Goals: Don't Leave Home Without Them

The other day I read that the Classic testing was going to be going on again and I got excited and told April. I was anticipating coming home and being able to log back onto Classic before it's release on August 27th. When I got home and wasn't able to log into the Classic server I was sad.

Turns out that they were opening the game back up to closed beta testers who were going to be able to play level 40 toons and be able to test out level 40-45 content. I was a sad panda. Read on for some of my thoughts as I wait for the Classic release.

Anticipation Leads To...Boredom?

After I was able to play Classic during the open stress test for 7 hours with my wife I have to say that logging in to the live servers is kind of boring. Maybe boring isn't the right feeling. Maybe something like antsiness.

(If you missed my recent livestream from the Classic beta you can check it out here on my Twitch or on here on YouTube.)

If there is something I know about myself and playing World of Warcraft is that having a goal is pretty much a requirement in order for me to stay engaged in the game.

For a long time gold-making filled that need.

When you are working on making gold you always had something to do. In fact you could have 5 or 10 things you needed to do in any give play session. The gold coming into your mailbox was your reward.

Logging into the game now I haven't been able to find a good goal to keep myself engaged. I think leveling a character in Classic will be one of those goals that keeps me coming back.

Since I am currently not making gold that doesn't have a large draw for me. Because I have too many characters to play that doesn't necessarily make it easy to make a goal.

I spent most of my game time tonight leveling a somewhat random level 50-isn paladin I have on an alt-server. I also spent some time playing my level 40-ish Void Elf warrior.

Into the Void

Speaking of my Void Elf that reminds me of one of my past goals that helped me keep playing. It was at the beginning of Battle for Azeroth and my wife and I had both gotten to max level in BfA and we were looking for things to keep us playing.

One of the things that we decided to do was finally unlock the Void Elves for ourselves because...hey...Blood Elves on the Alliance!

Tonight was I looking at my reputations and noticing that the Void Elf unlock grind was from the end of Legion. We did it much later. In fact I think we did it at max level for BfA.

I grinded (ground?) those stupid daily quests to raise my reputation for like a month or more. And it was boring. It was repetitive. It was mind-numbing. And I did it. Why? Because there was a reward at the end. The ability to make these cool looking Elves.

This particular Void Elf is not impressed.

But you know what happened literally the day that I got my Void Elves unlocked? You guessed it. I lost interest in the game almost immediately.

No matter how stupid or boring or repetitive the task if there is a clear goal at the end I'll do it. Why?

It's The Goals Dummy

I'm sure this isn't the first time I've written about this topic. In fact a quick search of my blog archive brought up the post "On Motivation: The Ups, Downs, and Mysterious Whys" which covers a similar topic and I know there are other posts that have a similar theme.

Without a good set of goals driving me to feel like I am progressing (even something ridiculous like playing a melee hunter in Wrath) I have a hard staying motivated.

Especially nowadays when I feel like I could be doing a multitude of other worthy things like reading, writing, or playing with my kids.

But given the short time I spend with it I think that Classic could go a long time to give me the goal that I need to be able to sit down here and there and really enjoy the game again.

If you leveled characters in Vanilla (or The Burning Crusade) you know that it was work. It was work just figuring out where to go to complete a quest.

I even looked up the Jame's Alliance Leveling Guide that we had printed out and put in a binder so we could follow it. In fact it's possible that we might print it out and put it in a binder again.

It doesn't really matter what the goal is. What matters is that my monkey brain can find a goal that is sufficiently interesting or worthwhile for my to be excited to log on.

15 years is a long time to play a single game and I've played this game a lot.

Motivation

What motivates you? What gets you up and logging into the game? Does Classic hold any appeal for you?

I was reading in the news today that Blizzard says that there is so many people preparing to play Classic that they are afraid there will be long log in queue times. They are looking into adding more servers to help accommodate this and work to alleviate long log in queue times.

To me this shows that the demand for Classic might be more than even Blizzard anticipated.

For players like April and I who have been playing the game since 2004 I think that there is going to be a combination of nostalgia as well as a return to something that we simple.

There is a great Mad Men quote that I come back to when I think about how strong nostalgia can be. (I think he was pitching an ad campaign for a Kodak slide projector. If you don't know what a slide projector is...um...it was before my time as well be I at least know what they are.)

"Nostalgia - it's delicate, but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, "nostalgia" literally means "the pain from an old wound." It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn't a spaceship, it's a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards... it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the wheel, it's called the carousel. It let's us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know are loved. " - Don Draper

So are April and I caught in the "pain from an old would"? Are we pining for a time before our lives seemed to get so complicated? Maybe. But I think that is ok.

Time will tell if Classic is all we think it's cracked up to be or will it just be a passing fancy that we try for a few weeks and then realize why we hated leveling in Vanilla. (Spoiler: I loved leveling in Vanilla and TBC!)

Sometimes you just want to log in and kill stuff for a few hours. The 27th can't come soon enough. Back to my low level toons while I wait.

P.S.

I've been going back and reading old blog posts and it's funny with all this talk about Classic that one of the most recent posts that I wrote (recent being September of 2016) was entitled "Thoughts on Leveling From 1-60 "Vanilla" Style".

Looks like I was way ahead of all of this "retro" gaming.

Maybe with all these NES Classic and SNES Classic and PlayStation Classic (and upcoming Genesis Classic and Turbo-Grafix 16 Classic) that WoW Classic is Blizzard's way of cashing in on the "classic" craze.

Now all they need to do is make a small beige PC tower case with a keyboard and roller-ball mouse and HDMI output and put a copy of WoW Classic on it. BAM! Brilliant idea. (You can run with that Blizzard.)

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