There’s been a murder.
I have bad news—if you play MMOs, you’re guilty of a crime. As are each and every one of us. We are the thousand knives plunged into the back of the «oldschool MMO». But who among us (don’t say ‘sus’, it’s not the time) is truly at fault?
You may now imagine me in a little deerstalker hat and a Sherlock-esque coat giving the final speech in a Whodunnit. Or maybe a nice shirt, like Benoit Blanc. Add a baw gawd at your own discretion.
The problem, dear Watson(s), is that so many are responsible that no-one can really be given the blame. The thousand cuts that bled old school MMOs dry weren’t made with malice, but excitement—eagerness to push things forward, to share.
Since some of you might’ve grown up after this death, let me explain what I mean. In the (very good) video essay by Folding Ideas, Why It’s Rude to Suck at Warcraft, Nathan Landel and Dan Olson collate a few anecdotes into the character of Wallace, who «walks between encounters and doesn’t wear shoes».
The full video is worth a watch, and goes into the issue of instrumental play in far more detail than I will here—but I think about the Wallaces of MMORPGs a lot, and where they’ve gone. I’m not saying you won’t meet strange characters in the present-day, but once you’re locked into the endgame grind loop? Not a chance.
This murder is more than a tragedy—a simple dichotomy of ‘old thing good, new thing bad’. What we’ve built up around MMORPGs has simply created an ecosystem where the Wallaces of the world aren’t supported. Nigh-extinct, only located in the streams of popular YouTubers playing World of Warcraft Classic, and not a fact of existence.The dead myths
Hardcore raiders used to be weird, man.
I mean that as neither an insult nor praise. In the time before raiders were professionally-sponsored digital athletes, they were frontierspeople—oddities who looked at the complex net of systems the MMO offered and said to themselves «that, I want to be good at that.» They were regarded with a superstitious kind of derision, fear, and respect.
Propping up this mystique was a lack of transmog systems and the elusiveness of powerful loot. There was just something cool about wandering into Stormwind and seeing a warrior decked out in the Tier 2 raid set and going «wow. That person has a lot of free time.»
Conversely, getting called a «noob/n00b» actually used to mean something. There used to be an actual gulf of knowledge you could have that would make you feel inferior, which meant the few who actually knew what they were doing were cooler by comparison.
But as time wore on, we’ve grown closer and closer to these personalities. They’re streamers. They have essays and tier lists and (often very informative) WoWhead articles. If one of them causes some drama, there’ll be ten videos online before we can even blink. I imagine if Zeus or Hera started vlogging, the people of ancient Greece might not be so awestruck, too.
Which leads into my next point: Our ambition had us learning too much. Supply rises where demand exists, and in our race to become just like these mythological figures, we all started getting way too invested in numbers and said: «Hey, being a God involves a ton of math, and I don’t wanna do any of that.
