Month: September 2019

Since I took yesterday off and I have a post in me, I figure I will make two posts today.  World of Warcraft Classic has shook my world like few other games have. It is making me re-evaluate a lot of my own memories.  Largely for some time I have been in this headspace of thinking that maybe I had just grown apart from the type of experience that World of Warcraft had provided.  Cataclysm is the point where I first made a break from the game, and there were a bunch of extenuating circumstances surrounding that.   Cataclysm represented the end of non-guild raiding as a whole and it saw House Stalwart ballooning in size overnight as we tried to incorporate all of the different cultures that made up the satellite guilds that raided with us as part of the Duranub Raiding Company.  It also saw us reaching a point where we were trying to make 4 different 10 player raid teams function at the same time, and I had allowed myself to get snagged by the most hardcore of these teams. I’ve never really been a hardcore raider in mindset, and it lead to me playing the game not for fun, but for success. I burned out and bounced extremely hard, and am realizing that I just used Rift as a handy lifeboat to ferry me away from the gameplay and experiences that I had not been enjoying.  I also found the breaking of the world to be a frustrating experience and didn’t enjoy seeing all of these areas that I had come to know like the back of my hand to be completely changed in the process.  Cataclysm was a turning point in the way I viewed World of Warcraft, and while I came back and played each expansion the time until I bounced kept getting shorter.

As I said before, I reasoned this shift as me reaching a point where I was a different sort of player than the World of Warcraft experience really supported.  However this made me start to question my feelings towards Classic WoW as well. Was I simply viewing that time through rose colored glasses? Was it not as magical as I remembered it being and was simply the circumstances that it was the best game we had available to us at that time?  I felt certain that there was no way I could go back in time and feel the way that I felt when I first stepped foot into Mulgore. Playing Classic has been this deeply cathartic experience, because no…  it very much is as good of a game as I remembered it being. Sure there are frustrations with the missing quality of life elements that we gained over the years, but on some level that makes everything we do have feel all the more special.  I feel like I am earning my way through the game for the first time since probably Wrath of the Lich King. Each mob kill, each level ding, each time I go bankrupt at the trainer… feels like I did something significant. The fact that one week into the game I am only level 25 feels important. I remember in Wrath I decided to level a Deathknight and had it up to raid reader in seven days of actual time.  The leveling game was probably the thing that I enjoyed the most out of World of Warcraft and it was truncated to a fashion where it no longer mattered.  Starting a brand new toon and getting it to level 120 is reportedly a 5 to 10 day process. The bulk of the game has been sped up to the point where it just doesn’t feel like it matters anymore.  Pouring on ten levels in an evening makes every single ding feel less important than the last.

The Community is another aspect of the game that I had missed, because effectively human interaction had been optimized out of the game.  Over the last week I’ve seen a lot of bitter tweets talking about how we could be communicating right now in live, and that we just choose not to.  The truth is I have made attempts to bridge this gap because there are certain protocols that I have gotten used to thanks to the much better communication in Final Fantasy XIV.  In that game it is effectively expected for you to join a group and say some sort of greeting. If people are feeling communicative then often times there will be a rolling banter as you do content. With both Legion and Battle for Azeroth I attempted to move this protocol over to World of Warcraft.  I would join each new group with a hearty “Hey Folks!” and occasionally I would get a response back. However most recently this greeting is met with silence or grumblings to “pull faster” as we all barrel forward silently along the most efficient path towards the final boss.  I’ve seen a lot of this same “silent running” mentality start infecting the groups in Final Fantasy XIV, and I sorta miss the random conversations I would get into there as well. In Classic however the model has changed drastically because for the first time since the launch of Wrath we actually need other players.  I don’t mean need as in to run dungeons or group content, but need as in to complete quests period. I accept every group invite because I know that I will be getting valuable assets at my disposal in the form of more bodies to kill things faster.  I stick around after I finish my kills to make sure the rest of the party gets theirs because I know it is highly likely that I will run into this player again at another date in the future.

I’ve created a social channel on Bloodsail Buccaneers and I am using these interacts as an opportunity to snag people for it.  Yesterday alone in two random groups I met two different pairs of people who seemed to be both competent and good-natured, and snagged them away to the channel.  When it comes time to build harder content groups at maximum level this channel will serve as a resource for our entire guild and maybe even serve as the basis of a non-guild raid.  I am systematically working towards that goal as I move through the world, because each person I meet has a permanence that just doesn’t exist in the current WoW Climate. What I mean by that is we are no longer only exposed to players from our own server.  Often times when you push a button and get a group you are thrown in with a batch of players scattered across a large block of servers.  That means you are likely never see that Priest of Earthen Ring or Hunter from Scarlet Monastery ever again. Because of this a lot of the investment goes out the window when you know it won’t lead to future grouping experiences?  In Classic on BB, I am constantly running into the same players over and over so it is worth that extra effort to send a player a tell thanking them when I got a drive by buff. Classic is effectively unspoiled and still pristine, and part of me wants to preserve it at all costs.  Argent Dawn my server since launch on the other hand has been tainted by fifteen years worth of bad blood, toxicity and apathy.  I can carve out a peaceful existence in my own guild, but I find it hard to be willing to put much effort into making a change to the ecosystem as a whole.  Social Channels were killed when the Dungeon Finder went in at the end of wrath, and I killed my own best home for making a change when I let ArgentDawn.us forums atrophy and die.

I’m fifteen years wiser going into Classic, as are a good number of the people that I am playing with in House Kraken.  I am loving the experience of getting to revisit a time and place that I held so high in my memory, and at the same time building brand new memories.  Classic really is a story engine because I’ve run Ragefire Chasm, Wailing Caverns, Shadowfang Keep and Deadmines and in every single instance I have a few stories to tell about them.  Classic excels and producing quirky moments and those are the sort of thing that embed memories in your brain. I’ve probably run Freehold a dozen times, and I can’t point out a single instance in any of those times that was memorable enough to freeze it in my brain. Classic represents this magical opportunity to see MMORPGs before they changed.  I am determined to enjoy every moment of this while it lasts. Who knows we might really make it work and get raids going.  Even if we don’t however I am going to have a bunch of great new memories to take with me into whatever game comes next.