Games

There is a thing going around twitter right now where folks are posting pictures of themselves back in 2004 around the launch of the original World of Warcraft, and then a more modern picture to show how they have changed in the fifteen odd years that have passed between. This is somewhat challenging for me, because of two points. One I was an early adopter of Digital Technology and swore by my trusty Mavica… which was an early digital camera that recorded 640×480 images to Floppy disks. Second I was generally the one behind the camera and as a result not in any photos that I have access to. I am sure my mom who is constantly taking fake composed group shots has a plethora of photos of me from that era… but we never actually see any of them after she has taken them.

At the time of the release of World of Warcraft on November 24th of 2004 I was 28 and at that point had been married for 6 years. I lived in the same house that I do now that we purchased and moved into in 1999. I was working with Vernie (pictured) and Socar (not pictured) at a handheld device company where we worked on applications for Palm Pilot and Pocket PC devices mostly. I worked primarily as a web developer and wrote some very early services infrastructure that allowed the mobile devices to remotely synchronize with our servers. Vernie and I shared a cube and worked together with him doing all of the heavy lifting on the front end, and me doing the back end stuff.

Shadoes and I went to the same college and wound up working together at a previous employer along with Mannax. In the above picture you can also see the original House Stalwart tabard featuring a golden tree instead of the crusader cross that is more common these days. The other members of House Stalwart were largely folks that I had met through my sequence of games to that point so a mixture of people from Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, Horizons and City of Heroes. Not pictured in the photo but part of this Scarlet Monastery group was Shiana, who we met through City of Heroes and would ultimately leave the guild to found Cerulean Sanctuary and the non-guild based raid Late Night Raiders where I did most of my Vanilla raiding.

The character pictured was not my first character, but ultimately became my Vanilla main. Lodin the Hunter was who I raided in Late Night Raiders with and Djagun was my trusty white cat pet that I picked up in Dun Morogh. I feel bad that I don’t have the original Djagun anymore on that character, but instead swapped the actual pet out for a Wintersaber when I became big enough to train one of those. Part of me wishes I had stuck by my original pet however. From late Vanilla all the way to present I have never played this character as a main again. I was a bad hunter and kept trying to make melee work, so I briefly explored that when it became a viable spec in Legion.

We scan forward to 2019 and I am largely playing Horde with my Blood Elf Demon Hunter as the thing that most closely represents a main. I am playing with Facepull, which is largely a group of players that I met back during Vanilla through Wrath of the Lich King on the Argent Dawn server forums. There used to be an IRC server associated with the forums and we all hung out daily both Alliance and Horde characters. It was the sort of Utopian existence that I hope eventually comes to game when both sides can play together freely.

For years I had this other family on the Horde side but never really played much with them apart from the occasional alt. Starting with Warlords of Draenor I started spending a significant amount of time on that side of the fence and with Battle for Azeroth it was the first expansion where I planned form the start to main horde. While I have bounced off of this expansion pretty pathetically, it has been nice to spend time with this other side of the family. Over the years I handed House Stalwart off to various other friends… first Elnore, then Rylacus and now it rests in the hands of Kylana.

The truth is House Stalwart doesn’t really feel like home, because enough time has changed and the names and faces with them. Kylana brought with him a focus on raiding first and guild second, which is a decision I always fought. I consider Cataclysm to be the real moment that House Stalwart changed for me, as we made the transition from non-guild-based raiding to raiding as a guild. With this we wound up consuming a bunch of the smaller satellite guilds that were part of the Duranub Raiding Company. With that caused a culture clash and a bunch of strife… and also around this time is when I first checked out of the game for any length of time with the launch of Rift.

I feel horrible that I dumped this all in the lap of my friend Elnore, and then chastised her as she made a bunch of changes to make the guild more raid focused. I tried for years to juggle the whole raiding and guild leadership thing, and probably did a poor job at it. The raiders were the most dedicated players, but I wanted to keep the guild as a sort of casual friendly place for everyone. Elnore, Rylacus and Kylana all made shifts to support the raiders above the random casual players, which rubbed me personally the wrong way… but ultimately were probably good for the long term health of the guild. I mean for a guild founded on day one it is pretty magical that it is still alive 15 years later.

As far as an image goes, this is the best I could come up with. In December of 2003 we took a cruise, and this is one of the photos taken with a Mavica, and as a result looks pretty potato quality resized up from a 640×480 image not framed as a head shot. As far as me personally… I am still living in the same house I was at that point and really see no signs of moving. I’m now 43 and have been married for 21 years. I’ve changed jobs several times, some for the better and some for the worse… but have currently been at the same place for 11 years in October.

I’m no longer actively developing apart from occasionally troubleshooting or patching something when it breaks and I have no other developers on hand. These days I manage sixteen people in a multi-disciplinary group that includes five application developers, five geographic information system specialists, five data analysts and a business analyst that sorta floats between the three teams. Each team has a super visor that serves as a discipline lead… not entirely different from the composition of a raid and having a dedicated class lead.

I credit my experience raiding and leading raids for helping me feel comfortable enough to transition away from being a pure technologist and move into management. I try my best to be the sort of manager that I always wanted, which may or may not be the manager that all of my employees want. However I do regularly have people transfer into my group, and the only time folks leave really is to move on with their career and find another gig that can pay more than we can. I consider that a win and the general sign of a functioning ecosystem.

That is another lesson that raid and guild leadership taught me. Occasionally someone needs to move on with their life and make some changes, and that is a perfectly natural part of things. I learned through gaming not to burn bridges someone needs to leave, and as a result many of those people eventually make their way back into my sphere of influence. The same goes for employees. I feel like part of my job is a manager is to mentor them along their career journey, and when that leads to them taking another job… you wish them well and do your best to keep in touch because at some point your paths will probably cross again.

So now we sit on the cusp of a brand new vanilla experience. Time has passed and I have changed a lot along the way. However I feel like I am interested in trying to reclaim some of the things that we lost through this new retro experience. While I played a lot of MMOs prior to it… World of Warcraft is the game that I imprinted on the hardest. I will be around playing Belghast on Bloodsail Buccaneers, and if you find yourself on that server say hi. I will be doing whatever it takes to get the one gold needed to buy a guild character so that I can get a guild up and running, but I have a feeling it will take a few days. It is going to be interesting stepping through the wormhole and seeing a version of the game similar to what I played fifteen years ago.

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.