I Wasn't Going To, But I Changed My Mind
Remember the better time in World of Warcraft? Back at patch 1.8?

Back when Mages, Shamans, Rogues, Priests, and Paladins were still using talents that had been based on guesses which proved to be wholly inaccurate? Back when endgame meant doing the same instance with thirty-nine other people over and over with nowhere to go but the same place you were already going? In a time where flightpaths didn't link, Azeroth had no weather, Tier 2 looked like crud, Battlegrounds were single-server, and oh hell just forget it. I have lost interest in even the parody.

Level 60 Love is the finest example of rose-tinted lenses that you can ask for. It is remembering a better time that, frankly, never existed. It is cheerleading to roll back before "everything got ruined forever" without bothering to actually examine what's been "ruined".

It's the assumption that you're out of love with the game because it has changed, not because you just fell out of love with it.

On some level, it's not too hard to identify with. The endgame keeps changing and moving forward and darn it, it's not fair. Unless you are completely cutting edge, odds are you'll get blindsided as soon as the next expansion hits, and all the things you worked on for months are no longer the best of the best. Except it's a logic expecting the game to be beaten at some point, for you to be able to stand up and say "yes, I've totally finished the game now!" and then walk away in triumph.

MMOs don't want you to do that. They're hobbies more than games - particularly game-like hobbies, to be sure, but hobbies all the same.

What is it you want? We want servers that mimic World of Warcraft before any expansions were released, when the level cap was 60. To read more about our goal, visit the Our Goal page. Specifically, the creators of this site would prefer patch 1.8, immediately preceding patch 2.0.

This is funnier when you realize that 1.12 was actually the patch before 2.0. For added humor I have taken their statement at face value.

Why would Blizzard do this? What income can they generate from a move like this? There are several ways Blizzard can justify creating level 60 servers. First, we believe many players that quit WoW would come back if “Classic” servers were available. Secondly, if Blizzard allowed transfer off these servers, that would mean players that want to move on would now need to purchase two expansions to join the other level 80 players. Finally, once players complete the content in Wrath of the Lich King, things will become stagnant again. What better way to retain your player base than allowing them to play on a level 60 server, and experience a whole new realm of content!

"We believe many players... would come back if Classic servers were available."

Think about that for a second.

Then think about the fact that the game recently passed 11 million subscriptions.

Now ask yourself, really - is Blizzard worried right now that their fanbase is eroding? Or are they fairly confident that while they might lose an account here or there, the number keeps going up?

Perfect customer retention is a myth, one that fails when you look at the reality that even if Blizzard let each player create the rules of their individual server they still couldn't keep everyone playing and subscribing. And it's the subscriptions that matter, not the physical buying of the disk. I can go out and get both the base game and the expansion for, what, thirty dollars? Three months of playing and I've made more money for Blizzard than I did by buying the game itself.

And trying to advertise old content as new fails on many levels. It fails at the point that no one, ever, has been convinced by that - people know a rerun is a rerun. It fails when you consider that unlike the new content, there is reams and reams of material on the old content available - enough that with a minimum of effort you can find, execute, and repeat the strategy. And it fails when you realize that if you're running content at the level where you have top-end raids one hundred percent farmed out - everyone has every useful drop in your core raid group - then you are going to be done with the old content just as quickly.

Has this ever been done before? Yes! Because of player demand, the creators of Dark Age of Camelot created an “Origins” server, that reverted the game to it’s “pre-expansion” time.

This neglects to mention that this was after a widely reviled expansion that made huge, sweeping changes to the game to ameliorate the fact that they were hemorrhaging subscribers. The same sort of thing that Star Wars Galaxies and City of Heroes has done, actually - both games that have struggled to keep their head above water many times, because they made the mistake of trying to court the players who had already left.

Look, if I found out that right now FFXI had changed itself to be everything that WoW is? I wouldn't go back. Because to get me back it has to be more than what I'm replacing with it. All that changes like that do is piss off the people who have stood by you as your game has gone into the ground. Similarly, Vanguard managed to shoot itself in the foot by trying to cater to the more casual crowd... a crowd that had long since left and ignored it, while the crowd that cared was annoyed by the changes.

By contrast, games like EvE have always been very clear on what they are and what they want to be. I can say that I don't like EvE, but its designers haven't tried to redo the whole game to get me back. They figure I've left for my reasons and I'm not worth pissing off their existing subscribers to get back.

WoW is what it is. If you no longer like what it is, it hasn't been a sudden change by any means - they've been steadily realizing what people in general do and don't like about the game, and moving things to accomodate that. The times will change, gear will be outdated, old instances will go unused, just like you don't read your books as often as when you first buy them.

The luster dims, inevitably. Blaming it on anything other than time is foolish, and thinking you can go back again is naive.