As the World Of Warcraft Turns

How History Affects Play In World Of Warcraft Just Like Real Life

When you were three years old, you probably had a stuffed animal that you slept with every single night.  If you’re as old as I am you might have gone through the mind numbing experience of playing retarded games like “Chutes and Ladders.”  You might have done some of the particularly stupid stuff we did (not to mention dangerous) when we would buy several thousand (yes THOUSAND) bottle rockets around the 4th of July to . . . get this, shoot at each other.  Yes, we even went so far as to take PVC pipes and make shoulder mounted rocket launchers to improve our accuracy – sigh.  (And if you do anything of the sort your parents should knock you upside the head and not blame me for giving you a dangerous idea – it was seriously dumb and I hope you’re not).

In the early 1900’s the big band sound was all the rage – I doubt any of you have a single tune from that era on your Ipod.  In certain ancient civilizations drinking urine was pretty chic.  The early 80’s brought us fondue parties, and we’re all certainly glad cell phones aren’t the size and weight of bricks any longer.  If you’re wondering if there is any point to all of this it’s that each of us experiences life in a completely different way, and each generation moves through the experience along a unique path.  What is cool today is going to fall right into the nerd ditch in just a few minutes.

There are a few of us who have played every game that Blizz has ever made.  Diablo was the first game to really do the online multi-player thing.  That was way back in the day where just about the only internet connections outside of gigantic metropolitan cities was a 28k dial-up (ick).  Needless to say the original B-net was pretty lame for those of us in the rural category.    Beyond that, you could play all the way through the entire game in about 30 hours – even the first time through.  It was fun, but fairly linear, and then you made a sandwich and played Nintendo.

I loved Starcraft, but didn’t get around to Warcraft until the middle of 2006 (after a couple of years of non-stop D2).  I figured if I was going to get into WoW, I needed to go back and play WC, WCII, and WCIII so that I would understand the storyline and all that kind of goop.  You know how much it helped me?  Zilch, Zero, Nada.  I learned next to nothing from playing the three prequels – at least nothing that actually accelerated my play in WoW.  I still get lost in the lore, but who gives a crap if it doesn’t make me a better healer.

And when it comes to playing the game, the very best players are those who play well NOW.  It’s kind of fun to think back about how unbelievably hard Kara was the first week it came out, but does it really make you a better player if your guild is falling apart now and you are still slogging through Ulduar?  You still think you’re leet  just because your old crew pwned Kara?

Pardon another small digression at this point.  You don’t have to listen to me at all.  I’m just a dood writing for a small web site about a game.  But one of my favorite writers ever – Mr. J.R.R. Tolkien had a theory about history and what it really means to any story.  He said (and I quote very loosely here) that:

…if you are going to write about someone walking down a road toward some mountains that the author needed to know who built the road, everyone that ever walked on it and everything that had ever happened in the mountains ahead.  Those little references to past history gave weight and depth to the story even if the reader never comprehends them all….

After his death, Tolkein’s son found this huge chest full of little notepads.  They were full of handwritten stories from Middle Earth that have been published as the “Books of Lost Tales.”  In them, Tolkein tells the full story of middle earth from creation all the way through the Lord of the Ring trilogy in poetry and prose.  Call them his own personal expansion of the Silmarillion.  They are amazing, and by far his best stories were in that back history and not in the last story (that’s just Lawbringer’s serious inner Tolkien geek talking though).

Some of his best tales were those he never intended anyone to read.  All those stories just gave him what he needed to create what is arguably the best fantasy trilogy ever written.  But whether or not YOU know all the history of Middle Earth will have very little impact on your enjoyment of reading LotR for the first time.  I read LotR about 15 times before I discovered the Books of Lost Tales.  And while reading the past history HAS given me more enjoyment of the final story, it hasn’t made me a better reader.

My whole point of this comes from something that most of you should know is one of my pet peves.  It never fails – every time Blizzard changes something about the game – and I mean EVERY SINGLE TIME, some doofus is going to write something that looks almost exactly like this:

Blizzard is just ruining the game for everyone.  Now you can get all this epic gear too easy and I remember how hard it was when I had to use a hammer on my old keyboard in VC just to get this one spell to work and now people get all these better graphics and rogues are stupid the new races suck because goblins have voices that bother me . . . . . .

…ad naseum.  You get the point.  The problem with this is that not a single one of those people actually live their OWN lives that way.  It bothers me because it couldn’t be any less intellectually honest.   It’s untrue, silly and just an excuse to gripe out loud in public and I don’t really like people like that in RL, so it REALLY bugs me when people punk about a game.  Sigh to the nth degree.

If those people really believed the juice they were pouring, they would go back and play all of the same lame games their parents played when they were growing up.  If your ability to enjoy the “WoW” experience is completely dependent on having “experienced” the same thing that people 4 years ago had to experience in the same ways they experienced them – how much MORE true would this be in real life?

But we certainly don’t see people hand spinning thread to make fabric to make their own socks – now do we?  I mean, how can you really appreciate socks if you never had to make your own socks like your great-great grandmother had to do?  You don’t deserve socks, and the fact that you can get better socks these days than ever before at basically any store in the country for super cheap just makes socks worthless and stupid and I hope that socks go out of business because cheap and good socks have completely ruined the footwear industry.

Apply this spurious thinking to virtually anything in any part of your real life and you’ll see just how silly it gets almost instantly.  If the game didn’t change you would have gotten bored out your mind three years ago and be stuck playing LotR or AOC right now because WoW would be a non-entity.  But it doesn’t mean that every new player HAS to play every stinkin’ thing that has ever been important to the game in order to have any fun or be any good at the game like it is right now.  They don’t make high school football players play in leather helmets just to experience the way it was back in the day.

Back in the day was lame compared to right now.  40 man raids were a pain in any piece of anatomy you care to mention.  The game right now is better than it has ever been and the next expansion will make it even better.  I know this is true because if the game wasn’t getting MORE fun then LESS people would play it.  You cannot sell a crummy product for 8 straight years.  Change is necessary and good the vast majority of the time.  Blizz gets griped at 24/7/365 and they use that input to change things that need to be changed and ignore the silly stuff.  If you’re so smart, go form your own company, develop games and see how that goes.

Most games fail because they do not stay fresh.  They keep the same old same old content and people get bored of it in about 2 hours.  WoW is good BECAUSE it has changed so drastically.  It more accurately resembles real life in that way.  Players that are new to the game can see the history they have missed when they ride through  the northern part of Deadwind Pass and wonder “what the heck is down THAT road?” But that certainly doesn’t mean they ever have to do Kara in order to have an appreciation for how good the game is.

When Cataclysm hits, it will be be a little sad for me to see Darkshore destroyed.  I’ve spent so many freakin hours in Auberdine it’s not even funny.  But it will give ME a better appreciation of the new content.  I agree with the goobers that having been through things gives those of us who DID go through them a better overall appreciation of the storyline, but that depth of understanding doesn’t make us better players.

Plus, on the flip side, if the level cap was still 60 and we were all still grinding it out for our T2 – the game would REALLY be dead.  THAT would ruin the game.  Not changing would kill the game.  Moving content forward so that even those of us who have done almost everything still have something to work for is NOT going to kill the game.  And every time the game moves forward, you have to go back and keep some balance so that the new player has some hope of doing the cool stuff at the end.

In all reality the reason Blizz does change the game is for YOU.  Yes, you; the guy standing in the back griping in a solid stream about how Blizz is ruining the game.  If you still had to level up the same old way you always did and do the same old dungeons you’ve always done you would stop paying your monthly fees and actually quit (we could only be so lucky).  Blizzard changes the game to keep the pros and old-timers interested.  Your leveling envy for the new guys who have it easier is just an envy complex and you should grow up and get over it.

You would roll your eyes so far back in your head you would never find them again if teachers these days said the same stupid stuff they used to say to my generation in high school: “you can’t use a calculator because if you never learn to do math on paper you won’t be as good at it.”  Dumbest thing I ever heard.  If we are supposed to NOT advance we would all still be skinning animals for their tallow to make candles just to have some light after the sun went down.

It’s even worse when the argument co-joins two disparate thoughts such as: “Don’t use electricity.  The Romans and the Greeks didn’t have electricity and using it makes you weak and inferior.  Sure, I have electricity NOW, but in pre-BC there was no electricity so you should go back and pedal the generator to drive your computer like I had to in fail-ville back in the day.”

Every generation stands on the backs of the work of the previous generation.  We don’t make kids develop their own languages and letters from scratch like someone had to 7,000 years ago.  We advance by taking what was done before us and then using that knowledge to do things quicker, better and faster than ever before.  But the jealousy of “how easy it is these days” always comes out.  Sure, I had to use a slide rule, but the reason we don’t use them any more is because it would be a waste of time and effort when there are far better methods of solving mathematical problems these days.  Sure, you had to figure out how to lead a 40 man raid on Onyxia, but that doesn’t mean that everyone should have to go back and do it exactly the way you did it.

You blazed a trail.  It was hard work and the next people coming down the road shouldn’t have to cut the same weeds you cut.  The really neat thing about WoW, if you’ll stop and think about it, is that you are becoming part of a fantasy history.  The changes work because the game works better now than it used to and that’s the way things should be.  Gear should get better and some things should get easier as the society as a whole progresses.  You have become part of that progression.  Don’t complain, it’s really cool that someone has enough forethought to sustain a fantasy world that moves enough to not get stale and boring.

Regardless of whether you are one of those people who have their brains plugged in all the way or whether you are in the slightly disconnected from reality group – when Cataclysm hits you are going to have no choice whatsoever.  The storyline is about to take a giant leap forward, and one of the oldest parts of the story – Deathwing – is going to change the whole World of Warcraft permanently – and for good.  And it IS good that the game is getting a complete overhaul.  It means we can enjoy it for another few years instead of having to move on to something far more lame – something where the story line never changes (console games ftl).  I, for one, will be glad when content progresses to the point where I never have to step foot in the Occulus again.

So I don’t want to hear that kind of stuff any more.  You wouldn’t apply that fail logic to anything else in the world (I know people try but that doesn’t make it less silly), and just because you apply it to WoW doesn’t make it less fail.  If you think the game is ruined then for pete’s sake quit playing right this second and plow a field with a mule and walk to school uphill both ways in the snow so you’ll enjoy life more because you have experienced the same way of playing life that your ancestors did – but watch out for the saber-toothed tigers – I hear they are a little tough in PvP.