To Legacy or Not to Legacy

There has been a lot of conversation happening about the Legacy servers for World of Warcraft.

I would like to spend a little bit of time putting my thoughts and feelings into words here.

In my opinion there are basically two camps when it comes to this issue:

1. Those that want to play the Old Game.
2. Those that want to go back in time.

I am in camp number 2, I want to go back in time really bad. I want those amazing feelings to spark up again, where something that was isometric, became a 3d world!

The sense of exploration, discovery, danger. All that is what made the game great and memorable for me. It wasn’t the old mechanics (old by now a day standards). It wasn’t the pointless pvp grind of Barrens. It was the fact that those 3 things were present no matter where you went in the game.

I was younger then, much less responsibility was on my shoulders, my friends had much more free time to spend on the game and by extension with me. We could go do things that we have never done before, explore a huge world, find creative ways to get past mobs without aggroing them.

I am sure this is why there are active communities for games like Everquest, Ultima Online, people cherish those memories. They go back to their favorite hang out spot and jump head first into nostalgia.

I go to Ironforge ever couple of months, and just sit at the entrance and remember how astonished I was at the size of the whole thing. The statues, the hallways, the forge itself.

All of that being said, doesn’t mean I want to go back to have an auto-attack paladin, or a hunter that gets his pet at level 10. I don’t want to grind mobs for hours to complete a quest.

I want to go back in time, I want to be able to spend all night exploring new places and laughing with my friends. Sadly that is out of my reach for now. What I can do is take a trip down memory lane and relive all those moments. That doesn’t require me going back to an outdated way of playing the game.

I am not trying to discard those people who are in camp number 1. I can see that actually seeing the old world, going through the motions of the old game would make for a much easier trip down memory lane. I don’t for a second doubt that there are people that prefer to do things the old way (a.k.a. the right way). However for most of us we just want to go back in time and make our first jump through the Portal at the log in screen, create our first character and then our first memory!

All that being set, I completely support the fact that the community is doing all they can, in all the right ways to have something like this an option. Regardless of the fact that I probably wont play on there, those that want to and will pay money for it, should have the chance to do so.

Blizzard is right to listen and weight their financial gains and loses from this endeavor. But I think in their current state of things, they also need to factor in that their WoW fans are becoming more and more convinced that Blizzard only listens when they hear the cha-ching sound. That’s not the Blizzard we all fell in love with, and if they make this move it will bring about a large amount of goodwill their way.

In conclusion, can we please come up with a way to travel back in time?