Found In the Woods

On Wednesday night I showed up at the local GameStop around 9:50pm to get in line to grab my two copies of Wrath of the Lich King, the new Warcraft expansion pack. There were only a few people there so I gathered my things and headed over to stand in line with the other nerds. It turned out to be a fun experience, pretty low key, full of heated discussions over which class combinations are more powerful in Arena matches, what it was like raiding in early BC (“OMG remember when Magtheridon hit the tank for over 1k each time? That was nuts!. We used to have healers for our Shadow Priests just to keep them up”), how lame RP is, how much Rogues *used* to suck, and how l33t old school pre-BC raiding was. I had a good time eavesdropping in on the various conversations and soaking up the excitement as the line grew and the level of anticipation for the 1.5-year-wait that was coming to a close.

One of the coolest things that happened, besides getting my copies a few mins after midnight, was I overheard a few of the guys at the front of the line talking and recognized a name they brought up from an old guild I was in. Actually, it was my first guild, and I was only a social. Invited by a RL friend of mine, I soaked up a lot of good stuff in that guild. They were off running high-end pre-BC raids when I was just getting my feet wet in Elwynn Forest on Dob. They were plowing into Karazhan when I was falling in love with tanking, head first in Zul’Farrak. Well, it turns out the few guys at the front of the line were all in Shadow/Legacy/Requïem, and the guy at the front of the line was no other than Aranor, the GL. He’s a really nice guy and it was pretty damn cool to finally meet him in the real world. We shared some stories about the old days and swapped war stories from recent adventures. He told me to transfer a toon over to Cho’gall (where a lot of those guys play now) and join them, but my commitments to Cenarion Circle are deeper and I’m having so much fun working on things over there. It’s tempting, I guess the jury’s still out. Maybe I’ll transfer my mage or something. Who knows.

Midnight hit, the manager let us in one-by-one to pick up our already-paid-for copies, and we all ran to our cars, smiles a mile wide, booked home and installed the x-pac for a long night of leveling in Northrend.