Growing up I enjoyed playing board games, especially risk. At some point in life it was just impossible to frequently make a larger group of friends/family members to play something - and well, when you have these rare moments in life and attend or host a big get-together few times a year - playing board games does not really come in mind (well, except drinking games).
Somewhere around November-December of 2013, I was bored and I decided to find something to play. I searched for the risk based games, AtWar popped up in the first few search results. I made a test account and tried to check the game - I got stuck in a tutorial which was very poorly done at the time for longer than an hour and I had no idea how to finish it. I gave up.
Few months later I returned to the game and that time I managed to escape the tutorial. I joined a 50k world game, as DR Congo if I remember correctly. I was trying to take cities with bombers. After trying to expand for few turns I left that game and deleted the account again.
Something was attracting me to the game though, so I tried it again after few weeks. I hopped into 50k world game again and latejoined as the same country - DR Congo. I spammed tanks and was finally happy that I "broke the code" and managed to expand. I stayed and would play a game a day, because the games in beginners lobby used to be so long with newbs not knowing how to kill other players. It took me months to reach rank 4, when I noticed someone speaking Croatian in game - Tito/Skanderbeg. He invited me to JNA and trained me to expand as Turkey and Ukraine. We played few inner 3v3s and I had my first CW the same day. I picked Spain and we managed to win against 3 high rank players.
This game has been a big part of my life. The best period of the game for me was 2014/15 when I was not even aware of the toxicity in the community, mainly because I did not interact with anyone outside the clans I was in at the time. All in all, the pros outweight the cons and I do not regret a second I gave to this game and community. I met many friends/enemies/frenemies to this day and I love them all. If I were to try and mention and give a word or two about all friends I met here - it would take me days and I would 100% skip some. I happened to not check up the game for months, but there has not probably been a single day last few years in which I did not chat with friends I found here - like Panda, Nedris, Empirezzz...