Did Elitists Abandon WoW?

Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was a lot, and today itself is also going to be… a lot. I have my MRI finally, which I am having to do some prep for because it seems like it is going to be way more “invasive” than the normal MRI. So I took the day off from work to recuperate from that and also to deal with the prep work for today. This whole getting cancer thing is complete bullshit, and I would not recommend it to anyone. As part of the whole cancer thing, I have been put on Tirzepatide to help me lose some weight and lower the potential complications of the eventual surgery. That has been its own wild ride, and when people say that it removes your ability to be hungry… they are telling the truth. I am eating more out of a sense that I should be eating three meals a day rather than a feeling that I need to. It also has had this weird side benefit of clearing my mind and quieting a lot of the anxieties and negative voices. Both are welcome side effects, but it has made me react to certain types of meals a bit differently. You got a picture of a Fungal Strider from Harandar accompanying this paragraph just because I think they are neat.

My focus has been on gearing my main, and I have struggled to find a pair of boots, because in theor,y I was able to fill every other slot through World Quests or by killing random rares in the world. I finally bucked up the courage to start queuing for dungeons, and I have been shocked at how relatively chill this experience has been. The last time I did dungeons in any form was during Shadowlands (other than Panda Remix), and at that point, folks were mostly assholes about everything. There was a rampant number of people who would drop after one boss, and then spend the entire dungeon complaining that we were not going fast enough or doing things in exactly the way they wanted them to be done. This time around… I would swear that most of the folks running random heroics are stoners, because they have all been super chill about pretty much everything. I get that we are on week two and maybe all of the most hardcore players have moved on to Mythics, and are no longer running heroics… but whatever the case, I will take it.

The other possibility is that all of the most hardcore players… got exported to Final Fantasy XIV during the great exodus. I know over there, the previously super chill dungeon running got significantly worse during Dawntrail. It makes me wonder if there is this malignant group of gamers that just sort of make every game worse, and when they move on… “nature finds a way”, and the balance returns. It feels like every older MMORPG that I have played, that is no longer living through its heyday, seems to be this way. Has World of Warcraft finally reached the place of being this niche experience that only people who really enjoy playing it have stuck around? If so, I am freaking here for it. A large chunk of why I had avoided World of Warcraft was due to the stereotypical “WoW Player” and the negative impact that it had on running group content. Panda Remix was a lot of fun, but I mostly decided that was due to the fact that we were effectively playing throwaway characters and nothing really mattered. Maybe the community has drastically changed since I last attempted to play it. Someone can fill me in with some of the details I might be missing, hopefully.

Whatever the case, I am having a heck of a lot of fun, roaming around the world and doing various stuff. The defend the base event in Voidstorm is quite a bit of fun, and most of the interactions I have had with other players over chat have all been positive, or at worst neutral. The game feels like it is just genuinely nice to play, and mostly just really good features to interact with. I love Hunts and hope that functionality continues forward, and I love the fact that it seems like all gearing paths end up in the same place and the same gear levels, regardless of the type of content that you want to interact with. I need to spend more time leveling up Delves, because I have been ignoring them to my detriment, but it also seems like I arrived at the same destination of having full 220 gear in spite of this. Has this normalization of gear acquisition been part of what smoothed out the raised feathers of the community? I guess time will tell when the raid opens, and I get access to the raid finder.

I had been struggling to fill my final slot, which was boots. None seemed to be available crafted on the Auction House and I inspected every other plate wearer in the dungeons I had been running, and they all seemed to be stalled out with 198 ilvl boots as well. Even though killing rares, I had probably gotten a dozen pairs of boots, but they were mail, leather, or cloth, and not a single set of plate boots. The greater internet theory of complaining and drop chances, however, won out again, because the moment I made a public post griping about the impossibility of getting boots… meant that the very next dungeon I ran, capable of dropping boots, dropped a pair. This only ever seems to work when you are genuinely frustrated, and not actually a way of gaming the system. I am sure I will stop playing quite so much when the Path of Exile league drops this morning, but I kind of hope I can keep doing a bit of both.

I am very curious to hear from you all who have stuck around and kept playing WoW, if you have any theories about the community and how it changed since BFA/Shadowlands until now. Is it, as my friend Ace suggests, that we all got old and mellowed out? Whatever the case, I appreciate what I am seeing from the playerbase.