{"id":35,"date":"2010-07-13T09:48:12","date_gmt":"2010-07-13T16:48:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/muffinsguild.com\/blog\/?p=35"},"modified":"2012-08-31T12:31:03","modified_gmt":"2012-08-31T19:31:03","slug":"nostalgia-gives-people-rose-tinted-glasses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/muffinsguild.com\/blog\/?p=35","title":{"rendered":"Nostalgia Gives People Rose-Tinted Glasses"},"content":{"rendered":"

I see a lot of requests on the official Suggestion forums<\/a> asking for Blizzard to make special servers with the time rolled back to Classic or Burning Crusade. These requests often come with sharp critiques of the current expansion(s), going as far as to accuse them of \u201cruining WoW.\u201d I see this even more with Cataclysm looming, where some of the quests and zones responsible for our fondest WoW memories will be going away.\u00a0 And while I will miss those reminders of early WoW, largely I think nostalgia gives people rose-tinted glasses.<\/p>\n

I remember classic WoW.<\/p>\n

I remember because there was not much to do at 60, Blizzard drew out the leveling process by filling it full of tedious \u201cbusy work\u201d that was designed to be time consuming but without the advantage of being more fun or interesting or even having better rewards.\u00a0 They did this by doing things like sending you running (literally) all the way across the world to talk to someone, only to have them send you back again.\u00a0 To further this goal, travel was intentionally made slower than hell.\u00a0 You didn\u2019t get your first mount until level 40 and even then it was the slow one.\u00a0 People think it\u2019s \u201ctoo easy\u201d that we get our mounts earlier and cheaper now?\u00a0 Well, I\u2019ll counter that my gaming experience was not enhanced<\/em>, nor did I become a better player, from the \u201cchallenge\u201d of running the full length of Azeroth on foot.<\/p>\n

I remember having to sit at the computer through long taxi trips because you had to reboard the bat at every flight stop, which was aggravated by long, inefficient travel paths that often circled back on themselves or took long detours.<\/p>\n

I remember if you talked a friend into joining the game to play with you, well, you better make a new toon to play with him because it\u2019s going to be months and months before he catches up with your main\u2026 if he doesn\u2019t get burnt out trying to do so and quit before then.\u00a0 And boy, you better hope you like that class you\u2019re leveling as much as you did when you made it, because if you have any semblance of a life, it\u2019s unlikely you\u2019ll have the time or energy to reroll after you\u2019ve hit the level cap.<\/p>\n

I remember doing long quest chains or completing arduous journeys only to be rewarded with a [white] item or something absurd like a +spirit 2h axe.\u00a0 Some slots, like trinkets and necklaces, were just very hard to find in general.\u00a0 I began raiding, as a rogue, with the +dodge Alterac Valley pvp trinket and the damage absorption one from Araj the Summoner because little out there was better.<\/p>\n

I remember the amount of crap you had to carry back then.\u00a0 Everyone\u2019s bag space was filled up by reagents, specialty tools and class-unique items, not to mention materials needed for professions.\u00a0 Of course, many common items only stacked in tiny quantities, if at all.\u00a0 Many of your bag slots were also permanent inhabited by other crucial items like keys<\/em>. Forget even carrying fun items like pets or more than one mount, which originally occupied bag slots unlike today.\u00a0 And professions?\u00a0 I remember items that gave you bonus to +skinning but were not skinning knives so you had to carry both, and mining picks that you could not mine with.\u00a0 I remember when you had to keep every level of enchanting rod.\u00a0 Of course, you probably never used those low-level enchants anyway because the profession UI didn\u2019t used to have a search feature to find them even if you wanted to.<\/p>\n

I remember missing entire dungeons leveling up, or else having to wait until everything was grey or green so three of us could underman the place, because it was next to impossible to find groups with the laughable LFG chat. Additionally, if you weren\u2019t part of the first pack of people to hit 60, it was really hard to even find people to do \u201cend game\u201d dungeons as well; after so many 45 minute Baron runs, attunement chains, fire resist farming, or just from running them a million times because there wasn\u2019t much else to do, everyone would rather eat glass than visit those places again to help you.<\/p>\n

And I remember when running a single dungeon a full evening\u2019s commitment, and even then you often didn\u2019t finish.\u00a0 I remember that it took a significant portion of time to traverse the map to get to their locations because summoning stones didn\u2019t exist, and once there you could expect to spend four or five hours inside, much of that time spent being lost or mindlessly killing (or re<\/em>killing after they respawned) packs of trash.\u00a0 Worse yet, we had to run some of them (like BRD) many, many times to get the gear and attunements and keys we needed before we could even think<\/em> about doing cooler things.<\/p>\n

I remember the ungodly long run back to Blackrock Mountain after a wipe.\u00a0 Ask yourself, is it challenging<\/em> to waste a quarter of your raid time because the run back after a wipe takes ten minutes, or is maybe just frustrating for no good reason?\u00a0 Blackrock wasn\u2019t the only offender; I remember dozens of other places where the nearest graveyard, flightpath, inn or mailbox was obnoxiously far away for no apparent reason.\u00a0 You spent more time being inconvenienced by little things than actually playing the parts of the game that were fun.<\/p>\n

I remember raiding was the only way to better yourself at 60, and unless you found a (large!) guild to do that with, it was farming twilight\u2019s hammer in Silithus or grinding undead in Eastern Plaguelands to do, and that was pretty much it.\u00a0 Practically every epic in the game was only available through devoted raiding.\u00a0 There were no crafted or reputation based ones that a dedicated person could work towards on their own with effort.\u00a0 If you didn\u2019t have time to raid or know enough people, you might as well just cancel your subscription once you hit 60.\u00a0 There were few solo activities, no dailies, no achievements, no titles, no cool rewards to unlock.<\/p>\n

And for every person I hear pine for classic raiding, I remember a dozen people who swore if they ever saw lava again it would be too soon.\u00a0 People frequently described Molten Core with the same adjectives they might use to talk about a kick to the groin.\u00a0 I remember raids being a logistical nightmare to wrangle 40 people, although this was partly made easier by the fact that half of them only had to be \u201cwarm bodies\u201d and there wasn\u2019t really any need to contribute more than that.\u00a0 Difficulty was often related to abhorrent resistance gear checks, aggro problems from white damage, or the aforementioned logistic struggles, rather than impressive and challenging strategies requiring teamwork and skilled execution.<\/p>\n

I remember armor pieces, including class sets, being itemised as if they let a monkey pull random stats out of a hat.\u00a0 Holy paladin wearing agility or a warrior with spirit?\u00a0 Of course.\u00a0 You wore armor with stats that were useless to you, because that\u2019s all there was.\u00a0 Dungeon sets had +armor bonuses, whether you were a tank or a healer or a mage, and nothing was oriented towards a particular spec or playstyle or role.<\/p>\n

I remember most classes only had one spec they could play on for PvE and many of those being just one trick ponies.\u00a0 If you were a shaman, you were resto and it was just because your raid needed you to drop mana tide for the real healers.\u00a0 Rogues were combat, warriors were tanks, and druids could do a wide variety of things poorly.\u00a0 Shadow priest?\u00a0 Ret paladin?\u00a0 In PvE?\u00a0 You\u2019re joking, right?\u00a0 Of course, the revelation that the class you picked may be laughably bad would often only be discovered after you\u2019ve already invested months of work into getting it to the level cap.\u00a0 Surprise!<\/p>\n

I remember when talent trees were littered with stupid talents like rogue\u2019s (original) throwing specialization or parry for hunters, or were totally schizophrenic like shaman\u2019s enhancement tree where you would take absurd talents to improve your shield block because it was, ironically, a prerequisite to the tier that taught you to use two handed weapons.\u00a0 Even if a particular talent tree had avoided containing useless talents, there was no guarantee it would be a balanced and playable spec choice.<\/p>\n

I remember when there were no mage tables, soulwells, or summoning portals, and we brought those classes so they could spend the first thirty minutes of our raid just making water and cookies or summoning people one by one.\u00a0 Mages were glorified venting machines, warlocks summonbots.<\/p>\n

I remember when HoTs didn\u2019t stack and only one healer in the raid could use them.\u00a0 I remember when they increased the boss debuff limit from 8 to 16, but people had to be careful what they put on the boss lest it push off something more important.\u00a0 I remember being a rogue who used sharpening stones instead of poisons for that reason.\u00a0 I remember five minute paladin blessings.\u00a0 I remember when hunters couldn\u2019t trap in combat and feign death killed them if they did it for too long.\u00a0 I remember when group buffs and max rank spells could only be learned from raid-drop books.<\/p>\n

I remember before Guild banks and linked auction houses.\u00a0 I remember nicknames like \u201cLagrimmar\u201d and being nearly incapable of playing in those cities on even the newest machine due to the horrible crowding and resulting server latency.<\/p>\n

I remember being so poor at 60 because there were no dailies to balance out my gold loss from raiding repair bills.\u00a0 I had no epic horse because the only way to get one was to spend my precious little time in-game grinding mob after mob after mob for coins or playing ebay on the auction house just to get enough money to buy it.\u00a0 My epic PvP mount sat in my bank until Burning Crusade, when I could finally afford to learn it.<\/p>\n

I remember waiting hours and hours to get a single battleground match \u2013 if I was lucky enough to get one at all; I also remember sometimes logging off after hours of playing and never seeing the match pop.<\/p>\n

I remember each faction arguing \u2013 justifiably — that the other had an edge in PvE and\/or PvP because they didn\u2019t even have access to the same classes, buffs and abilities, including staple buffs like Kings, Might and Wisdom.<\/p>\n

I remember when you had to install addons to get many things that are base functionality now, like more than one action bar<\/em>, auto-loot, scrolling combat text, and all the other great addon features that WoW took and made standard, including snazzier things like boss warnings, voice chat, threat management, instance maps, and gear-set management.\u00a0 I remember the original chat window and auction house interface. I remember before you could shift-click links of quests and items into chat and before you could track quests on the side of your screen.\u00a0 I remember the time before target-of-target.\u00a0 I remember when they added the \u201cdressing room\u201d and the ability to buyback things you\u2019d accidentally sold.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say classic WoW wasn\u2019t fun.\u00a0 It very much was and we wouldn\u2019t have stuck around if it wasn\u2019t.\u00a0 By pointing out the negatives, I\u2019m not denying all the positives, too: The communities were smaller and more tight-knit. End game wasn\u2019t so much of a gear-grind.\u00a0 Getting a level felt like an achievement, and not just one minus on the \u201cneeded until 80\u201d race, and hitting the cap was something to be really proud of.\u00a0 Epics really were epic.<\/p>\n

But the point is that as time passes, we remember these nice things we may have lost, but often overlooked how much really, really positive stuff we have gained, and all the great refinement on gameplay and the many additional features that have really enhanced our gaming experience.\u00a0 I’m not saying I hate classic WoW, I’m saying – Wow!\u00a0 Look at how far we’ve come!<\/p>\n

Overall, the main problem with vanilla WoW was that it was stagnant<\/em>.\u00a0 It took a lot of time to reach the end, but once you did, there were only so many things you could do until you finished all there was to do, which wasn\u2019t hard to do before long.\u00a0 After that point, it was boring<\/strong> and it caused a lot of disinterest from people who had up until that point invested a lot into the game.\u00a0 The only solution to this was to add more stuff, which Blizzard did and continues to do every time the content gets tired.\u00a0 Do we miss the old content and some of the great things that were a part of it? \u00a0 Sure.\u00a0 But, at the end of the day, it seems fairly obvious to me that we\u2019re where we are because of necessity to keep this game alive and compelling.\u00a0 Demands for classic servers and critiques of the concept of expansions are shortsighted because they ignore this very critical fact.\u00a0 Even if you\u2019re one of those people who pines for the original game, you have to acknowledge all the positive changes and additions that Blizzard has made over the years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I see a lot of requests on the official Suggestion forums asking for Blizzard to make special servers with the time rolled back to Classic or Burning Crusade. These requests often come with sharp critiques of the current expansion(s), going as far as to accuse them of \u201cruining WoW.\u201d I see this even more with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[72,26,73,3,74,6,16,12,71],"tags":[328,317,315,318,335,303,298,313,242,310,426,292,294,340,336,295,323,321,235,319,342,337,322,308,312,314,345,339,326,311,301,215,338,334,320,332,331,327,305,141,344,430,158,341,131,324,343,329,325,160,309,203,299,198,209,207,333,300,208,307,296,302,304,306,316,429,330,293,427,297,428],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/muffinsguild.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/muffinsguild.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/muffinsguild.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/muffinsguild.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/muffinsguild.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/muffinsguild.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":132,"href":"http:\/\/muffinsguild.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions\/132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/muffinsguild.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/muffinsguild.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/muffinsguild.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}