When We Were Young

I had an interesting revelation the other day when I realized that we were now about four months into Wrath of the Lich King. See, I began playing four months into Burning Crusade, myself. Back then everything was brand new for me despite the number of 70s running around. It got me thinking about how maybe a lot of the lowbies I see running around these days… aren’t alts after all, as I tend to assume they are by default.

It occurred to me that there was, in Burning Crusade, some nebulous point where the guard changed. A point where I went into Molten Core with 39 other people about about 30 of us had never done it before. (To be fair, some of the people there had, in fact, been playing in Vanilla WoW, they just weren’t raiding.) It makes me wonder if we’re going to see a similar trend in WotLK. How much longer until I tell people “this boss is just like Romulo and Julianne” or “This boss is just like Gruul’s” or “This boss is just like [some level 70 heroic boss]” and people have no idea what I’m talking about? Or perhaps we won’t get to that point this time because the raids in BC were, in general, more easily accessible than they were in Vanilla WoW?

I’m not trying to say to say any of this is a bad thing, by the way… I’m just pondering. And wondering how many people out there are experiencing this world for the first time.

I’ve been feeling kind of rushed lately in the game– a rush to clear all the available content, a rush to finish turning my blues into purples– and whenever that happens, as it inevitably will every so often, I have to sit back, take a deep breath, and play alts for a while to recharge my batteries.

Lunapike is grinding Timbermaw rep on her quest for the “Diplomat” title. The Winterspring music always gets me all nostalgic for some reason.

Tamaryn is doing the Karazhan key quest. Oh come on, did you really expect me not to? =P

Tawyn is relaxing in Stormwind. The content will still be there later. Just like the Burning Crusade stuff was all still there when I finally set foot into it a year and a half after everybody else did. I didn’t care back then that I was so late to the party, why should I care now? Remember when you were just a wee baby WoWer? I’m sure the game wasn’t always about achievements and loot and progression for you.

Perhaps sometimes it’s worth it, sometimes, to look around at the young’uns and take a page from their book.

…or at least to crack jokes with your significant other about how someday you’ll be able to tell your kids things like “Back in my day they didn’t hand you your mount outside of Northshire Abbey! /waves cane” >.>

19 thoughts on “When We Were Young”

  1. I’ve had that happen to me. Krystallus (“This is Gruul 2.0 without cave-ins or growth”), Mage-Lord Urom (“This guy is like the arakkoa boss in Sethekk”), stuff like that. It kinda gets to me when people are like “i never did that” 😐

  2. I haven’t ever been burned out in this game yet. I play alts to re-experience things though.

    Recently, I’ve recruited a tauren named Cluro. It’s like playing from scratch, but now I know how to play my class!

    I almost soloed lvl 21 elites at level 16. I feel proud.

    Either way, it’s important to take your time. Rushing is only get you to trip. Klin has been leveling quickly, but I’m going to keep question until every quest is done.

  3. In my case, WotLK was what it took to get my GF back into the game. As neither of us tends to be able to devote huge amounts of time to raiding and such, we’ve been casually making our way towards 80 and finding ways to just have fun together (achievements, running older dungeons as just the two of us, alt-a-holicing).

    What we find most painful, though, is there are still so many things we’ll never see in WoW, simply because most people are focused on the destination and not on the journey. Have been trying for weeks just to find a few more people who would want to do a Kara run even just once so that we could say we’d seen it, but no luck at all.

  4. I used to have to walk 1000 yards barefoot in the snow just to get to ironforge…and I didn’t have a gun like you “younguns”, the hunter trainer just gave me a dagger and I had to melee! 😀

    So true…I’ve been playing since Vanilla wow….but to be honest, I never set foot into a raid until Wrath. For the most part I never wanted too, I was happy doing all the quests I could and running VC 5 times every hour with low guildies. Once I hit 80…I finally decided to give it a shot…and I have to do the exact same thing as you to keep from letting all the gear progression go to my head. It’s relaxing to ride through darkshire (of all places) and relive all the fun of lower lvls.

  5. I remember a time when there was no FP in camp Taurajo, or when Dire Maul was new a shiny. Makes me afraid some time to think I’ve been playing this game for close to 4 years now. I remember being excited to go in scarlet monastery and think it was hard (not pulling everyone in cathedral), making the run hidden from the horde by going through Dalaran, etc…

    The thing I find the saddest is that a lot of these great moments are not there anymore. The game has changed and it’s more of a rush to get to 80 now and do heroics and raids. At least that’s my perception. So everytime I get a genuine new player with me I make sure to take them on a tour in scholomance and they have to listen to go on about how hard it was in the old days … maybe I’m goign senile 🙂

  6. \I’m a little disappointed that so many people hurry to get to end game when there’s so much to do before that. I think people have forgotten that leveling is not supposed to be a chore. It’s kind of nice because I’ve rolled a couple of Alliance alts on a server that’s only a couple months old, and most of the people there are not at end game. Leveling is so much more fun because people are in each zone, experiencing the content, instead of rushing through or me being the only one there.

    WoW has so much more to offer in levels 1-79 than people seem to remember.

  7. LOL…..kinda funny you mentioning the Kara key quest. I started a new toon about a month ago, and just this last Friday did the quest for the Scholo key…. My biggest trouble is finding people who want to do and/or will do WoW Classic and BC instances. Currently trying to find someone to do the Ramp on regular…. wow, the more things change….

    Gunsnbutter/Cerdwyn on Uther

  8. I tried Wow (vanilla) hated and went back to other games, then started a year after BC was out so I’ve always been behind the surge to endgame. I’ve honestly still not dinged 80 – by choice. It’s just personal observation of all the guild complaints post BC – I’m bored, I’m bored, I’m bored – at max level that made me decide to really see everything 1-70 before I go to Northrend.

    A couple of the 70’s have been there for a minute, but I’m saving it for later this year (heck another expansion will be in 2 years or so, so why rush?).

    There are still classic dungeons I haven’t been in or hurried through, quest lines I want to finish (I have two working on the Kara key too – lol!). Achievements and skills I want leveled, so no rushing here!

    WoW might be slanted towards raiding and endgame content, but that’s not all it is and I do feel sad for those that rush through it all.

  9. “the raids in BC were, in general, more easily accessible than they were in Vanilla WoW?”

    =O Really? Where were these solo raids? xP

    (Blizz need to make a one player MMO)

  10. I remember getting keyed for Molten Core… and when UBRS still required a key (and was 15 man). My fondest memories, no surprise, are of the Rhok quest, and soloing my demons.

    Winterspring also makes me nostalgic, as well as Silithus. And Felwood. And Eastern Plaguelands… Okay, yeah, I miss 1.0 a lot, not gonna lie. Everything was just a little bit more complicated back in the day, and I enjoyed the multilayered aspect of the game that they phased out with 3.0.

  11. When I was a baby WoWer there was only MC and no achievements. :< I was discussing with my friend the other day about how soon people won’t even remember what “the paladin patch” means or who Leeroy Jenkins even was(n’t).

  12. Honestly, I can’t see the point of reaching level 80.
    I have a level 65-ish? Blood Elf Hunter.
    Not by pushing, grinding, questing, etc.
    But simply by moseying along.
    (That’s another word these young ones don’t know anymore. /Sigh)

    I take weeks, sometimes a month or two, just to gain a level.
    I prefer to run around, see the world.
    (And, in my case, dying VERY often.)

    I am not really into raids and such.
    But I prefer to take things head-on.
    Knowing full well that I will be dead in less than 5 seconds.

    But then I look around, and I see all these low level twinks, being accompanied by a Death Knight, or a any high level.
    And they just rush past you, killing everything in their path.
    At the end of the day, all they can show is a lot of epic gear and achievements.
    They know nothing about the World or the Lore behind it.
    They have no idea that there is a “constant in-game joke/reference” all around them.
    They have no idea that He-man and Skeletor is in Shattrath City.
    They have never seen the Lost Vikings.
    Nor do they know about Mike Rowe (from Dirty Jobs).

    Me?
    I run around, exploring. Seeing stuff.
    I admit, I am useless as a Hunter.
    But I definitely win at “Dying First”.
    Even worse at getting Gold.
    I still can’t even afford training for a fast mount.
    At least I know most places to fall to your death.
    Or to see a rare mob. (And then die.)

    But I have seen interesting NPC’s, mobs, and places.
    Some day, I can tell my grandchildren that I didn’t play WoW.
    I experienced it.

    (And since it is way past my bedtime, and I have to get up in four hours, I guess I will just mosey along then…)

  13. Like people for the first time watching a TV series that I love, I envy the people just starting out in WoW. I miss the days of leveling my first character(s), seeing the new areas for the first time, seeing the new monsters, NPCs, buildings, landmarks and so forth. I envy these players getting those achievements and titles like The Explorer, since it seems to carry so much more depth than those of us who ran around after the fact emptily gathering achievements without the sense of wonder and discovery.

    I sometimes wish I could erase what I know of WoW and start fresh, to see it all again for the first time.
    Alts just don’t cut it as it’s going through the motions with some slight differences here and there.

    I started playing WoW the year before TBC was released, so for a very short while I was at the max level of 60. And you know, looking back, I really liked the game better then, it wasn’t so huge, it didn’t go after big numbers and big competition. We didn’t have thousands of gold (or even need it), we didn’t say if you’re not getting 10k crits you’re “doing it wrong” and crap like that. The game still had a sense of balance and control, and ever since it’s been spinning wildly into an unwieldly weight and scope. I fear the game will keep going into bigger and bigger directions as long as there’s big money to be made.

    But I miss the old days.

    Damn kids.

    Get offa my lawn!

  14. I remember back in BC, we’d fight Anzu in Heroic Sethekk, and people would say “oh, he’s just like Nightbane.” When then half of our group was still working on heroics and had never been to KZ.

    A good number of BC bosses were designed with mechanics taken from Naxx bosses, since so few people had been there. Second boss in blood furnace? Same poison clouds as Grobbulus. That guy in mechanar? Charges just like Thaddius.

    What really makes me think though, is when we start saying “oh yeah Thaddius? He’s just like that guy in Mechanar.” But Thaddius did it first! It’s just duck-billed dinosaurs all over again.

    –Kassari
    Silver Hand (Alliance)

  15. I actually jumped into WoW a few months before Lich King came out. I ran around on my balance druid in the trial and the world seemed so big. People in Barrens chat were talking about outlands and I just thought all that was so unaccesable for me. They talked about raiding and I thought, wow, I’ll never be there. They seemed like the elite, like I would never be able to do what they were doing.
    After a while I grew bored with my druid and rolled a hunter. I leveled to 35 with my sister (rogue) and her boyfriend (warrior). We had fun, goofed off, leveled in STV, etc. They left and due to IRL problems I had to stop playing for a few months.
    BOOM HERE COMES LICH KING.
    I level my Hunter to 60 and buy Burning Crusade. Within a few months I was level 70 and on my way to Northrend.
    Now the world isn’t so big. I’m flying around on my netherdrake in Outlands thinking about all the endgame (previous endgame) content I’ll likely never experience. I’ll probably never run those instances or raids I couldn’t get a group for in Burning Crusade content.
    It’s sad, but true. Sure, I might solo some of it for the hell of it, but it’s not quite the same as struggling through it, or pwning it’s face in a completely PuG group.

    dunno. I just wish I’d come in earlier, so I could’ve experienced BC, and even Vanilla WoW would’ve been nice to experience.
    Ah well. I’ll enjoy Lich King until the next xpac comes out, then I’ll likely enjoy that as well. 🙂
    To some extent, that’s true.

  16. It is funny how quickly people forget, or the player base rotates. I know we ran some old TBC instances this weekend and lots of people were clamouring to go see Magtheridon (!?) because they’d never seen him.

    If I told people some new fight was ‘like Netherspite’ in my 10 mans, I think maybe half of them would know what I meant.

    On the bright side, how long till my nether ray starts to look really really unusual! 🙂

  17. Funnily enough, I think I am going to be a mid-WoLK baby.

    I am expecting that when 3.1 hits, many of the things people have been doing to date will lapse….

    Just in time for me to hit 80, be wandering around looking for a group, and having people say “Back when we were running Nexus…”

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