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.
That all Hunter run in UBRS is a gaming moment that I will always cherish. It came up in guild chat the other night when the current members of Silent Strike were deciding if we’d jump back into Classic.
For me, it’s not the game so much as the moments and the community that existed at that point in time that makes me nostalgic for a game. I’m really fortunate to still game with quite a few folks that I originally started gaming with 19 (19!!! OMG) years ago in Everquest. We still bring up moments that we look back on fondly (or with horror, LOL)). Like that 8 hour corpse run in Plane of Fear, or our first Nekkid Gnome Race from Ironforge to Stormwind. We can go back to the game, but those experiences will never be reproduced.
The one thing I’m looking forward to with Classic is sharing the experience with some of my current guildmates who never had the opportunity to play Vanilla WoW. I know that the experiences won’t be the way they were the first time around, but I’m looking forward to the differences.
PS. Too bad you rolled Horde on Bloodsail Buccanners 😉
Elo!!! It is good to hear from you. I think it has been since my last foray into Rift that we have talked. The horde thing is largely two fold. One I have been playing horde a lot myself lately, and I never really played much in vanilla as horde. Two my friend Grace is die-hard Horde so I was easily talked into it as a final destination. She played Alliance during a few expansions just to hang out, so I thought I would go similarly Horde.
In theory it is a whole set of experiences that I never really got the first time around.
Great post and discussion. My journey in EverQuest was similar to yours in WoW, Bel, in that I played largely solo at first but would take group options when offered. After a while I’d /lfg to get offers but I wouldn’t start groups.
Then, when Lost Dungeons of Norrath arrived and the whole game became group-oriented and extremely manageably so, Mrs Bhagpuss and I began to gather a whole raft of potential group-mates, adding them to friendlists and the custom channel we used as well as taking people from our guild. Rather than wait, we’d send tells and ask in channel and guild and put our groups together fast. Mrs Bhagpuss was better at it than me so I let her do much of the work but i also learned how to do it myself.
After that, for a few years in various MMOs I wouldn’t hesitate to put groups together but as time went on and the developers added more and more ways to avoid needing to talk to other players to get anything done I just went with the flow and stopped making groups. Now I barely even join PUGs if asked. There’s just no need.
Whether Classic will reverse that trend I’m not sure but I’m happy to give it a go if it does. Should make a nice change.
I will have to disagree. Although I admit I don’t know how much of my feelings are due to my social anxiety, personality or personal experiences.
I never liked the idea of “hardships build stronger relationships”. All the people I ever cared about was not because of the experiences we shared as much as because I just enjoy their company and talking to them.
This also applies to MMOs. I always tended to just do content only with groups of friends/guild mates. I rarely did it with complete strangers. And there were times where I wanted to do something but couldn’t find people within that circle interested in doing it and trying to find a PuG either felt like a waste of time or a painful experience.
Even sticking to just the same social circle could also have its drawbacks as it could lead you to just getting used to do things in a certain way and not experimenting or learning anything new.
For example, there was a dungeon in Everquest 2 with an annoying boss that would bounce the tank around. The tank had to place themselves at a good spot so they wouldn’t bounce so much as to get away from the healer’s range. Every time we did it would be a bit of a struggle.
Then one day I got invited by a couple of acquaintances to do the dungeon. Since I already knew they were good folk from previous interactions and I wasn’t the one tanking this time I accepted it. Thanks to that I learned a a much better way to tank that fight and then every time I had to tank it later the experience went much smoother thanks to that. If I had stuck with just doing the dungeons with my regular group of friends I’d have never learned that strategy.
There was also a case in EQ2 where I saw friends of mine leaving the guild because they felt the guild leadership had a clique going on to do dungeons and raids. And I am certainly I have been seen the same way by others due to my generally passive nature of waiting to be invited to groups rather than starting my own and I usually got invited by the same people.
As for the people I hang with in Final Fantasy XIV are people I met through watching streams. I like to do group content with them not because I need them or feel needed but just because I enjoy their company.
Most of them are away now playing other games but I like that I can still do anything I want in Final Fantasy XIV regardless of that. And when they come back I can try to share my experiences with them.
So, yeah, I prefer the way MMOs are now. I will admit though that perhaps a better balance might be found between the convenience we have today and the more social aspects of the past. I just don’t know how much of it can be done with a game’s design and how much of it is player’s culture.
So what you describe is a lot of what my early MMO experience was like. I was fairly passive and mostly just grouped with people I knew. Then at some point I got tired of feeling like I never had any control over grouping opportunities and just got frustrated enough to take destiny into my own hands. To say it changed my life sounds cheesy but there is no way I would be in a real world management job were it not for this decision. I learned how to build groups, I learned the basics… lock down your tank and healer in direct messages and once you had those the rest of the group came together quickly. I only went through this transformation however… because I had to. I needed other people to do the things I wanted to do. That need was the kick in the ass I needed to go out and make it happen.
I am frustrated with myself that I don’t do that much anymore. I have reverted back to my passive state while gaming because I don’t have to put myself out there anymore. I am hoping that not having the safety net of a dungeon finder will kick me in the butt again and make me put myself out there.
I can see where you are coming from. And funny story, one of the friends I made in EQ2 had the same idea as you when he first approached me. The difference is I was the tank, he was going to be the healer and his wife one of the DPSes. It worked well enough.
I was going to make some other arguments of why I think this wouldn’t work for me. But at this point it would just probably sound like excuses even to myself. Plus I don’t think it would really advance the discussion any further either.
What I will take from this then is that we are looking for different things and have different feelings when it comes to MMOs and that is totally fine as long as there are different games that cater to those. I hope WoW Classic can provide with what you are looking for. 🙂
I find myself having very different memories of Classic, and I’m going to attempt to put them all together in a post on my own blog after my hiatus is over. Until then I wanted to offer you a summary, not to argue with your point of view but rather offer an alternative view.
For me Classic doesn’t just represent a dark time in my life, it also wasn’t an environment that people like me could thrive in. I was just beginning to recognise I even had mental health problems and the social expectations of Classic were too much for me to handle.
I found myself drowning with no one to save me, and as you’ve pointed out reputation was everything. There was no anonymity to be had and you couldn’t just name change or swap server. I did eventually swap server, a long gruelling process of levelling a whole new character because it was the only option available. It would be the first of four server swaps in my raiding career.
Eventually, with treatment and medication, I was able to stabilise and heal and I found a home with my current guild among friends. Many of the features that have been accused of taking away the social aspect of the game have helped make the game easier to play. There’s no burden of being social if I don’t want to – which sometimes as a female player is necessary – and LFR and dungeon finder has been a godsend since I became diagnosed with ME a few years ago and had to retire from raiding. I can keep up with content and still experience the storylines without having to sit through four hours of raiding, something that I will probably never be able to do again. I can just about manage one wing of LFR before I need to take a break now.
I guess the point I’m trying to make is that I think it’s great that people are going to have Classic back, and have the chance to enjoy the social options they like, but those same players (I’m talking generally, not directing this at yourself) also need to be more aware of the good things that new features have done for players with mental and physical health conditions.
Very powerful comment and I appreciate you leaving it here. I see your point definitely. I struggle with my own issues, especially with anxiety. I go through these long periods of being pushed into “turtle mode” where I disappear and just don’t talk to anyone. For me at least this is enabled by the fact that there is very little forcing me out of my shell. When I was playing early MMORPGs back in the day I would get pulled out of these funks because I wanted something in game, and I saw the social interaction as a means to an end. I am one of those people where social interaction seems like a good idea, so I make plans… and then the closer I get to those plans the more I start scrambling for excuses to cancel them. If I ever get myself over the hump I wind up enjoying myself, but getting that foot over the threshold was my own personal struggle.
Not saying it is the same for you because everyone is different. Having the “need” of other people gave me the impetus to take that first step. The desire for gear or progression was enough to outweigh the voices in my head telling me catastrophic things are going to happen. So needing the other people to make something happen helped me personally. Now I just find myself not interacting at all for large periods of time because I don’t have to. I can get whatever it is that I want without the need of other human beings.
I didn’t start playing until mid 2009, so Classic is not really a rose colored trip down memory lane. However, I’m hoping it is a return to playing the game when class design was less complex. Certainly I know it will be slow going and hard, but I’ve grown weary of the race to get to cap as fast as possible, the economy that has been wrecked by the Draenor Garrison shuffle and gold sales from the shop. I’m looking forward to playing.