Thanks to my love for MMOs, I’ve found the love of my life

Thanks to my love for MMOs, I've found the love of my life

World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Rebublic have ensured both personal and professional happiness in the life of Mein-MMO author Kevin. That’s the story about it.

In life you make many decisions and very often we only know afterwards how good or bad they were. Some of them even change your life so much that you can’t or don’t even want to imagine how things would have gone otherwise. To find the love of my life, I had to make a decision that I never thought would lead me to her.

I would therefore like to tell you the little story of how I met the woman who I was then allowed to marry and with whom I now have a wonderful child.

WoW sparked my love for MMOs

The release of World of Warcraft in 2005 took my life in a completely different direction. I was 17 at the time and had to beg my parents to pay for WoW’s monthly subscription. It’s not at all easy to explain to parents why they should now pay 13 euros a month for their child to spend significantly more hours in front of the computer than they already do. Luckily, they eventually gave in. Getting on my nerves every day and talking for hours about how important this is to me probably worked.

It was my first real MMORPG and, above all, the first thing that fascinated me. The huge open world, the ability to play with others, the quick and fairly easy entry, and all the things you could discover. It was just incredibly exciting because everything was unknown and new to me. I hadn’t seen anything like that in gaming before.

That was my first character in WoW. A paladin who made it to level 40 – but with a shovel as a weapon!

Countless hours in the game and in TeamSpeak followed over the years. The latter in particular is part of the whole nostalgia for WoW Classic for me. Hanging out with others in the TS until 4 a.m., running in circles with your character in Ironforge while talking about God and the world – that was a special, unforgettable time. I was also a smoker back then, and those nights the fags were blown away faster than I was dropping Lemmings in Lemmings to their deaths. Definitely unforgettable how the keyboard looked through the ashes of the cigarettes.

Lemmings was a game for the Amiga.

To date I have spent over 20,000 hours in WoW. It would be interesting to know how many of them I ran in circles. Ultimately, WoW sparked a fire in me for MMOs and MMORPGs in particular. Accordingly, after that I tried everything that came onto the market as a WoW killer – Lord of the Rings Online, RIFT, Warhammer Online and whatever they were called. But one thing also fascinated me and, like WoW, brought my life in a new direction – Star Wars: The Old Republic.

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Star Wars and a new MMO? I have to play this!

Those were my thoughts back in 2009, when I first got a real sense of the coming of Star Wars: The Old Republic from EA and Bioware. Of course I knew Star Wars Galaxies. However, the train had passed me for too long, so I saw SWTOR as a chance to gain a foothold in this great universe, because I love Star Wars.

Back then, I researched games on various gaming sites and through magazines. In 2010 I came across Oldrep.de by chance. Perhaps some of you still know this SWTOR fan page from gamona, which later continued to exist under SW-Planet.de. In any case, at that time they were looking for freelancers on a voluntary basis to report on SWTOR.

At the time I was a student, had time and wanted to know what it was like to work as an editor. My degree in German and Scandinavian Studies might suggest an editorial career path. However, I applied more on a whim and less because of a concrete career idea. Oldrep.de seemed like an opportunity for me to write something about a topic that I was really interested in.

Oldrep.de then became SW-Planet.de and dealt with Star Wars in general.

As someone who spent hours in MMOs and was willing to write articles for free, I guess I ended up being a good candidate for the site owner. In any case, they didn’t hesitate for long and accepted me into the team. Free, passionate employee and MMO nerd – must have sounded fantastic at the time.

It was only later that it became clear how important the decision was to apply and just do it. Without this application, I would neither have met my wife nor would I probably be doing my current job. Accordingly, although my work was unpaid back then, it was still an absolute win for my life.

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“I’m a guild leader – don’t you want to join my guild?”

My wife was playing Aion and Guild Wars at the time. With both games she found her passion for MMOs and has earned a lot in both games. I’m still amazed at how easily she can figure things out in games – I totally stink about that. Anyway, she was also interested in SWTOR and had an internship at gamona during her master’s degree. She was then part of Oldrep.de and that’s where we got to know each other.

It was initially a purely professional collaboration and remained so for a long time. At that time, we communicated as a team via Google Hangouts and that was all there was to it at first. That only changed after the release of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Because my wife was looking for a guild after the release and as luck would have it I was the guild leader of a great guild called Calacyria. We came from WoW and just wanted to play SWTOR as well.

So I said to my wife at the time, “Hey, I’m a guild leader of a guild – don’t you want to join my guild? That’s not a problem, I can just bring you along.” I can’t remember why I emphasized that about the guild leader. As if that were some kind of special feature or distinction. Luckily she didn’t let the “Look how cool I am” bother her and joined the guild.

What does it really take to run a large guild in an MMORPG?

My wife and I’s two SWTOR characters on Makeb.

Logically, in the guild we spent more time together in the game, more time in TeamSpeak. We played dungeons, raids, earned hard-earned credits and left no survivors as a bounty hunter and Sith warrior – it was great. Over time, it just developed more between us and it came about that she also came to visit me in real life. What can I say, she blew me away.

How I used to be a raid leader in WoW and what I learned for life

At the time, I wasn’t sure if I wanted a relationship. It’s been two to three years since my last couple of relationships, but I was kind of undecided. But what I did know: If I enter into a relationship, it will be one that could potentially end with marriage and children. I was tired of short stories. I told her all that openly and honestly at the time. It didn’t put her off and we entered into a relationship that has been going on for over 10 years now.

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So we met through work and then fell in love over time through SWTOR. Today we play World of Warcraft together because after a modest development of SWTOR I convinced them that this could be our gaming home.

Dream woman and dream job

Of course I didn’t forget the small extra income. Finding my wife had another crucial impact on my life. The decision to build a life together with her also meant that I am now self-employed (in the areas of editing, online marketing and project management) and work for GameStar, GamePro, Mein-MMO and others. This independence would never have been possible without her.

It was my wife who had her first trainee job after graduation and financed our life with it. My self-employment only yielded around 200 to 300 euros per month in the first few months. Accordingly, she had to finance and get us both through. In the meantime, my work is on a solid and successful footing. She has also had a great career path and is very successful.

Nevertheless, to this day she is the one who supports me in difficult moments of independence. I wouldn’t be doing my dream job without her – I know that. I am eternally grateful to her for that. I consider myself lucky every day to have a strong, loving and amazing wife.

All this just because I started WoW in 2005, fell in love with MMOs and was therefore interested in SWTOR. I then applied for a vacancy at Oldrep on a whim and was lucky that my wife overlooked some of the “macho things”. It’s these life choices that make me think, “Wow, that really changed everything.”

I look forward to the next adventures with my wife. Our child is a big one at the moment and what will come next remains to be seen. Only one thing is clear: MMOs will always be a part of our lives and we are a damn great team.

Couple tells us how they met in MMORPG: “Obviously the biggest problem was the distance”

Reference-mein-mmo.de