Hi,
Nickname's Riv/Rivlet, from Spain, Europe. I found out about Warmane through Twitch and Google. As the title suggests, I'm just somebody looking for an MMO that can make me lose myself in it. Unfortunately, I deem that to be scarce as of late.
Let me give you some info, in case you want to help me out with some suggestions: I'm 35 years old, so I was born in 1990. I played my first videogames when I was 5 or so, mostly thanks to my older brother and cousins. Truly, my first consoles and videogames (of my own) were the original PlayStation with Final Fantasy 7 and the Game Boy Color with Zelda: Link's Awakening and Pokemon Gold.
Focusing on MMOs, I first came in contact with them through a forum I used to be in during the early 2000s. People there were playing Ragnarok Online, so that was the first experience I had in that regard... and what an experience. I absolutely loved (and love) that MMO. I played on a private server. Money for videogames was always an issue back then (kid, parents ruling, etc.). Second one was Lineage 2. There were others as well.
When WoW came out, I had to watch from the sidelines. It was very unfortunate, because I really, really wanted to play it. But yeah, buying the game and paying a monthly subscription was prohibitive. So... The love I had for the wonders Blizzard used to make back then (Warcraft, Warcraft 2, Warcraft 3, Starcraft, Diablo and Diablo 2) met a barrier it couldn't break.
Fortunately, I had the ability to test it out a little bit on a private server when they became a thing. My tauren reached level 40 until I got bored/occupied with my studies.
Guild Wars became my scapegoat. At first, when Prophecies came out, it didn't appeal enough to me. A couple of years later, when I got the Complete Collection, I fell in love with it, its stories, its world, its quests, its characters, etc. The overall feeling, so... Big Guild Wars fan (and a bit of a loremaster).
Something similar happened with Guild Wars 2. I bought the game at launch, but it had changed so much in comparison to the original Guild Wars that I felt it wasn't for me. Years later, I gave it another chance and I got hooked. It's incredible how good the game is in many ways. Unfortunately, it also "betrayed" what it used to be in terms of storytelling and world building. I'll elaborate on that later, because it's connected to me being here.
Then came the turn for Final Fantasy XIV. This time I had the money, but I always felt biased towards subscription-based systems. Fortunately, it was after Yoshi-P had changed the early stages of the game, which meant I could play the base game and Heavensward with its new questing system. The beginning was tough, but I was liking the experiment and considered subscribing. I got hooked, but then I made a mistake: to show support for the fun I was having with the trial in its early stages, I paid our subscriptions. Unfortunately, I didn't think that meant that, once the subscription was over, I wouldn't be able to continue playing at all (I thought I would be able to access the base game and the first expansion still, just like trial users) and that discouraged me a great deal, so I stopped playing.
I'm not poor, but I'm not rich either. Also, we rescue cats (18 of them as of today), so that takes a toll. I'm very responsible in regards to our finances, which makes me think a lot about every single € that goes out. Also, I work a lot (doing double shifts during this last couple of years to save a bit more), which means the time I had for gaming is limited. All of that means that when I subscribed to WoW on December 2024 (I got mega-hyped by the fact that they were relaunching Classic as if it was 2004 all over again), I barely had time to play and my mind was like "the design of this quest sucks; it feels like it's made to suck time and money out of me, instead of providing an interesting/rewarding experience". My friend got to level 30 or so. I barely hit 15, I think. Wasted time, effort, money.
But I still freaking love the Warcraft universe (W1, W2, W3 and their awesome manuals —yes, the games and the manuals are the only lore references I care about, because everything that comes in "expanded universes" feels too... convenient. Different.) and I still love MMOs. But I'm struggling to find something that really moves me.
I feel that's mostly because there are too many things that have changed. The videogame industry isn't what it used to be anymore. It's a money-printing (and money-sucking, specially for MMOs) mammoth that focuses too much on the audience: will it be able to get the money out of their pockets? will they like this? Will they feel offended by X or Y thing? And yes, it is logical. And every company/product should take the audience into account, but I also miss the times when the product came first. A bunch of crazy visionaries that had a cool idea in mind and said: let's make it happen. And then, people liked it. Less marketing. More raw creativity.
And so, after replaying Warcraft 1, 2 and 3 again, feeling captivated by them (and their manuals; I really want to credit how much soul they poured into them) I thought: what if I play WoW on a private server? At least I won't be thinking in terms of time and money consumed, even though I have other worries (will it be a good experience? is WotlK enough? will I miss the rest of the stories and expansions? will it be a fair experience? will I lose everything if something happens to the serv?). Don't get me wrong, paying for something is fair, but it's just subscriptions. My life, no matter how hard I try (and you can see that I tried) can't adapt well to them.
Specially if the deal is: pay base game, pay subscriptions, have ingame items and cosmetics locked behind ingame shops, ingame currencies, ingame tokens, etc.
Tl; dr: which server might be the best for me? I'm tempted to try the most populated one (I want an experience that is very much alive), but I read around that something more slowly paced, RP/lore focused would be Lordaeron.
Thanks. See you around.
