Three Weeks on Nostalrius
Posted: Mon Apr 11, 2016 3:39 amI have, as a person, an uncanny ability to jump on bandwagons right before one of two things happens - that the bandwagon explodes into the limelight, breaks down and vanishes, or both. I finished reading Lord of the Rings a couple months before Fellowship hit theaters, and a marathon run of A Song of Ice and Fire the summer before the HBO Game of Thrones series began. World of Warcraft itself I got into in late 2006, right before its first expansion, The Burning Crusade, began. This pattern, most unfortunately, repeated itself again with Nostalrius, which I joined about three weeks ago. Though my time playing on the server was cruelly, cruelly short, I had more fun than I had had in years on retail, or even playing games in general.
I've played a few MMOs over the years - WoW and Guild Wars 2 the biggest names amongst them. I was never an especially hardcore player, either - I eschewed raiding and PVP alike, preferring instead to explore the world, immerse myself in the lore, and try a wide variety of characters and professions. Of all of them, though, my memories of vanilla WoW were the brightest and dearest. Within the labyrinth of folders on my external backup drives, I'm fairly certain a folder of screenshots from those days still lingers.
As the years wore on, and expansion followed expansion, I suffered the burnout and disappointment many of you know well. I would briefly resubscribe during Mists, and hit the level cap, and unsubscribed for the last time. After that, I mainly stuck to single-player games and modding, with titles like GW2 proving briefly entertaining, but ultimately disappointing. I had heard of the murky, chaotic world of private servers, but considered them at best an interesting curiosity.
What brought me to Nost was the prodding of a friend of mine, one who was constantly looking for a new multiplayer game to try. At that point I was fresh out of ideas and a desktop, my last put out of commission by a bad power supply. Considering again the private server, I looked through a list of promising servers, and though Play TBC was recommended above all, another caught my eye - some cleverly named place called Nostalrius. Two things struck me right away - that it had a PVE server, just like I preferred from the vanilla days in retail, and that it adhered strictly to how vanilla worked, with no instant 60s or item buyins or anything else. So I grabbed the client and got us set up.
From the first moment my undead priest stepped out of the tomb in Deathknell, I felt that, at long last, that I was home. Seeing the eerie, haunted wilderness of Tirisfal as it was in the days of vanilla brought memories and joy long-buried back to the surface. But I soon came to notice something more, as well - the people around me. Though the numbers of other players was incredibly high, more than I'd ever seen on vanilla, people were courteous and helpful. Nine times out of ten, instead of trying to just tag a quest mob before anyone else, people would group up so that everyone could get credit. It was a pattern that held even out into the chaotic, crass world of the Barrens, where on my arrival, a kind shaman gifted me a ten-slot silk bag totally unprompted, out of the blue, asking nothing in return.
Though my friend's interest drifted off, I was hooked. I switched from the priest over to a troll hunter, a close recreation of the hunter I had played on retail so long ago, and began to level him instead, hoping that, eventually, the resources he generated leveling and mining would help boost the rest of my characters while being entertaining in and of itself. I had feared that it might be boring, being that I was going through familiar territory again, but each new day was better than the last as I fell in love with that class and character all over again. As I worked through the Barrens into Stonetalon, I started watching a Let's Play of Warcraft III, which I'd never played through myself, wanting to immerse myself again in the world and its lore. It was, in every way, as good if not better than it had been a decade ago.
I'd just finished the LP and started into Stonetalon in earnest when the news came. It was shattering. The LP fell by the wayside, I couldn't bear to stomach anymore. Progress halted on my hunter. As the clock ran down, I pulled together for one last desperate jaunt - to run through the heart of Desolace and, at the very least, learn Expert Cooking on my hunter before the axe fell. I succeeded, and left him there, as Desolace, during my time in vanilla, had for whatever reason been my favorite zone. After that, I logged back onto the priest who had been the vanguard of this experiment, and joined the community as we gave our farewell to the server at Orgrimmar tonight.
I wish it was easy to distill just what it is that made this place so special, and made a short three weeks on it so endearing. Maybe it's rediscovering the mystery and grandeur of Azeroth and Kalimdor, whose vistas seem that much more epic and enormous on foot. Perhaps it's that mystic quality of "unlearning what you have learned" in returning to the vanilla essence of a class, in peeling away whatever flavor of the month mechanic Blizzard has jammed into the game (after ripping something else out) to get back to what made it special in the first place. Maybe it's the sense of community that comes from searching for dungeons through chat, or grouping up by helping someone take down some pesky centaurs instead of just dialing into a dungeon finder panel. I couldn't tell you exactly what, but all I can tell you now is that false god of convenience isn't always what it's cracked up to be, and sometimes the best experience, the ones that stick with you, are the ones earned by overcoming great hardship.
In that sense, I can only hope that the end of Nostalrius proves the greatest hardship of all, and that, after all, there is still a light at the end of the tunnel for us. I'll miss you guys - Remember Nostalrius.
I've played a few MMOs over the years - WoW and Guild Wars 2 the biggest names amongst them. I was never an especially hardcore player, either - I eschewed raiding and PVP alike, preferring instead to explore the world, immerse myself in the lore, and try a wide variety of characters and professions. Of all of them, though, my memories of vanilla WoW were the brightest and dearest. Within the labyrinth of folders on my external backup drives, I'm fairly certain a folder of screenshots from those days still lingers.
As the years wore on, and expansion followed expansion, I suffered the burnout and disappointment many of you know well. I would briefly resubscribe during Mists, and hit the level cap, and unsubscribed for the last time. After that, I mainly stuck to single-player games and modding, with titles like GW2 proving briefly entertaining, but ultimately disappointing. I had heard of the murky, chaotic world of private servers, but considered them at best an interesting curiosity.
What brought me to Nost was the prodding of a friend of mine, one who was constantly looking for a new multiplayer game to try. At that point I was fresh out of ideas and a desktop, my last put out of commission by a bad power supply. Considering again the private server, I looked through a list of promising servers, and though Play TBC was recommended above all, another caught my eye - some cleverly named place called Nostalrius. Two things struck me right away - that it had a PVE server, just like I preferred from the vanilla days in retail, and that it adhered strictly to how vanilla worked, with no instant 60s or item buyins or anything else. So I grabbed the client and got us set up.
From the first moment my undead priest stepped out of the tomb in Deathknell, I felt that, at long last, that I was home. Seeing the eerie, haunted wilderness of Tirisfal as it was in the days of vanilla brought memories and joy long-buried back to the surface. But I soon came to notice something more, as well - the people around me. Though the numbers of other players was incredibly high, more than I'd ever seen on vanilla, people were courteous and helpful. Nine times out of ten, instead of trying to just tag a quest mob before anyone else, people would group up so that everyone could get credit. It was a pattern that held even out into the chaotic, crass world of the Barrens, where on my arrival, a kind shaman gifted me a ten-slot silk bag totally unprompted, out of the blue, asking nothing in return.
Though my friend's interest drifted off, I was hooked. I switched from the priest over to a troll hunter, a close recreation of the hunter I had played on retail so long ago, and began to level him instead, hoping that, eventually, the resources he generated leveling and mining would help boost the rest of my characters while being entertaining in and of itself. I had feared that it might be boring, being that I was going through familiar territory again, but each new day was better than the last as I fell in love with that class and character all over again. As I worked through the Barrens into Stonetalon, I started watching a Let's Play of Warcraft III, which I'd never played through myself, wanting to immerse myself again in the world and its lore. It was, in every way, as good if not better than it had been a decade ago.
I'd just finished the LP and started into Stonetalon in earnest when the news came. It was shattering. The LP fell by the wayside, I couldn't bear to stomach anymore. Progress halted on my hunter. As the clock ran down, I pulled together for one last desperate jaunt - to run through the heart of Desolace and, at the very least, learn Expert Cooking on my hunter before the axe fell. I succeeded, and left him there, as Desolace, during my time in vanilla, had for whatever reason been my favorite zone. After that, I logged back onto the priest who had been the vanguard of this experiment, and joined the community as we gave our farewell to the server at Orgrimmar tonight.
I wish it was easy to distill just what it is that made this place so special, and made a short three weeks on it so endearing. Maybe it's rediscovering the mystery and grandeur of Azeroth and Kalimdor, whose vistas seem that much more epic and enormous on foot. Perhaps it's that mystic quality of "unlearning what you have learned" in returning to the vanilla essence of a class, in peeling away whatever flavor of the month mechanic Blizzard has jammed into the game (after ripping something else out) to get back to what made it special in the first place. Maybe it's the sense of community that comes from searching for dungeons through chat, or grouping up by helping someone take down some pesky centaurs instead of just dialing into a dungeon finder panel. I couldn't tell you exactly what, but all I can tell you now is that false god of convenience isn't always what it's cracked up to be, and sometimes the best experience, the ones that stick with you, are the ones earned by overcoming great hardship.
In that sense, I can only hope that the end of Nostalrius proves the greatest hardship of all, and that, after all, there is still a light at the end of the tunnel for us. I'll miss you guys - Remember Nostalrius.