When World of Warcraft’s first expansion launched, people had a lot of opinions, but one of the most widely held opinions was how much better the leveling experience in Outland was compared to the leveling experience in the base game. Instead of being confronted with massively spread-out quests that often spanned wide geographic areas, players instead encountered tight and well-structured hubs, often with multiple quests bringing players to the same spot at the same time. There were non-stop cries from players to revise the old world of the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor to work the same way.

This exists in stark contrast to the fans of WoW Classic who will now tell you that the game’s classic leveling experience before any expansions was, in fact, the superior version of the game. But to be clear, what I find fascinating about this is not the fact that these are two competing groups with different ideas about what a night of playing the game should look like from first principles. Quite the opposite. By and large, it seems to be the same group of people… but separated by more than a decade and a variety of intervening experiences.

To be clear, I am not saying that I have personally hunted down every person who posted a thread about revamping the old world prior to Cataclysm to see if they now prefer the old world pre-revamp. It is, instead, largely speculative and derived from observation. Nor am I saying that people were fools seduced by an easy road before, or conversely that they were right before and have since become misguided.

I’m saying that we’re better about figuring out what we want now rather than what we wanted years ago.

One of the interesting things about any kind of long-developed MMORPG is that there is an odd sort of short-term memory loss we all have as players. We all have a bad tendency to ask for something repeatedly, and then once we’ve had it long enough to get used to it, we tend to want the opposite. It’s not because people are fickle or dumb but because we tend to want and think about the things we don’t have in the best possible light, and only when we have them do we start realizing the drawbacks.

When Final Fantasy XI first launched, a lot of people who were playing the game really wanted the game to have more robust options for playing solo. One of the most frequently floated idea was having a party of NPC followers who could work with the player to take on challenging content. You know, the sort of thing that actually exists now in the form of Trusts, which some of those same players now rail against as destroying the experience of leveling in the game.

Now, Trusts were not added overnight or for a lark; they were added because players were requesting something similar and had been for some time, as well as to address a very real issue, that being the fact that players did not want to be searching out groups that did not exist in order to level up and actually play the game. This was not arbitrary. Pretty much anything added to an MMORPG comes about not in a sudden fit of dev pique but rather in an effort to address player requests and to solve real problems that exist within the game’s environment.

But I would be lying to claim that Trusts have not massively changed the environment for the game. FFXI has always had the potential to be a very lonely game, but it gets doubly so when people now level mostly via NPC parties instead of seeking people out. Combine that with a natural decrease in population over time, and it is very easy to look at the game and believe it has changed in ways that you may not like.

The trouble comes with assuming that those changes came from designers who didn’t know what they were doing or didn’t care about the consequences rather than being at least somewhat community driven. The designers did not decide, “Hey, you know what would be fun is if player-made parties ceased to exist.” They looked at players grouping to level and decided that this represented a serious problem for the game because the population has largely filled out at the top levels and no longer wanted to go back to the earlier stuff.

Sometimes, sure, there are multiple competing groups who have different ideas about what an average night of play in an MMORPG should look like. I daresay that, to use an obvious example, MOP’s Bree and I have different ideas about what balance should look like in City of Heroes even if they are largely similar ideas. I think we even have different ideas about what should be done with Incarnate powers on a whole. (Probably; I would delete them! -Bree)

Yet both of us know that the Incarnate powers were added for a reason. It was an attempt to address an actual issue the game had and respond to player requests; it wasn’t just the designers shoving in a New Thing with no concern for why people wanted it.

As MMOs mature, players develop a different set of desires for what the gameplay should actually look like on a moment-to-moment basis. This is hardly surprising. The thing that often gets lost is that those desires are not set in stone. When you first start playing an MMORPG, you want leveling to feel fun and special and novel. If you’re a player who likes running a lot of alts, of course, odds are pretty good that after a while you want leveling to be pretty smooth and painless so your alts can just participate.

But after you’ve gotten your alts up a bit, well, you might very easily swing back in the other direction. Smooth and painless is boring and almost pointless. You want something that feels more deliberate. You have your alts leveled. And when you’re operating over a long enough timespan, it’s easy to forget that you were one of the people who wanted smooth and painless back in the day in the first place.

Our priorities change over time and as we accomplish some goals, we wind up with new ones. It’s not that we were necessarily wrong before and we’re right now; it’s that what you want today isn’t making a blood oath about what you are always going to want for the rest of your days. And we shouldn’t act like that’s even what we’re supposed to expect because that encourages people to pretend that whatever they want now is a principled stance instead of just based on preference.

But it’s also important to keep in mind that our priorities change because it keeps us from treating getting what we want as if it were something done in spite of us. I don’t think that people who were asking for leveling to change in WoW back in 2008 are somehow disingenuous for changing their minds, but I do think it’s worth keeping in mind what your own changes in priorities might be about. It’s not that developers took away something pure and beautiful. It’s that this changed because people wanted it to change, and it’s all right to have wanted that, just like it’s all right to want something different now.

Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.