The main reason why I enjoy WoW's Classic Era is that the leveling process is slow and steady.
Yes, it can be grindy, but the basic design of Vanilla WoW was that leveling was a good portion of the game, and the WoW community in general has moved on from that perspective to a primary focus on Endgame. If that weren't the case, in-game boosts and leveling guides and even externally paid level boosts* wouldn't exist.
For all people like to claim that it's not the destination, it's the journey, we certainly see plenty of people ignoring that journey in their rush to get to the end.
Thank you, Prince Humperdinck. From Imgflip and The Princess Bride.
But for me, the slow yet steady leveling pace of Classic Era takes all of the pressure off of me. I know where I'm going, but I already have been to the mountain, so I'm not worried about how quickly I get there.
And besides, I only know how to play two classes in Era --Mage and Rogue-- so I'd have to start from scratch to learn how to play a new class.** Nowhere better to start than in a game that has the journey as one of the key design pillars.
***
I realize that even in Classic Era I'm in the minority, judging by the number of people who get boosted or advertise for boosts. The reality is that I can't make somebody like a leveling experience if they're predisposed to not enjoy it, and it is foolish to try. All I can do is point out that the pace of leveling in Classic Era is perfect for Classic Era. Accelerating it, as has been done in Season of Discovery, only served to push people to whatever the Endgame was at each phase of the seasonal release. Given that Classic Era doesn't have all that many things to do at Endgame, there's an increased risk of losing your players because "there's nothing to do!"
Still, I need to point out that the leveling environment in Classic Era just works. You get a few levels, you have to spend gold to train. Your gold is depleted, so you go craft or gather and sell on the market, go out and quest some more, and go up a few levels. Rinse and repeat.
There's only one major area where this breaks down, and it's the low L40s. Questing kind of dries up for a while because the quest chains out of Dustwallow Marsh and Azshara were left in an incomplete state, and the major instance to visit, Uldaman, has low L40s content only in the first half of the dungeon. Once you hit the mid-L40s, the rest of Uldaman becomes viable and Zul'Farrak and Maraudon open up.
But I'm willing to give Blizzard a mulligan on that gap, because overall the game simply works.
Life is a journey too, and I'd hate to wake up one day at 80 years old, look around, and say, "What did I miss?"
*Whether to Blizzard or some nebulous third party.
**I did that in TBC Classic as an Enhancement Shaman, but only at a highly accelerated rate. Were it not for those low levels, however, I'd not know how to play Enhancement at all.
Under the header of "Everything is Cyclical", people are returning to WoW Classic Era.
How do I know, you might ask?
Because we actually have Alterac Valley Battlegrounds being played when it isn't even AV Weekend.
What you see here are the number of Alterac Valley Battlegrounds in the mid-afternoon on a Monday.
For six months or more, the number of AV Battlegrounds you'd see --no matter the time of day-- would be ZERO. Unless, of course, it's AV Weekend, where you get bonus honor for playing Alterac Valley on those days.
This past weekend was most definitely not AV Weekend, yet there were on average three or so AV battlegrounds happening concurrently. Even at 1 AM Server Time. It felt good to see that BG window pop within 15 minutes, whereas it had been simply not popping at all.
I don't know the reason why people are coming back to play in Era once more (go ahead and post your wild speculations in the comments if you're inclined) but it is good to see them here.
While I realize a lot of people my age are very fond of certain classic video game themes, such as that of Super Mario Brothers, I was a bit too old for the original NES and Super NES. So, Mario and The Legend of Zelda never really resonated with me.
I suppose you could say that I was of the Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man era, where the music was limited to a 4-5 second ditty at the beginning of the game:
As well as the intermission themes:
Still, you get the idea. Things were a bit minimalist back then, and not because the creators didn't want to add music, it's just there were limitations to the technology (and the associated cost).
Well, and that for a lot of arcade video games found at the check lane area of grocery and discount stores the sound was actually turned off*, so unless you went to an actual arcade you may not have heard the music at all.
My first real encounter with a video game's soundtrack beyond a short little ditty was that theme for Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar.
This is the version I was familiar with, for
the Commodore 64.
It's not a very deep theme by any stretch of the imagination, but when my college roommate began playing the game for the first time, the sound was a revelation.
You could draw a straight line from an Ultima IV through games such as Wing Commander and X-Wing, through Diablo and Baldur's Gate, up through Civ IV's Baba Yetu to today's games. There's always something in there to draw inspiration from, and while some people play video games with the soundtrack muted, the music is well worth a listen.
***
I guess that it was inevitable, but all the above was prelude to the announcement that the (now) venerable Battle Bards podcast has ended. Eleven years is a long time for a podcast's run, and Syp, Syl, and Steff gave us years of great video game music. I know it was only Syp and Syl for the past few years, but I'll always think of the three of them when I think of Battle Bards.
My personal favorite of their podcasts was very early in their podcast career: their interview with Chance Thomas, the composer of LOTRO's Riders of Rohan Soundtrack. Were it not for that interview, I'd not have gotten up the nerve to contact Mr. Thomas and see how I could purchase the score to Theme for Rohan, as it seemed to me that it could be adapted to a high school orchestra.**
I'm amazed how young Taylor Davis looks
in this video. I guess we've all gotten older in
the 12 years since this video first aired.
I wish the Bards luck in their future endeavors, and I'll miss their voices.
Now to listen so some more music...
*I don't know if my experience was the same as others, but there were always complaints about the noise from arcade video games, so the sound was frequently turned down/switched off at the request of the store owners.
**Mr. Thomas did confirm that the piece could be adapted for high school (or even middle school).
As I've gotten older, I tend to have... aftereffects... when I perform physical labor.
Working on the deck has reacquainted me with an aching back and arms, and ripping out the invasive honeysuckle that were crowding out our shrubs gave me sore shoulders that lasted a week.
So, I turn this week to aging in a gaming context.
I owned an MMO mouse for a little over a year before it broke and I went back to a simpler one. I found that a trusty basic style works better for me. From Reddit.
Just remember to bring the Tylenol and the heating pad for afterward. From Pinterest.
Sure... And I like Civ IV too... From Facebook's RPG Lovers group (and FF XII memes).
I can identify with both panels now. From X. No, not Xavier University, but that other thing.
Yesterday was a beautiful, sunny day. Not humid at all, and a pleasant breeze coming from the northwest.
A good day to finish off this batch of wood for the deck:
10 year old grill not included.
I flipped over and began working on the side of the deck closest to the porch, so I could exploit the wood I had left. I could cut out the bad sections of the replacement decking and still have enough left to replace these small pieces. That photo is kind of deceptive, however, as the board lengths rapidly grew to requiring 12 foot boards.
I have now exhausted that first batch of wood and have about 60% of the deck rows left to replace. The length of the rows isn't nearly as important as the number of rows, because the number of cuts on the saw will be the same for most of what's remaining. I'm thinking of getting one batch of wood in September and then another in October, and that ought to finish up the decking. All I'd have to do then is wait until Spring or early Summer to paint the deck.
Oh yeah, and begin Phase 2 of the rehab: the railings and stairs.
It's an oft-referenced saying that you are the hero of your own story, just like how people never really see themselves as the villain.
Yes, I was thinking of this sketch. From imgflip.
This has some interesting effects when considering where we came from versus where we're going. We try to make sense of our lives and unconsciously put ourselves in the best light possible. Nobody likes to think of their ancestors as mere peasants. But that's the thing, isn't it? Just on sheer numbers alone, most people living today came from peasant --or worse-- stock.
Although perhaps another quote from Henry David Thoreau would be a more apt one: The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.* In that respect, the desire to see yourself as the hero is quite strong.
Where would the video game market be without the ability to see ourselves as the hero? Or the pencil and paper RPG market? Or even the printed word?
We as humans watch sporting events and cheer on our chosen teams experiencing highs and lows through their exploits. Just ask Liverpool fans what it meant when they finally won the Premier League, or Chicago Cubs fans when they finally broke the century long curse and won the World Series in 2016. Or ask Crystal Palace fans when Manchester United came from behind to beat them in the FA Cup in 2016.
So... When we play the hero in a game, is it escapism? Or do we delude ourselves into thinking that everything we do in our lives can turn us into the hero, and we feel cheated when we're not considered as such, even in something as a video game? Honestly, I don't know the answer to that question, but the older I get the more I wonder whether in our youth we convince ourselves of our own greatness and then spend the rest of our lives dealing with the disillusionment that follows. If we're lucky, we find a sort of equilibrium, where we can acknowledge our highs and lows in equal measure and simply accept ourselves for what we are.
Nothing in particular really triggered this introspection, but it has been growing on me for a while now. I can't look at the elitism found in a lot of activities --we see it in gamers/gaming and comics, but it's prevalent everywhere-- without wondering just how much of that is driven by that insecurity that we feel when we wrestle with the reality that we aren't the heroes we imagine ourselves to be.
*Here's the full quote in context from Thoreau's book Civil Disobedience and Other Essays: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..”
Okay, I’m going to say something that ought to be patently obvious: visible activity by other players in an MMO is critical to an MMO’s success.
It’s a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised at the number of games that struggle with that simple notion.
"Hello??!! Anybody here??!!"
I remember when I first started playing WoW, there were people running to and fro in Eversong Forest; not that many, mind you, but enough to get the feeling that there were others inhabiting the world. Then I was taken/escorted to Orgrimmar and… Holy crap was it crowded.*
But as I leveled, outside of a few critical places that were busy, such as Hillsbrad or Stranglethorn, the number of other players I encountered dwindled until I barely saw another soul in Outland or large sections of Northrend. At the same time, I began to see “Dalaran” more and more as the location of people I encountered and put on my friends list. It wasn’t until I reached where Dalaran floated above the Crystalsong Forest in Northrend that I truly understood just how many people played WoW on my server.
And, more importantly, where they all were.
After that revelatory moment, I began to keep a closer eye on how MMOs handled the “multiplayer” aspect of their games.
***
It’s a rather common problem that over an MMO’s lifetime people will gather at watering holes where the current content is located. The problem is that is not where the new players are, so to a new player it certainly seems like nobody –or nearly nobody—is playing the game.
If you don’t want people around, that’s fine; I’ll be honest in that I kind of prefer the isolation to an extent. However, if you want to do any form of group content, well… Good luck with that.** It’s just that you need people out there and visible in the world to give you the impression that the game is viable.
***
By all indicators, WoW Classic Era doesn’t have a large population. The server selection screen identifies the East Coast Cluster as having a low population, and if you look at the raiding population it’s not exactly overwhelming.
However, if you enter the two capital cities in Classic Era, you’re going to find a decently sized group of people just hanging around, even at 1 AM server time. Given that you periodically return to a class trainer to train, you’re always returning to a major city while leveling. Additionally, the leveling process itself funnels you into the capital cities early on, acquainting you with the fact that this is where people go no matter their level.
The impression it leaves on a new player is that the game is active even at the beginning.
***
Lord of the Rings Online does something similar in that your intro zone and first leveling zone –for clarification purposes they are distinct zones based on your race— may be active, but they all funnel you toward Bree. Bree becomes a major hub within LOTRO itself that is always active, no matter the expansion. While the leveling zones have fewer and fewer players in them, Bree is always omnipresent as a watering hole. Sure, the central location of whatever the current expansion is gets the lions’ share of players at max level, Bree is probably one of every player’s top three hangout locations. Bree shows a new player that yes, people do play the game, and some of them are even at max level out there. LOTRO may not have the activity of even WoW Classic Era, but it is active in its own way.
***
When you get to Retail WoW, however, a lot of the systems put in place back in the Classic game are no longer present or no longer needed.
Blizzard quickly discovered that people at max level congregated at a central location in the current expac zones, abandoning other areas. Shattrath City and Dalaran was where the people went, and the major cities became ghost towns. History repeated itself in both TBC and Wrath Classic, only more so, as there were very few new players out leveling in the world. Blizzard's solution was to put the focus back on the capital cities in Cataclysm, but it didn't exactly work as intended. Automated systems, declining subscriptions, and server transfers all meant that while some servers had active players where Blizzard wanted them, others did not. And to make matters worse, servers marked "New Players" were frequently those with the lowest population in the WoW ecosystem.
Instead of server merges, Mists of Pandaria introduced connected realms, clustering servers with low population together so that the world would feel like an active world. Blizzard abandoned the idea of returning max level players to the capital cities where low level players could see them, and as time went on more systems were created to get people to max level as quickly as possible. If you were new and wanted to feel like part of a living world, you had to skip over all of the "old" content to get to the new stuff.
***
When J1mmy put out this video:
There was a particular sentence that resonated with my experience in many MMOs since 2009:
"...but sure enough the second I hit 60 right on cue my pager's going off and I'm getting contacted from people in Stormwind begging me and pleading me to return and start the Dragon Chronicles and so I went back to Stormwind, I got to the dragon place, I think I leveled up like once or twice and then I logged out cause I realized that through that entire experience [of leveling through Battle for Azeroth to Dragonflight] I had yet to talk to a single other human even once."
It's kind of ironic in that for many MMOs the most active you see players out in the world are in the starter areas and the main hubs in a current expansion.
The starter areas are where new players inevitably begin play***, and the hubs at the current expansion are where all of the max level toons go. But it's once you leave that starter area where things get mushy, and if you don't see anybody around the promise of seeing other people at Endgame can seem like so much vaporware.
To combat that emptiness you need good gameplay, good systems, and a story that remains valid throughout the leveling experience. And all three demand one thing that a lot of game companies don't want to utilize: a development team's time. It costs too much time and money to make sure the mid-game is taken care of, despite it being a critical part of keeping a player playing your game. It costs far less money --and is more profitable-- to simply put new items in the cash shop rather than plan for the long term.
*And more than a little intimidating. Ironically enough, as soon as I arrived, I was accosted by someone looking for guild signatures. Having someone come up to me out of the blue kind of froze me in my tracks. I have since gotten over my fright of that sort of behavior, but it did take quite a while to do so.
**And the overall lack of players available to perform group content at level is one of the reasons why automatic group finders are a thing.
