The Returning Player's Plight

It's strange to think that Classic turns four in less than a month, and even stranger to think that I've also been playing retail again (if casually) for almost three years now. I originally started playing WoW in October 2016 - add three years to that and you're about halfway through Wrath of the Lich King. By that point, the game had had a huge impact on me but was also changing a lot already.

Things are certainly very different now, as the last three years of dabbling in retail haven't felt like a big deal at all. What's also interesting to me is that I still struggle to feel properly at home there, even after three years of refamiliarising myself with it. My returning-to-retail journey has been a long and slow one, from the initial desire to just have a quick look at some new stuff and being confused by everything, to falling into a routine playing with my husband with only moderate enthusiasm for the game itself, to slowly starting to work on some goals of my own. However, even now, with me logging in quite regularly to do my own thing without the husband, just for fun, I remain somewhat detached. Even after three years, I still feel like a "returning" player, perpetually confused by the fact that things aren't the way I remember them.

This probably isn't a problem for the average person, but for me those early years in WoW really made a huge impression on me and shaped my ideas of how a lot of things "should" work. This is very apparent when it comes to classes for example. I don't think it's a coincidence that the classes I've played the most since picking up retail again are monk, demon hunter and evoker - all three of which didn't exist yet when I last played WoW in the past. (Okay, monks technically existed during my stint with Mists of Pandaria, but I never played one so I still knew nothing about them.)

It's much easier for me to accept the way a class works nowadays when I've never known it any other way. With pretty much every other class, there's always that feeling of things being slightly off, as I find myself looking for abilities that are no longer there, keep forgetting to use (to me) new abilities and just generally get confused by things not working as I remember them. It's honestly been surprising to me just how strongly some of those ancient memories are influencing my perceptions, even on classes I barely even played back in the day, such as warrior or warlock.

The world of Azeroth has also changed in a lot of ways that makes it confusing to navigate sometimes. This post from 2020 mentions a lot of them, and while I've gotten a little better at finding my way around, it's still an issue for me three years later. On the day I drafted this I was playing a Horde alt for example and found myself wondering where to find the portal room in Orgrimmar. Can you ask a guard where it is? Nope. I tried to instead ask for directions to a place which I knew would require a portal to get to, which did prompt them to mention its existence, but still with no map marker or directions. As it turns out, I had to ask for one specific location that is accessed via the portal room and that then also prompts the guard to tell you where it is.

Or there's that whole zone phasing thing. I appreciate that Blizzard didn't want to do another Cata and just remove old zones whenever they made major changes to them, which is why they introduced the "bronze dragon phases you between different versions of the zone" mechanic, but it's still sooo opaque. I remember flying to Uldum during the Fire Festival on a level 49 alt, clicking on one of the bonfires, levelling up, and having the zone phase around me, with the fires suddenly disappearing before I could click on the second one. I thought I was lagging out at first! It took several relogs and some googling for me to figure out what was going on, that the game had decided to automatically switch me from Cataclysm Uldum to BfA Uldum the moment I dinged, and that the bonfires only existed in one version but not the other.

It's these kinds of things that make me feel tired and estranged from the game. These aren't fun little secrets to uncover, just messy systems that really make you feel confused about what's going on.

The reason I've been thinking about the "returning player experience" recently is that Blizzard added a "welcome back gift" in the latest patch that can be applied to any character of level 60 or lower that hasn't been logged in for at least 60 days. This is independent of your subscription status, so it also showed up for a bunch of my old alts.

If you do pick the "gear upgrade" option, the character is auto-equipped with a level-appropriate set of gear, four 22-slot bags, and teleported to their capital city. Unless you were in BfA or Shadowlands, you also get the option to fully wipe your quest log. Any old gear, old bags, and anything you had in your inventory appear in your mailbox instead.

I tried this on some old alts just to see what it's like and... I can see it being useful. It's not been that much of an issue for me in WoW personally, but as a general rule, a cluttered inventory can indeed be off-putting when returning to an MMO you haven't played in a long time. I don't like the quest-clearing myself since I do like the way my log helps me remember where I last left off however many years ago, but it's fine since that step is optional.

The free gear is an interesting workaround to deal with the broken level scaling and the way many returning characters will find themselves way too weak to fight anything (I've found out that this hasn't just been a problem for me) but I wonder if it's enough of a band-aid. To use a personal example again, I used the gear boost on a level 10 void elf mage that I had literally just created and never played. The starter gear with which she was originally spawned was replaced by much more powerful items, and as I ran around doing my first few quests, I was effectively one-shotting many mobs. However, as my level increased and I didn't get gear upgrades from quests equally as fast, I quickly started to feel weaker again, taking us back to the same old problem of the triad of levelling, gear acquisition and scaling being somewhat broken for players without heirlooms right now.

It's nice that they're trying to be more welcoming to returning players, but at the same time I feel like this is barely scratching the surface of the kinds of obstacles you're faced with if you skipped a few expansions.