Slightly Green wrote:
Couldn't agree more, I had played MMO's before WoW and have played others since stopping WoW, but none of them match up. Still not going to go back to WoW however, spent far too much of my life on that game as it is, regardless of all the fond memories I have of it.
I don't think there's anything wrong with just letting something go and simply cherishing the memories.
The 'WoW golden days' for me are not going to return, whilst I'm still good friends and/or in contact with the people I first played with four years ago, our collective circumstances have all changed so that we simply couldn't play the game in the way we used to, even if we wanted to.
For some time towards the back end of Wrath and for the first few months of Cataclysm, we had a fucking fantastic Manx guild on the go. (A bloke started a thread on a set of local IOM forums asking if there'd be any interest in a Manx guild, and he got enough folks involved to start the guild.)
Even at our peak we generally didn't have more than about 15 members online at any given time, but we ran loads of instances, did plenty of 'old world' raids (vanilla 40-mans with 8 or 9 of us at Level 80 for example), all helped each other out, often just went onto the guild's Mumble server simply to natter, guild chat was routinely friendly and hilarious, managed to get some 10-man raids together and even killed the first six bosses in ICC.
The best thing was we were all Manxies, i.e. either lived on the IOM or had close connections to the IOM, and a lot of us knew each other IRL too - it was the best 'feeling' game I've ever known. I distinctly remember a couple of insanely late nights with a couple of guildies where I was still running 5-mans with them at well past 3am in the morning, needless to say we were all being 'alternatively fuelled' in one way or another to still be gaming at such a late hour - and it was brilliant fun.
Unfortunately as tends to happen the guild quietened down over time as people started to move onto other things or their circumstances changed, to the extent that in the end we had a sort of 'soft disband' and those of us still active in the game moved to another guild on a different realm. (But a lot of us are still in contact with each other and on very good terms, friends on FB etc, even if we don't game together any longer.)
I think it's a 'lightning strikes just once' kind of a deal, I really do - and I have the very fondest of memories for it, pretty much the best extended gaming period of my entire life.