Because people who talk about the nostalgia of Vanilla and BC are the only ones circle jerking around the "nostalgia" expansions. Most people who started in Cata and onward don't feel the need to constantly prove they're some sort of veteran player by constantly talking about the "Good Ole' Days." I personally hold Vanilla and BC to a very high esteem and thinking back to it brings a lot of nostalgia, but the constant harping on the nostalgia by a lot of other veteran players is one of the most obnoxious things I have to hear on a daily basis from the WoW community.
The feelings associated with a game like WoW mostly originate from your attitude going into the game/expansions. If people would keep an open mind going into new expansion rather than "This better be as good as WoTLK," maybe I'll start to see some threads about how nostalgic Warlords of Draenor was when we're 4 expansions past it. (Which will still annoy me)
Over time, Cataclysm really grew on me. I initially loved the massive change in the old world cause I have seen the same world for years. Thought it was a really ballsy and smart move to change a lot of it. It revamped old content for me personally. I also remember being a lot more emotionally involved in the quest lines than I was previously.
For the flip side, and the part that grew on me...difficulty. I don't think anybody can really argue that Cata didn't ramp the difficulty of normal dungeons. I can remember wiping so many times in Stonecore, BR Caverns and Grim Batol. Initially I thought, ok this is BS cause all these dungeons are taking way too long and too many people are not reading up on them and it is frustrating as hell. Having spent the past year playing MOP, please give me the difficulty of Cata again, I beg you! I recently was leveling my pally through Cata dungeons and we wiped, I was like, "Oh yeah, we are in Cata, we have to be careful now". I loved it, not that it is really hard for me anymore or with the gear now but it was such a refreshing change from having facerolled the MOP dungeons.
Another reason why I love Cata is because it is finally where I began to raid, albeit, in LFR only. Yes, they seemed to be a bit schizophrenic and easy but I am going on the pure memory of finally seeing end game content myself and getting decent gear. So nothing about it is intellectual, solely emotional.
So long story short, there are some of us out there that appreciated Cata and look back with fond memories.
Rofl what? Why on earth would you assume that? That's a pretty ballsy assumption to make.
These threads always crack me up. If you claim to have had a better time or preferred the game back pre-MoP you're made of immensely and told you're just lying and it's nostalgia. The same thing will happen two expacs from now if someone says they preferred the game back during MoP. It's like it bothers people if someone thinks the current state of the game they play isn't perfect. It's almost as if they think that their opinion devalues their own enjoyment.
But yeah as for the topic at hand, Cata has a few nostalgic views for it. Mainly I see people talking about how much they enjoyed the hard 5 mans and entry raids or Firelands. I also loved the entry raids and heroic dungeons from Cata's launch. But I played with friends and guildies and didn't do LFG too much so I can totally understand where people that did that often wouldn't have liked the difficulty of them.
As for MoP, I can't think of anything that it brought that I actually enjoy. Well Monks I suppose are a very cool class and lots of fun. So I take that back!
The only thing I miss about Cata is the initial difficulty of the dungeons. Once they were nerfed there was nothing left for me.
I have some for 4.0 especially the dungeons. But at that time we were doing the whole thing for the third time, so the magic was somewhat gone.
Also cata sucked after that, so there are all these negative feelings competing with the nostalgic ones. Maybe at some point they will go away like they did with wrath and bc
"And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five?
A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head."
My reasons
The questing experience felt odd and disjointed; Raids (bar the first tier) were dull; and most of all the majority of my time was spent doing nothing in Stormwind.
Although in the previous expansions my nostalgia primarily comes from a combination of being new to wow and the rpg scene along with having a substantial group of in-game friends which quit 2/3 through Wrath.
Last edited by Trickname; 2014-04-22 at 07:46 AM.
There is actually a lot of nostalgia talks about Cata, they're just not positive ones. People mention all the time things like awful healing at the start of Cata, awfully long DS tier, awful LFR, awful pvp and so on.
Only one thing was good in Cata for me - shadow priests were balanced and were fun to play. Hard heroics were nice, but raid balancing 10/25 failed miserably in the first tier, forcing almost all guilds break into 10s, utterly derstroying 25 as a format. Call this nostalgia if you want
Last edited by l33t; 2014-04-22 at 08:33 AM.
Guys let's be real, Cata changed the old world for the better. Not saying the raids/arenas/bgs/dungeons were better but the actual leveling, making it a dynamic world that changed as you progressed. Which, I for one loved. Leveling is my favorite part of the game (1-58 then skip to 68-80 cause BC leveling is garbage, Cata and Mists areas are too repetitive.)
Can't wait until people still hate Cata in WoD and people try to claim "it was only 2 expacs ago, people didn't start to like TBC until MoP". The word nostalgia should be banned on this forum, it just stifles any form of useful debate.
I feel a little nostalgic about cata, even though I have played since launch. But I had a long break during it, and I didn't have an active guild and didn't raid, so I don't have those special memories that I did in pervious expansions. I guess I'm most nostalgic about the music, which was great, and the fact that I could roll a tauren pally which is my main today. I guess I can be nostalgic about the old world, but I prefer the remade cataclysm world. Maybe people here can't remember how shitty leveling used to be unless you had done it 500 times before.
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I would say that ignoring nostalgia as a factor when people talk about the evolution of the game makes it impossible to have a useful debate. Some people just aren't able to take a step back and watch the game as a whole without fond memories clouding their judgement.
Mother pus bucket!
In your opinion, maybe. But Cata changed the old world for the worse. There is really nothing redeeming about 1-58 now. Even the practically unchanged Silithus isn't as good as it once was, because they completely removed any quests involving the AQ raids, as well as the NPCs associated with the raids. Sure, the first playthrough wasn't bad, but after that it lost all its enjoyment. I had more fun leveling pre-Cataclysm than I have afterwards on any new alts. I also enjoy those characters I leveled through the old world than I do the new.
No one really has memorable events of the expansion that they can't repeat today. Mop feels more like an extension of cataclysm. I don't feel like anything has changed except the health pools got larger and there's more places to go. The "game" is still the same, therefore there's nothing to be nostalgic about.
That isn't the case for vanilla -> tbc -> wotlk, each of which introduced pretty dramatic shake ups and improvements to the game.
No one is saying "ahh, remember that time when I got invited back for 10 days free membership in 4.3 and went from level 81 to level 85 and pugged deathwing on lfr difficulty all within 5 days of casual play?" Apologies if that sounds like I'm trolling, I'm not, that genuinely was my experience. I remember the time, yes it was reasonably fun, but it didn't keep me playing for very long. After I'd killed deathwing I saw little point in repeating the experience in normal or heroic, especially as I was not socially involved in the game. It kind of trivialised the experience for me.
However, having said that, it is likely that I would never have killed deathwing anyway. That didn't necessarily bother me, I haven't killed Garrosh either because I'm not subbed.
So I suppose on one hand, I did get to see the encounter thank to LFR. On the other, I didn't need/want to see it anyway.
For one thing, Cataclysm is not that old yet. We're only like a year and a half past it. Most players who have been around for a while are going to think of much older content when they think of nostalgia.
It's kinda like how I'm almost 30, so most "nostalgia" talk about gaming in general for me is going to be about SNES/N64 games instead of XBox 360/PS3 games.
Personally I really liked the first half of Cataclysm (I stopped playing shortly after Firelands). Content was innovative, fresh, and most of all CHALLENGING. Of course this upset the entitled generation of WoW because they had to actually work for their achievements....
History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people - Martin Luther King, Jr.
I don't know, I am almost 33, and I have nostalgia of PS2 games, and reaches as far back as the Atari 2600 (not SNES as I didn't have one). Cataclysm isn't "not old enough yet", and there was nostalgia talk of Wrath only a few months into Cataclysm. There should have been nostalgia threads/posts about Cataclysm for a year now, but there isn't. Only nostalgia talk is about the release difficulty, despite it actually being a bad thing for the game. The game has yet to recover from the crap expansion.
And I am sure once the XBO and PS4 are more widespread, there will be nostalgia about PS3/XBox360