Let me share as well I guess.

I was ten years old when I got WoW, I had had a laptop for a year already because my dad (who I spent every other weekend with) was the type to scream at people an then give them gifts when he felt guilty... anyway, I hadn't really known what to do with it until I learned about WoW. My friend had gotten it on the day it was released. However he didn't have a laptop so he played on his moms work computer. Similarily some of my other friends had trouble connecting.

I did not have this issue since my mom worked two jobs and my dad talked on the phone all day. For two years I played world of warcraft 18 hours a day. I didn't go to school or to sleep. I learned English, how to read a map and how to work in a team. I earned peoples respect for the first time in my life it seemed. They would listen to my advice because I wrote with correct grammar and punctuation about the actual patterns the enemies would repeat.. quickly people started to do as I said (something no one ever did in real life; listen to the tiny late-in-puberty kids ideas).

I think it's safe to say that WoW was my whole life. At the end of vanilla (shortly before burning crusade) I had finally reached level 60 but it was also then that I woke up one day with my neck stuck in a bad position. My mom took my to the countryside and I cried in withdrawal for two weeks like a heroin addict. When I came back the game wasn't interesting anymore, it had drifted a part.

During the glory days many things were different. First of all, the people didn't really know how to play the game. For some it was too intimidating / hard to actually grapple with the content and the storylines. Some of them were super immersive while others were difficult to figure out. Many people however were content to sit in the cities and ask for charity from the higher levelled players. This created high status for those players, however, if they were 12 levels higher than you then you could not see their exact level. This meant that you could be a level 25 dude in some shitty gear and still be considered a god by some level 10 dweeb. Being able to tell how strong someone was came down to recognizing the gear and gossiping with others OR being strong yourself.

Some of the coolest things about WoW were totally emergent, for example, IF was so laggy (because it had the only auction house) that walking through there was just a slideshow and I had memorized for how long to hold different keys to go where. Somehow it /felt/ like a really crowded place. When the PVP battlegrounds came you had to go to some obscure place and wait a really long time to get to play. It was kind of absurd to see the culture adopt to various things like this. If I had been older at the time I am sure I would have seen a different side to it, however, thanks to me being so young and making friends in the game who had kids my age they often had to go pick up from school around the time when I was supposed to finish school. So instead of them playing with their kids or me learning something useless at school I was playing with them and learning about what they were interested in, as if I was one of their mates at the pub.

One time I got invited to a wedding (of real people, held in-game) and a high level character gave me money for alcohol (I had never even seen a gold coin at the time) and my character got drunk in game, I had not been prepared for the "simulation" and it felt extremely realistic, I'd go so far as to say it was the first time I drank and partied because it honestly gave a similar feeling as later in life when I experienced these things for real. They had a level 60 priest (I think the only on the server) do the ceremony and then we had fireworks when we walked down the street.. Also the onyxia quest was freaking amazing when it first happened and all the NPCs in stormwind started panicking and the queen lady turns into some monster. Idk, all this stuff was freaking amazing. It's also why I learned about BF Skinner and FOSS. Basically, I owe WoW my whole outlook on life.