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[Column] World of Warcraft: Nostalgia and its Impact on Blizzard
BillMurphy
Former Managing EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 4,565
Greetings from sunny Orlando, Florida. I’m on vacation this week with my family visiting the house that mouse built. I had planned on doing a first impressions piece on Satellite Reign but unfortunately that won’t be the case. I’ll circle back to Satellite Reign next week and talk about a few Blizzard related topics instead. Isn't it time we got a WoW Progression server?
Read on for more of Rob's Nostalgia and its Impact on Blizzard.
Try to be excellent to everyone you meet. You never know what someone else has seen or endured.
Comments
How I miss my WindFury Totem... Arcanite Reaper Shaman
Frost Shock FTW
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
"Nostalgia is one of the most powerful marketing tools."
... and it's the only thing that keeps WoW going. It's the facebook of MMO's, where you come to talk to your friends from high school about the good old times, commiserate about how Algebra I was hard and that touch down pass you threw was the most awesome thing ever in you life.
And then you realize these times are past and everyone else has moved on.
"Nostalgia is one of the most powerful marketing tools."
Not the case for me...good memories in WoW but the toxic puke community will turn you off minutes/seconds after logging in. The nostalgia is in my head, not my wallet.
A older server would be great. but i can see blizzard not being able to control themselves then selling XP pots or some other money making scheme.
I started playing on a Vanllila server going back to 1.12 and seeing so many corpses in the starting area is crazy, knowing you can fail is strangely satisfying . shit can't be facerolled, grouping up, braving dungeons and open world elites, having quests not point you in a direction, "Find the hidden path southwest of here".
Nostalgia is worse imo with games that only do questing.You have no CHOICE,you would have to basically follow the same path again quest by quest and 90% of them are meaningless and boring.Sure you could play a different class,but i never liked altaholic gaming.
It is true restarting a new server is a powerful money maker but not for nostalgia.No matter what players would literally RACE through quests,barely taking time to notice anyone or anything in the game,just vee lining for the next yellow marker.There is a good chance that many a player would know where to go exactly but i bet they would still just look for markers on their map.
My point is that although sounds like a great idea,would it do anything for gaming?Imo not a thing,it would just make Blizzard more money,not like they need it.I would rather see Blizzard step up and deliver instead of their current trend in making cheap to build games.I mean they COULD be the leader,they have the money and the fanbois.
The Problem is they carry a huge overhead,too many big shots want big salaries,too many mouths too feed.So they build what they need to,the bare minimum.IMO a reboot server would be exactly what i expect from Blizzard as i would expect it from SOE,just another cheap gimmick to make money.
I want to see NEW games,physics,i want to see boundaries pushed ,Blizzard could be that developer,they just need a kick in the ass.Simply put Blizzard has had it too easy,there has been no push for them to step up,people keep buying everything they sell.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Yeah, progression server might make some money. I don't know. Some of my best times in that game were due to noobishness, and I can't get that back. Raiding Westfall at level 20. Kiting adds the length of Ragefire Chasm because we didn't have a tank, or know what a tank was. Hanging out in Tarren Mill at the end of the day, not leveling just watching the battle. Ten man wipes in Scholomance, being in the server first Molten Core PuG and wiping on trash, repeatedly, joining a guild just to do instances and watching it evolve into a raid guild.
It's time... for World of Starcraft. Give us something new Blizzard, show us you still got it (in MMOs). Maybe do for EVE what you did for Everquest -- dumb it down, make it accessible, make it a phenomenon.
Bit it has been requested before. I don't think they will do it because I don't think they have copies of those eras anymore as they have consistently claimed it wont happen.
I peaked in my understanding wow in Wrath. Would lobe to work my way through vanilla and TBC now that I know how to play wow and mmos in general.
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.
played on a vanilla WoW emu server when it launched a while back called Emerald Dream.
I had a freakin blast, as much of a blast as I did on Project 1999 with Everquest. Nostalgia IS a powerful thing. If Blizz could make a legit real progression server that wasn't all effed up like EQ's iteration of progression serivers, I would most certainly be down to pay to resub to give it a go. It's hard to get that classic experience though once your code and UI elements and graphics and all of these other things have been changed over the years. That's why P99 and using their own server with code tuned to the original iteration of Everquest has and always will work ten times better than what SOE has tried to do. Even with Ragefire, people downing Nagafen in 2 days, it's stupid. That is not a classic experience whatsoever.
"Its better to look ugly and win than pretty and lose"
I once was an admin on a private vanilla Server for WoW, had alot of fun scripting the events bosses and dungeons/raids. Many players joined us and thanked us many times for the effort we put into creating a true nostalgia server.
We upgrade the Server to TBC content and the player base doubled and we had many amazing raid groups begging us to join and hang with them through the progression towards the Black Temple.
Then we upgraded to Wrath of the Lich King and the player base fell apart...
We admins had a meeting of why things went south and it became Unanimous... we reverted the server back to TBC and left it alone and the players flocked back and praised us for our decision.
I understand there is alot of ridicule over Nostalgia, however despite all the flaming towards it the players choosing Old school content prove the negative mindset wrong. Blizzard has had years of demand for a old content server and has ignored the player base repeatedly.
Now we have patch 6.2 on the horizon and the time walk content which drags players back to the older Heroic dungeons of TBC and WotLK content and there seems to be a controversy between the nostalgia players and the Theme park players.
Maybe one day Blizzard will capitalize on teh players wants and create a Vanilla server to test out the waters and see that the demand for the older content will revive the subscriber base.... yeah right.. its wishful dreaming and will never happen. The player base will continue to decline because Blizzard is focusing on its newer games Hearth Stone and Heroes of the Storm.
Played: UO, LotR, WoW, SWG, DDO, AoC, EVE, Warhammer, TF2, EQ2, SWTOR, TSW, CSS, KF, L4D, AoW, WoT
Playing: The Secret World until Citadel of Sorcery goes into Alpha testing.
Tired of: Linear quest games, dailies, and dumbed down games
Anticipating:Citadel of Sorcery
anyone knows when wow is going free to play or better buy to play?
I wanted to go back and play some wow but the monthly fee system is not for me.
A buy to play model would be awesome as well
I'd resub for it in a second.
BUT all the other stuff would have to go also- LFG, queing for BG's anywhere, and so on.
I want to have to have my pet learn new abilities by taming other animals who have that particular ability and leveling them up.
I want to have to buy different weapon skills and have to raise them.
I want to have to do the epic chained quest to get the skeletal horse mount of the 'lock.
I want to earn BG tokens.
FUCK the arena.
I want my hunter to be able to use dual fist weapons again.
I want an arcane mage to actually take skill to play.
When I talk about the fun I had in WoW it was during that era, vanilla and early BC, before the island of Quel'danas became a place to just f'n grind rep. BC was great before Q'Danas when crazy with grinding.
"I understand that if I hear any more words come pouring out of your **** mouth, Ill have to eat every fucking chicken in this room."
You can never go back and get that WoW feeling, April 2005 (when I started playing) will always be one of if not my all time best gaming experience. Creating my nightelf and being dropped into the world, the music and just a true sense of mystery and awe when traveling through the world I genuinly didn't know what was around the next corner. This is all before youtube and internet ruined everything.
You just cant go back but I was their so I consider myself one of the lucky ones to have had the true experience of MMO's.
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
Selfies and garrisons v Vanilla/tbc/wotlk servers - people want the latter, no one asked for or wanted the former.
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
This isn't a signature, you just think it is.
Whenever the topic of releasing classic/progression servers are brought up Blizzard keeps throwing up the same bullshit lie "We actually dont have the old files....".
That's a bullshit fkn lie a 30 second google search can pull up all of the files needed to host your own classic wow private server. It seems they don't want to admit their failures. The world knows you fkd up with wow, everyone knows each expansion release got progressively worse.
Its time to release a damn classic wow server. In fact the time was about 5 years ago.
I for one will not be touching another Blizzard game after the failure of D3. May Jay Wilson rot in a burning hot fkn hell.
I'd be surprised if old WoW builds weren't stored somewhere. Its not at all surprising when Daybreak (soe) claims they don't have EQ code, but Blizzard doesn't strike me as the type of company that would lose or dispense of anything, including old code.
Its far more likely that they don't feel the money it would yield would be worth the trouble. They aren't in the business of doing stuff to just make some money.
What they really need is the oops we made a mistake for a few years expansion, the next expansion should put you back in time right before the Wrath expansion I guess they could fit that into the emerald dream, bring back talent trees, stun procs, insane demon summons, never ending battlegrounds, make warlocks warlocks again, bring back CC, pre 2008 racials, get rid of homogenized skills. ETC.
I was just fine with ALL expansions, all incredibly fun. My no.1 is still Wotlk and very close 2nd MOP. And before Wod I had all possible combinations of classes and factions, 22 alts, all maxed out. Wod, not sure what exactly went wrong, but I have been enjoying in full for 1 month ...then suddenly lost all interest to play. Usually I have been playing a lot every expansion at least for half year. Now 1 month. Fortunally I find Swtor still very fun, played it for more then 5 months, now weeks ago started again with Gw2.