by David Piner on Nov 04, 2011
Spending too long remembering the past may mess up the present, as World of Warcraft: Cataclysm taught us. The heavy focus on rebuilding the old world along with bringing the game back to an earlier difficulty curve is one of the biggest complaints the game has received. That doesn’t stop players from continuing to reminisce about the good ‘ol days though, since Cataclysm simply changed the game and didn’t necessarily revert anything back.
Taking a step back in time, to before Cataclysm launched, everyone was ecstatic that the game was making raiding and heroics difficult and that epic gear was no truly epic. Players were bored that heroics were less about fighting and more about walking from point A to point B spamming your AoE spells and that raiding was too easy for everyone to get into.
This spawned many of the founding principles of Cataclysm and led to a lot of negative opinions, especially at launch. Raiding difficulty was artificially inflated by imposing heavy mana restrictions on healers and many PUG tanks just weren’t up for the tactics required for these new heroics. So heroics went from easy as pie to hard as nails. Sure epic armor was truly epic, but at the same time where is the fun in suffer to get through a dungeon for nothing but some valor points?
That is where many players either turn to brighter horizons (Mists of Pandaria anyone?) or to the past, back to the game that they once loved. They hope and wish for the return of either vanilla WoW or, at the very least, The Burning Crusade when prestige gear was much more prestigious, instances were challenging, and heroics were hard as nails.
Remember Magisters' Terrace? Many players long for the day to return - to what many call WoW's golden years.
No, that’s not déjà vu, and you’re right that is exactly what Cataclysm was. But many players will tell you that it didn’t have the charm and the new combat system wasn’t exactly what they were hoping for. That is why many of these players turn to the idea of “progression servers” to fix the game and take them back to better days.
“Progression servers” are special servers in Everquest that roll the game back to earlier days and release patches / expansions at set intervals. The idea probably didn’t originate from EQ, since the idea of taking the game back or at least forking it came along with the idea of changing a game, but EQ popularized it. These servers are a huge hit with fans and bring in tons of subscriptions for EQ.
Yet, WoW is a slightly different game, and we’re at a slightly different time of its evolution. EQ1 has seen its glory days come and go and returning to those glory days is what obviously the playerbase wishes for. Yet, WoW is still alive and rather healthy. While subscriptions have been falling, it’s obvious why, and Mists of Pandaria aims to fix the issue. So what point would progression servers have other than to appease a small niche of the playerbase that wants to spend 4 months to get to level sixty?
Well, I’m not exactly sure, but there are a variety of pros and cons to opening these servers up. The biggest good thing to come from it is taking that niche and effectively putting them where they want to be, making that subsection of the community happy which is what a game should do. If it takes playing an older version to make a smile appear on someone’s face then by all means, let’s get to it.
It also opens the doors for newer players to try older content. So instead of listening to us old timers ramble endlessly about Naxxramas, they can actually go there and suffer through pulling 40 players who are AQ40 geared together and wiping for weeks before getting a single boss down.
Though, if these servers were high population and condensed, that would solve tons of the older issues. 40 players might not be so difficult to pull together if there are 10,000 players online at any given time (which obviously there would be). Not to mention most of those players already experienced with raiding and capable of actually doing the older content from their past knowledge.
Yet, it isn’t full of purely good things. We have to take into consideration that we’re talking about a game from seven years ago. If we all remember, the game was very unforgiving and incomplete back then. It originally didn’t even have battlegrounds (some may call that a feature) and the grind was sickening compared to today’s standards. Dungeons were grueling and having rare gear was pretty awesome.
Raids also required 40 players and a minimum of 25 in TBC (Karazhan was a 10 player raid for lesser gear). Those 40 players had to know what they were doing. Players have a hard enough time pulling together 10 players to do a raid, think about pulling together 40 and making sure they all have perfect attendance.
Not to mention we’re forking the game back in time while the developers are working towards advancing the game into the future. That also means that we’re splitting players off of live current servers and into what is essentially another product. Vanilla WoW wasn’t something you could do casually either you had to dedicate your life to it in order to get anywhere which means it wouldn’t be a neat side adventure for players on current servers.
There are a lot of merits and a lot of negatives to implementing progression servers. I think that one of the best approaches to it would be if WoW were to move to a freemium model that the progression servers be the free servers with a cash shop applying to it. That sullies the idea of progression, sure, but it also makes it a bit more tolerable. Imagine playing through vanilla with the ability to use an XP scroll or buy your mount with real life currency.
Well, there you have it. Are you stuck in the past and long to return or do you think we should forget about it? Leave your thoughtful comments in the comments section below.
Oh, and if WoW releases progression servers anytime soon I’ll be sure to eat my mount’s best friend.I don't see it coming until at least toward the end of MoP, if ever.