Classic Culture War

One thing that immediately impressed me when I started playing on Classic era last year was the community. It was small, but precisely because of that, it was also very tight-knit. You didn't meet many people out in the world, but when you did, it was a pleasant surprise and you knew that player was there because they really liked Vanilla and wanted to be there; they weren't just following a recommendation from their favourite streamer or riding the latest trend. If anything, it was the opposite: choosing era over regular Classic would mark you as a bit of a weirdo who wasn't afraid to go against the flow.

I've often mentioned the Classic era Discord in my posts here, which has both been a great community resource as well as just a nice place to see community spirit in action. I saw some pretty interesting discussions there, and I was often impressed by how hard people tried to stay respectful even when their in-game interests were pretty much diametrically opposed, because driving people off just for enjoying the game in a different way wasn't going to be in anyone's interest.

Now, as much as I've enjoyed watching era's population grow, I also had a feeling that this was eventually going to change its culture as well... and things came to a head for me last week when I finally gave up and put the general chat channel on the Classic era Discord on mute.

In many ways that shouldn't be a big deal, because I ignore general chat in many MMOs and larger Discords, as it's just too busy and often serves as nothing but a place for a certain crowd to shoot the shit in public. But I really liked the chats we used to have in the Classic era Discord... until I didn't anymore.

Recently the general chat there has been nothing but the same few trolls repeating the same old "jokes" at each other, or endless arguments about GDKP or when Blizzard's going to release fresh servers so people can go and leave era already. It was just starting to annoy me, and eventually the ratio of this "spam" vs. actually interesting conversation became so bad that it just wasn't worth following anymore.

Yesterday I decided to take a quick peek to see whether there'd been some sort of change since I applied the mute and promptly saw someone telling another person that they should kill themselves, followed by another poster chuckling about how the mods on the server are so laid back nowadays that clearly anything goes. I still use the smaller channels that are limited to specific topics, but general's basically become toxic and useless as far as I'm concerned.

In-game, my server has fortunately fared better, and while there's been a lot of growth, it hasn't felt in any way unpleasant yet. I'm hopeful that we'll be able to retain that state of affairs, mainly because I know it can be done - Hydraxian Waterlords remained a pleasant medium population server all throughout Classic's original run, even while the general community perception in places like reddit was that all of Classic was basically a bunch of min-maxing sweatlords that wouldn't play anywhere but on the biggest megaserver.

Nonetheless I have to admit I've been wondering what all this growth is going to mean for my guild, Warriors of Sunlight. It's easy to be inclusive when you're always short on people and every extra person adds value, but as I saw with the Forks, being able to cherry-pick your roster changes people, and it sneaks up on you slowly. Since every WoS raid is overbooked nowadays, I found myself wondering when someone would raise the question of why we still take just about anyone - why not take the people with more dps as a priority? Plus we've had some newcomers that were clearly expecting things to work more like they did in 2020 - you can usually recognise them by the fact that they come to MC buffed up to the teeth and then die from getting aggro on some random trash mob because none of the old-timers (including the tanks) bother with popping their world buffs in Molten Core.

And there have been early signs: more talk about how to optimise your damage, and the other day a new hunter openly complained that so many people parsed green or grey in our logs and accused them of being semi-AFK during the raid. There was pushback against that, and later one of the officers made a big post about how this is a laid-back, casual guild and how that's what's it's going to stay, and if people want things to be run a different way, they can always leave and make their own guild. I really appreciated this doubling down on the guild's ethos, but we'll see how well it holds up. Like I said, it sneaks up on you. I still remember all the banter in the Fork raids slowly turning into brags about how much dps so-and-so had done on each trash pull...

However, Classic era is different, and the people that are currently holding the guild together have not forgotten what got them through the lean times, nor are they chasing any lofty achievements just to be able to tick them off and then move on. I'm hopeful that as long as we keep this core that wants to maintain the game as their casual space to chill, things will hopefully work out in our little corner of Classic era at least.