Clearing the Gravestones

I haven't really played World of Warcraft much in the past year.

I had played for around four years. I had gone from casual player to hardcore raider with an absurd number of achievement points under my belt and a two- to three-night-a-week raid schedule. I logged on almost daily. I ground hours of reputation (last count I was at 49 Exalted factions), I sought out insanely rare pets and mounts, I slogged through PvP arenas to obtain the most bizarre and useless trinkets for the bragging rights alone. I had thousands of gold. Hundreds of non-combat pets, mounts, and every single spell I could possibly learn. I knew every cooking recipe available, every alchemical transmutation, and capped my fishing skill. I was ranked third Feral Druid on my server. I was damn good at what I did, vying for top DPS nightly with a dedicated Rogue. I was elected Guild Leader of a Level 18 Horde Guild. I RP'ed with several different guilds on a regular basis. I was known on several channels, I helped newbies in my spare time, and I had explored every corner of the globe before flying was permitted.

And then in November of 2011, I stopped.

My ex-fiancé, who had RP'ed with me, intertwined his backstories with my own, had helped me co-found the guild, our reliable Off-Tank, left me. And suddenly, I just didn't have the heart to play anymore.

The Loque'nahak I had tamed. The collection of drakes I had earned. The powerful Purples (all gemmed and enchanted). The numbers I'd crunched. The achievements I'd earned. None of it mattered.

I gave it up.

Half my friends had had to stop playing. A new child, job demands, differing time zones, lack of interest... people had moved on. And when I stepped down as Guild Leader, the entire guild collapsed. I had no more reason to play.

Almost a year passed. A new expansion was announced, and I rolled my eyes. (Pandas? Really?)

But then two individuals came into my life who played. They nudged and encouraged me to get back into it. So... I did. I realized I'd kinda missed it. The problem was, they played Alliance. And I'm a Horde girl.

I rolled Alliance anyway. Nothing of my old game-life was really left. The entire reason I'd started playing the damn game in the first place was because I wanted to play with friends. If I played without friends, it was lonely. These two gave me a shot at playing with friends again, and I took them up on it. I chafed at being Alliance, but I got over it when I realized that both sides are full of assholes to pretty well the same extent, both PC and NPC alike. I tried to ignore the fact that my allies were now Gnomes and Dwarves and those damn Space Goats. But I did get to play as a Worgen, so I was at least at peace with my own character. I refused flat out to attack any Tauren, though. I have a limit.

Then the expansion hit. And somehow I just... kinda... I don't know. It felt like it was trying WAY too damn hard. And it was deflating to see all that hard work I'd done suddenly be relegated to "old content". I just couldn't bring myself to learn to battle my non-combat pets, or work toward any of the new achievements. It looked like... well, work. So my relationship to WoW even now is tenuous. But I still find myself looking back fondly at my old main, Alabachion, the White Tauren Feral Druid.

I'd written a lot of RP posts for her in our old forums. I loved RPing with her, even spontaneously. She was a deep, complex character with a long history and I'd loved developing her as new changes came to the world of Azeroth. I'd worked hard on her, and she eventually developed into kind of a secondary aspect of myself: the calm, fierce, powerful yet gentle female I always wanted to be. Feral, but civilized. Loyal, dedicated.

On a whim I decided to go back to the old forum - long dead after the collapse of the guild - to copy and paste all my old RP posts into a word file to save them. (It eventually totalled 35 pages of written work, the most I have ever written for anything, character or otherwise.)

But the forum had fallen into disrepair.

As any civilization that suddenly crumbles, so too did our dear old forum become the den of vipers, jackals, and worse - spammers. They had created literally thousands of dummy accounts and posted a myriad of useless advertisements. And somehow, somewhere, deep in the recesses of my heart, something stirred in anger.

How dare they disturb this sacred place.

I had not forgotten the old passwords. I tried to log in as Guild Leader, to no avail. But I would not give up so easily. I logged in as Admin, determined to clear away the creeping vines of spam and infestations of opportunistic bots. And I was successful. Immediately I set about tending this old dead place as a groundskeeper might tend a graveyard - trimming away the overgrowth, clearing away the debris, and keeping things tidy... even if those who once might have cared no longer would.

I banished the influx of registered but inactive accounts. I snipped off the useless and meaningless posts of the bots. I put up fences of permissions, preventing all newcomers from posting anything - no longer would interlopers find it so easy to spread their filth. And then I set about the arduous task of trimming the weeds... namely, the over 70,000 dummy accounts. Like so much overgrown grass I mow them down.

... perhaps it is a fool's errand. Something in me years to protect this place, digital though it may be, and to a bygone, silly era of my life.

But silly though it may have been, I loved it once. The camaraderie of the guild, the thrill of taking down a boss we had never defeated before, the pride in newly acquired gear, the drive to seek new things and reach new heights. The awe of watching the stories unfold, knowing we had driven them forward, the sorrow at watching favorite heroes fall to the might of the evil we faced, the exultation of wreaking vengeance upon those who had brought that evil. The fascination with the lore, the wonder at the new places we explored, delving deeper into the mysteries of the ever-expanding world.

And so it is, that a part of me isn't so unlike my old main.

It's what she'd do, if given the chance - tending to the old, forgotten gravestones of heroes lost but not forgotten, remembering their great deeds... for one must, or else they are indeed truly dead.