I was playing WoW very active from release to 2006 and was in a preety good raiding guild too. It was called Dagordacil and was one of the best guilds in Germany and the World at that time until the most people went inactive because of the udpdating policy of Blizzard at that time to make things unbeatable until they had developed the next content.
But anyway the reason i m writing this here is because i got a lot of questions recently on how i learned to read the demo format. And i m going to tell the whole story here now.
When i was playing WoW there was a guy around called Dopefish and he released movies about exploring areas noone else showed before him. This movie was mostly made on private servers but nontheless inspired me to start exploring WoW myself. Those vids are still around on youtube:
I started to learn how to wallwalk and that stuff, but still we were going on the ground ;)
Some time later Dopefish released his next movieNogg-aholic. And this movie blew everyone away at that time! It was recorded on live servers only and introduced the model changing to WoW: (And yes i m posting all 5 parts of the movie here. If you haven t watched it yet do it now! ;) )
Well contrary to his comment in the end of the movie this wasn t goodbye for him in WoW and when he came back he founded the community Nogg-aholic. The best people in editing WoW were together there and when i found that site there were secret groups inside that community and one group in which only the best of the best people were recruited in (not more than 15). I had already written a tool to move adt files around (those are the files that make the outside world of WoW) so they invited me to talk with them in the channel called #secret-meeting. I even met someone there i already knew from kreedz and had caught cheating: akg. But at that time i wasn t good enough to get in directly so i had to go it the normal way.
For every step (i think it were 4) there were quests you had to solve. The first three were really easy and with some time, luck and google you could beat them. But the last one was so hard that either you know what you have to do and solve it in 1 day or you re smart enough to learn it in 2 weeks or you ll never solve it. There were people there in the step below this who where trying to solve it for months but could never do it. Anyway it took me like 3 hours and i found myself in the last group before the secret-meeting group.
We were only 3 people there and got access to sites and help from the people above us to learn new things. And what we started to do there were things i thought would be impossible to do before that time. One of those sites was wow-dev and in that time i learned how to reverse engineer nearly every file format.
After some time we decided to make a movie to showoff our skills. It is called lowcost-flightpath (recorded on official servers only) because we managed to hack the ships so we could fly around with them. They liked it so much that they decided to invite us to the #secret-meeting group. And that was when we started to learn the real things. And we could do anything we want in WoW at that time. Like fly around spawn objects, move objects build paths in the world and i even wrote an anti aggro hack so you could run through dungeons with level 1 and no monster attacked you.
At that time the first version of Naxxramas came out so i hacked my way through it on the testserver and made the first video ever on spawning saphiron:
This movie was made for a WoW radio show called "WoW - Nacht" we had in Germany by wow-szene at that time and i was invited there to chat about the unreleased Naxxramas and about 50k people were listening :D
Well after all that i needed a break from WoW i stopped playing the real game and only continued to hack around a bit. I was invited in the radio show again to talk about Nogg-aholic but we were already going different ways. There was nothing left in WoW we could do and so Nogg-aholic went inactive.
From time to time when there are new things released we still gather again in #secret-meeting and the last big thing we did was hacking ourselfes on the private Blizzard server where they tested the addon Wrath of the Lichking. So i was already playing a Death Knight in April 2008.
Half the people of our group went in the gaming industry and are working there today in companies like Starbreeze (The Chronicles of Riddick, The Darkness) and CCP Games (Eve Online). Malu05 is still coding on a Machinima tool so i ll just link his youtube channel here there are some amazing movies he posted.
I want to finish this post with a clip that was made by Dopefish for a project called NAC by nogg-aholics #secret-meeting and never got finished:
