My Life As A Gamer: The Dark Portal (Re)Opens Today

Classic World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade launches today, ending the two week pre-patch period. This video shows what that was like on many servers, albeit in a satirical fashion.

You can't go home again.

The pre-patch period should have been a full month, but the beancounters pushed this to make the financial quarter look better than it really is as it ends presently and the end-of-quarter reports and earnings call is soon to come. The result? Everyone that didn't buy a Character Boost, or couldn't use it because they rolled a Blood Elf or Draenei, had to resort to recruiting people with geared Level 60 Mages to run them through various dungeons with a massive pile of mobs in them to grind up to L60 as fast as possible. Then they would get carried through various raids and do PVP to gear up as best they could prior to today.

The rest just spent real money to skip to L58, get some starter gear, speed-level to 60 and spend the rest of the time gearing up.

That gearing isn't trivial. Top-end gear from Naxxramus still gets used at Level 70 in the early raids of Karazham, Gruul's Lair, and Magtheridon's Lair as well as in Heroic Dungeons. That translates to free gold since you can sell the quest rewards to vendors, which contributes to your gold stash so you can buy Flight Training and your first Flying Mount at 70. (Druids get Flight Form via a quest chain at 68.)

Which means that right now, we're seeing this go down.

I was there 15 years ago. Been there, did that, etc. so I have no desire to do it again.

And this attitude--mocked above in the videos--is why. WOW has been No Fun Til Endgame for nearly 20 years now. Everything about what is high-status, and therefore what gets you into groups and raids, revolves around this fact. It's why The Metagame is a thing and has a stranglehold on everything about the game. It's why the World First Race gets corporate sponsorships, and why the game remains Raid Or Die (despite PVP, and Mythic Plus in Retail WOW).

The contempt that currently afflicts the entire game is, unfortunately, baked into the cake and--like the Old Gods and Azeroth--removing the cancer means killing the patient.

And that's why I'm inching out the door.