Knight, and a reputation ground into the negatives
The grindy little badges from vanilla World of Warcraft that prove I was there in the vanilla days: the old honor-rank ladder up to Knight, and deliberately tanking a faction's standing all the way down to Hated.
Here is a strange thing about having played World of Warcraft back in the vanilla days: there is almost no way to prove it to anybody, and the game quietly kept the receipts the whole time.
Back then my main was Maurizio, the warlock. Between the big forty-man raid nights there was a second game underneath the game, and it was made almost entirely of grinding. Not the fun kind. The kind where you do the same dull thing for weeks because you decided, for no good reason, that you wanted a number to go up.
Knight
The first one was the old honor system. Vanilla had a PvP rank ladder, fourteen rungs of military titles, and you climbed it by racking up kills in the battlegrounds. The catch, and it was a vicious one, is that your rank decayed if you stopped. So holding a rank, let alone climbing it, meant showing up week after week and putting in hours I probably should not have had. I got up to Knight, which sounds modest and was not. Below it the game also handed me Private, which is the rank everyone passes through and nobody brags about. I am bragging about it anyway, because the whole ladder is gone now. They tore the old rank system out years ago. You cannot earn “Knight at level 60” anymore. I have it, and that is the entire point.
A reputation in the negatives
The second grind is the one that makes other old players nod. In WoW you have standings with dozens of factions, and most people spend the game raising them. I spent a chunk of mine lowering one on purpose. To get on the good side of the goblins who ran the pirate town of Booty Bay, the move was to go kill their rivals, the Bloodsail Buccaneers, over and over, which sinks your standing with the Bloodsail straight down through Hostile and into Hated. So there is a faction in the game that despises me, by design, because I ground them into the dirt to make a different set of goblins like me. There is no good reason to do this. I did it because it was there.
None of it made me better at the actual game. It did not gear me up or win a single raid. It was just the texture of being a person who lived in that world in those specific years, doing the slow, pointless, oddly satisfying chores nobody made me do.
And that is why I still have the screenshot up top. Re-subscribe today, all these years later, and the account remembers everything: the Knight title, the faction that hates me, every dull hour I poured in. The game kept better notes on my teenage years than I did.