My Forever Social Conundrum

As part of being excited for WoW Forever, it was natural for me to start thinking about questions such as what I'll want to play and how... which quickly made me realise that I'm actually facing something of a conundrum in terms of what I want out of this game.

What originally enchanted me about World of Warcraft back in the day - and also worked its magic in Classic to some extent - was the vastness of the world and the social interactions: seeing the same people repeatedly and making new friends, but also just sharing funny moments with random strangers and silly pugs. Pretty much all my best and most memorable moments in WoW have involved other people in some fashion.

So naturally, I'll want to lean into that in Forever too, right?! Well, yes, but... then I think back to Classic Burning Crusade and remember that my worst moments in WoW also involved other people. I don't want to keep harping on about this because it feels stupid to act as if I was "traumatised" by something as frivolous as a video game, but the events of Burning Crusade Classic really left a mark on me. It wasn't all bad, but the bits that were bad, felt very bad.

I don't ever want to relive the experience of an MMO making me feel like I'm in a race that I can never win. I don't want to try and keep up with people who selectively no-life the game until they've ticked all their boxes and then log off, not to be seen again until the next raid. That's why I gave the anniversary servers a wide berth from the beginning, because I knew they were going to be full of exactly that kind of experience.

WoW Forever promises to be different of course, but will it? One can certainly hope that the way Blizzard has been promoting it will attract the right kind of audience, but I have no doubt that the usual suspects will also be there on day one, racing through Forever as if their life depended on it, whether it's streamers for whom it literally is their job to play all day or merely their followers. Ironically for me, this means that at least in the beginning, I'll be better off playing the game in a more guarded way, just doing my own thing and not paying too much attention to what anyone else is doing.

Real life should help with that, as I happened to already have a holiday booked from which I'll return only the day before Forever's launch, which means that I have to be back to work the following day and will likely be too busy and too knackered to spend too much time thinking about WoW. November is also a busy month at my job in general, so I don't expect it to be the ideal time to binge on any form of entertainment. Which is to say that while I do expect to be playing from launch, it'll probably be in limited bursts.

With all the new content present from the very early levels, I'm also kind of tempted to go for my own horizontal progression right from the beginning, rolling up lots of different alts to see the changes to all the starter zones, and then levelling them up via different paths to see what new things there are to explore in different levelling zones as well as the new low-level dungeons that have been added. That would also naturally make it harder to keep grouping with the same people repeatedly.

That said, I can't deny that I'm feeling quite excited by the prospect of seeing some of my old guildies from Classic again. (I'm aware that at least a few of them have expressed an interest in giving Forever a spin.) I'll just have to make sure to remain steadfast and not let anyone rush me at the beginning. After all, that level cap isn't going anywhere.