teebling's bday? Congrats mate! 28 huh, ahh to be young again..
Don't want to make you dread the future or anything but god once you get a couple of years into your 30s you really start to notice it, urgh..
Enjoy youth while you can! Sure wish I could lose weight as easily now as 5-10 years ago.
More on topic, Wow definitely had a profound impact on my life. I started in late highschool and came to slack immensely with my studies due to playing too much. I toned down wow significantly in very late vanilla (around nax release I think) as I started university, but once TBC came out my brother got me back into the game and I went all out hardcore raiding all the way through TBC and Wrath, MT'ing and dpsing for the server's leading guild.
I met a girl through wow back then and we ended up living together for years. She saw how I was slacking with university and got me to take it more seriously, and so I ditched my math major to study English instead, and around late cata-early pandaria I played very casually in order to graduate properly. We however split up and I went back into hardcore raiding in late pandaria/early-mid WoD. Just before that I also finally graduated and became a highschool teacher of English and math.
After working for a few years and saving up money I eventually went to Japan, where I arrived with such miraculous timing as to land a private school job after just a few months (they were desperate lol).
Time passed and I met my current wife, and well we got married last Christmas.
I have had many times where I looked back and thought my life/chances etc had been ruined from too much wow and such similar thoughts. But now looking back from where my life is, the encounters I had in wow and the timing with which I slacked to play wow/stopped to study ended up coming down to changing my degree just in time for a wonderful job at a great school first in Denmark and then later in Japan, where this weird math/English combination somehow was exactly what was needed at just the right time, in exactly the location that allowed me to meet my wife, a Japanese woman with an interest in Denmark (they are rare, let me tell you that), just as she was about to quit her job of 8 years and move to this area.
If I hadn't played wow I might've been an accountant or something, working somewhere in Denmark, never realizing my dream of going to Japan. Might have never split from my slightly abusive girlfriend (or might indeed have never met her and pulled myself together for my studies). Might have never met my wife.
And I would never have found this forum!!
Needless to say, WoW has been a massive part of my life for years, and I have had mixed feelings about it. Now, settled in a job at a permanent position, slowly making friends, learning the language, married, trying to have kids, and the original version of the game I so loved all those years ago is coming back?
Yeah, I can't regret it how things have turned out, that's for sure. And being able to admit to myself that it is okay I love this game so much, that even if I totally ditched the life around me to play it ended up bringing so much good to my life that I can now continue to enjoy it (a little more moderately) even this many years later and see naught but happiness around me..truly, wow is a life's companion.
I'll be playing wow classic until I sit here teaching my grandkids how to properly kite as a hunter, telling them stories of large fat monsters patrolling the dark roads at night so that they come home properly after school as good kids.. :p
Became a bit of a long story, sorry about that!
