Really I made this first blog to address somethings that I feel are pertinent to the MMO community
Yesterday, I read an article, by a random website trying to generate views by bashing a game, of a genre, that they cared nothing about. What distrubed me is that they tried to bash the game, but at the same time, they bashed an entire genre of games. This genre being Massively Multiplayer Online Games. Specifically, Role Playing Games. This made me go back and think about my entire experience in my 7 year career.
I became furiously worked up, typing up a storm, trying to validate my 7 years (This is on and off of course, I went through phases of playing and not playing). Typing up all my responses of how he is wrong and this is right, and all this typing, got my brain flowing. It made me think back to all the moments that made me love this game called World of Warcraft. It also reminded me what I hated about it.
The Early Days
I bought the game in December of 2004, using my mother's credit card, and immediately trying to figure out why me and my little brother, who is about 10 or 11 at the time, are not able to talk to each other. Finally, we realized that the game had different servers! Yes I know, laugh now but at the time the only difference between servers I knew was US East and US West. I created a Tauren Warrior, because at that point in my gaming career I loved being up close and personal with the enemy. But later deleted this character because my brothers friend from school was playing a character that was able to use guns! This, moment and day stood out to me as one of the funniest thing about how my brain worked at that age. Quickly, I created a hunter and off my journey began.
Many of days were spend running Scarlet Monastery to get the awesome looking sets of armor from the bosses in there. Yet most of my time leading up to max level are forgotten memories except Scarlet Monastery, I think that one was just burned into my brain from running the armory a billion times to get that damned axe to drop.
Yet after two grueling years (note: If you are reading this blog, please don't correct me on patches and such not being out I have no clue when exactly these events happen it was what seemed like centuries ago) , on and off losing interest in the game because of my short attention span of being 14 years old (maybe 15 I don't remember). I finally got the drive to hit 60 shortly after watching my little brother do something, I don't really remember what it was, It could have been Alterac Valley. Although I believe it was before battlegrounds patch. Anyways, we were members of multiple guilds, doing the small dungeons and wiping, many times. As frustrating as it was Stratholme and Scholomance were always fun to do.
Then finally when I started building up my dungeon set ( This really felt epic to do in this day and age, you could not hop out the gate as 60 and really get the purple-epic level gear as you can in max level now. At least that's how I feel about it.). I started slow and moved into the Blackrock Spire dungeons, the Lower and Upper ones. Eventually, as my play progressed and my gear along with it, I moved from one guild to another the first one who ran pretty much strictly the 20 man raids, which were out at this time, Zul Gurub and Anh Qiraj. Then eventually I found my way to my last guild of the closing of my first chapter in World of Warcraft, named Forever Dark. This had many of personalities in it, it had quite the Australian membership, being as our guild leader was from there. I don't exactly remember where the guild was in terms of progression in Molten Core but I do believe I hopped in as they were just starting. We progressed week to week struggling here and there but eventually figuring out how to beat this boss and that boss, and farming up our gear etc.
The Good Times
Towards the end of things, Naxxarmas was out at that point, and we knew we were never getting there, but we kept on keeping on in Molten Core. This, is where the game exploded for me. We hit a point, where we had put every boss on farm except Ragnaros. He was sitting between us, and Blackwing Lair. Every week, we would farm up to Ragnaros, slaughtering everything else. Just struggling with him. Now, back in Vanilla the legendaries were reserved for classes other than what I played. I played the hunter, and the best bow available was a pretty damn rare drop off of one of the last bosses in Molten Core. A string, that started a quest for the bow that everyone wanted. It was a status item, we had it drop a couple of times, maybe two? Its irrelevant though. Anyways the point I am trying to get to, is when we had it drop, towards the end of the raiding for me, something happened that will stick with me for the rest of my life everytime I go back to the thought of this game. It dropped, and every single hunter passed up the opportunity to get this item to give it to our class lead. Not because we had to, but because we wanted to. He had nothing that he owed us, we owed nothing to him. Yet because of the hard work and dedication he put in every week to trying to help out everyone in the guild, especially us hunters, who joking some of the more inept players in the game. Passed up what could have been our last chance to get this item to give it to him. Someone I have never met in my life, I was nice to, for no reason over the internet. Imagine that.
This is, to me a testament of the game before it was "mainstream", before it was 12 million subscribers. There was a sense of community, in the server that is, you knew who the big names were, you knew who the power players were. High Warlords, "The Guys with Teir 3- Gear". Every time you saw them in Orgrimmar you stopped to look at how cool their stuff looked. Everyone was nicer to each other, anonymity was not present, the trolls were known and shunned away. God I can almost remember the name of one troll from my server who everyone absolutely hated and knew he was a terrible player but trolled chat incessantly. Yet, the second name changes were available this removed all player accountability in the game. As Bioware might put it "You had to deal with the choices you made". This is long gone now. A fresh start is a server transfer and a name change away now. Funny what things money can do in this world.
Well that was just the damn purple bow that took up 2 paragraphs, anyways, back to that Ragnaros guy. So yeah, Ragnaros. He was a bitch of a end boss. Took about a solid month of play for us to all finally work out all the kinks, farm up all the necessary gear. Which, (gasp!) wasn't the gear you would expect in todays realm of things. It wasn't about the fancy DPS stats that you see in today day and age, it was about the right balance between survivability and your damage output. One starry night (not really), the stars aligned, and we defeated him. The boss that stood in our way for more than a month fell. Our teamspeak exploded, everyone was yelling, shouting, just absolute joy. I still remember to this day, that our guild leader cried that night, and thanked everyone for their hard work and dedication to make this finally happen. It stuck to me, like glue. I will never forget (not soon anyways) how it felt to be the hero. Running and shouting through general chat that we did it. We killed it him. Even if it was in an online video game on my little section of the server, it felt epic. The last time I felt epic in this video game that we call World of Warcraft.
The Aftermath
The game after "Vanilla" as it was hereby dubbed by the community, to me lost its flavor, I lost interest in my hunter, lost interest in the game. I became absorbed in other real life things, video games, fell by the wayside.
Then I met a friend who convinced me to join him on his server on his guild. So I started the journey yet again down the treacherous path I call the leveling process. I did it once, barely. How on God's green earth could I do this again. Finally several months later I finished and picked up the role of a healing shaman on the alliance side. It was fun, I did well, I had heroism (so I did well). I also gained a few friends along the way that I still keep in contact to with this day, not because of the game, but because I liked them. It had nothing to do with the community. That was shot to hell at this point, everyone was in their clique doing there thing.
I think everyone in a good raiding guild at this point and was in one at some point during BC/WotLK can attest to this fact, that a small minority of the players put the majority of the players on their back. It is inevitable, there are going to be players in a semi-causal guild that do not want to bend or change their ways just for the greater good. I will leave that be till I rant about the term elitist later on in this blog. But what is the difference between this and Vanilla? Well, reflecting back on my experience in the original version I had a realization, the Molten Core was quite possibly the most casual raid encounter of all time. You could complete every single boss, not being at 100% capacity for a single fight. My little brother who was a shaman would sometimes fall asleep during the raid, not contributing at all, just exacerbating my point. I was 15 years old MAYBE when I was raiding 2 times a week for 3 hours at a time. I did not min/max. I had no clue how to theorycraft or what theorycrafting was. I just spammed buttons and had fun (I will say that spamming buttons as a hunter I still had a shot rotation, might not have been optimal but I still fought for top10 DPS). My progression was purely based off my time invested. Not player skill, at all.
Now 17 years old and being able to understand the bit of math behind what I was doing. I progressed with my real life friends and the few other players carrying people who didn't play as well as we did into the end-game. The person who did this most was our main tank. He understood the game like the back of his hand, he knew every single encounter, he min/maxxed like no other and in my eyes, the best player on the server. Yet the time he invested in the game, did not equal out to what other players were getting out because he limited himself to the guild we were in. We all did. We could be in that top tier guild, but we stuck together.
Its is my opinion that Blizzard created the monster that people coined the term elitist when they changed raids and raid mechanics and forced down peoples throats to use the class to the full potential. The raid model from Vanilla changed so drastically much from when I stopped playing in Wrath of the Lich King. I didn't get the same feeling that I did after I defeated Ragnaros after we defeated Karazhan, after we defeated Illidan. The same can be said about Yogg-Saron anyone of the end-game bosses that I encountered.
I will have to admit however, I did not get to defeat Illidan until after the severe nerf to him. Yet my point still remains that nothing has come close to the defeat of Ragnaros in my eyes. The game became a farm badges and get high level items place. No longer was it the same 40 man epic raid instance of its former self. Which I was a fan of. Not having to worry about pulling the weight was something now putting itself front and center in my play experience. Maybe it was because of the role switch I endured, but I think not, seeing as how the "clique" I seemed to be in progressed at a much faster rate than the guild as a whole in the 10 man heroic sector, picking up on boss mechanics quite quickly and taking down the 10 man heroics faster than some of the higher ranked guilds on the server. Which from what I have gathered from my friends still in the game. Is still the same today.
I missed it, the 40 man raids which were so integral to my play experience giving us a huge feeling of group worth when something was accomplished, led to fighting and bickering in the 25 man experience, finding ourselves at odds with each other.
In comparison to Molten Core epicness, for the "casual" Karazhan, lacked. HARD. Naxxaramas lacked even harder, taking away from the epic feeling that Molten Core gave me, even as much of a "casual" as I was at the time. Even "casuals" breezed through this content not giving them the fullfilling experience that I experiences as a youngin' in Molten Core. This is where I think it finally all made sense to me.
I was fine with where I was in Vanilla, I was content with where I left off in Molten Core. I killed Ragnaros. A very epic feeling adventure. Did I still have alot left on my plate? Of course I barley touched the Blackwing Lair raid, and didn't even bother with the daunting challenge of AQ40. What I think games such as SWTOR need to take out of this lesson is that the "casuals" such as I was in my youth, do not want to breeze through content such as Naxxaramas, or Karazhan. Just make sure that the Molten Core of your game gives them the feeling that I experienced. Yet make sure the player that I wasn't still has the challenges of Blackwing Lair and AQ40.
I apologize for the lengthiness of this blog, but I feel like I needed to type all this out to truly understand how I feel about the MMO genre as a whole.
