Page 6 - WoW Magazine Issue 29

6 // World of Warcraft Community Magazine
ARTICLE
THE GIFT OF WARCRAFT
GIVING
nd with that, 2016 is almost over.
Winter Veil is well under way, there’ll
Abe some new presents under the tree
to collect on Christmas Day, and it is time to look
back on what has been an extremely eventful year.
When I consider what the game’s given me over
the last twelve months, there’s been an amazing
amount of evolution in an MMO that many people
thought couldn’t re-invent itself successfully. In
fact, there were those who considered that the
damage done by Warlords of Draenor would never
be repaired and yet here we are, with a completely
new way of playing our favourite game.
The changes are brilliant: when you think of
Artifacts, Class Order Halls, World Quests and the
new Mythic Plus dungeons, plus all the regular
staples of gameplay, there really is something for
everybody. From the most hardcore to the utterly
casual, your needs are more than covered: as I find
myself at the relaxed end of the pecking order, there’s
still a ton of choices to make. It’s not a problem
being here, quite the opposite, because the decision
to not allow the game to take as much time from
my life has been a very deliberate one. You see,
this was the year I turned 50, and I had determined
that before then I’d get myself to a level of physical
The GameOn Magazine
By Sarah Reeson
fitness to survive the next decade and beyond,
and that meant far less time in front of computer
screens and instead both in the gym and outside.
The decision to wean myself off the game for
long periods of time has been nothing but positive,
but there have been casualties, mostly within
my extensive family of alts. I still only have one
character at 110, and I doubt that will change any
time in the immediate future. However, amazingly,
this doesn’t bother me, and with the help of the
Warcraft Mobile App this year I was able to make
progress on days when I’d not even have a chance
to log into a PC at all. That was almost a revelatory
occurrence for the better and once I finally get
the family into Class Order Halls, this will at least
allow me a notion of progress even if I’m not able
to World Quest every day. There’s no rush however,
it will happen when there’s time and I’m ready.
When I submitted the title for this article, I’d
thought long and hard about all the things that
Warcraft has given me over the years, and then
realised that’s not what matters most to me after over
a decade. This isn’t me being thankful or grateful for
a bunch of pixels, although I am very much both of
those things… the best gift for me is always the one
that people patently fail to spot, because they’re too