A few days ago a conversation started on twitter, initially between myself and Heart1lly but expanded outwards from there. What originally started as a discussion about World of Warcraft Classic also similarly expanded out to cover the golden age of MMORPGs in general. Now that I am staring at the calendar and see that I will be playing a “Classic-zed” version of World of Warcraft in thirteen days, I find myself mulling over it some more. I find myself extremely excited by the possibilities it might present. This morning rather than posting pictures from the modern classic client, I have dug through my archives and am digging out a bunch of 4:3 aspect ratio screenshots from my early years in the game.
I’ve written about this before, but largely I think when it comes to video game nostalgia especially surrounding an online game, we are less nostalgic about the game itself and more nostalgic about a certain set of circumstances from a certain moment in time. I think much of the draw of the nostalgic is that we know at some level that we can never again arrive back at that moment and have those same feelings, because the world has changed and we have changed with it. However it feels good from time to time to try and retread the steps we have passed before, and as I age I find myself doing this a bit more often. I regularly reinstall aging game clients just to experience for a moment the glimmer of the joy I once had playing them.
Sure we should be out there making new memories, but I feel like the modern crop of MMORPGs actively hampers that ability. The first MMOs worked and created the lasting relationships that they did in part because we had a serious need for other people. What I mean by that is that in order for us to have a fun night, we needed a bunch of other people to be similarly interested in doing the same thing. This meant that without really meaning it… you yourself were open to doing things that were maybe less than optimal for your evening because it would mean that in turn the other player would be willing to assisting you at a later date. I cannot count the number of Paladin and Warlock mounts that I helped people get, knowing that it was a really important achievement for them and that at least on some level I was accruing social capital that could be spent on my own desires.
When I say lasting relationships were formed, a good number of the bonds with gamers that I talk to on a semi-daily basis were forged during this era. It was a shared sense of struggle that lead us all to bond over so many nights in Dire Maul or Lower Blackrock Spire… or eventually Molten Core and Blackwing Lair. The majority of the folks that I record AggroChat with on a weekly basis have roots that tie back to the time we spent in World of Warcraft on the Argent Dawn server. These are life long friends that moved past just the game. I’ve helped people prepare their first resume, or proof read a term paper in college, or even in the case of Rae hired for one of my development positions.
There is no denying that MMORPGs have become significantly more convenient for the players, but I think that convenience has been a double edged sword. Last night I found myself queuing for a dungeon in FFXIV without even asking in guild chat if someone wanted to ride along for the fast tank queue. Why did I do this? Because waiting on another player is inconvenient and I now live in a time where I no longer have to get myself messy with human communication. I feel bad that my brain sometimes thinks in that manner, but there are a lot of times we can live in our own little bubble and are presented a series of nameless faceless and often time voiceless individuals in our group that we don’t need to communicate with.
The rough edges have been smoothed to the point where a dungeon run is a series of encounters that are messaged so well as to not need any form of communication. With Shadowbringers, Final Fantasy XIV introduced the Trust system, which allows you to run dungeons with a full party of NPCs. The funny thing about it, is that running with a trust feels no different now than running an Expert Roulette with a full group of human beings. In fact the NPCs talk way more in a party than the humans that are there with me all barreling towards a fixed goal that we all have memorized by this point. I present that again… this has all come through the fact that we no longer need to communicate to play these games.
Now I am not naive enough to think that a return to World of Warcraft Classic is going to magically usher in the golden age of MMORPGs again. However I am looking forward to needing other players, because even for me… who is generally thought of as a community organizer… I occasionally need a reminder that the other people matter. The Dungeon Finder opened the game to a lot of people who lacked the social network to be able to form groups, and because of this you will find a lot of proponents. For me, it was the death of social gaming in World of Warcraft, because rapidly these thriving social channels that we used each night for grouping went silent. Why say into a channel “Tank and Healer looking for dps for dungeon” when you can just push a button and get a group assigned to you.
The problem with push button grouping is accountability goes out the window. I think a lot of the toxic behavior that we see in gaming as a whole is due to the fact that there are generally no consequences attached to it. During the pre-dungeon-finder society in World of Warcraft, your actions and ultimately your reputation mattered. As a guild and raid leader I was in communication with the leaders of most of the other raids and guilds on our server. We had a situation happen on a raid where someone rolled need on a pair of BoE boots, and then at the end of the raid that player informed us that he was leaving the raid and going elsewhere. Within moments of the raid being over the BoE boots were up on the auction house.
This was a pretty uncool move, and I mentioned it in passing to the leader of the raid that the player was going to as a warning. Within a few minutes of conversation among various guild and raid leaders I found myself in tells with the player. The unintended consequence of his actions was that he was finding himself kicked from that new raid and barred from all of the other raids that he could have gone to. He was begging me to call of something that I didn’t even ask for in the first place. Raid leaders hate mercenaries, and effectively his behavior was something that none of the other raids wanted any part of either. When you needed other people, and you were limited to the scope of your own server… prior to the existence of server transfers… your reputation as an honorable player was way more important than the gear you happened to be wearing.
So in truth I figure most of the people that we are dragging into World of Warcraft Classic will bounce within the first few weeks. However there is a part of me that is hoping it will serve to rekindle a server community surrounding the game that brings back some of the things that I remember from my past. I want social channels to matter again, and the dark art of forming a group to be a thing. I want to meet new people and bolster that list of life long friends that I have met through gaming. Right now the only people I really meet are through Social Media or introduced to me by friends of people I already know through gaming. The problem there is that on many levels these are just surface friendships because at no point in our gaming do either of us actually truly need the other player.
The strongest friendships are forged in the fires of shared adversity. In order to have that adversity the game needs a significant amount of friction pushing back against you on a nightly basis, and the modern MMORPG lacks that apart from the most hardcore of activities. Sure were we Savage or Mythic raiders we would have the same tales to tell, but I just don’t have the appetite for raiding that I once did. I want the simple moment to moment game-play to matter and with this I am looking forward to hanging out with people in a re-imagined World of Warcraft. I am trying to go into it with open eyes about the slim chance that it acts as a catalyst to bring about the styles of gameplay that I find myself missing. So while I am not going into this with rose colored lenses I am hopeful nonetheless.
