New Tool Brings Lost World of Warcraft Friends and Missed Connections into WoW Classic

Many things have changed since World of Warcraft debuted in 2004: the Azeroth card has quadrupled; Deathwing twisted the landscape in Cataclysm; Arthas perished in Anger of the Lich King; and Illidan was introduced, killed, resurrected and exiled again. But for the players who have held on during the 14 years, there is no better measure of time passing than the memories of everyone you knew before. The year 2004 was pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter and pre-discord, which meant that a whole generation of Internet friendships lived and disappeared on World of Warcraft. We would only learn later how difficult it was, that these links could be completely cut off. Once they're gone, they're gone. Ask any Warcraft veteran: We all lost people. If only we had the foresight to ask for their full names during these endless races of Dire Maul. You know, just in case the unthinkable thing happens.

Vanilla Friends is a second chance. The website attempts to fill the gaps left by the pre-social media era by allowing Warcraft players to revive the long-distance agreements that they had made with other players there are more than ten years. It asks three pieces of information: the name of your character in World of Warcraft between 2004 and 2006, the server on which you played and your email address or your Discord user name, so that those who remember you have the means to contact you. The registry currently contains 48,000 names, all submitted by lone Warcraft veterans who wish to correct some of their missed connections prior to the launch of Classic at the end of August.

"When I installed it, we were an average of three people a day, then some content creators shouted, and we had a few hundred people, and we went from 4,000 to 8,000 people," he says. Sams, the architect behind Vanilla Friends. "We had a [Blizzard] post one day, and he almost closed my data. "

Sams is not a programmer or a web designer. He tells me that the background of Vanilla Friends is a simple WordPress site, linked to a tangle of Google documents. Functionally, it is a catalog of all World of Warcraft kingdoms that were active during the pre-expansion period of the game – the era that grunts today call for. "Vanilla Warcraft". Once you're there, you can browse by server name, character name or guild name, to find the souls who proposed their recipes in an online chat, which saved you from a group in Alterac Valley, or who have always been a capable tank or a hard healer at the time when you and Azeroth were young themselves.

For Vanilla Warcraft fans, Blizzard has promised to offer vintage sceneries, low-resolution models and archaic systems in his next reorientation, World of Warcraft: Classic. But that's not enough. The true irreducible must repopulate the kingdom with the same people with whom they were playing 15 years ago.

Lose contact

This is a difficult desire to express to those who have not experienced it personally, but World of Warcraft and most other contemporary MMOs have the means to forge a certain intimacy across all ganks and corpses. I remember the night my guild finally killed the last boss of Blackwing Lair, an infamous 40-player raid on the top of a volcano in the Eastern Kingdoms, after working for eight consecutive hours. Our guild name has been listed as one of the best on the server. But what I remember best is the way we then drank electricity. The discussion box exploded. We all wanted to immediately try our new shiny weapons. So we started a last-minute Stratholme race at three in the morning. It was like the dying embers of a wedding reception, as the boys in the hospital untie their knots on the dance floor, eager to keep the energy alive. No other video game, before or since, has given me the same feeling.

We may not have realized it at the time, but as high school friends lose touch, the relationship in World of Warcraft is tenuous. The people with whom we would overthrow empires could disappear in the air just because we lost our connection with the game. Sams set out to resolve this injustice; He has created a place where the Warcraft community can meet forever with his friends.

The saga of Kuja and Opeth

On the Vanilla Friends Discord channel, there is a sub-section called "Success Stories". This is where Warcraft veterans gather to share amazing stories about how the website brought them together with a particular Orc or Gnome they thought they would never see again. It's here that I've told the story of Opeth and Kuja, two Warlocks, who spent time in a World of Warcraft kingdom during the first few years. days, the craziest of the game. They attacked the Scarlet Monastery, then they were friends for life.

It started like any other friendship in Azeroth. Opeth was in The Barrens, struggling to complete a quest. Kuja was in the same situation. They closed their eyes and exchanged an invitation to the party. Opeth does not know exactly what caused their relationship – they are memories of decades, but he remembers his quest with Kuja for a few hours, before being caught in a larger group that wanted to take down the fanatics behind the instanced walls of the monastery. After that, it made sense to keep the partnership alive.

For two consecutive years they were inseparable. Opeth immediately sought the name of Kuja when he was connecting and together they conquered the boundaries of the world; pick up the spoils of forgotten catacombs, stroll through the jungles, dream about the glory to come. He pondered the teenage cat passing through their Teamspeak channel – both installed in separate rooms well after bedtime. Whenever they did not play World of Warcraft, they were talking about World of Warcraft.

"It would be just the little things, we would be sitting down to play, and the game would be reset for two hours on Tuesday night, we would be right there on Teamspeak connecting their warlock armor," Opeth said in an interview. interview on a Discord call. "We were both noobs, we had no idea what was going on, I said I liked Felhunter more, and he said that he loved Nemesis more. I was like: "Perfect! I'm going to fetch Felhunter and you'll have Nemesis!"

Finally, Opeth launched a warrior. It never made much sense to have two warlocks in the same party. Soon, they were at the same level and in the same guild. They progressed through the treacherous extremes of the World of Warcraft dungeon, as they had always promised. The pair fell in love with the game for its extraordinary ability to bring together strangers like them. This is the kind of discovery you are aware of long after leaving World of Warcraft.

The way their relationship was dissolved was nothing bad or scandalous. Kuja was seduced by another guild, where one of his friends played, and Opeth transferred his talents to another server after some people he knew in real life started their own career in World of Warcraft. The two men decided to stay in touch in the way they could handle it, but as everyone who was online in the early 2000s knew, it was remarkably easy to disconnect.

Kuja left World of Warcraft in 2007 during the second expansion of the game, The Burning Crusade. Opeth held on a little longer before hanging up his keyboard towards the end of 2008 's Wrath of the Lich King. For more than a decade they had not spoken. In Azeroth, you often know your friends only by their dwarf or elven name, and these do not appear in the phone book. Today, Opeth is 30 years old and lives in Canada. Last May, he finally broke the silence.

"When I saw this website, I thought:" I wonder if Kuja is activated. "It was sorted alphabetically and [there he was,]"He said." It was the level of nostalgia I was looking for. Just, "fucking shit, this game released 15 years ago, it was my life for two years and I play with the same player that I knew at the time. & # 39; It was like putting the last piece in the puzzle. Everything is there. "

Warcraft Class (ic) Meeting

Opeth tells me that the pair has not failed to beat since they started talking again. The only difference is that they are both over the age of ten, which gives them a lot of things to catch up with. "We were stupid kids at the time," he laughs. "All that mattered to us was to jump from the university to play World of Warcraft." This is one of the strange Vanilla Friends wrinkles. It is difficult to prepare to talk to someone you never thought of talking to. Sams compares the feeling to a first date: "You have not talked to them for a long time, you say to yourself" Is this weird? Does that make me a vine? "But he, like Opeth, says that once they demolished the initial clumsiness, everything clicked.

Eli Dalton, a 31-year-old Georgian, tries to make a real headache in front of World of Warcraft: Classic: he wants to re-assemble his ancestral guild Vanilla Warcraft, Requiem. Dalton no longer plays on the World of Warcraft live servers, but he has kept in touch with a handful of members of the Requiem clan. For the rest, he turned to Vanilla Friends, recovering the old members of the guild and sending them back to the fold. Vanilla Friends is replete with minor wins, but Dalton is the author of an honest restart. Twenty-five members of the birth-born Requiem will all return characters on the same server, more than half of them returning to World of Warcraft for the first time in years, as if nothing had happened. exchange.

"We sit every night on Discord, we talk to each other as if nothing has changed," he told me. "[The only difference now is] you could hear a baby in the background instead of a dog ".

I am almost jealous of the surrealist realm created by Dalton. I too have my Requiems. Me too, I have my Kujas, and me too, I spent years unsavory in college, where I was able to reassure myself that I was loved and valued through the people with whom I killed monsters. But until now, I have not found anyone that I lost with Vanilla Friends. At the moment, there is no excavation of Blackrock Depths back home in my future. So I will go alone and try to rekindle the magic myself. (But if you're there, Albinozod, I'm waiting.)

We can not rely on World of Warcraft Classic to successfully maintain an extremely personal nostalgia. It's easy to fear that Classic will fall flat. Maybe I'll play a few hours and I'll leave again, with the final judgment that my optimistic memories have nothing to do with World of Warcraft, and that it's about youth and the abandonment of all responsibilities. You can join the troops, you can dive back into Molten Core, but you will never be a teenager again. All the elements of adult life that first caught your attention on the game will always be present. The world will never be more sublime than it is right now. You'd better hope that nostalgia is able to fill the gaps.

I'm asking Dalton this question. He repeats that he is a true believer. With the help of Vanilla Friends, Requiem will leave again. It's all the hope he needs. Like everything else in World of Warcraft, it's a group effort.

"It was never about the game." The type of game that generated a certain sense of community. "When you meet other people, you develop relationships," he says. "I've already developed these relationships, and what I want is to deepen and deepen them, and I'm really looking forward to seeing how far we can go in this evolution." in adulthood. "

Editor's Note: World of Warcraft Classic will be available on August 27, 2019. We played it! Check out our WoW Classic Upgrade Guide and our WoW Classic Prints below: