Exploring a Feeling

Community General Discussion
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I started reading the wow novels in contextual order. It’s been on my todo list for a while. As I’m reading about how Nerzhul became corrupted and the hard choices that Drek’thar and Durotan make, and the conflict with the Draenei, it all feels very close to home. The writing in the book isn’t that great technically speaking, but the story beats are really good.

It is inspired me to do a little nostalgic tour of the Outlands. As I was running through, re-earning transmogs that I’d vendored before the word was a Twinkle in Greg Street’s eye, I was feeling a profound sense of some emotion I can’t name. I can’t put my finger on it. “Loss” seems to dramatic. Melancholy?

I’m not saying anything needs to change, or they TBC was the perfect expansion. In many ways, modern wow is a better game. But there’s something to it to not be on an infinite wheel of character progression. I’m just exploring this feeling, and I was wondering if anyone else ever feels this way.

I’ve always been on the more hardcore end of the spectrum. Player power first. But, I used to have time every week to do all these quests, read all these in-game books. There was no power-gain opportunity lost because I didn’t spend the night doing Heroics. I felt a lot more connected to the game.

Would I give up m+ spam nights to have the time afforded me to experience this again? Are they mutually exclusive? I dunno. But I will say I never feel nostalgic or reminisce about m+ dungeons. I enjoy them in the moment, but I never think about them afterward.

I dunno where I’m going with this other than to say that on the path to challenge, we may have lost our soul. I don’t know that it’s better to spend to every hour in game chasing a higher performance benchmark.

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It’s this reason that I’m an RPer first and a content fiend second.

The challenge will come and go with the expansion, always and ever-turning on the hamster wheel. But the experiences and adventures I’ve had with people that were once strangers over the internet, but now are the best of friends – it’s irreplaceable and whimsical and a whole lot of other sappy adjectives.

I’m glad you found a piece of valuable perspective in the wastes of Outland. It seems to do that to people. Keep treading water - this was a great read.

(Edit: the time wasn’t wasted. Think of all the wonders you have left to rediscover!)

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No, definitely not wasted. This is gonna be long and rambling, sort of a free thought exercise.

I took a break from the game back in WoD. It wasn’t even really blizzard related. WoD, to me, could never be good because of the AU story. I hate them. AU stories have no stakes. It I also was going through some IRL stuff.

But I digress. Ever since I came back, I’ve played the game more like a sport. I level several characters at the start of every season, so I can play the position that the raid and key team needs. I avoid any spec that’s sub bar on performance. I practice, practice, practice. Do my homework. I don’t do anything that detracts from getting that week 1/2 AotC/KSM. I don’t read quest text, I (rather famously in my circle of friends) don’t do world content. I just run dungeons until raid night, I get vault full of myth track gear on 8 characters every week, and I have all season.

Until last week. Im not blaming blizzard for my choices. I choose to compete. I choose to try and play like Naowh or Meeres. I choose to train for wow like a sport. Until last week. We hit 250 pulls on smolderon this week. Roster boss is killing us. My Druid (my raid main) is 488.5, 486 equipped. We’re not reclearing. There are no more upgrades, really. 6 item levels on a head piece, 3 on a belt. At this point, I just wanna kill this boss so I can get to the actual hardest boss wow had ever made.

I logged on Friday to continue my dungeon grind, and I just couldn’t do it. Staring down the barrel of 12 more weeks to kill 3 bosses. I just couldn’t find the motivation to finish off my vaults. So I went fishing. In game, not literally. I fished up the aquatic Druid appearance, looks like the catfish mount. It was peaceful. Then I pulled up the wowhead guide on where all the Druid forms are, and I went about getting those. Simple, easy fun. I’m down to the last couple that drop off of rates. Then I went back to the pre-cata stuff to get some mogs and mounts that I’ve been neglecting to pick up. I really liked the pre-raid dungeon set from BC on my Druid. Oh, it’s super low Rez by todays standards, but I remember wearing it everywhere. It was part of my healing set for a long time.

I was thinking, what used to motivate me? What kept me from burning out when I raided 4 or 5 days every week? What made me keep working on one character? I didn’t level up a second character until ZA, and that’s because I thought the bear run was so fun I wanted to do it twice a week.

Part of it is egocentricity for sure. A big part of wows original storyline and even into zangarmarsh was very Druid-y. There were reasons for my character to care about the lake being drained.

I don’t think they can repackage the same formula. I don’t think going back to the way things were would really work. I think there are things and cultural preferences today that are incongruent with it. They cannot accomplish it with friction, and I’m not even sure they should or even could.

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I keep coming back to the idea that what really changed was the level of min/maxing that needed to happen. I knew that warriors and later paladins were better tanks, but I continued to tank. I tanked all the way through Sunwell, even though Illidan explicitly had an anti-bear mechanic, I just didn’t take the boss for very long. I knew that I could do it, even though it wasn’t the best option.

I never approached wow with naivety. I was adult in 2004, with a job and a wife and everything. I knew about Thotbot before I eft Teldrasil. I had a rogue friend who didn’t like daggers, so he used swords. He changed his spec to use swords-related talents. It was never a question of what was better, because you could do anything as anything. You didn’t have to be one of the best players in the world to beat the raid. We put Illidan on farm and our highest dps was a Moonkin — in the days of the hybrid tax.

And considering how I play the game today, this sounds insane to say. But I think the game was better when it was easier. We had more raids, more bosses, because they were easier to make. Easier to tune, fewer mechanics, required less testing, whatever it was. No BC dungeon is as complex as even something like Halls of Attonement. Enemies basically just meleed you, maybe one or two packs would have a couple casters. It was never hard. But it was fun, and engaging. Murmur was a cool fight. Not hard, just cool.

I’ve voiced this opinion in other threads, that wow should more directly target letting most players “finish” the game to their interest level. But I don’t mean that in the business savvy sense. I just mean as difficulty and drop chance have permeated wow culture, I feel like I’ve lost something. You can be hardcore about anything. Battle pets, mount collecting, quest completion. Every area has a META that becomes the “right” way to play. Multiple alts for mount collecting, squirt camping for battle pets. Raid and m+ take it to an extreme. You can’t complete it if you don’t play the “correct” way, and the “correct” way is to forego everything in pursuit of performance. Wow bosses take more tries than even games known for their difficulty. Ornstein and Smough aren’t as hard as Smolderon.

Why does that level of difficulty exist in an mmo? Who does it help? Who is it for? I think they are the logical steps towards mechanical purity. For years, the “correct” way to play is to min/max the fun out of everything. I’ve geared 8 characters this season, I can tell you down to the hour how long it takes to hit 480. Why? Who hears that and thinks that sounds like fun?

I suddenly feel like everything I’ve done in game since I came back at the end of legion was in service to an insidious master that I didn’t even realize I was serving.

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I’ve felt that before. Every time I dive deeper than just a quick visit to Shatt for the TW quest I feel that. I’ve felt that for a long time. Enough for me to personally reflect on it.

I was never hardcore into wow in the sense of progression. I was very much hardcore into wow and it was the only game I played for MANY years. Wow was new to me and I made some intense friends. We were on vent every night, sometimes doing a dungeon or leveling characters or just doing our own things like farming or professions.

A part of me misses that. I also know I don’t want wow to be the only game I play again. I feel like I could have something similar if I was willing to put in that kind of time again. I’m not and I’ve made my peace with that. I really do enjoy wow in DF.

I think we’ve had a similar feeling but for different reasons.

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I just watched the video a guildmate did back when we were in ICC. My kids and my wife (who was there with me) watched it together. Nostalgia was strong. I loved that expansion and my bear was a ton of fun to play back then.

Nothing will ever beat the moment we killed Arthas for the first time, and when he auto killed everyone in the raid, the bear who had popped all his CDs at once survived the blast, went kitty form to claw Arthas while his raid screamed at him not to bug their first Arthas kill.

Was a ton of fun.

Want some grainy, old WOTLK nostalgia, you can look for the bear butt in the video. That’s me, kicking it back before I got married, had kids, and got old :slight_smile:

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Not really, none of Warcraft’s storytelling has been emotional not even their crown jewel of Arthas Menethil.

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This is a wild take. Is it just based on cinematics? There are a ton of well written, evocative quests. Especially around the 2nd war and the scourge.

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Especially the quest paying homage to the Blizz employee’s brother who died of cancer:

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See this is a strange take. I’ve said for a long time now that the cinematic team has gotten better inversely to how bad the game design team has been.

The cinematics and emotion from them (albeit that Sylvanas was written pretty badly) has poured through. Anduin and Saurfang definitely tug at the emotions.

The game, in trying to become more modern, has definitely lost its sense of self, but there is emotion to be had.

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You can’t stop this feeling, 'eh?

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It’s entirely possible to optimize the fun out of your own gaming experience. This is true not just in WoW, but a lot of gaming. Heck, life, even.

You only have so many time points and it’s up to you to decide where to allocate them. Money/power feel good and have their use, but focusing solely on them to the neglect of most/all else can leave you walking away from your experiences feeling, idk. Hollow.

I enjoy some raiding and m+ because encountering challenging scenarios and making my character stronger is hella fun. However, I play video games (going back to the old days before I even had high speed internet) for the experience, not to make numbers on an in-game spreadsheet increase. I see it more as an interactive book than just a series of inputs/outputs with XYZ reward structure, and WoW’s in-game story/lore stuff (of which there’s actually a LOT more of than you might think, even nowadays, it’s just not part of the main quests) plays just as important of a role in that as the progression systems.