The sense of community on Kronos at low levels

There is this impression that vanilla servers held a close community where players knew eachother well and had to maintain good reputation so as to be invited in groups. I will be discussing this point with the point of view of my leveling on Kronos.

While leveling I have to admit that I met a very limited amount of players, maybe 1-3 per area, with the exception of Stranglethorn Vale that for some reason was filled with Alliance (meaning I got to have some free spontaneous PvP action a.k.a. ganking :D and I loved it) and the Hinterlands where I spent way too much time hunting trolls and hoping for lucky mushroom/cauldron respawns in spontaneous groups (damn those mushrooms, did Blizzard ever think that 4 in the whole area is enough for 5 people? It ain't !) if I wasn't running away from a gnome warlock that had sliiiiiiightly more mount speed than me. On those occasions I remember only good interactions with the other Horde players, they were patient, comprehensive and fun to play with.

Free chest for Mangochutney :D

 Most of the time I was able to solo quests and elites either with the voidwalker or using some sort of shadowbolt-chain-fear, meaning I didn't have much reason to group either. And it took me less than a month to make it to level 60, that may have had its influence. Then again I did join groups for Ragefire Chasm, the Wailing Caverns, the Scarlet Monastery, Zul'Farrak and Blackrock Depths (in retrospective it's impressive how many dungeons I did considering how long they could take), but I didn't keep much contact with those players, however friendly they were. All dungeons could be completed, players always ended up coming (sometimes with a help of a summon) and very few ever left. I can't remember seeing a ninja.

My second dungeon ever on this server, great run except for the murloc boss wipe. Fatshammy, Chargebead and Commonwealth are now 29, 22 and 24, they haven't played in over a month. Rainforest seems to have deleted his character.

 My closest contact during this period was a warrior I met in Stranglethorn while looking for iron bars or such to whom I sent my excess raptor meat and food, he then needed bags which I could make and thus we met again and again, we started joking (how on earth is he using 20+ bags? Stacking ogre's panties?), talking about Warcraft, doing dungeons together, etc. He even invited me to his guild to start raiding afterwards, but my playtimes did not match.

In the end I would say that at level 60 I had 4-5 friends overall that I had met during my leveling, one of which I would never see online again (a warlock that had helped me back at level 20 when the Stonetalon's tarentulas all wanted me dead). I had mostly good interactions with others, but occasions were sparse, I spent the greatest part of my time alone.

So, the sense of community while leveling ? While players were frienldy and very nice overall I have to say that I did not find much interactions in my experience, I knew pretty much no one and had few contacts outside of dungeons but it is true that I leveled up way too fast, that as warlock I have it easy and that I had no guild and it may have negatively contributed. Besides, many leveling players stopped they journey and I did not get to see them again.

[See other articles about Vanilla]