Ignorance was Bliss

| Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Dying. Nostalgia. Whiny. Legitimate? No no, not it.

I think I've figured out exactly, objectively, undeniably the one thing that was absolutely better in vanilla WoW and why no expansion, raid, or tool can ever bring that back. I was a noob.

No no, it's not the "first time factor." Like I said recently, I am still a but amazed by the sight of Ragnaros. The looping ride around the lake of Caer Darrow to Scholomance never wore off. I get a slight buzz when I get to runecloth or thorium while crafting: This is it, this is the final run! It isn't, of course. That last one is probably just nostalgia, so let's ignore it.

Being a noob is a wonderful experience. Not only is everything new, but the expectations are different. Oh, other players were still elitist and rude (less so than these days though) and corpse runs from wipes I caused took just as long, or probably longer. Personal expectations are different. I didn't feel the need to get into a raid. I didn't feel like I deserved anything. After all, I'd earned nothing. Raiding was some distant, strange thing. When I finally got to MC and knew that finally, after all those months of ending BRD runs with a peek at the two giants, finally I would get to fight them! I'm pretty sure I died that first time. We wiped even. That was fine. We had lower expectations. We were all noobs. And it was glorious bliss.

Unless Blizzard has figured out those red flashy things from Men in Black, it will never come back. That is why WoW will never be as good as it ever was, even as it becomes better than it ever was.

I'll try to have some happier posts later in the week, hopefully with no melancholy or riots.

4 comments:

Kring said...

I read your post as "WoW without raiding would be better because raiding is the worst part of WoW. It excludes everything that made WoW great."

I agree.

Anonymous said...

I totally get what you are saying there!
I love World of Warcraft and Cataclysm has challenged me to re-learn the classes I’ve already leveled and learn the classes I haven’t rolled yet.

Yet with all this fun and excitement, it will NEVER be the experience that I had as an n00b! That’s not to say it is bad! My first couple of guilds were fun because we were friends or became friends as we experienced this new game (to us) called WoW. We leveled thru Vanilla to Burning Crusade not having experienced any off it prior and it was awesome.

To me, it’s still awesome, but not in the same way. I marvel at the expansive world still! I still enjoy how the game is an entity of its own. (Things happen whether or not I log in)

The thing about life is you only have a first kiss once. Hopefully, it was epic, but it’s up to you to make the rest of the experience fun and exciting.

Darraxus said...

I agree. Not only is the noob factor gone, but the community has gone downhill as well. Some of the people I enjoyed playing with the most dont play anymore (actually, almost all of them). I still play with them on other games like League of Legends, but something is definately missing from WoW.

Christopher said...

I think this is why people act all nostalgic about world pvp, but don't actually do much of it. That thrill of a character with a red name just isn't what it used to be. I guess you can't go home; with our resilience gear, cooldown trackers, mouseover/focus macros and researched-to-death matchup guides we're far better equipped to crush our enemies, but the unknown just isn't, well, that unknown anymore. Side note: at the end of vanilla, my rogue had 3700hp. That moment in time, crystal clear in my memory, will never, ever exist again.

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