Nostalgia Day

If you're in Mass, reading this on your iPhone, nice phone. You might happen to hear the preacher talk of Biblical times with some sort of whistful nostalgia. Or his childhood. $10 he'll mention values at least once and how they've declined. Double or nothing on family.

Personally I prefer a Lord with whom I can directly interact. Specifically one I can kill and maybe take stuff from. He talks to me and other people can hear it. It's nice. His name is Ragnaros.

You probably have figured out that I am a bit of a nostalgia nut. I liked vanilla and I still do. That's why I'm in MC while you're all sitting in DPS queues trying to get frost emblems. We called them badges in my day. Actually, in my day we called the scarabs and we had too many, always of the wrong kind. Have I mentioned that I don't sit in DPS queues because I'm a tank? I wonder who would win, my tank alter-ego or Ragnaros. Considering my ego can solo some level 80 heroic pulls, I'm betting on that. Moving on.

I've decided to add some balance. You see, I believe in simpler times (the irony better not be wasted), back when we had regulations on media that forced some amount of balance in the media. Now all we have is Fox News and not nearly enough people watch it or listen to their many fine people in other media such as radio, podcasts, and the hysterical guys (and if you love etymology you'll like that one too) screaming on the street corner.

So, time for some balance; I will present two sides on the nostalgia issue:

Things were better back then, because we were poor.

They were all f-cking children!

Molten Core and why Vanilla players seem better
I recently ran into a few BC babies, meaning players who started after Burning Crusade came out. They are often entirely inexperienced in any high level content in Vanilla, often not doing any instances past level 55 or so. Maybe they wipe in BRD once, but they don't clear it, and the later instances are certainly unknown to them. Let's not even imagine raids.

So when I form an old world raid, they tend to get confused. They send me their gearscores and in one case, speculate that we won't be able to finish because our tank has only 22k health, which was a fury warrior; the tank was me with righteous fury on and marginally more health. This last group I ran into weren't attuned, got lost in BRD, and couldn't seem to understand basic directions.

The rogue did slightly impress me though. I don't think he'd ever heard of attunement and I'd not expected people to not be attuned. But he saw us all run over to an elf and vanish. rather than going "wtf where r u?" he instead talked to the elf and got a quest sending him into BRD. Then he got lost and almost died.

For someone who started in vanilla and knows the place, it seems stupid that someone can get lost in there. I mean come on, how can you not know the exact perfect route to take to get to any given location, with or without the key? Didn't you read the manual? What's next, a rogue without the lockpicking skill for a door 25 levels below him? Oh, we had that.

MC went fairly well aside from some loot complains. Such as the DK who claimed to be nine and furiously shaking because he was only standing up for himself; after I kicked him for being actively hostile and whiny the whole run. Also he got annoyed when I got the schematic for force reactive disk instead of him. He didn't seem to understand that the highest roll wins when there are four engineers rolling. The guildy got annoyed when the other enchanter outrolled him and frantically tried to buy it. Again, he didn't seem to understand that I meant it when I said it was an open roll, or at the start when I said they could make deals about the formulas if they wanted, as long as I was told before.

And then people forgot to get their cores, even though I told them to wait before leaving. So I ended up with almost all the cores and an ingot. At least I managed to hand out most of the BoEs before they scurried away. Yea, only most. This is pretty standard. People see the achievement pop up and *poof*. These were serious business back in the day. What may now seem like barely more than DE fodder (if not for nexus crystals being nearly worthless) was once worth a ton of gold; and the cores... well those are still worth a decent bit of change. So to a vanilla player, to just skip up on these when the raid leader is trying to hand them out, doesn't make much sense.

Okay TL;DR: Vanilla players have a certain set of knowledge and expectations which are unlikely to exist in newer players. This makes them appear stupid. It's worth noting that almost none of this knowledge has any practical use; unless you're the sort of person who prefers weird markets like mid-50s BoEs, mass runecloth, and turning nexus crystals into small prismatic shards and then into large prismatic shards which I presume are used by someone, since they give me gold for them.