Off-topic Saturday--The End of an Era

I'm an avid (well, as avid as a non-raider gets) World of Warcraft player. Recently, I broke up with a friend of ten years (another story for another day) who also played. Because of how Blizzard has battletags set up, changing my battletag would do no good to conceal my identity, and even putting this person on /ignore would not suffice for me. When I break ties, I tend to enact a 'scorched earth' approach.

So I had to take the very hard step of completely cancelling my account, and purchasing the game anew.

Side note: my friend is not a bad person. She has a good heart. But she has severe Borderline Personality Disorder, and I stuck by her for ten years. I finally realized that unfortunately, I have to take care of myself. Our friendship has never been a healthy one. I reiterate, however, that she is a good person, even if her illness makes it too hard to continue being her friend.

I started playing WoW ten years ago this March. My first-ever character was a human female warrior. I was new to the game, and decided it knew best when it came to selecting a server. I had no idea what 'PvP' even was, so when the game suggested the Gul'dan server because it was low population, I took its advice. Hooboy.

I constantly--and I mean constantly--got ganked (attacked and killed) in contested areas, often by players 20, 30, even 40 levels higher. Despite the constant annoyance, I managed to level her to level 40, said 'Fuck this', and rolled a human paladin.

On the same sever.

You know the old saying about insanity and doing the same thing over and over, right? (I've never claimed to be sane.) I leveled her to 72, said 'Fuck this' again, and rolled a character on the opposite faction, this time a Tauren Hunter on a PvE server.

That was when I turned my back on the Alliance and forever embraced the Horde.

I named my hunter Ehallanee. Her one and only pet was a savannah huntress lion she tamed just outside of the Crossroads named Puma. I rolled her back in 2009, shortly before Wrath of the Lich King went live. at the time, there was no Dungeon Finder, so you either hoped to round up some friends or hoped your guild mates weren't too busy to group up and go. Mounts had just become available at level 30 instead of 40, and both the mount and the training to ride cost a fuckload of gold. Mounts weren't yet account-wide, either.

I remember farming the hell out of the centaurs in Thousand Needles for the money and silk they dropped to raise funds. Yeah, I could have made a blood elf chick and had her dance naked in Orgrimmar for gold, but I don't dig that (no offense intended if you do). Ehallanee and Puma farmed for two weeks and finally got the mount. A week later, a new patch dropped that put the gold and level requirements even lower. D'oh.

I remember running out of arrows for her halfway through the Sunken Temple dungeon and having to switch to my very loud rifle. I got complaints about the noise and eventually kicked, but I didn't care. I got to see actual dungeon content! This was back when missile weapons required ammo pouches and ammo.

I used to imagine her flirting with the tauren guy who ran Camp Taurajo, and the little, progressively more difficult 'Hunter, go and kill this creature to show your worth' quests. I remember killing Washte Pawne, because I was sure he would have a good drop, being a rare and all, only to instead get a quest that led to me (and presumably, Ehallanee) pondering the price of impulsivness.

I remember the search for Mankrik's wife.

I recall my early Outlands quests, and how excited I was to get those early gear upgrades, and how excited I was to lay eyes on the Howling Fjord for the first time.

I stopped playing her for a long time afterwards, as I got wrapped up in alt after alt, but she was still my favorite.

Now I have to give her up. Forever.

It may not mean anything to most of you. "it's just a collection of pixels and data," you say.

But just imagine, for a moment, something that did mean a lot to you, that you had to give up, because of a friendship or marriage or relationship or hell, even a job that had suddenly and irrevocably soured. Or it was never good to begin with, and you finally got the courage to just let it all go.

I will never see her again. But maybe after I'm done mourning that collection of pixels and data on a screen, I'll make a new Tauren, a son or daughter, because Ehallanee did hook up with that handsome Tauren after all, and they had a young one.

Maybe, just maybe, he or she will be a mighty hunter, too.