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Notes -
What do you mean exactly by Pointless?
Thoughts on Classic WoW
So this summer I got back into World of Warcraft for the first time since about 2010 era Wo, when I lost my virginity and left for college and didn't really have a ton of time for video games anymore. WoW kept adding expansions, and with each expansion your old character became irrelevant and there were new levels to grind and new gear to seek out, and as it left me behind I never had interest in coming back to it. But at the start of the summer, a fit of pique fueled by a knee injury and my pregnant wife's hormonal desire to have me around the house combined with a hormonal antipathy to doing anything interesting lead me to find a video game to play to kill time. I had heard that Blizzard had revived the classic games I had played back in the day, and I downloaded TBC classic and re-upped my subscription. I'll note that any of my thoughts on video games probably suffer from the guy who has only seen Boss Baby syndrome, because I'm not really a gamer.
And it's been a ton of fun. Most serious gaming I've done since, well, 2010. I was really surprised how much interest there was in the game, I had figured on playing mostly solo on a dead server, but in reality I played in groups constantly because there were so many players that at times it was unaesthetic or impossible to play solo. Over a month or two of screwing around, I got my orc shaman to 70, and figured why not try to get into an easy phase 1 raid, that might be fun to do once. Well it turned out to be so easy to find raids as a shaman that I quickly got geared to the bleeding edge of progression content, despite just kind of logging in when I had time to raid and PUGging into a guild group that needed a fill-in. I was amazed at how committed a lot of people were to being absolute best at a 20-year-old video game that is widely denigrated, but I was happy to hang out and sponge off their higher levels of skill in a supporting role.
Then, tragedy struck, Blizzard announced a whole new version of World of Warcraft, Forever, dropping in November. Given the level of no-lifeing in the game, Forever feels like a threat for some people. The nature of WoW is that, as a game built around expansions, the original game was great, and ever few years an expansion came out and fixed some problems with the old game and added some new features and content, but over time changes and improvements and expansions stacked up to the point that the old game almost disappeared. Forever promises to be the original, vanilla experience, with minimal adjustments to fix some major flaws and add some major features, but without the slowly stacking changes that destroyed the original. Instead of vertical progression that makes your old character irrelevant, it will have horizontal progression, new content that doesn't make your old work redundant every few months. You can keep playing whenever you want for as long as you want, and nothing will ever really change, just endless new content.*
For players in TBC classic, this was tragedy, in that so many players got so excited about the new game that they immediately left the old game. There were stories of 25 man raids losing half their members instantly during the middle of a four-hour raiding session, and lots of serious guilds that had been putting in 10-20 hours a week on raids simply shuttered rather than fight the roster boss every week trying to continue. Like a bank run, this worked its way down: some players quit instantly because they wanted to play Forever and didn't want to "waste time" on TBC, others quit because they knew they'd want to no-life Forever when it dropped and needed to take time now to "farm Rep with their wife/employer;" then more players quit seeing that so many others had quit, figuring that the game was dead and further effort was "pointless."
It's this last category that fascinates me personally. I've had a number of conversations with people who were sinking a ton of time into the game a month ago that go something like "Well, I'm enjoying playing TBC, I'd prefer to keep playing TBC, but now I'm going to quit because playing TBC is pointless with Forever coming out soon." And that is such a confusing statement to me. My brother in Christ, what was the point of playing TBC last month? This was never getting you laid or getting you paid. It's always been pixels on a screen, lusted over by us dorks, an utterly pointless but fun hobby. It's always been a twenty year old game being replayed by bored dads to recapture their teenage nostalgia fix, that was inevitably going to move on from whatever content you were doing now next year when next expansion anniversary hit. And they can't explain it to me. They just keep saying that "now" it's pointless.
And this feels so odd to me, because if there's any group of people I should understand it's other bored millenial dork dads playing WoW classic. But there's some essential disconnect, where I can't understand what they're trying to communicate to me. We were playing the same game, the same raid, the same way, and yet I can't talk to them. I just don't fit in anywhere, I guess. Other people will never make sense to me.
Assorted other thoughts on WoW:
-- Playing a game developed between 2003-2007, it's amazing how many cultural artifacts you find. WoW wasn't exactly written as a "political" game, it never had a strong central story or message** but looking at it from 20 years on you notice certain things. In theory WoW is built around a racial war between the Horde and the Alliance, but neither is really the good guy or the bad guy, the NPC mobs are the villains, and all the really big threats to the world that result in endgame bosses and raids end up involving neutral factions that give you the quests. The Argent Dawn, the Cenarion Circle, the Earthen Ring, etc. This makes sense in game, it avoids creating exclusive content for either faction in the endgame, or making too many duplicate quests for each faction; it's easier to just have both sets of players go to the same place and do the same quest from the same questgiver for the same reward. But the moral message is very 2000s: nations are fine, armies are fine, but the really good guys are NGOs! Argent Dawn literally tells you in their introduction that they "aren't political and don't want to be political, we are just dedicated to protecting the world from the undead scourge of zombies!" The Cenarion Circle is magic Greenpeace. Leveling and in pvp it's the World of Warcraft, in endgame raids it's World of NGOs.
-- On the same note, I'm curious how other players map Horde vs Alliance to red tribe vs blue tribe. In my mind, the Horde is obviously blue tribe: a mix of indigenous refugees, freed slaves, alt lifestyle burnouts, history's victims trying to make good. The Alliance is obviously red tribe: your classical trad heroes joined by traditional religious belief and racist hatred of the Other. But I could equally see the alternative: Horde is masculine, aggressive, ugly while the Alliance is effeminate pretty do-gooders.
-- The problem with nostalgia is that you aren't a child anymore. This is most visible in nostalgia games, which are basically easy because I'm smarter than I was when I was a child. Pokemon Red took me months to beat in 1998 because I was seven years old, I wandered around for hours trying to do basic things because I couldn't figure out puzzles, and ultimately beat the Elite Four with an utterly absurd team because I hadn't thought ahead about building a good team. Now when I feel like replaying it, I can beat it on a train ride to Connecticut, because I know where everything is and what I need to beat each challenge and I'm mentally planning my route through available resources from the starter straight through to the end in a few hours. WoW is a little harder, but ultimately pretty easy at this point, thanks to playing smarter and the resources available online, along with some nerfs from the developers who want a more casual game. People hate that the bosses are easy to kill, and respond not by casually playing an easy game for fun, but by setting increasingly arcane rules to make killing bosses harder. People don't just seek to finish a dungeon, they seek to speed run it, skipping the unnecessary fights, pushing their performance to the bleeding edge, and refusing to play with anyone who isn't also an elite player. Or alternatively, they try to speedrun the game leveling quickly, or they try to play through the whole game without dying once. Which is an interesting achievement, but ultimately is just about making an easy game artificially hard. What's interesting to me is that Blizzard obviously doesn't want this dynamic to dominate, they want the game to be easy to play casually, but the playerbase refuses and seeks an elitist consensus in game.
-- Why are middle-aged men playing an old video game still trying to hit on women? Not only will women in disc get harassed if they talk, you can sponge free stuff off men in game by merely pretending to be a girl. Easily achieved by the simple expedient of saying you don't talk in disc because you don't want to get harassed. Lmao wut?
I'll also use this post to announce that last week, my daughter was born. Little Artie FiveHour is happy and healthy, and all around an excellent baby. So whenever I post from here on out, you can chart how fatherhood changes me.
*I suspect, though this is not confirmed to my knowledge, that the progress of AI tools is a major part of this plan. Blizzard devs believe that they can now create new content easily and quickly, on an essentially infinite scale. Reading an account of the development process of the original WoW game while stuck in the hospital last week, Staat's WoW Diary while stuck in the hospital last week, there was a real debate when the game was first on the drawing board over whether dungeons/instances would be a limited number of handmade and unique experiences or "procedurally generated" where a random cave with a randomized set of mobs would be created infinitely based on set parameters. At the time, handmade dungeons won out because they were so far superior to the procedurally generated models, but with AI tools offering the ability to generate effectively infinite additional content, we're likely seeing a swing back towards infinite semi-unique content. Another example of how anything that survives long enough to make it to generative AI is assured of eternal cultural life. A book series can have infinite AI written sequels, a TV show can have infinitely more episodes, a game can have infinitely more levels, an album infinite songs. Some of these, just by happenstance, will actually be good. I think one of the cultural tools we will need to develop is the discernment to decide what versions and what parts of a given series are actually good, and which can be safely discarded. Completionism will be impossible in the future.
**Once again from Staat, I learned just how loose the lore was in Vanilla WoW: Chris Metzen was the only guy actually interested in writing the story. He gave broad outlines of the factions, races, and zones. The level designers then created the zones and populated them with monsters. Then, with this mostly done project, the quest creators came in and wrote the actual stories that your character encounters in the flavor text, using this already existing zone. The lore content is literally just a superstructure built mostly on already existing gaming content. Any messages or stories that are compelling within WoW have a subconscious, egregoric, or emergent. A true experiment in a compelling story, compelling because of the time that players sink into it, without a real author. A true paragon of the "death of the author" dynamic.
This disorganized authorship also explains how uneven Vanilla ends up. They started from the Humans at level 1, and worked outward from there. That's why the Human starting zone feels both so detailed and so poorly made, while other starting zones are much less intimate but also way more technically sound. They never even played any of the raids, because they lacked enough players on the dev team to play a 40 man raid, and just kind of guessed how they would go. Everything was being figured out in real time, and right up to the end they thought Goblins would be playable and gnomes wouldn't exist.
Congratulations! The newborn stage was way more fun than I expected.
The newborn stage for me as a father was a hell of sleep deprivation for little-to-no emotional return. Pretty sure my wife had some hormonal assistance there that I just didn't. YMMV, I just want to make sure @FiveHourMarathon doesn't have expectations falsely raised and then shattered. ;-)
For what it's worth, though, things get better much faster than I'd have expected before I had my first kid. I could have anticipated that it would be heart-meltingly adorable for a 1 year old to precariously toddle over to my legs to demand "Bup up!" to be picked up ... but really the emotional connections started far earlier. There's a great yet subtle transition from "I'm talking to her when I hold her because it's so boring and there's nothing better to do" to "I'm talking to her when I hold her because holding eye contact while she contorts her lips and makes noise trying to copy me is one of the most fascinating things ever! I'm rooting for you honey!"
Haha definitely fair.
I was surprised by my ability to operate on very little sleep and short naps (even at 31) and I shouldn't overgeneralize from that!
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So far so good, I've enjoyed the newborn stage more than I thought I would. I was dreading it, but it's mostly like raising an orphaned baby animal, except that I care about her way more and she's way more important.
I figure it'll get bad later, but right now she's such an easy baby that if she was any easier I'd be worried about her. Given, part of that may be that Mrs. FiveHour coped with her fear of the vagaries of parenthood by buying every possible baby device and tool, so maybe it's just easy because we are oversupplied with gadgets to make it easy.
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Congratulations on the firstborn!
Thank you, much appreciated.
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As someone who was in a bleeding edge content guild during TBC I have often been tempted by that sort of thing, but really, I just wish I could have my old guild back and heal with my dwarf paladin. Starting over doesn't interest me much. Maybe if I had a dedicated 5 man squad that we re-rolled horde (which I've never done seriously) and just did dungeons till endgame and then started a guild. I guess? But how would I even do THAT when I have a kiddo that now thinks his bedtime is after mine?
I can tell you that it is entirely possible to raid while bottle-feeding an infant.
I got a surprising amount of gaming in while nursing for the first two months or so.
Not much sleep, but plenty of gaming.
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Children deserve a parent who's present with them rather than a screen.
Children don’t deserve anything, they are objects I have conjured out of the ether to satisfy my own narcissism and quest for immortality.
It may be wise in the long term to invest undivided attention in them, but that’s a different argument (and also entirely unnecessary for a pre-verbal infant).
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What do you picture as a functional view of what parenthood should look like? When my newborn is sleeping on my lap, should I sit in quiet contemplation of her? Am I allowed to read? Post on the motte? Talk to my friends and relatives? Where do you draw the line?
If you optimize for what's best for the kid rather than what's convenient for the parents, it's no screens in the same room for young children. I don't think the data on it is incontrovertible, but it is pretty compelling. The AAP recommends absolutely zero screen time under under 2 year olds. I walked the walk on this with my own kids, literally never letting them lay eyes on a turned on screen. I was prepared to let them watch educational-type shows when they turned 2, but looking at their behavior at around 2 years old, I realized I would have to sacrifice some other form of play to make time for it, and it never made sense in terms of what was best for them, so my kids never saw a screen until they entered the public school system.
You draw your line wherever you want, but I would personally be mortified to model playing video games to my kids.
In the studies you've read, what sorts of interventions prevent the child from growing up to be a moralizing prig?
It's a combination of nature and nurture. Both I and my brother were homeschooled with limited screen time (I don't remember the details of the restrictions), but only I became a moralizing prig (until approximately age 22), while he did not.
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You know what'll fix the birthrate crisis? Criminalizing Netflix for young parents. And books, too, probably.
Yes, there's a point where ignoring your kid while mechanically caring for them is a problem, but infants spent a lot of time being uninteractive and holding them is pretty much all you need to be doing.
WoW also has a lot of interesting colors and shapes for a toddler to look at while they sit on Daddy's lap and watch him tank Illidan. Important lessons to absorb about leadership, coordination, and internet/chan culture, too.
It's a bit of a personal topic for me. I literally met her mother on WoW, and it took a while to unravel us from the guild I led after real life took precedence.
You know, ironically, I had originally scheduled the baby's due date as my quit time for WoW this run, or at least of scaling way way way back to "maybe I'll log in and screw around every now and then, but I'll definitely have to stop raiding."
It's actually been the reverse as of this week. Before, I only PUGged raids, because I couldn't justify scheduling a block of three-four hours weekly where I was going to be sat at my computer and ignore anything else that was happening. I was always going to respond to my wife, or to work calls, or I should be asleep, etc. Then the baby was born, and I suddenly find myself with a scheduled time from 9-1 every night where I am, in fact, sat quietly with zero other adults and no one to bother me, and I've actually joined a guild and signed up for a BT run a week in advance rather than logging on when I found time and hunting around for a PUG. Artie mostly sleeps on my lap during the raid, and if she fusses I just type "AFK rq baby aggro" and everyone understands. Now, I suppose one could criticize that I'm probably not giving her 100% attention if she happens to wake up during the five minute boss fight, but a) it's five minutes and b) it's not like I'm ignoring her, just comforting her with one hand while trying to work my rotation with the other. Strategic hot keys and macros make it possible, though it may also help that I'm super casual by the standards of the guild I'm in and am ok with accepting corresponding loot restrictions.
I still suspect that as she develops more and requires more active attention I will quit, but I'm almost at the point where I have achieved all my goals already, so it will line up perfectly.
That was my experience early on as well. I got a lot of gaming in between nursing and the baby sleeping the first ~2 months or so. Now at 4 months he's a lot harder to hold while sitting at a computer, and also a lot more fun to watch while he plays on the floor. Dad can still do it, but he's playing a strategy game, not anything realtime.
Baby will sleep earlier and longer at night as she gets older though, so you may still have 9-1 free if you're willing to be a bit sleep deprived.
Sure but when I have 9-1 free, I won't want to book it for running Sunwell. The unique factor here is that I am not free from 9-1, I'm on shift watching the baby, I can't go anywhere or do anything, but that isn't actually a very active activity, it's mostly just feeding her every two hours, changing 2-3 diapers, snuggling if she fusses, and making sure she doesn't die, before waking my wife up and passing her off until 6am. Under normal circumstances, my wife is mildly upset if I come to bed late. In these circumstances, I'm being kind to my wife if I stay up extra late, letting her get more sleep.
And anyway, while I'm questioning why everyone else is quitting TBC all of a sudden, I'm kind of feeling like I'm going to be less interested in TBC after I get an Illidan kill. I have Black Temple booked for Friday night with a group that cleared it in three hours last week after running a successful Hyjal with them on Saturday, and I mostly just want to kill Illidan once. He's the guy on the box, and I never got him in high school. That's beating the game for me. After I knock him out, I'm not sure I'll want to run it every week for the foreseeable future, though maybe I'll try to gear up enough to "mothball" my shaman until Sunwell drops in case I want to come back. Maybe I'll level an alt, or maybe I'll look for a single player RPG that offers a similar experience, or maybe I'll just quit video games again for another decade.
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True though, as a parent, I've learned to give other parents a lot of grace. We put way more pressure and expectations on parents than we used to and then are shocked when the birth rate collapses.
Except for cases of neglect and abuse, parents are almost universally doing more for the world than childless people. Let them have fun and save your scorn for the people who play video games to the exclusion of dating, marriage, or childbearing.
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Congratulations! Enjoy the hell out of it, bro. It passes quicker than you think. What comes later is good too, but different good. There's only so many months when the little one is overwhelmed with excitement because "Dada! Dada!" came home.
Thank you much. At the moment she is in the pure loaf stage, and it's basically no different from the various orphaned kittens I cared for in my youth. I'm excited for her to get older and more active. I of course think she is and will be the most beautiful and interesting and intelligent baby of all time, but she's probably pretty normal.
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Congratulations to you and your missus. I was entering the portal of BC as a druid when it first dropped, slightly older then than you are now. It was a fun game, and I played mainly because I had a group of similar dudes I knew in real life who played. Quit at Pandaria, never looked back, but it was a great time while it lasted. My wife did not find my gaming particularly attractive.
Thanks, George.
It's an irony of women: they want you home and quiet, but hobbies that keep you home and quiet are unattractive, while hobbies that keep you out and around at all hours are attractive.
Very true. I was never better behaved than when I was sitting at home playing WoW for hours into the evening. Then when I quit I would go out drinking into the great constant party that is Osaka, and...well that wasn't ideal either.
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The point, for a lot of players, is to be the best.
They are obsessed with it, often to their detriment.
If there's an boss to kill, they're tracking their DPS and posting the logs to compare against the rest of the world. They sharpen their characters into the finest instruments of damage, or healing, or mitigation, trading off literally everything else that isn't perfectly optimal for their role. They will never be satisfied until they get the #1 "parse". If this results in the raid having 40 characters without a single extra point of health buffer, so be it. If this means any mistake would kill them, or wipe the raid, they would take that trade in a heartbeat. They're always chasing that perfect parse.
If there's a dungeon, they're mentally tracking how long it takes and trying to do it faster. If they can shave 30 seconds by doing a mechanically difficult jump to skip some enemies en route, they will try it every time. If there's an 80% chance a teammate gets the timing wrong, and they all die, and it ends up costing them 5 or even 10 minutes, they will still try it every time. The "best" way to do that dungeon is to skip the trash packs, so they will try and skip.
If they need to farm, they will always go to the "best" farm. That is, the one that theoretically pays the most per hour. If this area is heavily contested, and everyone else is farming it too, they will not adjust their strategy, because farming a less contested zone would not be "the best". If the area is better farmed by one class that is not the one they are playing, they will level an entirely new character of that class from scratch just to farm (taking weeks of effort).
If there is gear that is "BiS" - Best in Slot - they will spend every waking minute trying to get it, until they do, and it's an act of mercy by Blizzard that the raids can only be attempted once per week. In vanilla classic, there was a dagger that dropped from the end boss of a dungeon at a 0.2% rate (not a typo. zero point 2 percent, and later 2% after the devs changed it). Players would solo this dungeon boss 5 times an hour (the limit) nonstop until they got it.
But "best" only has value in a social game. If everyone leaves, they're just playing solitaire on Blizz's servers. They naturally move to the new thing and try to become the best there.
Sure, I get that dynamic. But we're dealing with the particular scenario of players who have already chosen the middle-child form of WoW. Retail, modern WoW has about 7 million active players, tbc classic had a few hundred thousand. Players in tbc classic have already self-selected into a less populated version of the game from a social perspective. It doesn't make much sense to me to drop the game suddenly, all at once, because it loses some of its already limited popularity. I could understand someone playing a very popular game, one that most people would recognize, say whatever the latest and greatest CoD is, moving on instantly when another game attracted popularity. But this is a population that has already chosen to play an unpopular game. I have trouble comprehending how 100,000 players is materially different for so many people than 50,000 players.
Never played retail, so I'm not 100% certain, but as I understand it, the reward structure has been gradually made less rivalrous there. This is "good", in that no one gets screwed out of their vertical progression by luck or politics, but it undermines the thing they were chasing all along. They want to be the best, and if the best isn't rare or difficult, it doesn't mean anything.
In vanilla/classic, only one person gets the legendary sword Thunderfury (maybe 2 or 3 if the guild gets very lucky). That represents potentially months and months of effort by 40 people, and it can only go to one recipient (typically the main tank and guild leader first, then a second tank, then maybe the top performing dps). It's not guaranteed either. Some guilds can run the raid for a year and never get it.
As for the Anniversary/TBC realms, it was generally understood from the start that those were "Classic plus waiting rooms" and that the population was always planning to drop them as soon as the new Classic came out. Maybe in a nod to the sheer number of classic releases, they called Classic Plus "Forever" and are planning horizontal progression. We'll see how that goes when it meets the population of minmaxers always itching for a little more vertical.
This process basically started in TBC, and the course they set in TBC made what the ultimate evolutionary drift of retail kind of inevitable. You started to see Arena epics that were as good as the best raid pieces, you saw badge vendors, you saw heroic difficulty dungeons, you saw a variety of welfare epics offered to help people get geared up. This was a huge improvement over original vanilla in my mind, but it also will inevitably lead to what we have now in retail. Which I never played past Wrath, but I saw the writing on the wall even then as each new expansion was announced and the changes got goofier and goofier in my mind.
The problem is that each convenience change improves the game in the moment, but as they accumulate they eventually kill the spirit.
That's exactly what confuses me about the dissatisfaction on display! If I were treating the game as a "Classic+ Waiting Room" I would never choose to invest any amount of effort in the game that I would regret if Classic+ dropped. Many thousands of players are upset that Classic+ dropped when it did, and that seems silly if everyone "already knew" that the game would die when Classic+ dropped. It's irrational, and I can't figure out what's going on there.
I suspect that in the long run Forever will be a reboot of WoW, and will eventually make a lot of the same decisions made originally. Maybe not for three or four years, but that's Forever in gaming terms.
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That works well in Retail WoW, where the developers design around it. But what puzzles me the same mindset is found in people who play exclusively play Classic, a game that wasn't designed around this mindset.
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That wouldn't happen to have been a level 19 requirement dagger that therefore made it tremendously popular for alts in low-level PvP, would it? I recall something like that specifically...
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Many MMO players are the kings of optimizing the fun right out of a game. I played both WoW and FF14 for years, and I would see so many people playing in ways they admitted were less fun, just because it was an extra 1% more DPS or whatever. Absolute lunacy.
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The new weather graphics look amazing. This reminds me of a video where a streamer hears the Stormwind song for the first time.
Well, the pixels on the screen look better. That, and there are more people running around. Taken to the extreme, your criticism can extend to playing IRL and soon you’ll sound like a medieval Hand of Meditation: wealth shall vanish; what thou hast here another shall have…
It’s interesting that there seems to be a “biological minimum” of socialization that is simply required to enjoy an activity. Few would play chess or League all day against bots, but many would against humans, even though there is no actual socializing involved. Similarly, no one would play WoW-Retail if the realm were populated solely by bots, but there is so little socializing that it’s often indistinguishable from bots. Nevertheless, we have to know that there are other players around us.
Entertainingly, I'm apparently one of the few. I played Blizzard's League ripoff, Heroes of the Storm, for years, every single match against bots.
It's not like the personalities of League players are improving the experience.
HotS was very fun, I was a GM for many seasons. The thing that made it great but was the same reason it was never very popular was because it's designed around team work.
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Yes. I would have a similar reaction to someone making a similar statement about ragequitting rock climbing or BJJ or golf, if they were obsessed to the point of sinking second-job hours into it one week and the next week quit saying it was pointless. If it's not getting you laid or paid, then you should be doing it for some reason that is largely intrinsic to your own sense of values and not be vulnerable to the whims of fortune. It points to some pre-existing emotional imbalance in how they were relating to the activity if outside actions can impact you to that extent emotionally.
I always remember the Christopher Moore line that people are happiest when they have someone to look up to, and someone to look down on. In most male hobby spaces, the guys in the middle are happiest (in terms of the hobby). They have people better than they are to aspire to reach, and they have people worse than they are to bully or to help.
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I think this is one area where your understanding would benefit from watching a movie other than Boss Baby.
Contrary to popular belief, most gamers are not primarily motivated by the sheer intrinsic joy of seeing numbers go up. Video games usually provide some form of longer-term goal that you're building towards, to motivate the more repetitive small-scale gameplay. In traditional single-player games this is usually pretty straightforward: you want to get to the end, because you want to rescue the princess, or maybe because you want to hear the conclusion of the story. In other games you're motivated by a more vague concept of "mastering" the game, learning all the tricks and techniques to beat it perfectly.
If you give up on this goal, you'll immediately lose a lot of your motivation for playing the game. Jigsaw puzzles are fun, but if you know you're not going to finish the jigsaw puzzle, it feels kind of stupid and pointless to sit there adding a couple more pieces.
Live-service games like WoW also provide this kind of motivation, but they can't make it as obvious. It can't actually be possible to get to the end of WoW because then you'd stop playing, and they want you to keep playing forever. So they goal has to be something that you can't really achieve, and that fact kind of needs to be obfuscated from you. I'm not familiar with WoW in specific, but common mechanisms for this include:
There are probably some people who play WoW solely because it's a fun social hangout and a way to waste some time, but I bet a lot of players keep going because of a long-term "goal" like this. Even if the goal was an illusion and never actually achievable, giving up on it still feels like giving up. (EDIT: And if you're planning to pick up Forever when it comes out, that means giving up on Classic.)
...OK, but you haven't applied any of your vague concepts to the situation at hand. What we have here, taking only the individual case, is at best something like:
September 1: Player spends 20 hours a week on World of Warcraft TBC Classic Anniversary, a game played by 100,000 people any given week, which will run no later than next summer at which point it will end. They derive immense joy/value/meaning from the game.
September 30: Player refuses to spend any time on World of Warcraft TBC Classic Anniversary, and actively regrets prior time they invested, because now 50,000 people play any given week, and the game may drop off further in another month and a half.
There's no reasonably logic to me by which a game that lasted another year with 100,000 people is significantly more meaningful than a game that lasts a shorter period of time with 50,000.
I'm having trouble figuring out how someone loses all those motivations so suddenly under those circumstances. All the aspects of mastery are still there. They're not even meaningfully reduced for the most part*. It's like back in high school, when people would get real upset about breakups, and I'd ask if they figured they were going to marry that particular boyfriend/girlfriend and they'd say no, and I'd say well then obviously you were going to break up some time.
*I may need to check my privilege here, in that I exclusively play desirable classes and I'm not a complete idiot/prick, and so the social aspect of the game may be easier for me even in a reduced population setting than it is for others
I don't think the player numbers really matter, except insofar as they motivate the player to decide to switch to Forever.
September 1: Player spends twenty hours a week on World of Warcraft TBC Classic Anniversary, a game where they're eventually gonna become the best or get all the cool mounts or whatever it is, there's definitely something like that. They are probably not thinking ahead to the far future when the game will shut down, they've just got that vague near-future-but-not-really feeling that they're working towards a goal. It feels almost productive!
September 12(?): WoW Forever gets announced, launching in a couple months. Player makes a plan in their head: they're gonna switch to it on launch day. It'll probably be a little more fun, and a little more popular, and a little more actively maintained without losing that classic charm. They aren't thinking about their TBC Classic Anniversary goals when they make this choice, because those goals only really exist as vague feelings.
September 30: Player regrets spending time in World of Warcraft TBC Classic Anniversary, a game where they're never gonna be the best or get all the cool horse armor or anything, because they're going to stop playing it before they have a chance to achieve any of those things. It feels like a waste of time!
Sure but on September 1, the inevitable end of the game was known. Either the servers would move on to Wrath and all your TBC achievements would be irrelevant, or Classic+ would drop, or it would be a low-pop Era server. There was no universe where the "vague near-future-but-not-really feeling" lasted very long. Given that state of affairs, it shocks me that people invested anything that they weren't ok with losing?
I will note one thing that seems rotten is people who spent real money on boosts suddenly finding the toon they boosted in a different position.
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I would have thought that Alliance is pretty clearly the blue tribe, because it attracts the majority of female players, who usually want to play pretty human or elf characters. Plus all the men who would simp for them by giving them equipment and such. The horde I remember being the dude-bro, sausage fest faction of guys playing ugly orc and tauren characters while saying bad things about women. But I only played it at release, which was a long time ago, and maybe things have changed since then with like the Blood Elves adding a "pretty" race into the Horde.
It's funny because on TBC release this pretty much flipped overnight because of the Blood Elves. But it feels weird to even have this conversation now, so many years after the species of gamer that would flame now long defunct forums about this topic all are not just responsible adults, but retired elders for some of them.
So much has happened since, and yet so little has happened to MMOs as a genre. Perhaps nothing even since that fateful South Park episode. Except a slow grind of convenience features spiraling towards ever more lonely massively collective gacha existence.
It really feels like WoW and its vortex of attention was the alpha and omega of MMORPGS. Like D&D for pen and paper. The grognard in me who used to get a kick out of VtM and DAoC snobbery hates that the beginning and the end of the genre has been themepark slop. But render onto Caesar.
The promise of MMOs was that you could build a new life in a new world on the internet, with new relationships unburdened by physical limits. And then the most peculiar thing happened, and the real world just became the internet. In a sense all social media is just MMOs without the game attached. So the only reason to keep making the game is nostalgia for the frontier.
Sometimes a game just nails the genre so well that there's nothing left to do. Blizzard also did that with Starcraft and RTS games, IMO.
Reading about WoW's development, the biggest thing they nailed that got me into the game in 2004 and back in 2026 is that they are obsessed with making it run on everything. They didn't want you to need serious gaming gear to play it, so that more people could play. It's one of the few good games that will run on my macbook air without fiddling around with a bunch of nonsense that crashes anyway. I've downloaded a few games people recommended over the years, only to find that my computer wouldn't run it for a variety of reasons, and given up. I'm not going to spend hundreds on a new console or a gaming pc, and even a bit of friction in getting a game to run on my computer tends to leave me cold about trying it.
Doesn't AI fix this now?
How exactly does it fix it?
When I download WoW, I hit play and then I play it. You can't get less friction than that.
The AI can download it, install it, configure it, mod it, and launch it with 1 request.
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Iterating AI queries after its first 3 “solutions” don’t work is actually very frictional.
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That feels a bit like an addict's behavior to me.
Not that I am judging or anything, I think that in the (school break) week I played KOTOR, I did very little else besides some eating and sleeping. But a nice thing about games like KOTOR or Baldur's Gate is that eventually they end, and typically the game is not so engaging that you will decide to start a new playthrough immediately. (I revisit games, but mostly after a few years.)
What seems to be looming now (per your description) is endless new content, produced faster than it can be consumed. Makes me really thankful that I am not into MMOs.
Where do you draw the line on what constitutes addict behavior? Is it in the behavior itself, or the object thereof?
There was a lot of misandrist Discourse about this with relations to the upcoming GTA drop, a game franchise I haven't played since the PS2 at a friend's house. Men were profiled, and criticized, who intended to take time off work or who informed their wives they would be a little bit unavailable. And it seemed kind of ridiculous, because every hobby involves similar tradeoffs, and the writers generally put in little effort to really justify their disdain, instead relying on vague anti-male prejudices.
Because any hobby or recreational activity means making those kinds of compromises. It's perfectly normal and natural to me to do all the laundry and cooking and spend time with my wife before going on a weekend camping trip, or making sure all my work ducks are in a row before going on vacation. Certainly when I go on a two hour long bike ride, I make sure my wife doesn't need anything and the cats are fed. Surely your position isn't that hobbies themselves are addict behavior? Or the untenable absurdity that no hobby can trade off against other activities? Or the repugnant conclusion, that one should not attempt to correct for one's absences by doing more for their wife before doing something else because the balancing is immoral?
One can take the puritan position, that any fun or recreation is at least a little bad and should never trade off against family and labor duties. But unless one is extreme and anti-human, that fails.
One can take the position that video games are bad and are an invalid tradeoff against work and wife, but that seems like kind of a silly value judgment and limiting on freedom. I'm not really interested in everyone have prescriptivist oversight of everyone else's hobbies.
One can gesture vaguely at "moderation," but that's not really an answer.
Camping trips and vacation inherently have to be scheduled for a particular time period. If you don't take time from other things, they become harder to do. GTA may be played at any time, so taking time from other things to play GTA means only "In more hours I can play more GTA".
Sure but the launch is an event, no? You can play GTA any time, but you can only play it at launch once at one particular time.
Which I don't find meaningful but clearly many people do.
There's nothing inherently disordered about saying within a marriage "hey I really want to do x, so in exchange I will do y for you." Inasmuch as that structure is rejected as illegitimate, I think that's bad for marriage.
In some sense every event is unique. This is my only chance to play it at 3:15 PM on a Friday the 13th in an even numbered month.
In another sense, events have various degrees of uniqueness. I think most normies, and probably even most gamers, will see a camping trip or vacation as significantly more dependent on scheduling than GTA is.
Are you
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Your intuition seems to be incorrect with regards to normies. Generally I'd figure enlisted are the normiest of normies, and the DoW feels that playing GTA 6 at launch is such an incentive their offering it up to convince people to re-up.
But regardless, my concern isn't really "Do most people feel that the launch of a video game is as much of an event as things I want to do, like getting drunk at an iggles playoff game or setting a rock climbing tournament?" it's "Do people really think that they get to judge how I spend my free time because I have a wife and a kid, or insert themselves as the person I forgot to ask about a deal between my wife and I?"
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Related, I stopped playing multiplayer games. I hated having to keep up or keep my skills sharp. I have things to do. I want to game on my own terms, probably finish the game eventually.
I've always felt that way about popular FPS and similar games, in that I try them when hanging out with friends, who are much better than me, and then I'm not that interested in playing because I suck and I'm not interested enough to invest the effort in ceasing to suck.
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The Point is other people.
Other people are the most fascinating thing in the world and the often best part of anything. We anthropomorphize everything because our brains are wired to think in terms of other people. Chris Nolan's Odyssey is interesting primarily because other people are going to see it -- there's nothing stopping anyone from reading the great works or watching older adaptations. Something was lost when we went from everyone watching the last episode of Seinfeld at the same time to Netflix letting anybody watch anything at any time.
The Odyssey really is a great example here. I came out thinking the film was basically pretty poor, but still grateful for all the resources and craft put into creating a common point of reference and discussion for a few weeks, and full of goodwill to Christopher Nolan. Seems like ever increasing amounts of effort need to be burned to create such moments in the current age.
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Yep well said. It's about being part of a moment, the social atmosphere, more than anything.
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My tender year chuds from my hometown, grew up playing WoW together in McBumFuckville Midwest-edition . It looks like there is some desire to get the band back together for WoW Forever. I've been seriously considering it, even going so far as to look at the talents calculators, and skills changes. We've dabbled in classic servers occasionally, we started playing late TBC, early WotLK, though I don't think anyone has been playing retail classic for a bit.
It's fascinating to me that you see horde x alliance as blue tribe vs red tribe. I know that a certain famous streamer of "Gamer-Chuds Rise Up"-mentality has some massive ally guild in beta, which confuses me. I see the opposite. Horde is straight up the bad guys in most cannon lore and they give as good as they get, underdogs they are not.
As I type this, I do wonder if this is however a split between the different types of reds. The problem with the red vs blue dichotomy is that it only works on a our post-modern level. It is all together too binary, too simple. My inchoate thought is the divider is that in modern era "Christian" is red tribe, but in pre-industrial societies it was undoubtedly blue-tribe. Since WoW is pre-industrial-ish fantasy, values/themes are being projected on an imperfect axis.
You're picturing a Hegelian dialectical view of history, that the Zeitgeist of progress at one point rested on Christianity, but has now moved on to other things. This was how our old world history textbooks were written: Sumerians and Persians were important until the Greeks, Greece was important until Rome, Rome was important until Christianity, Christianity was important until Humanism and the Enlightenment, etc.
Possibly, though maybe an embarrassing admission, I've never read Hegel, I know nothing of his philosophy, or what a "Hegelian Dialectical view of History" is. As far as remember wasn't Hegel the one who funded Marx?
But that is how my old world history textbook was written, very dichotomous. I've been musing that maybe humans are just built for viewing things as two sides. Good vs Evil, Insiders vs Outsiders, Black vs White, Us vs Them, Red tribe vs Blue tribe. Idk it seems like everything devolves into a binary. Probably just due to how the human brain evolved to handle socially complex situations effectively or something.
In the red vs blue tribe thing specially its complicated because chud gamers are not how the example red tribers are portrayed, in the traditional use of the term (it's definitely evolved), gamers are almost always blue or grey tribers, who through politicization of games have become, anti-blue tribers, not necessarily red tribers.
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Eh, Thrall is green Jesus who just wants peace and freedom for his people. When you first encounter the trolls in WC3, they're a literal foodslave race. The Tauren are Native Americans. The undead just want to understand their place in the world, find out who they really are, maaaaan.
That's at least an outlook you can take that is consistent with the lore. But personally, I agree, fuck all that whiney pussy shit. Lok'tar Ogar! For Hellscream!
You are of course correct, Though, the undead lore is a bit all over the place. The real soyboys are undoubtedly Blizzard for being unwilling to write consistent, good characterization of the two sides in a way that is appealing without being cookie cutter. It's funny how a decision made almost 20 years ago on Ally vs Horde still burns a fire in my stomach.
That said, after thinking about it, some of my more local friends are much more lefty/blue tribe, they are joining my hometown chud friends in playing (I wonder if this is going to be a disaster) and they are also diehard Horde gamers. In that sense, maybe Blizzard has created an effective lore, with the goal being to create good narrative anchor points for a wide swath of diverse mindsets on both factions rather than make interesting lore/characters.
I think it's a fascinating example of how absolutely terrible writing can become deeply meaningful to a great many people by the simple expedient of having them interact with it violently and repeatedly for hours.
I wonder if there is a psychological parallel around belief? I can envision humans having this, for lack of a better phrase, "coping mechanism" for when we expend effort towards a particular narrative, a narrative that divides. It causes the narrative to become deeply meaningful, to infect our psyche despite how banal, or weak it might be. Video games in general do a lot of cognitive hacking of the human mind, some of which is undoubtedly deliberate, but I wonder if this narrative adoption aspect is, or if its merely accidental?
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Like the Tower of Babel and existing overly-long fiction like Xianxia, when an AI-generated work is 99% slop and 1% gold, I think people will discard it, and the gold will be sought by few if it's even discovered. There are plenty of great works of art that already exist, like this 2000s game, so there's no reason to see new ones unless they bring something new, which AI struggles with.
I always think of a lit professor I heard once who offered the point that the most popular great literary canons are the Russian and the ancient Greek, because a determined reader can read effectively all of the great works of Tolstoy/Dostoyevsky/Pushkin right up to Pasternak in a year or so; ditto Homer to Plato.
But we've become rather comfortable with a concept of fictional canon by which we can easily distinguish the real from the fanfiction, and I don't think that distinction will be as useful going forward.
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