I was checking out Arren’s latest post over on Through the Eyes of Death today. He discusses the recent announcements about the upcoming changes in patch 3.2, many of which will make leveling 1-70 faster than ever.

I agree with him that most of the reason is that everybody has “been there, done that” and there’s no sense prolonging the pain anymore. People are just trying to get to Northrend content as fast as possible. Nobody cares about how Edwin Van Cleef was screwed by the nobility of Stormwind. Nobody cares why the worgen are in Duskwood or how they got there. In fact, much of vanilla WoW and Burning Crusade has been made moot by Wrath of the Lich King anyway. I think another reason is that Blizzard’s next expansion will include at least ten more levels. We’re talking about having to level grind to 90 and doing most of it in lands that are now pointless. Illidan’s dead – why are we in Outland again?

But I digress, as usual.

I wanted to talk about what it was like when we used to have to walk to school in the snow, uphill, both ways. Arrens mentioned the warlock in his post, which sparked this post of my own because my first class was a warlock. I remember the “good old days”, as it were. Both warlock mount quests were very exciting, but my second epic mount dreadsteed quest was memorable because the chain was so long and it was actually “epic”. At the same time, it was also very frustrating.

When it came down to the instance runs in the end, it was even more difficult because you had to find four other people willing to help you who had no reason to except love for common man. After a couple of weeks of hard work, sweat, crying, contemplations of suicide, and hundreds of gold spent at the auction house, I was finally able to saddle up the dreadsteed.

Back then you weren’t really a warlock if you were level 60 for any length of time and you didn’t have your dreadsteed. You were just a poor warlock impersonator, a wannabe. Getting your dreadsteed was your warlock club card. I suspect that paladins had the same thing going on with their epic mount and perhaps druid with the epic flight form.

Rose-colored glasses? Probably. There is a lot about vanilla WoW that was quite terrible – let’s just be blunt. I remember many quests, as Arrens mentioned, that were just a hassle. You’d run all over creation for a quest that really wasn’t very interesting and, in the end, you ended up with 2000 experience points for your trouble. In the forty minutes it took you to complete the quest you could have made four times that amount of experience just grinding pig men or something.

I think it’s human nature for us to embellish some of our memories, even the ones that maybe don’t deserve embellishing. Or maybe those are the ones that need to be cleaned up the most. I remember the wars that took place between Southshore and Tarren Mill. There was nothing to be gained from that but corpse runs. And sure, I remember when my warlock, after some brutal battleground sessions, was able to finally get the title of Knight. And that was when they were using the rating system; you couldn’t just hoard honor points. Now when you look at the title, it sounds awesome and fear-inspiring. But when you think about the hell you went through to get it, was it really all that fun?

So I think much of the QQing is for nostalgia’s sake. Will a new player have the same amount of appreciation for his brand new flaming dreadsteed as we did years ago? Maybe, maybe not. But the game has evolved now.

Does anyone remember getting up on Saturday morning to watch the Superfriends or Scooby Doo in the 70s? I do. I’d get a giant bowl of plain Cheerios (no fancy stuff back then) and set up camp in front of the television. That was great fun. Would I force my kids to watch an episode of the old Superfriends? Wonder Twin powers activate? That was beyond lame. If I’d had Justice League in 1978 my brain would have probably exploded.

It’s just the evolution of WoW. We remember its past fondly. But comparing vanilla WoW to Wrath of the Lich King is almost exactly like comparing the Superfriends to Justice League.