World of Warcraft and Working in Tech
Long-ass post alert.
A Bit of Background
The year is 2007. My parents had recently got me my first PC.
One of the first things I learned was how to pirate video games and movies using BitComet and a very famous Bulgarian private tracker.
2007 had been an amazing year for video games, so I was having a blast playing Crysis, CoD: Modern Warfare, Mass Effect, Rome: Total War, Fable, and many, many other single-player titles.
At the time, the “popular” game in Bulgaria was Counter-Strike 1.6.
We gathered in internet cafes to play LAN competitively and bet chocolates and other sweets on 1v1s.
But that was never a game that I played at home. I wasn’t really into multiplayer games at the time. I remember thinking that it was too complicated to get it to work, host servers, or even join them, since we all had pirated copies.
That all changed when suddenly everybody in school started talking about TBC, Lich King, Blood Elves, raiding, spells, and all these other awesome-sounding things.
I didn’t know what any of it was.
But it all sounded so interesting and mysterious. It felt like I was the only one not in this secret club of raiding, elves, and loot.
So one day I went home and saw that my favorite tracker had a torrent called World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade.
And conveniently, inside the torrent description was a short guide on how to set it up to connect to a private server.
Now you might be wondering why anybody would want to play on a private server instead of retail WoW.
Same reason we had to pirate the games: we were really poor.
Paying for video games came to the Bulgarian consumer many years later.
The WoW Social Effect
World of Warcraft was my first taste of an MMORPG.
When I started playing, I wasn’t even a teenager yet. I was around 10 years old.
The game was so immersive. Such an incredible experience, with this huge open world and all these classes, spells, and dungeons. It felt like nothing else I had ever tried.
And the most interesting part?
There were other people there playing with you.
You could talk to them, form parties, and go do dungeons together.
Wow.
Since it was so popular in school, the game became something that allowed me to form a social circle of like-minded kids.
It also became a medium through which every member of our friend group could sort of prove themselves or showcase their strengths and interests without some of the social pressure and bullying that came with the live school environment.
“I didn’t know you were cool like that”
There was an older kid who I used to fight with a lot at swimming practice, for various reasons. He would try to bully me and we’d get into fistfights.
We generally didn’t like each other very much.
Kid stuff.
When Lich King came out, I managed to make a really strong Tauren Warrior fairly quickly. It had a funny name that was recognizable by other Bulgarians on the server.
I had also joined the biggest Bulgarian guild on the server: Orenda.
I’ll never forget the name.
One day I’m walking down the street and this same kid who used to bully me comes out of nowhere and we start talking.
It’s awkward.
We’re a bit more grown up now. We don’t want to fight again for no reason, but there’s still tension in the air.
I asked him:
“What’s up?”
And he replied:
“I’ve been playing WoW all day.”
Damn.
We had something in common after all.
So we started having a normal conversation for the first time ever. It turns out we both played on the same server, and we were both in the same guild.
When I mentioned the name of my warrior, I remember him saying:
“No way! You are ‘Sprincovkata’? I did not know you were cool like that!”
We are friends to this day.
He’s also working in tech now as a successful Software Engineer.
Guilds, Raiding, and Working as a Team
A few years passed.
Lich King 3.3.5 had come around and established itself. Everybody was now playing WoW.
It was the game at the time.
Worldwide.
I was still a teenager, still playing on that (biggest) private server.
But now I had a few years under my belt.
I had a main character for raiding and a main for PvP.
The two characters taught me a lot about different social scenarios. Both were cooperative, but the context was very different.
PvE
My PvE main was an Orc Elemental Shaman.
I wanted to be a top DPS in our raids, but I was never high up in the rankings, even though I had good gear and good rotations.
I was getting bummed out about it and worried that they would stop inviting me to the big raids, like Icecrown Citadel.
But I kept getting invited to every raid.
Everybody in the guild was friendly toward me. I was also very friendly and talkative.
Eventually, I voiced my concerns to the much older guild master—a working man with a family—and asked him:
“Why do I keep getting invited if I don’t contribute much to the DPS or healing?”
Meeting a Niche Demand
He explained to me that DPS stats weren’t everything.
I wasn’t the main DPS or the main healer. I provided valuable buffs to the party when we were fighting bosses, and there was nobody else who could provide those particular buffs.
He also said that me being cooperative and listening to the instructions of the raid leaders was valuable.
And, importantly, I wasn’t rolling “need” on items like an asshole.
That stuck with me.
It was the combination of my gear, my class abilities, my rotations, and my overall behaviour that kept me—a 13-year-old—in the biggest raids.
I was filling a niche. Meeting demand.
In much the same way, that’s what I’m doing now as a security engineer with a niche skillset in a big market flooded with people.
Most of the time, it’s a combination of factors that makes you stand out and be valuable to the people around you. Not a single skill, attribute, or stat.
PvP
My PvP main was an Undead Death Knight.
I was doing 2v2 Arenas with a very good friend and neighbour of mine. He was a Disco Priest.
We used to train martial arts together and even compete. I was a weight class above him, and we were both pretty good. We won a few tournaments.
At the time, however, we took WoW Arenas much more seriously than training.
We spent a lot of time acquiring PvP gear. Chasing that one rare trinket from ICC. Min-maxing. Testing different talent specs. Practising rotations. Looking at matchups.
We gradually started looking at the game in a much more mathematical way.
Something that I find myself doing now when working on engineering problems.
The effort we were putting in was paying off. We were winning arenas, climbing the rankings, getting tokens and reputation.
You could even say that we spent some time aura farming in Dalaran.
But there were, of course, challenges.
Paladins with their bubble. Frost Mages. Rogues. And all the other annoying counters to our particular setup.
That was honestly the part I found most interesting.
These counters forced us to push harder. We had to understand why we were losing, figure out what the other team was doing, and find ways to counter their counters.
It taught me a lot about researching complex, ongoing problems.
About the importance of preparation.
About how important communication is for a team’s success.
And perhaps most importantly, about how important it is to stay cool.
Getting tilted could turn a winnable game into a loss. Getting angry with your teammate could turn a difficult match into an argument. Neither helped us win.
I didn’t play any team sports growing up, so maybe this was my replacement for it.
Looking back, I think all of these experiences helped shape me, both as a person and as a teammate and colleague.
WoW taught me things that I didn’t realize I was learning at the time.
It taught me how to work with people. How to find my place in a team. How to identify what I could contribute. How to prepare for difficult problems, experiment with different approaches, learn from failure, and keep my head when things weren’t going my way.
Those lessons have translated surprisingly well into my adult life and into working in tech.
I don’t think playing World of Warcraft somehow prepared me for a career in technology in any direct sense.
But it gave me an environment where, as a kid, I could practice a lot of the same things that I now do professionally: collaborating with people, solving problems, optimizing systems, communicating under pressure, and finding a useful niche within a larger team.
And for that, I’m genuinely thankful for all the time I spent in Azeroth.