Legion & Legacy - End-of-year Thoughts

Just because I haven't been playing WoW doesn't mean that it has been completely off my radar. For one thing, the launch of the Legion expansion in late summer was hard to miss. And I do have to hand it to the WoW community: They are very good at building hype. I actually watched a video of someone talking so enthusiastically about just how much fun he was having with Legion that part of me was genuinely tempted to give it a try. I know better of course, but I have to give kudos to people for still managing to rouse these kinds of feelings in me after all these years and despite of my brain knowing better.

Following the reactions to Legion once the launch hype had died down was also interesting because... either Blizzard really never learns, people will complain no matter what, or maybe a bit of both. The reason I'm saying this is that after all the "there's nothing to do" moans about Warlords of Draenor, we are now back to people complaining about excessive grind and alt-unfriendliness - the exact same things that people were criticising about Mists of Pandaria. It's pretty fascinating to observe even without playing myself.

Meanwhile, I have been feeling a genuine itch to play some Vanilla again, but after just getting a new PC I'm uncertain about how to go about it. The memory of how much of a hassle it was to get the Vanilla client up and running last time doesn't exactly endear me to going through all of that again. And it makes me kind of sad to say it but... I also think I'm pretty much done with Kronos. I didn't really put down deep enough roots on it, and the fact that it's a PvP server just makes it too hard for me to casually enjoy myself on my own. I was really hoping that the opening of the gates of Ahn'qiraj would invigorate my interest somehow, but seeing how I wasn't even able to observe the event peacefully, the opposite was the case. It's annoying that the private server community has such a hard-on for PvP servers that good PvE options are few and far between. Mind you, I don't regret giving it a try, but it also taught me that PvP servers are not worth my time in the long run.

But oh, what's this...?

The drama around Nostalrius continues, and apparently they have now decided to relaunch. I've previously written about why I don't think Blizzard will ever create official Vanilla servers, but it's hard to not feel at least a spark of hope these days considering that they've gone on record only this month to say that they are still thinking about it. The Nost team on the other hand, previously the community's untiring official champions for legacy servers, have now decided to throw their toys out of the pram and will just do the same thing as other private server hosts, which is to keep going and simply ignore any cease and desists from Blizzard. One can't help but see this as unhelpful to the cause... if you thought that official Vanilla servers ever had a chance that is. For many that were quite happy to play on private servers on the other hand, the return of Nost is a joyous day. And you know what? I think at this point it might be for me too... because they are also relaunching their PvE server.

It will be the last one to go up as part of an incredibly badly thought-out staggered release and will likely be the least populated... but all that is perfectly fine by me. Maybe in the new year I will give levelling another Vanilla character a shot, this time without constantly having to worry about gank attempts.