Throughout my life, I've played plenty of RPGs. Some, like Wild Arms 3, were unable to hold my interest long enough to reach the finish. World of Warcraft, by comparison, has kept my continued interest for longer than I'd like to admit.

What is it that has given Warcraft its staying power? To me, it's the people. I've been in a number of different guilds, forging relationships with people in each that actually go beyond the borders of Azeroth. I met the GM of my first guild over the holidays last year and shared a dinner with his family. A former guildmate made a trip up to Boston from Philadelphia to crash my birthday party. I've sat down for lunch with fellow priest blogger Derevka from Tales of a Priest. And now, I've met the guys behind AddOn Spotlight and Big Crits.

This weekend was a pretty big one for your WoW.com East Coast crew -- fellow Massachusettian Mike Sacco and I travelled down to New York City to break bread with addon columnist Mat McCurley and Totem Talk columnist Rich Maloy. It was a great night -- we drank at no fewer than seven different locations over the course of nine hours. Between the spectacular Italian food, the beer, the games of Connect Four (Sacco was soundly defeated by Rich, as shown in the picture above), the 4 a.m. trip to McDonalds ("These fries are better than fries have a right to be!"), and Mike Sacco's stirring rendition of Criminal, it was the most fun I've had in recent memory.

And that spectacular night would have never happened had it not been for the connections I made over this silly little game called Warcraft. Have you ever rolled the dice and met some of us scary "internet people" in real life? What kind of IRL connections have you forged with people you've met and played with in game?

Tags: bromance, Bromantic, bromanticon, bromanticon-2k10, facebookfeed, game-discussion, gamer-discussion, rad-bromance, world-of-warcraft-discussion, world-of-warcraft-topics, wow-discussion, wow-hot-topics, wow-issues, wow-topics

Filed under: Breakfast Topics