Raiding in World of Warcraft When It Was New

Raiding in World of Warcraft meant getting up to 40 people to agree on anything, then asking them to beat a giant boss together. Blizzard Entertainment launched the game on November 23, 2004, and it was an online role-playing game where thousands of players shared one world. You made a character, picked a race and class, and spent your nights questing, leveling up and teaming up with strangers. At its peak in October 2010, WoW had about 12 million subscribers, and it's still running today.

Making a character

The first night was all character creation. You chose between the Alliance and the Horde, two sides that couldn't talk to each other in the game. Then you picked a race, like Human, Night Elf, Orc or Undead, and a class, like Warrior, Mage, Priest or Hunter. You picked a server, and that server became your home, because your friends had to be on the same one.

Then came the name. It worked like picking a screen name, and the good ones went fast, so you ended up with something like Xxdarkmagexx and a lifelong regret. Players remembered each other by name for years, and the same names kept turning up on message boards, and running into someone from your server out in the real world felt like meeting a celebrity. Your computer might have spent the week before at a LAN party, but this was the machine you actually raided on.

Why was World of Warcraft so addictive?

World of Warcraft was addictive because there was always one more thing to do. One more quest to finish, one more level, one more piece of gear or one more run through a dungeon with your guild. The game rewarded you constantly, and your friends were usually online too, waiting for you to join them.

Guilds made it feel social. A guild was a group of players with their own chat channel, their own name above your head and their own drama. People made real friends in guilds, scheduled their week around raid nights and spent hours talking on voice chat while they played, much like the regulars in IRC channels years before.

If you came from RuneScape, this felt familiar, only bigger, louder and with more people asking for help with the same quest.

The long road to 60

In the original game, the top level was 60, and getting there took a long time. Players typed /played to see how many hours they'd spent on a character, and the answer was often measured in days. Leveling meant running across big zones, doing quests for people with exclamation points over their heads and dying to monsters that were a little too strong. Then you ran back to your body and did it again.

Some zones became famous for their chat. The general chat channel in the Barrens, a big early zone for the Horde, was known for jokes, arguments and endless questions about where to find one particular quest giver.

Raids and 40 people

A raid meant gathering up to 40 players, each with a job. Tanks held the boss's attention, healers kept everyone alive and damage dealers brought the boss down. One person not paying attention could wipe the whole group, and then everyone had to run back and try again.

Raids took hours, sometimes whole evenings, and they took planning. Guild leaders assigned spots, handed out loot and kept people from getting into fights over who deserved the good sword. The first time your group got through a boss, people yelled into their headsets like they'd won a championship.

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Leeroy Jenkins

On May 11, 2005, a video called "Leeroy!!!" showed up online. A guild called Pals for Life spent a long time carefully planning how to get through a room full of dragon eggs. Then one player, Leeroy Jenkins, came back from being away from his keyboard, yelled his own name and charged in alone. Everyone died.

The video spread everywhere, and "Leeeeroy Jenkins!" became a catchphrase far outside the game. It turned up as a Jeopardy! clue in November 2005, and Blizzard later added an achievement named after it. The player behind it, Ben Schulz, did interviews about it years later.

The Corrupted Blood plague

In September 2005, Blizzard added a raid boss named Hakkar, who cast a disease called Corrupted Blood. It was meant to stay inside the raid. Instead, it escaped through players' pets, which carried it back to the big cities. Low-level characters dropped dead in the streets, and players either ran away from towns or spread the plague on purpose.

Blizzard eventually fixed it, but scientists noticed. Epidemiologists later studied the event in medical journals, because players had reacted to the plague a lot like people do during a real outbreak.

South Park and the Burning Crusade

On October 4, 2006, South Park aired an episode called "Make Love, Not Warcraft," where the boys spend weeks leveling up to defeat a player who is ruining the game. Blizzard helped by providing character models, and the episode won an Emmy, the first time a show built from game footage like that took one home.

The first expansion, The Burning Crusade, came out on January 16, 2007, raising the level cap and adding new races and lands. Stores held midnight launches and lines wrapped around buildings, the same scene as the Halo 2 launch a few years earlier.

Can you still play the original World of Warcraft?

Yes, you can play a version close to the original World of Warcraft. Blizzard released WoW Classic on August 26, 2019, rebuilding the game as it was before the first expansion, with a level cap of 60. Lots of old players came back, found their old friends and got lost in the same dungeons again, probably still wiping on the same pull.

Things people remember

Any raider's away message from back then probably said something like this.

Where is your old raid group now?

FriendCrib has groups, which are a bit like guilds with no loot drama. Start one for your old server, invite your old raid group and catch up on what everyone's doing now. Make a crib and find your party. Somebody in there still remembers who pulled the boss early.