Jan 10
3
Five years of World of Warcraft
I started playing WoW when the US beta was in the late stages. I got a few days of play before the open beta ended, and then I waited a few weeks before the beta started in Europe. Back then, I was familiar with Anarchy Online, which was the first “real” MMORPG I had played – sure, I played a text based game called Nightmist, but that game wasn’t really “massive” and games such as Runescape is a lot further down in the food chain. Anarchy Online was a fun game, but very different from WoW, and despite all the time I had spent on that, it lost out rather quickly to WoW.
But the WoW five years ago is very different from the WoW we have today, both in the good aspects and the bad. My real life job has me analyzing and evaluating online memes, so my interest in WoW is not only for the game itself, but the society it creates. Lets take a walk down memory lane, as I express my rather biased, and perhaps, rather elitist views of the evolution of WoW.
World of Warcraft was fun, new and very exiting. One of my earliest memories was when I met another dane on the beta servers, and we played through Darkshore and the surrounding areas together. At one point, we killed a bear, and I always smile when I see a Rotting Bear Carcas drop from a mob, and remember how me and my friend tried to agree on some terms: the carcas sold for a whole silver, after all! We eventually decided that one of us got the item, and the other was to get drops from the next couple of mobs to make it fair on both of us. A whole silver, can you imagine?
I was quite a newbie back then, and I didn’t really immerse myself very much into the finer details of the game until I managed to get my priest up to level 60 and start doing some raiding. Back then, raiding was a terrible complex thing: You couldn’t just make a PUG for Molten Core, and expect everything to be alright. Just making a guild and managing 40-60 people and have them coordinate on some – at that time – rather sophisticated bossfigths, was a massive undertaking. When Zul’Gurub came out, I was suprised to see that people would go there first, even if it was harder than Molten Core, and then go to MC and beyond when they had enough people. I suspect this was the first sign to Blizzard that 40 man raids just weren’t going to cut it.
Raids were very difficult back then, at least from my perspective, and even if we don’t give much credit to the fights now. Talent trees were badly made, each class was generally forced into one role, and there was a lot of requirements to be met, just to have some succes. There was a great respect for the people that managed to clear just Blackwing Lair, and even more to those that went through Ahn’Qiraj and old-Naxxramas. I was not one of them – I fell short just before the Twins of AQ40.
Then came the Burning Crusade, and it turned the world upside down. Suddenly, a druid wasn’t forced to be resto, a hunter didn’t have to be marksman. The silly specs like the survival melee hunter or the pitiful excuse for a balance tree, got replaced by something that could at least work, even if there was a lot of focus on watering down hybrids. Raiding was made a bit easier, first with a 10 man instance to get you going, and then later 25 man instances that were a little bit easier to manage. They were still hard, mind you. You couldn’t just walk into Serpentshrine Caverns with a PUG and expect to clear the place in a few hours, even at the end of TBC. Even heroics was something that you wouldn’t take lightly; I tried going through Shadow Labs heroic when I was in mid-Karazan gear, and that was a terrible experience, where we decided to give up on the third boss in the end because it was just too hard. It was a challenge we were not yet ready to face.
But while the hard working raiders was rewarded with lots of items, other players had a chance to get into the action, even if they had a late start to the expansion. Some time after a new content patch came out, Blizzard would allow you to buy nearly as good items – for some of your slots – for heroic badges, and I think that was a great idea in itself. When Sunwell came out, a person who had only been doing heroics could buy a full set of epics, ranging from Karazan to Black Temple level and above. One piece for each slot, most of the time, but still an option for the new player, or the alt. With a bit of elbow grease, they could get into a SSC or BT guild, and work their way up to the rest.
I think thats fair. Some people work for months and months to be able to manage the harder content, and those who doesn’t go the natural way will have to struggle a bit more, and a bit longer. Effort equals reward.
Then came Wrath of the Lich King. We re-used Naxxramas (which made sense, I might add), and added a big area with five big portals but only one boss, and threw in the guardian of magic for good meassure. Naxxramas was quickly cleared, and it would take a good while before we saw Ulduar – a bit too long for my personal taste. When it came, however, it was the epiphany of a raid instance in my book: Many bosses, changing settings, challenging hard modes, and a place that you could take on whether you were in a big 25 man guild or simply a 10 man group of friends. Blizzard did right with Ulduar, and I have many fond memories of raiding the instance.
Then it sort of went down hill. It took a very, very long time for Trial of the Crusader to come out, and when it did it sported a disappointing five new bosses. But hey, you could do them four times each week, so in reality it was 20 new bosses! That was, when the place was actually unlocked, and only after waiting for a month could you clear the whole place and try the hardmodes. What followed next was months of killing the same bosses four times each week, and the fights were all identical. Even going into the heroic version didn’t offer anything new or exiting: The bosses did more damage, they had more health, and they had shorter enrage timers.
There were no new adds spawning, there was no clever change in the way the fight worked, there was no pressure to play it smart. Just heal more and do more damage. And you had to do this over and over again. Doing Ulduar twice a week was acceptable, but clearing the same five bosses four times every single week, with no refreshing changes was a daunting experience. Sure, it was challenging, but we are at a point where the only real challenge is Anub’Arak on heroic 25, and all of the other bosses are just a minor annoyance.
And at the same time, as new raid instances were released, Blizzard made new gear for the people that hadn’t quite made it to that level of raiding. They were a level of emblems behind the rest of us, but could still get good gear from doing heroics. The gear isn’t perfectly optimized, and it doesn’t offer the same look and feel as the stuff that drops in raids, but it can still give you an edge and get you into raiding, even if you will have to struggle for the last tier.
Then came Icecrown Citadel. I had, and have, high hopes for Icecrown, and so far I have been pleased with the content. But Blizzards need to please everyone is a thorn in my eye, when people – with the release of Icecrown – are getting emblems of triumph for simply stumbling over a heroic boss. Heck, even my level 72 hunter alt gets two emblems of triumph for the first normal random dungeon she completes, and if I keep that up, I can probably buy a few pieces of epics as soon as she gets to level 80.
It all boils down to this: Some people have worked very hard, and spent a lot of time and gold on beating the content that Blizzard puts in, and we are fully equipped to go in and face whatever Icecrown throws in our way. Other people have been doing a lot of heroics for the last few months, or they have sleepwalked through Naxxramas 10 and 25, and they have almost instantly gotten a full set of tier 9 with accompanying epics for the rest of their slots, with very little effort. The difficulty they face in their 232 gear is not much harder than what we face in 245-258 gear, and it feels a bit like all my hard work was wasted.
No, no, ofcourse they should have access to all of the content. I wouldn’t dream of denying them that pleasure. But I do feel a bit of resentment when I have raided for the past year, and worked my way through every instance and every hard mode to get to this place, only to be matched equally to someone who has done heroics and Naxxramas for the last 2 months. Everybody should see Icecrown and enjoy the end of the expansion, but maybe, just maybe, these people should work a little bit harder for it.
It feels as though the hard work we have put in is being reset whenever new content is being put out, and while we can gear up slightly faster because we have access to both 10 and 25 versions of the raids, I do feel that it might be pushing it a bit too much to reset people to a standard with every release of new content. I want everybody to enjoy the game, but maybe we could reserve just a little bit of respect for those that works a little bit harder for it. Is that too much to ask for?
I’ve tried a lot of MMORPG’s since I started playing WoW, and I’ve always come back, simply because it is the game that offers the most. And I do still enjoy the game. But it all leads me to wonder: How will Cataclysm be?
Are we nearing a point where normal 5 man bosses drops epic gear, where you get a starter raid set when you ding 85, and where Blizzard are so focused on making every bit of the game accessable for everybody, that they are too frightened to make something just a little bit challenging?
