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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.
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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