My Life As A Gamer: It's Not Just The Rules That Make Old School Gaming

With the release of World of Warcraft Classic coming on August 27th, a lot of YouTube channels that focus on Vanilla WOW got an uptick in traffic. Recently, one of the Twitch streamers who's in the Classic Beta took the time to watch and comment on one of those videos. What was the subject? Etiquette. I won't give you the reaction; you can watch that version if you like here. (Side Note: "Asmongold Reacts" is sufficiently popular that it's a niche-within-a-niche for WOW video makers.)

I was there for Vanilla. I can confirm that all of this etiquette was the social norm back in the day; I can also confirm what Asmongold said in that breaching them was also hard to punish due to a lack of means to do so outside of shunning and defamation. As I've been involved in WOW since Vanilla, I can also confirm that all of this has eroded over time with more changes that automated grouping and matchmaking at the expense of rendering social interaction and standing irrelevant outside of (in)famous streamers or videomakers and top guilds. My guild is, I think one of the oldest on my server; we've been around since 1.12 in Vanilla. No one cares.

Yeah, I'm going somewhere here.

Not every change made to a game is for the better. As the tabletop RPG scene reveals with the Old School Renaissance, making changes can have unintended effects that prove to be deleterious to gameplay and the audience. There was no attempt to solve a human problem with human solutions, but rather to use technocratic means to do so, with the predictable results of institutionalizing the suck and making the experience--and the audience--worse by catering to the bottom rather than cutting them off. The demands for constant growth--the definition of cancer--incentivize these incompetent changes; the competent response is to accept that Not All People Like All Things, and let go those who cannot or will not accept the game as it is.

Classic is going to be the Old School Renaissance for WOW. Is it going to be as successful as other revivals? Yes, because of the business model; it's meant to be a retention scheme, keeping subscriptions active when players in the current iteration of the game goes stale and would otherwise drop their subscriptions, so active populations fluctuating is not a concern. Nonetheless, a lot of players who would play are not those with Vanilla experience; many started with Wrath of the Lich King or later, after the erosion of these social norms had already occurred.

We can only hope that a restoration of previous environments results in a recreation of social norms to adapt to them, but this time with stronger means to deal with violators due to past experience teaching what does not work vs. what does. It's already the case in the tabletop scene, and I have reason to believe that other revivals have similar things going on, so I can be confident that it will be so here. In any event, Classic will never be me reliving my Vanilla days; I can't be hardcore about the game anymore, so I won't anymore than I am with the current game. It will be a passtime, and no more. Nonetheless, when I play I'll be pro-social; it makes the game better to play that way.