a few months because of school. I re started in late June on my new account as a draenei shaman, I've been playing hard core since level 10 D: (My first real character got to level 30 in a week...).

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I've never been a serious gamer before, but i started playing WoW about a year ago to play with some friends that were on the same server. I found the leveling pretty boring but enjoyed myself with leveling professions and reselling things from the auction house.
Later when i reached level 58 on my priest and entered the dark portal, that's where the game really started for me. I haven't stopped playing ever since! That's where it got me! :)

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A little before September of 2004, during closed beta, when my friend let me borrow his account while he was on vacation. Later he had a second beta key sent to him by "accident", which Blizz let him give away. Wow I've been playing this game a long time... maybe I need a life. :-)

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I started playing around when the game was first released in the UK. Got a couple characters up to the 30's, got bored as I didn't have anyone to play with, quit for a couple years.

Then I heard BC was coming out, and that Blood Elves would be a playable race. So I bought BC, un-froze my account and rolled a Blood Elf Mage. Got her up to the 30's, got bored, noticed there was another new playable race. So I rolled a Draenei hunter.

Now I'm level 70, with a level 70 druid alt and raid leader of one of the largest guilds on my server. And all it took was taking up my now co-guild mistress up on her offer of a guild to call my home... :D

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I really didn't think I'd like WoW. A couple RL friends were players, and one day while I was at their house and we were waiting for the other to get ready to go out, the other decided to log onto WoW for a moment. What I saw looked ghastly boring ... press buttons, gather stuff, go back to town ... /yawn.

But last year I found myself laid off, and while collecting unemployment and looking for new work, decided to get the 10-day trial. After around the 4th day, I loved it.

But the first time I "got it" was when I was 20something and struggling with one of the Grimtotem quests up high on the bluffs. There was a Tauren Hunter up there and we grouped up. While we don't group up any more, we still chat when both of us are on. But for a while, we were always grouping for one reason or another.

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yeah,i got hooked 1 year ago.because friends of my side all have played getting funny,so i joined the wow.

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Normally i hate online gaming but my 61 year old uncle ran out of funds so i bought him a WoW card what a mistake next thing you know hes like "Hey why don't you play for a while" that was two months and 4 days ago I still don't know wether to slap him or thank him its still kinda in the air but man what a good game

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I was playing Ultima Online with a buddy of mine for ages. Then he broke down first and bought WoW pretty much the third week after it came out for public consumption. He couldn't stop raving about it and how incredibly better than UO it was. I bought it the next day, hopped onto the same server he was on and rolled my paladin who is still my main to this day. I thought it was meh, kind of fun and wasn't terribly impressed with Stormwind when I paid my first visit.

Then I hopped on the tram and made my way out into the gnome section of Ironforge. As I made my way out of the mini gnomish city and into the main area of Ironforge, my jaw dropped. That instant where I saw all of the wonderful detail of the buildings and then such a hustle and bustle of activity just a few paces by the bank just had me right then and there. I was on the phone with my buddy as I was playing and he was like "Oh yeah dude. Wait till you fly back to Stormwind City." So, I hopped on the gryphon and just couldn't stop saying "holy sh*t" non-stop flying over most of central Azeroth.

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Well, servers are down so. I got hooked about 6-8months after Wows release. And my first toon was polynikes and has about 17-20 played days on him. and he's not lvl 70 yet. between being an altaholic and sports, travel, school and the occasional punishment doled out from my mom, I never have played continuously for 2 months straight.

But I love it and Poly is 62 now and burning through outlands

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I only started playing in mid 2007 and didn't really "get it" until yesterday when I ran Sunken Temple after a random "hey we need a Tank" message to me from a group looking for a PuG. The original mage who sent the tell ended up going AFK early in the instance for some unknown reason so the rest of the group ran back out, split up the group and reformed with a Pally in his place.

We proceeded through the instance until the Pally begged off saying he had to go, too. Grrrr! We had cleared everything up to that point and only three bosses remained. The remaining four members of the group including me decided to go ahead anyhow and we ended up downing all the rest as a four man group! I and a shammy were L55 and we had another L53 shammy and a L54 Rogue. I was an L55 Arms spec Warrior (now L56), relying upon scrolls and R.O.I.D.S. for damage mitigation.

Anyhow it was the best PuG I've ever been in so far and even though I had never been in ST before and was thus quite inexperienced with the instance, not a single negative comment was uttered about the occasional problem of my arms spec meatshield holding aggro. In fact I was incouraged by another member of the group complimenting all of us saying "it's nice to go through this place with such experienced players". I didn't say I was a total noob to the instance because it didn't seem important at that moment.

The shammy's just continued to throw down totems and we all pulled and massacred as we went, gritting our teeth and pressing on, determined to finish the instance. We did, with me getting the last kill shot when everyone else had wiped. I just kept hammering away at the last boss, hoping the totems would last longer than the boss did, and they did.

Up to that point I was getting bored with the seemingly mundane and repetitive mob killing quest grinding, but now I want more. And I want to get to L58 to pass through the Dark Portal so I can unleash some warrior fury upon Outland. I should be able to do that within the next few days and I'm very much looking forward to it. So yeah, I guess you could say I'm hooked now.

-Laz

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