The World of Warcraft Expat
Can’t move across the world? Be an expat online!
While expat life is undoubtedly a dream way to live for many, it can get lonely from time to time. We miss the normalcy of our old lives and many things we have taken for granted in the past.
For me, the World of Warcraft (WoW) game has been one of those things. I’ve played the game since the original beta in 2005, thanks to my dad (yes, that means I made my first character at five years old), and I have played on and off all that time.
When I moved to China from the US, I didn’t think about how it would affect my WoW gaming. The internet connection from China to my United States account would be too faulty to play. Thus, I would lose all my progress in the last fifteen years.
Yet, my desire to play the game to distance myself from the everyday stressors of being in a foreign country brought me to try Chinese servers for WoW.
WoW is still incredibly popular in China. But, the biggest problem for expats is that you need a Chinese ID to make an account within China, which can be a considerable undertaking.
So how did I get around the Chinese ID requirement? Did I make new friends? Did I become the number-one player in China?
Below I’ll detail my expat experience as a foreigner in the Chinese World of Warcraft and how it has affected my life in the long run.
The Beginning of My Chinese WoW Experience
As I mentioned, you need a Chinese ID to create a World of Warcraft account. So in 2020, I got my (at the time) girlfriend to lend me her ID so I could make an account.
First, I needed to find English speakers I could play with to show me the ropes on the new server. In World of Warcraft, there is something called a “guild”. Guilds are a collective of real players that join together to progress in the game, fight big baddies, and have fun together.
Now that I could play, I needed to find a guild to play with! I googled “English speaking WoW guild on Chinese Servers” and found a 5-year-old (in 2020) post with this reply.
That’s right; I was following a breadcrumb from turtle_cunt_soup on Reddit.
After thirty minutes of trying to read Chinese to find the right server, I finally did it! I logged in, typed /who TCW, aaaaaand found 40 people playing even after all those years! I got an invite and started playing with a few of the guys.
Playing on Chinese Servers
I thought I’d try to play with Chinese people as I am playing on Chinese servers. Yet the TCW guild I was a part of had a reputation as a “laowai guild,” a slightly derogatory term to describe foreigners in Chinese mandarin, so many people did not want to play with us.
This was paired with, of course, all the chat being in Chinese. Two years later, my speaking improved considerably, but my reading and writing were still nonexistent.
These factors pushed me further into playing specifically with the TCW foreigner guild, which would prove highly beneficial as I made some of my best friends throughout those two years. We can play the game together, complain about life, and relate to one another.
A lot of us found a few things in common with one another. Instead of going to the bar every night, we’d rather hop on the computer after a long day at work and kill a few things. Doing this in the company of like-minded people made it even easier to spend every night on the game.
So, author, why did you stop?
Remember that old girlfriend I told you about? The one whose ID I borrowed for the account? Yeah…. The ID expired, and I needed to input her information again.
Let’s say she doesn’t like me very much nowadays, so I was indefinitely locked out of my account after being unable to refresh the ID.
Yet, even before that, I had stopped playing with the official TCW guild. As many expats, especially in China, can tell you. Some foreigners take it upon themselves to have a dick-measuring contest when surrounded by other foreigners. There was a ton of drama in the large group (around 40 people), so my friends and I just stuck together outside of that.
Although I was locked out of the account, my friendships had already been solidified, so the venture into Chinese WoW proved fruitful.
Alright, author, why did you write this stupid story?
Well, I wanted to paint a different narrative of expat life. We often hear stories of traveling to new places, getting new jobs, and everything under the sun about expat life.
Yet, I’ve never seen anyone detail their online expat life. Although my time on Chinese WoW was about a year and a half, give or take, I was still able to make incredible friends and memories.
I made friends with a Chinese father of three who plays the game to make a full-time living selling in-game gold or a Belgian actor whose daughter is famous all over China. Especially my friend Chris who almost fought a guy in Shanghai when I got punched in the face.
I would have never known or made memories with these people without leaving the US or playing World of Warcraft.
What‘s your unorthodox way of staying sane as an expat? Write a comment below and let me know; I’d love to chat about it!
Did you enjoy this article? You can find more JUST like it on my Medium landing page, where I cover all things expat and China-related. I’m also a freelance copywriter; if you want to contact me about the services I offer, you can contact me via my portfolio website.
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