Greentext

Summary: 3k hours into World of Warcraft, Retail + WotLK private server.

I've been playing vidya since... 1992? Classic Monochrome-green machine to play CalGames on.

Ever since then, my limit for a game tended to be about 100 hours. I got 500 hours into Clicker Heroes, sure, but that game was made to be run in the background, so that doesn't really count.

It was not until I found World of Warcraft where I slowly pumped hour after hour into its massive world. I found it somewhere in 2021 - near the end of BFA. The Shadowlands beta was out, is when I started. OK sure, I played a few hours at a classmate's house back in 2005, but I don't feel that counts. Anyway, I found that there was a F2P version where I could freely try out most classes, quite a few races, and a ton of quests.

I've walked everywhere (I even tracked where I've been in a massive image of the worldmap for about 500 hours-ish?), I walked because the mounts weren't available for F2P yet, did all the quests I could, tried every race (which includes the starter zones), every class available (had an excel where I planned it all out).

I ended up with 1000 hours. 500 for my main (Human Paladin - been wanting to play that since Warcraft 2), and another 500 spread out over my 40 or so alts. Ever since I've been coming back, because with each expansion release, a little bit more content becomes available, so I racked up another 500 hours there.

In the meantime, WotLK Classic was going to release, but my income was still shit, so I found Warmane, a non-Blizzard server. You could level 7x as fast, which I did a few times, simply to learn the difference between "Classic" and "Retail".

Then it hit me. I want the Loremaster title. That meant doing a little over 3000 quests (about 99.99% of all quests in the game). But 7x made me level too fast. Luckily for me, there was a 0.5x XP option. So that's how I grinded. I did every starter zone, every regular zone, every dungeon (I was typically the "overgeared" guy of the group, since the rest was rushing through). I had fun!

That grind took me 1000 hours total. Plus another 500 for all the alts before that.

I'm pretty sure I played over 3000 hours total.

Oh, and I ended up getting my Loremaster title, as well as the World Explorer Tabbard (because I've been everywhere).

My favourite places to run around was 100% the old world. Black Rock Depths just has an atmosphere that's completely missing from TBC onwards :(

I've been thinking of playing TurtleWoW, but not sure if I can survive the Vanilla client - the WotLK one was already pretty rough 😂