Dear Blizzard,

Despite playing since Burning Crusade, I’ve never actually posted on these forums, so here goes. I’m not posting to complain or to let you know that my account has been hacked. I’m not sure who to send this to so if this is the wrong place for a message like this, please forward it to whomever this would be appropriate.

I just want to thank the developers, programmers, artists, IT folks, customer service people and anyone else who I may be forgetting. World of Warcraft really means a lot to me, and for one very important reason:

After I got out of the house and got married, keeping in touch with my parents became difficult. My Dad and I had played WoW together regularly (we used to be in the same raiding guild, etc.) So we still played together semi-regularly. After a time my mom expressed that she wanted to play WoW with Dad and myself.

Now to give you an idea about my mom, she really did not like video games. She hated that I spent so much time on them when I was young. She NEVER played them. So her desire to play came as a real shock. So we got her a WoW account and we all began new characters. My wife soon got an account and joined the group and it became a weekly family activity. It was something we looked forward to every Wednesday. Despite my mom never having played a video game we managed to run a lot of dungeons together and get almost to Burning Crusade content.

My mom really enjoyed it, she enjoyed it mostly for the time spent with us (not to mention the “guild meetings” at Cracker Barrel.). But she still liked the game. I remember it was Scholomance (I think) where we gave up for the night and my mom called me the next day because she had an idea on how to beat that boss. That brought a wide smile to my face.

Well here’s the part that’s hard to write. This past September, my mom was diagnosed with malignant melanoma well into stage IV. She soon passed away November 27th 2013. It was a runaway train of a disease, nobody saw it coming. Tumors metastasized in her brain causing a number of small strokes, she lost her mobility and a measure of her cognitive clarity. Even when she was really sick, she even talked about playing. She missed it. We all missed it.

I write this today because yesterday was the first day that I logged in and managed to actually play for a bit. It was a big day for me.

In conclusion, thanks for helping make a great platform where my family could congregate and have a fun time together, even for my Mom (Stellie, Lvl 51 Warlock, Ysondre). It made all our lives a little brighter.

She'll always be in the family guild roster.
Azeroth will always have a little piece of her. Rest in peace mom.

An open letter to the WoW community.