In the end, walking away was nothing dramatic—no failed exam, no personal crisis, no moment of truth like they contrive in the movies. You don’t think in advance about how your MMORPG character’s story will end, not the way football players dream of walking through confetti into the sunset like Elway. It just happens, slowly or all at once. You might see it coming in advance, attached to a specific date like a deployment to Afghanistan, or it might come up suddenly like the news you’ve failed advanced Chinese and won’t be graduating. In my case, it happened without me really noticing. Late in Wrath of the Lich King I got a new job whose hours precluded raiding with Elitist Jerks, and by the time I returned to a raid-friendly schedule, the prospect didn’t enthuse. WoW just didn’t feel the same, not raiding nor arenas nor anything else. It wasn’t the focused misery I’d felt in the last T K T days. I returned to the old ways and realized I simply hadn’t missed them. The good old days, when Chris and I tromped through a fascinating world of mystery in search of loot and adventure, were gone. The excitement and pride of building our own guild up from nothing to top class, of learning how to play together, were never coming back. That didn’t make me sad and it still doesn’t. Everything comes to an end—even the best things—and we needn’t cling to them. Let ends be ends. So I stopped payment on my account and uninstalled the game client, and without even a formal good-bye, I was gone.
In the months following my WoW account’s lapse into inactive status, I’d still check up on things. Elitist Jerks remained my browser homepage—I followed their progress through the end of Icecrown Citadel—and I read up on the upcoming plans for Cataclysm. I’d use the fabulous but now defunct Blizzard Armory website to scan my old guildmates for the new gear they found each week. I looked at Ghando, at the accomplishments he’d earned in the in-game achievements system, the gear he still wore even in that suspended state. At the guild tag with all the prestige attached, both of which stayed precious long after it ceased mattering to anyone in my daily life. Weeks stretched into months and the checks were less frequent, like furtive glances at an old flame’s Facebook page, until at last they were just a trickle. Once a year or so, I’d glance at my old account info and wonder what it would be like to play WoW again. Never too much, since I knew the good old times weren’t ever coming back. I’ve never been the type to waffle on these things, and I didn’t then, but it persisted as a kind of daydream. Then, one day, Ghando disappeared.
While actively playing, I’d used a Blizzard authenticator for account security—a physical object kept at my desk, which when prompted displayed a code unlocking my account. Once I stopped playing WoW I unlinked the authenticator and lent it to a friend for his account. Many months later when I checked my account, my alts were all in place but my treasured shaman was gone. He must have been stolen, I thought: transferred off my account while compromised by one of the many outfits constantly hacking Blizzard accounts, whose existence encouraged me to get an authenticator in the first place. This was no material blow—while at several points in the past Ghando may have been worth hundreds of dollars, his value was now confined exclusively to the sentimental. Here I could embark on a soliloquy about this loss as a kind of death, as a comment on the folly of bonding with digital avatars, but in truth it elicited no strong reaction. I was a little sad, but the episode really just confirmed the decision: I wasn’t going back.
Until I did.
It was this book that did it. You can’t write effectively about a game you haven’t played in years, not even about its distant history, and besides, WoW was the ideal medium by which to speak with those still active in the community. So at the start of 2016, well into the Warlords of Draenor expansion but still in advance of Legion, I downloaded the game client and bought Warlords. Before renewing my subscription I checked the account and saw the listed characters: my mage alt, my priest, and my death knight. No shaman, no Ghando. With a sigh I decided I would spend the expansion’s new catch-up mechanism, a free boost to level 90, on the priest. I paid for a three-month subscription, settled into my seat, and fired up WoW. Following the Warlords of Draenor opening cinematic (spectacular in classic Blizzard fashion, as detailed and polished as a major Hollywood production), I faced the familiar login screen. The Dark Portal of Draenor stood monolithic and malevolent as it had in The Burning Crusade, red and orange now instead of fluorescent green, demanding only my account name and password for entry into a world of infinitely entertaining adventure. I punched it in, and the six-digit code for the authenticator I’d since retrieved. Never again would I suffer a character’s permanent loss. The login server labored a moment and yielded. I was in.
And suddenly there he was. Atop my character list on the Mal’ganis realm, standing some eight feet tall, broad of shoulder with thick hunched neck, two curved horns stabbing forward like spears, was Ghando. Clad just as I’d left him, in tier 9 raiding gear with a dagger and shield, with his helmet hidden to reveal his angrily anthropomorphized bovine face. Updates to WoW’s character models had softened his expression, widened and detailed his eyes into thoughtful yellow-green orbs instead of the surly glare I’d picked out for him some eleven years past. Still, it was a bit like spotting a family ghost, or perhaps running into a childhood friend on the street decades later. Someone you loved dearly but made your peace with never seeing again. My Blizzard account listing, for whatever reason, had been wrong, and without an active WoW account I’d had no way to know. Here he was, in the flesh, and at once I felt a surprising wave of apprehension. You can have it all back, the game spoke to a certain nook of my brain. All of it. I knew this wasn’t true, that there had been real love there and was no longer, that love extinguished never really returns, the way ivy scoured from a redbrick wall won’t ever regrow quite the same. I knew this and still stared at the screen a long time before clicking the bright red button that started it all: ENTER WORLD.
I then applied the level 90 boost to Ghando, skipping over two expansions’ worth of leveling content, so WoW treated me to a special experience. The boost was intended not just for lapsed players like me, whose experience with the UI and game systems allows us to jump in and quickly pick up new changes. It was also meant for new players, whose constant and surprising influx has kept WoW financially flush for years, and those new players can’t just be dropped into the game world at level 90 and expected to fend for themselves. So Blizzard attached a scripted story sequence to characters to whom the level boost was applied, stripping them of their old gear and spells, pushing them on a madcap scramble through the Dark Portal, a massive battle sequence, and a frantic flight through the savage Tanaan Jungle. Fun but simple quests teach the game’s basic mechanics, and a full complement of spells and talents gradually fill your action bars. It replicates the familiar MMORPG process of leveling in a safe and linear starting zone, only with the process greatly accelerated. Voice-acted dialogue and exciting cinematics1 packed with classic characters from the early Warcraft strategy games make the event a fabulous introduction for new players.
On the other hand, as a veteran I found it maddening. The story, setting, and characters were great, but the game’s insistence on emptying my inventory and spellbook left me feeling robbed. My old raid gear and inventory was useless at level 90, but I didn’t want it suddenly taken away, to be retrieved after the opening event at any mailbox. What’s more, the Ghando I knew was a raid-conquering hero with a devastating arsenal of spells for any occasion, not a Lightning Bolt–spamming debutante without access to his bank, guild vault, the Auction House, or any of the countless other amenities associated with a high-level WoW character. Ghando, the legend brought out of retirement for one last ride, as the movie posters say, was being treated like a bleary-eyed noob rolled fresh out of bed. It felt a bit like the second chapter of any Metroid game, where having gotten a taste of the protagonist’s fully kitted badassery, she loses all her weapons and must start from scratch: not exactly heartbreaking, since you know you’ll get them back with time, but drudgingly disappointing all the same. The game tried to make me feel competent, like I was accomplishing important things, but instead I felt nerfed down to a weakling.
Some things I’d been able to keep. All my gold, many thousands of pieces, a modest hoard nonetheless rendered trivial by years of expansion-fueled inflation.2 My mounts were still available: a solid but not exceptional collection, most notably my rank 11 mount from the days of the vanilla Honor System. I was more surprised to see the Elitist Jerks guild tag. Any large guild undergoes periodic trimming, cutting long-inactive players from the official roster to avoid clutter and confusion. Despite five full years of inactivity, I’d somehow not been purged. This came as an enormous comfort for reasons I don’t myself understand, though when I looked at those Elitist Jerks currently online I recognized few of the names. Functionally anonymous, I said nothing and read little on Guild chat—though a few old friends greeted me in whispers and passed along gaudy crafted gear to help me level. Local chat was quiet too, and every other player I saw went about his questing in socially inert determination. Global Trade chat was the typical mix of spammers, trolls, and illicit ads for gold sellers with the occasional earnest request, but even that seemed muted compared to my recollection. Though I heard plenty of scripted NPC dialogue, this little corner of Mal’ganis was silent as the grave.3
Not that you’d necessarily want everyone talking. Video games can be wonderful things, but the Internet is a horrible place filled with horrible people, and the very same people who sustain your community can also corrode it from within. The popular gaming comic Penny Arcade’s “Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory” posits offensive outbursts as the medium’s inevitable product. Public forum plus anonymity equals someone named Plainbagel hurling wild abuse at complete strangers because he wants to be dispelled faster in a five-man instance. This sounds reasonable but falls short because it lets game designers off the hook. Plainbagel is probably a functional if not high-functioning human being, not a sociopathic monster nor a child lacking self-control. His behavior is not innate but learned: because he has seen other people behave in this way without censure or consequence, he perceives social gain for mimicking the behavior.
In theory it’s easily remedied: allow players to report each other’s bad behavior, actively punish people who misbehave via bans from the game, and notify the reporter that some action was taken. But in practice, even attentive game developers can only do so much. Automated reporting systems are obvious targets for fraud and exploitation, so the system demands human eyes reviewing chat logs. Consider a single WoW server and all its myriad interactions between tens of thousands of players, twenty-four hours a day. Multiply that by the several hundred realms spread across the globe; it’s more ground than a single software company can cover, unless they’re willing to invest huge sums of money hiring thousands of workers with the sole aim of policing in-game behavior. Blizzard hired hundreds back when World of Warcraft was new, and it used to offer fairly robust reporting mechanisms where players could lay out their complaints in detail. These days, in the game’s twilight years, the infrastructure has been streamlined and reporting occurs via pull-down menu: cheating, language, spamming, inappropriate name. No option for sexual harassment, for racism or homophobia unless perhaps it’s expressed with especially foul language or by a character named Hitler. The Ignore feature can block individual characters but provides no meaningful safeguard against sustained harassment. Blizzard cares, in an abstract and academic sense, how people behave in Azeroth. They’re just not going to do much about it. Establishing healthy, fun social environments is up to the players, and we’ve gotten pretty good at sorting ourselves by humanity.
The developers, to their credit, have removed some of the natural friction points between players. Relative to the total population, only a handful of players are truly awful, and they’re easily blocked in the game. Most bad behavior occurs because a player is angry or frustrated at something that’s happened in the game. Ease those points of frustration, keep them happy, and they’re much more likely to treat each other well. For instance, loot distribution in most dungeons is now automatic—no arguments, no dice rolls, no theft. Legion’s “multi-tap” system is a particularly good example of smart social game design. If several competing players have each damaged a monster in the game world, every one of them gets his own loot without having to share. Now players don’t argue over monster taps; in fact, they go out of their way to help strangers beset by foes, because they’ll get loot and quest credit too. I’ve even helped Alliance players out on my PvP server because certain tough monsters were better tackled as a pair. We couldn’t heal each other or speak, and we had to be careful not to accidentally damage one another, but we shared a fun experience thanks to good game design and clever implementation. Blizzard’s emphasis on consistent “quality of life” improvements in the game make the lousy moments easier to stomach. If some asshole decides to boot you from a dungeon run just before the final boss, the Looking for Group feature will find you a new party in minutes. No harm done, right?
But if you played for years on end, you’ll start to notice a downside to the automated matchmaking, to the instantaneous queues for any dungeon or battleground you might choose to play. MMORPGs are about persistence, slow accumulation over time. They’re about permanence. Convenient on-demand rewards undermine that very ideal, making a weakness of a strength. I’d argue that WoW’s years-long trend toward convenience, toward merging realm servers into giant pools of players easily matched for on-demand activities in instances, has weakened the social bonds that made it great. In the old days, guilds and relationships were everything. Treat someone badly and she’d tell her guild about it, which sullied your reputation with dozens of people. That antipathy might reach further than you; every time you grouped with anyone else or opened your mouth in chat, you carried your guild’s reputation on your back. Guilds would routinely refuse to deal with each other due to past instances of petty assholery. None of this is true today, because modern WoW has functionally obliterated its own intraserver social structures. That’s the unfortunate compromise for MMORPG developers: the only proven and economical way to address harassment is to make other players so ignorable, so disposable, that it undermines the game’s reason for being.
I emerged from the Tanaan Jungle entry event to a snowy windswept slope and the rudimentary beginnings of a fortress tucked into a bowl-shaped depression in the earth. A few point-and-click quests officially established my garrison, a new feature in Warlords of Draenor and more or less in keeping with the latter-day video game trend of persistent base building. Timed construction processes and carefully doled-out rewards encourage players to come back every day, if only for a few minutes to set their NPC minions on the next six-hour task. Tie-in mobile apps let players develop their garrisons while on the toilet at work or slouching in line to get coffee. I understand these things, why developers use them and why they elicit quantifiable responses in players, but personally I’ve never had the patience. Simulators and strategy games like Civilization will consume me for hours at a time, but in action-focused games like WoW they feel like tedious tack-ons. Put simply, if I have dynamic real-time control of an avatar, any time spent in menus detracts from the experience. Garrison construction felt like a chore, albeit a relatively cool one.
The game also gave me a set of quests to fill in early progression, but these felt more like errands than exploration. Quest-guide mods had always been popular, but now they were integrated directly into the default UI. You never had to wonder where quest objectives were—just run to the highlighted spot on your map! Even though I saw other players running the exact same quests, I felt no connection to these people. Each of us pursued his own garrison, his own private story, all layered atop each other but yet invisible to the others. If you’ve ever read China Miéville’s strange crime procedural The City & the City, it was something like that.
It was also of a piece with the cinematics, the scripted events, the writing and pacing of the quests, the division of characters into one of several hard talent specializations, with just a handful of choices on a linear talent tree. The vanilla talent trees were awful, of course—gnarled and overgrown with terrible talents you often had to pick simply to access a necessary one higher on the tree. Hybrids abounded, with Mortal Striking tanks and arcane/frost mages. Hunters specced for melee instead of their typical ranged attacks. A thousand builds to pick from, nearly all of them less than optimal. Raiders and high-end PvPers gravitated toward a handful of optimized builds, and in those contexts it felt you had no choice, that anything less than the settled science let down your teammates.
So I understand Blizzard’s choice to pare away the choices. I understand why the modern WoW offers less intimidating if less meaningful options, why dungeon-finding is a simple menu rather than a harrowing journey to the gates of said dungeon, why one may find oneself in a battleground with total strangers as the sole representative of one’s realm server, why so much of Warlords of Draenor centers around the construction of a stockade fort in a wilderness hollow. It’s all fabulously designed by smart people. Today’s systems are unequivocally better than yesterday’s. But that same obvious, data-fed care also renders them sterile.
It neuters the old axiom of the game as a harsh and unforgiving master never to be pleased; substituted is the more market-friendly concept of game as service, player as customer. The game now seeks the player’s approval, not the other way around. An in-game Adventure Guide lists the bosses to every dungeon along with short biographies, which seems innocent enough until you look closer and realize it also lists those bosses’ abilities and how best to counter them! Players used to learn these themselves, either through explanations in Party chat or trial and error. The first time you saw any given boss monster, you often had no idea what to expect. Imagining the bosses’ backgrounds and roles in whatever nefarious doings was part of the fun! Wipes were the price, of course, and there’s the rub: players don’t want to wipe learning encounters in organic fashion. Certainly not during the leveling process! They want to get into dungeons and clear them expeditiously, knocking out daily quests and accumulating loot. Lest you think I’m forcing the corporatist angle, a large tab in the Adventure Guide is named “Suggested Content.” Not even a pretention to adventure. Everything is a commodity. Everything is content.
Some nods to mystery remain. Though the mini-map points me anywhere I want to go and stocks every zone with ample flight paths for easy transit, I find myself spending a lot of time just riding around on my Black War Raptor, admiring Draenor’s savage beauty and the interesting places populating it. Orcs and ogres huddled in a fortress built in the rib cage of a colossal beast’s fossilized skeleton. Windswept plains abound with packs of hulking, snow-dusted clefthoof, and around an exposed magma fissure I encounter seething, hissing fire elementals (which, curiously, aren’t resistant to fire damage). Zooming along on an errand I nearly miss a narrow passageway between two crags, an ice cave at the back of which sits a blocky iron treasure box. A rare monster squats in an icicled hollow and, when killed for the heck of it, drops a fine piece of leveling gear. Hunters pursue the clefthoof, and NPC soldiers from various factions tussle in the open spaces between towns. Small scripted events abound, offering optional entertainment for small rewards, usually for my garrison. This is new—or, rather, it was not the case ten years ago, when monsters loitered aimlessly about their designated areas and many quests were roughly painted on a naked landscape. It dawns on me that the mini-map and its helpful arrows are like the big screen at a stadium concert: an easy, seductive distraction from the real action. You’ll get much more from pulling your eyes down to the performers, but doing so takes a conscious effort.
The game itself, the essential mechanics of movement and combat and casting, is still pretty fun. I’d leveled many characters of different classes through various expansions, but never before had I felt so strong. Modern WoW gives players of any class an arsenal of skills both formidable and diverse.4 Where at first I found the system narrow and constraining, I soon begin to appreciate the subtleties—how changing a single talent reordered my whole damage rotation just by emphasizing one buff over another. Questing offers a diverse palette of challenges, often with fun mechanics cribbed from other games.5 The quest writing and dialogue are dramatic but never lose sight of the light, referential humor for which Blizzard is known.
Returning to WoW took me right back to the old ways and familiar rhythms. Hours fell away, and every time I stopped to take the dogs out, the game exerted a telekinetic force. What quests were next on the docket, and when would be the best time for dungeon runs? What was going on with my garrison? While busy with real life I’d still make time to log in, if only for a few minutes to assign my “follower” NPCs fresh missions—the mechanics of which, flipping through assignments to match their particular skills with the mission parameters, elicit an elementary pleasure not unlike pushing wooden blocks through appropriately shaped holes. I pad through my darkened house, toothbrush pinned between back molars, and fire up WoW to send out garrison missions before bed. Bathed in pale blue light, I lay out my followers into valuable ten-hour errands that proceed while I sleep. Every hour of the day made productive.
All of which is to say, WoW’s PvE experience has never been better designed. For all the nostalgia contained in these pages, only with the rosiest of tinted glasses could anyone argue for the vanilla regime, or The Burning Crusade. More than a few fans would vote for Wrath of the Lich King, so thoroughly rooted in Azeroth’s lore. I’d agree that’s where WoW’s modern age began. But the systems were never so clean, the rewards so sculpted to challenge and necessity. Like its predecessors, Wrath was packed with petty indignities: incredibly long and geographically complex corpse runs, redundant leveling zones, badly imbalanced crafting professions. Players flying cross-continent had to steer clear of the Wintergrasp PvP zone, lest they find themselves abruptly dismounted a mile up in the air. Cataclysm demolished and overwrote a game world players had grown to love, and Mists of Pandaria felt like a niche product for those already invested in Blizzard’s adorable/insufferable pandaren race.6 Warlords of Draenor returned the game to its roots in the tale of a savage orcish horde pouring through a Dark Portal, told through classic characters animated and voiced like never before, and Legion throws back to The Burning Crusade with a demonic invasion of Azeroth and the return of a legendary franchise favorite, the demon hunter Illidan Stormrage. At some point in the endless construction of new content, in the narrative’s forward march, Blizzard seems to have remembered what everyone loved about their games to begin with and made a conscious effort to get back there.
MMORPGs, more so than other online games, warp conventional senses of time. I don’t mean the sessions that devour three or four or six hours at a clip, though those happen—I mean the way their narratives sit static. I can delve into a necromancer’s lair and slay him for a major quest, but if I walk back into that cave fifteen minutes later all his acolytes have respawned and the man himself once again stands cackling over a violet-smoking cauldron. Nothing can ever really change, because the next player in line (or one player, with many alts) needs to finish the same quest. It’s a bit like a theme park, animatronics reset for every fresh run. It’s hard to legitimately advance a story and impossible to develop characters. Since Wrath of the Lich King, the game has gotten better at presenting epic moments, through the aforementioned in-game cinematics and new “phasing” technology that allows select portions of the non-instanced game world to appear differently to different players. (It’s phasing that allows each player to build his own garrison on the same windswept slope.) But these innovations don’t really help the characters. We accept stories as arcs, as sequences of events summing up to a progression, but characters are different. Characters we see as static; they’re people frozen in amber at the ends of their respective stories. We see them and think only of the conclusion, not the journey. Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father and savior, not a mass murderer, because we’ve watched his arc to the end. MMORPG characters, even such momentous figures as Jaina Proudmoore or the former warchief Thrall, have no proper end, and as such can only be appreciated as specters of the Warcraft characters we already knew. Nothing in an MMORPG has a true future, only an entertaining present and a past sustained through players’ nostalgia. Saving the world inaugurates no Pax Azerotha; in fact, you’re going to save it all over again next week for another goddamned hunter weapon.
WoW’s decade-plus perch at the top of the heap has built a churning population of players like me, whose subscriptions may occasionally lapse, even for years, but who eventually return to the fold. Old friends beckon alongside new content, but what I personally find most appealing is the familiarity even years later with totally overhauled talents, spells, and systems. Like riding a bike, it never really goes away. Instinctive shift-clicks to loot all items from my kills; turning Ghando’s body sideways when fleeing from monsters so I’m not hit in the back and dazed; constantly spamming the jump button while running because, well, they gave me a jump button, didn’t they? Habits honed over years and laid to rest resurrect themselves the moment I log back in. My pinky finger hovers ever over the Shift and Control keys, ring on the A, long on W and index on D, though in an instant any of them may leap up to the number keys to cast a spell. The body remembers, sometimes better than you do. Even your motor neurons recognize these rituals.
So it should come as no surprise that WoW players adore the past, constantly celebrating the old and defunct. They keep old gear (I still have my Earthfury Boots from Molten Core, the first epic item I ever received), they use that old gear to transmogrify their current equipment to look like old gear, they traipse through old leveling zones, and they delve back into old dungeons. Years after the legendary-quality sword Thunderfury faded into obsolescence, players still ran Molten Core every week for a remote chance at acquiring it. For many players WoW is a pleasant bath of old memories, of adventures with friends both present and departed. As a guildmate whispered to me in the hours after Ghando’s return, They always come back.
Blizzard recognized this with their Timewalking events. Five-man dungeons have long been the game’s most popular attractions (aside from compulsory leveling zones), but once characters progressed past a given dungeon, nostalgia used to be the only reason to return. Warlords of Draenor changed this, in June 2015, by introducing Timewalking. For a weekend at a time, players may visit dungeons from a prior expansion under special conditions: all players entering those instances find their gear and abilities automatically scaled down, so monsters once again offer a challenge.
WoW leverages its own nostalgic appeal to keep you coming back, to reinforce the feeling of home. If that seems like an obvious and cynical ploy from developers chasing their bottom line, consider that it’s only possible because the game endured so long and won so many devoted fans. The loot dropped by Timewalking bosses is “timewarped,” meaning that gear from level 70 or 80 or 90 gets automatically boosted up to level 100 power the moment you leave the Timewalking instance. Players also acquire tokens redeemable for more high-end items. The dungeons themselves are a delight, particularly given WoW’s new and improved combat. I found myself taken immediately back to the early days in Shattered Halls, in Gundrak, in the Pit of Saron.
I cleared these dungeons with total strangers, but it became apparent we were really sharing the space with the ghosts of our memories. Deaths were more funny than annoying, since most derived from peculiar boss abilities long since forgotten. Oh yeah, the old Lightning Nova. LOL! After a wipe on a pack of trash monsters, our tank started marking targets and calling out assignments. Holy shit, noted our paladin. We’re going old school now.
I can’t Hex undead, I typed into my Party chat window. Remember when we had to actually pay attention?
I know, it’s BS.
Now we just AoE everything, chirped our warlock.
He was absolutely right: In days past, every engagement in a dungeon used to require exquisite pulling, crowd control, and focused fire. A single loose monster would probably kill the healer and wipe the group. Now tanks used their improved survivability and ample threat generation to corral all the monsters of a group into a pile to be melted by intense area-of-effect damage. Easier and more fun, but less demanding, which is as good a two-phrase description of modern WoW as I’ve ever heard. Players enjoy this but also lament it. There is no surer way to start a long and boisterous conversation with a WoW player than the formulation “Hey, remember X?” where X is a frustrating hardship from years past.7 Challenges, however trivial, breed camaraderie. Game director Ion Hazzikostas—my guildmaster Gurgthock—acknowledged the value of danger in explaining why Warlords of Draenor and the future Legion expansion wouldn’t allow mounted flight at launch: “World of Warcraft is full of memorable moments that are only possible when players explore the world by ground. . . . The world feels larger, more dangerous. There’s more room for exploration, for secrets.” What’s the essence of any story? A character who wants something, runs into obstacles, and overcomes them. That’s WoW: an endless series of entertaining challenges, a new chapter of your avatar’s story every day of the week, because unlike NPC characters your own can be contemplated in situ. You’re the sole master. A populated online world must present itself as a public attraction, and that’s why its best storytelling will always come from the players themselves.
Though a small chunk of chapter 6 lays out the important distinctions between PvE and PvP environments, veteran WoWers will have noticed I have barely touched upon another major category of realm server. Role-playing (RP) servers existed from the very first day, offering a different spin on the experience for those players most interested in storytelling through Azeroth’s lore. Put simply, to RP is to play as though the game world were real and your avatar an actual person inhabiting that world. Speech adapts first; the more extreme RPers might speak in flowery fantasy language, peppering their chat with “thou” and “thee,” but the vast majority are more subtle. They avoid the constant acronyms and typical Internet shorthand associated with MMORPG chat, taking more care with their communication. RPers make greater use of the /say and /yell commands, speaking out loud in character and dexterously cycling through custom emotes to express themselves. Different rules apply to whispers, Guild chat, and other features too video gamey to pass as anything else. These are taken as out of character (OOC) by default, for personal communication and practical planning. While adventuring or running dungeons, players keep their chat serious and in character. These guidelines vary from server to server and guild to guild, maintained and policed by the community itself. Players on role-playing servers aren’t forced to role-play. Indeed, many choose not to—for them, being on an RP server is happenstance. Blizzard makes no attempt to enforce role-playing etiquette, though RP servers are subject to more stringent naming guidelines (you can’t name yourself Luvtospuuj on an RP server), and players who spam others with OOC messages or otherwise aggressively disrupt the environment are punished. Put simply: role-play as much or as little as you like, but don’t harass others out of their own immersion.
The appeal should be obvious to anyone with a bit of imagination. Since tabletop role-playing games and live-action role-playing have both been popular for decades, computer RPGs were the next obvious step. All the fun and storytelling possibility without the tedious rolling of dice and scanning of tables! WoW’s RP servers offered on-demand fun with a never-ending supply of partners.
I dabbled myself in the early days, leveling a feeble paladin on an RP-PvP server. Since the avatar was chrome-domed and sported an imposing mustache, I played him more or less like Samuel L. Jackson in his unfortunate latter-day remake of Shaft. Thankfully I kept no chat transcripts from that time, but rest assured it was cringeworthy on more than one level. Still, nobody in any of my Deadmines runs complained about it, and most even seemed to enjoy the change of pace. Some took the character seriously, more or less, while others shifted their own personas to match. I was, on more than one occasion, berated for my antics by a gruff if well-intentioned “police chief” character. Though the escapade started as a joke, I quickly saw the doors it opened. Regardless of the character I chose to play, merely playing one inspired others to do the same. It was a bit like dancing at a wedding reception: one person can break the ice. Even if I never saw these people again and we never hashed out any rules between us, RPing gave us another dimension in which to play. It created lasting memories (I still snicker over those moments a decade later) although nobody ever received a material reward for RPing. But they did it all the same, in the simple spirit of pure fun.
Of course, some delved deeper than others. RPers certainly raid, run battlegrounds, and compete in arenas, but you’ll rarely see dedicated RPers atop the ranking. It’s a question of personality, of one’s instinctive approach to the game. RPers aren’t inferior players, but legitimate success requires you conceptualize WoW as a game and all its designs as competitive rules to be manipulated. It demands acronyms and careful adherence to the latest meta-game and humping pillars rather than tooth-rattling battles for honor and glory. Playing WoW in this way rarely feels heroic. Grinding rarely builds fond memories. RPers set means above ends because, as argued previously, obstacles and struggle are the essence of any good story.
Often this means subjecting themselves to special challenges. This might be as simple as a strict “Red equals dead” rule: your character so despises her enemies, she’ll attack anyone from the opposing faction on sight. This inevitably gets her into trouble, more so than strategically “carebearing,” as most players do while attending their business, but it’s part of the character and so any distractions acquire that extra dimension of fun.
As with anything WoW, a few players took this idea to strange and extreme lengths. A Hunter named Gweryc Halfhand achieved notoriety for his insistence on fighting only with melee weapons instead of ranged—a choice forced, as the story went, by the unfortunate mangling of his right hand. Swinging various heavy weapons alongside his trusty wolf Cafall, Gweryc struggled his way to level 70 without any assistance from others. He published a blog detailing the finer points of his exploits, forcefully arguing for the value of unconventional approaches in a game: “My monthly subscription rents me a playground, not a bunch of pixellated penis enlargers, not a spot as somebody’s slave in a raid guild. It’s about fun, and I get a major kick out of pushing the envelope.” He decided the character’s mulish personality was best suited for a dwarf and thus forsook other races with better innate bonuses for hunters. Through his writing the process seems a nightmare, but he delights in its peculiar challenges.
Brave souls undertook even harder tasks, like pacifist leveling: no kills of humanoid opponents, or even no violence whatsoever. Noor the Pacifist was a rogue, inspired by Gweryc’s blog, who refused to engage in combat of any kind or receive experience from those who did. He snuck his way through the retrieval quests sifted from WoWhead. He scoured what few experience points he could from exploring new areas and scraped a few more from daily battleground quests. Reaching the level cap was practically impossible, but that was never why Noor (a “fifty-year-old male computer programmer,” by his description) played. It was technically possible, given a long enough journey, and the journey was the point. Other notable characters included Rotgut the Naked Troll—nudity was actually quite a popular theme, with more than a few players using no visible clothing. Jewelry and weapons alone were enough for the skilled and patient to fight their way through most leveling content.
Among those intentionally fettering themselves, twinks form their own category. The term “twink” in gaming has several meanings but generally refers to under-leveled alternate characters or accounts; an experienced player limits herself to a smaller rule set for practice or amusement. Twink characters usually benefit from a powerful and well-funded main character funneling them resources like the proverbial rich old uncle. In WoW twinks have always been organized around PvP, specifically battlegrounds. Battlegrounds become available at level 10 and players are matched by graduating brackets (10–19, 20–29, and so on), so each level number ending in “9” has its own twink community. Swarms of players forever frozen at level 19 clash in Warsong Gulch, rushing into battle on foot since they can’t yet ride mounts.8 They wield the absolute best gear available for their level, crafted and enchanted to maximize combat output. Normal characters don’t have nice gear while leveling because they’ll just replace it soon, the way children aggressively outgrow their shoes, so twinks barely notice them in the course of battling among themselves. Because the community is small and they play battlegrounds almost exclusively with each other, rivalries grow intense. Twinks have some of the fiercest flame wars on the Internet.
In a certain sense twink players prize process over outcome, but their ultimate objective remains winning. They’re just hunting a leaner (perhaps purer) species of competition. Role-play, to return to the thread, has a trickier relationship with competition. The people RPing may be competitive and their characters possessed of an unholy determination to succeed, but the act of role-playing is inherently collaborative. Like improv acting, it asks all participants to work together, to take risks and give of themselves in pursuit of a shared experience. Everyone labors a bit harder, but they have more fun in the process.
This is the very reason RPing returned to fashion. What flourished with vanilla WoW’s infinite possibility and faded as The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King placed an ever greater emphasis on achievement has made a comeback. Mists of Pandaria’s extra-fanciful settings and pandaren populace (always a cult favorite) inspired a new generation of RPers, and Warlords of Draenor’s dense lore only expanded the burgeoning community. Legion followed in the same footsteps, adding extensive and well-written “artifact quests” attached to each specialization for every class. They never really went away, of course; Blizzard always maintained a separate message board for RPing and fan fiction, “WoW Roleplay” has its own popular sub-Reddit, and mods like MyRolePlay give players a blank canvas to flesh out their characters in full, florid detail.9 Quickly peruse the forums and you’ll find remarkable testimonials of longtime players who’ve recently turned to RP. They love how the game feels like home, but for those not focused on beating Mythic-level raid dungeons, the daily grind of Warlords of Draenor’s follower missions and work orders left them feeling cooped up in their garrisons. Even Legion, at its endgame, comes down to endless dungeon runs under progressively more masochistic conditions. Class halls, cool as they are (warriors literally leap up through a golden beam to Valhalla), aren’t effective social spaces. Nobody ever assembled a dungeon party or made a new friend in a class hall. RP colors in the map’s edges, makes the world seem larger and older and more dangerous, lets players forget how incredibly powerful and well-designed their characters’ abilities are. It turns out being master of the universe is kind of a chore. Little people in a big world have the freedom to be frivolous.
That’s why most RPing activities aren’t dungeon runs or ranked battlegrounds or questing expeditions at all; they’re social events. A glance at Blizzard’s official RP forum shows recruiting posts for guilds and notices of upcoming events, some open to the public and others by sign-up. Players explore such ideas as “Daycare of Warcraft,” a space where players pretend to be infant versions of their characters. Think Muppet Babies, with baby night elves and worgen pups instead of Baby Kermit and Babby Fozzie. It includes “adult” roles—caretakers and nannies for the youth. No players, the post specifies, may take any action inflicting serious harm upon any of the babies. Others organize Night of the Living Dead events where a powerful warlock raises swarms of “zombie” undead players dressed in rags for grim and shambling marches on the mist-shrouded Alliance town of Darkshire. “Shadow Sermons” hosted weekly in Silverpine Forest induct fresh corpses into the Horde’s undead subfaction, the Forsaken. Some events are quite literally tea parties: sin’dorei (anyone #woke and up on her lore knows “blood elves” is a slur) conjure food and drink from the arcane and perhaps a warlock gets incensed enough to summon an infernal, but the tablecloths are barely singed and everyone socializes and has a gay old time.
Storytellers are always socializing their pastime. A great story is best shared, so RPers seek out and provoke each other to play. They solicit and dole out advice on each other’s stories—correcting lore where it might drift astray or agreeing, Yes, that’s a brilliantly fresh take on the Illidari. One player states he’d like to play a pandaren ninja and another replies that while WoW has no ninjas as such, a close approximation might be a Shado-Pan from this clan and that spot on the Wandering Isle. The feedback isn’t really the point, of course, any more than advice columns are about solving folks’ thorny issues. It’s about the act of sharing, and partaking of what’s shared. It’s about sustaining a proud community. RPing is loud if nothing else, between the insistence that players communicate in /say or /yell instead of private chat and the constant seeking of social reinforcement. New RPers marvel at the community’s boisterous warmth, especially compared to the sterile silence of leveling zones or the white noise of spammers and gold sellers in Trade chat. If you feel as though WoW has become indistinguishable from the rest of the Internet, spend an evening role-playing on one of the established RP servers (Wyrmrest Accord has become something of a hub). It’s an old way of doing things, harking back to the ancient days of text-based online games played over Telnet. Without graphics, players had to dream up their own identities; all you could ever know about your fellows was the description text they wrote for themselves.
Of course these practices lead to their own conflicts. As a communal activity, RPing relies on certain common assumptions—accords easily made among friends or in Guild chat but poorly communicated to the world at large. Game critic John Brindle once wondered about ownership on WoW’s RP realms: “In the age of Twitter timelines and filter bubbles, we’ve become used to inhabiting tailored slices of reality. But in 2004, hanging out together in one big shared space . . . was still the dream of the Internet. WoW had no player housing, no private space, and while it has since added some of each, they are limited in the big hub cities where most people want to RP. The result is a scarcity of useable space, even in the midst of geographical abundance.”
So on RP servers, self-appointed Stormwind guards found their halls packed with scheming thieves, and members of the Church of the Holy Light grumbled endlessly about cultists gathering for dark rituals in the nave. Everyone felt entitled to his own interpretation of the game world, his own backstory, while also implicitly relying on the larger community for immersion. As Brindle notes, “It was actually criminal roleplayers who had the biggest stake in maintaining these presences; crime is no fun without someone who is trying to catch you. So most people basically agreed that a Guard should exist, even if there was sometimes dispute about who should run it or how it should work.” Occupying customary spaces with the expected behaviors and hewing to the game’s visual presentation are the best guidelines to widely accepted RPing. Very few people are going to read the in-depth guide to your guild’s lore that you bump to the top of the realm forums every few days. Without the ability to really own any given space, RPers must start from a solid premise and work to convince others of its legitimacy. Needless to say, this is a difficult task. Few players are up to it, and so it’s no wonder Blizzard has continued their progress toward a game as private and personalized as the rest of the Internet.
As I worked Ghando up to level 100, from the questing zones and back to the Tanaan Jungle,10 I found myself missing that kind of connection. There was a gulf of sorts—between the cozy bustle of a full quest log and the long, empty hours of waiting for work orders, between rapid progression and the trickle of scarce garrison resources necessary to access the best content. Without that sense of forward momentum I was left with two depressing shades of quiet: the soft quiet of waiting and the harder one, loneliness. General chat was empty, and anyone I saw was a silent automaton on an errand. Even stealing someone’s monster kill or mining node no longer elicited an angry response. It was a waste of time; they merely moved along to the next resource. In dungeons, the Adventure Guide explained each player’s role in any given fight, so there was no real need to communicate. I’m chatty by nature in games, and yet I found myself proceeding in exactly the same silence.
So alone I played. Ghando roved across the wilds of Draenor following tiny icons pasted on his map, collecting garrison resources twelve or fourteen at a time when thousands were needed, finding the odd apexis shard when again thousands were needed. The comically mismatched numbers seemed to mock me, though with focused grinding they added up quick. If you’re willing to spend a whole day working at something, WoW is happy to reward you for it. The game guarantees you Y reward for X effort, and this is probably the single biggest reason it’s more appealing than the rest of life. It’s also why modern WoW, in contrast with its own past, feels more like a game these days than a place. Between the game’s crisply designed systems and the cornucopia of add-ons to assist me, the work was enjoyable enough but clearly work. For some people that’s perfect. Elitist Jerks’ raiding core appeared online for perhaps an hour each week to clear old content—I never saw them otherwise—and they seemed content with that arrangement. If they logged on apart from that it was to run specific errands, after which they logged out.
If players aren’t pushing the envelope, what exactly are they doing? Checking off daily quests, pushing for ever-higher arena ratings, accumulating wealth and upgraded gear through the ample and easily accessed endgame events. It wasn’t that WoW lacked for things to do. I just struggled to escape the unsatisfied feeling that had led me away from the game years before. It’s fun—and how can anyone really complain when a video game is fundamentally fun?—but these days it’s too nested in comfort to ignite anyone’s passion. The developers provide their customers with an excellent product, yet we find ourselves looking back most fondly to years-old pain and suffering. I understood acutely why so many choose the social embrace of role-playing. I was halfway there already, imagining the tales of my garrison and its followers’ exploits, because those were all I saw happening. Hours of exploration, of treasure-seeking, and all for a few more points in a giant pile of integers that would eventually let me upgrade a garrison building in order to build another garrison building and thereby access Tanaan Jungle. It feels like progression, activates the associated neural circuitry, but delivers only in the minutest sense. By the same token, more than a few players spend all their in-game time (and heaps of their real-life dollars) collecting cosmetic pets, which in Mists of Pandaria were granted the ability to battle each other Pokemon style. Even the most obscure features of a character may represent hundreds of hours of mentally engaged play. One dungeon run saw the matchmaking system pair me with a guildmate, and neither of us even noticed each other until most of the way through, because we paid no attention to anything outside ourselves. The end result feels like treading water in a busy, warm bathtub. We’re all in complete control of our destinies and we know exactly when the next reward comes. Again, I cannot stress enough how well designed the World of Warcraft is. Its designers have labored to be everything to everyone, and they’re damn close to pulling off this impossible task—but it is, after all, impossible.
WoW has always been a cyclical experience, tuned not to seasons or the calendar year but Blizzard’s regular expansions. It’s not quite clockwork, but players have always been able to expect new expansions about every two years. My experience playing Warlords of Draenor came at the low ebb of what the community consensus has dubbed a front-loaded expansion. They feel there just wasn’t enough to do, particularly as the two-year cycle approached its end. Legion’s release at the very end of August 2016 abruptly kicked the game back into high gear.
Whether you’re a new or returning player, a new expansion is the best time to throw yourself back into WoW. Your garbage gear won’t matter for the first month at least, which gives you an opportunity to catch back up to the hardcore players if you want. Expansions are great fun—charging through the leveling zones, exploring new areas and living fresh stories and getting new gear and immersing yourself in this vibrant virtual world alongside your guildmates. Even if they’re total strangers you can run dungeons together and commiserate over a handful of obnoxiously bugged quests in Val’sharah. Crafting professions feel relevant as you build yourself useful items; gatherers make piles of money hocking their wares in a desperate seller’s market.
As of this writing, late in the year 2016, it’s too early to render any big conclusions over Legion, but playing it reminded me of the best in WoW for all the same reasons Warlords of Draenor represented the worst. Seldom does a game last long enough to see the industry change around it and react—over the years WoW’s clever designers have swiped mechanics from other popular games, from Pokemon’s monster collecting and battling to platforming and rail-shooting and the infamous “pikmin” dungeon in the Legion zone of Suramar. Even rarer is a game that gets to learn from itself, to exist so long with so much security that the designers can react against their own prior choices. Legion represents a conscious reaction against its predecessor; Hazzikostas himself stated in a Twitch Q&A the week after Legion’s release that the developers wanted to “step back from the Warlords garrison model.” Dynamic zones keep every region of the Broken Isles engaging and tough, especially since frequent “world quests” with meaningful rewards draw players out of their capital cities. Player-versus-player combat is reborn, as world quests draw the Alliance and Horde into close contact in the open world and some explicitly reward killing the opposite faction. In battlegrounds and arenas, the game steps in to normalize players’ gear—newbies and fresh rerolls no longer get their faces stomped as the price of admission, and hardened veterans can earn a long succession of valuable class-specific perks for their valor. Stripped-down spellbooks for every class keep the action comprehensible; you can pick up the basics in just a few hours. Guild rosters bulge with names old and new, every one of whom has a demon hunter alt. Green chatter fills your screen at all hours of the day and night as the hours flash by. This is how MMORPGs are meant to be played, in wobbly nascent states exploding with promise. Many people take a week off work just to immerse themselves in the juvenile madness. Just to have a prime seat at the show, a great perch at a party that’s not meant to outlast the night.
We circle around to find once again that the best parts of online gaming exist in our choices, in expressing ourselves better than words alone permit. Work for years in someone’s cubicle or live as housemates and you might still barely know her; play with her for an hour on voice chat and you’ve learned more than any details of biography could reveal. I don’t need to know where you went to high school. Show me how you tank, how you burst, how you peel. If we’re going to live in a permanently connected world that so vividly transmits pain and anger and madness, let the things we do for each other be just as real. Let our friendships endure.