I was going to write ten of these, but then I realized, it'll probably better to condense some of the years because most of them involved lots and lots of WoW. For now though, I do want to talk about year two.

My second year at Ten Ton Hammer was all WoW. Moving out of 2006, there wasn’t a BlizzCon that year, but there was The Burning Crusade, my first major expansion I covered. The Burning Crusade was a surreal experience, because vanilla WoW had been running for I believe around two years when it came out (Nov 2004 ~ Jan 2007). I didn’t honestly know what to think about the expansion.

Having been a hardcore raider in vanilla, I think my biggest mistake was not being a hardcore raider in TBC. The problem with my experience with TBC was that it was poisoned by the fact I wanted to be a casual. I desired not having to log in 3 to 5 days a week at a mandated time. I desired not spending every other waking moment farming gold, gear, resistances, etc. Instead, I wanted to just run Karazhan, farm gold, and do dailies.

Which was fine, but I did miss out on a lot of raid content, arriving at it much later than I had arrived at raid content in vanilla. On the flipside, I found my appreciation again of the social aspect of the game. Sitting around, grinding dungeons and doing dailies while chatting is probably the absolute most fun portion of an MMO.

Which brings me to a quick side discussion – I believe it’s important that we realize MMOs are a bit more than the mechanics that drive them, they’re the social interaction you engage in while the game offers some distraction to fiddle with while talking. Raiding, a prestige event, is designed around the fulfill the social needs of players who want to coordinate within the game, while dungeons and casual activities are designed to be a bit more thoughtless.

At the end of the second year, I did get to attend BlizzCon for the first time ever. My first convention! It was a scary experience, because I was young and in a foreign land of California. This was 8~9 years ago, when the Internet was still rather young and the world was nowhere near as connected as it was now. So it was a new and unexpected experience.

It was also great to meet a lot of the guys who around (Jeff and John) that year, who were part of our small team of Team Hammer that got to visit the expo. BlizzCon was amazing, I still have my Big Blizzard Bear reminding me of getting to meet all of the WoW fans and the energy there. I think that StarCraft II was on the horizon, and that was exciting at the time.

Overall, ’07 was a great year, of WoW and the Burning Crusade, along with BlizzCon. Very, very fond memories. In the next article I’ll go over probably 07 until ‘11ish, which were my tenure running and working on our WoW site. We’ll go over some of the interesting things that happened in WoW, up to and including my amazing prediction that WoW was going to have a free-to-play option. Until then, be safe and have fun in Azeroth.


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Last Updated: Mar 13, 2016

About The Author

Get in the bush with David "Xerin" Piner as he leverages his spectacular insanity to ask the serious questions such as is Master Yi and Illidan the same person? What's for dinner? What are ways to elevate your gaming experience? David's column, Respawn, is updated near daily with some of the coolest things you'll read online, while David tackles ways to improve the game experience across the board with various hype guides to cool games.

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