I'm Tommi, from Finland. Mostly Classic these days. Mostly Alliance. Mostly bear.
I started in 2005, on my older brother's account, without asking him. I was eight years old and I did not understand a single thing that was happening, and I have not really stopped playing since.
This is where I write about it — Classic, battlegrounds, world PvP, and a long-running argument with myself about which expansion is to blame for everything.
Cataclysm was the best the feral druid has ever felt in PvP. It was also the patch that let everyone fly over the entire old world, and the open world has never really recovered. Both of those things are true, and I have made my peace with neither.
For about a year my realm was a corridor with nobody in it. You could ride from Menethil to Ironforge and meet one person, and he was a level 19 twink who had gone the wrong way. Then they merged us into something bigger, and Stranglethorn started being frightening again.
Five nodes. No gimmick, no vehicle, no boat, no orb that makes you explode. Everything that happens in Arathi Basin happens because somebody made a decision, and that is the entire reason it has outlived almost everything built after it.
Everyone remembers it as the one with the demolisher that steers like a shopping trolley. I remember it as the only battleground where attacking and defending felt like two different games, and I still think it was ahead of its time.
I have tried. Three times. And every time I reach the Barrens and I am looking at the same beige hill for the fourth hour, and I think about Elwynn Forest, and then I log out and I do not come back.
Younger players do not believe this part. Before patch 3.1 you paid gold every single time you changed spec, the cost went up the more you did it, and it capped at fifty. I was a feral druid who wanted to play a battleground as balance. You do the arithmetic.
I liked every expansion up to a point, and the point was Mists of Pandaria. Not because of the pandas. I want to be careful here, because "the pandas ruined it" is the lazy version of an argument I actually have.
Main. Has been my main, in one form or another, since 2006.
My first ever character, made in 2005, named by an eight year old. Still standing in Ironforge. I will not be deleting him.
My Wrath main. Retired. Everything good that ever happened to me in this game happened on him.
Levelled entirely because I wanted the cat. Abandoned immediately once I had the cat.
Bank alt. Has never left the Trade District. Owns considerably more than I do.
My name is Tommi Korhonen. I'm twenty-nine, I live in Finland, and I have been playing this game since the European launch in 2005, when I was eight years old and using my older brother's account without permission.
I have played almost all of it. Vanilla as a child who understood none of it. The Burning Crusade as a teenager who understood slightly too much of it. Wrath of the Lich King, which is still the best it has ever been, and I have never heard an argument that moved me on that. After that it gets complicated. I liked Cataclysm more than most people did, for reasons I have written about at length. Mists of Pandaria is where I think the game stopped being the thing I fell in love with, and everything since has mostly confirmed it for me. I looked at what is coming next and felt nothing at all, which is worse than disliking it.
Then Classic arrived, and I was more excited than a grown man should be about a fifteen year old video game, and it turned out the thing I had been missing was not nostalgia. It was a world that is inconvenient on purpose.
What I actually do in the game: I tank. Bear form, five man dungeons, and I have never once minded being the person who has to know where we are going. And I do PvP, but the kind that happens outdoors. Battlegrounds, mostly Arathi Basin, and world PvP whenever the realm is busy enough for it to happen on its own. I have essentially no interest in arena. That is not a moral position, it is just not why I log in.
The shorter version: I like the parts of Azeroth that make you travel through them.
Instagram— rather less about this, rather more about being outside.