Nostalgia

People are unable to a surprising degree to recognize changes in themselves. They get around that problem by ascribing all changes they see to being changes of the environment. Thus are born the "good old times", and nostalgia for many things that don't deserve it. Now nostalgia has hit the MMORPG world with a vengeance, with the original Everquest opening up so-called "progression servers", where you can play EQ1 just the way it was in 1999, without the expansion sets. The expansions will be opened up one by one through player actions.

I can recognize a bad idea if I see one, so I'm not playing. But quite a lot of people are gripped by nostalgia and are playing on the progression servers. At least a while. I've seen quite a number of different blog entries and message board discussions about it. But usually after a while the nostalgia fades, and people notice that the graphics are kind of bad, and that EQ1 death penalties suck.

I remember the "good old times" of Everquest, and I had a lot of fun then. But most of the fun was due to exploring a game concept that was new, and an unknown world with unknown possibilities. The reason I'm not even trying to go back there is that I know that I can't. I have changed, my innocence is gone, my demands in computer graphics quality have gone up, and my tolerance for grind and bad game mechanics has gone down. The exactly same game that had be glued to the screen six years ago totally fails to excite me now, because I have moved on, and so has the frame of reference.

Nevertheless I'm not immune to nostalgia. My regular attempts to restart a second WoW career on a brand new server is certainly driven in part by my memories of the "good old times" when World of Warcraft was still about playing together with friends, and not about DKP systems. But there are also more realistic reasons, like player level demographics. When I tell here about my adventures with pickup groups in low level dungeons, that is something which would be a lot harder to realize if I tried to level a character on an old server, especially on the Horde side. Going to a new server, playing Alliance, and playing a priest, are decisions that are *designed* to enable me playing in the small group style which I have identified to be the most fun for me.

Of course some people's nostalgia is motivated by their feeling that some expansion set or change to the game has made the game much worse than it was. I've heard about some crazy Star Wars Galaxies players planning to create a reverse engineered pre-NGE SWG private server, not that I believe that this would ever work. In Dark Age of Camelot the "Classic" servers, which let you play without the terrible grind of the Trials of Atlantis expansion, are apparently very popular. So maybe in a couple of years we will see "Classic" WoW servers. I don't think I will play on those.