I think this video sums up pretty well the psychology of playing games and Nostalgia

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Maybe this video was already posted here. Maybe not. Anyways, I found this video in my today’s Youtube Recommendations. This post is mainly for the Veterans among you that do not like how certain parts of the game are developing, compared to classic WoW til WOTLK.

Now, some of you might know this Youtube Channel of Josh Strife Hayes, who is someone that dedicates his Youtube channel on the psychology and design of video games, especially our beloved genre of MMO(RPG)s.

In this video he talks about the psychological (Dopamin) combination of gamers real life situation & game life and how your real life situation does affect the experience of MMO(RPG)s/every game.

I really recommend watching the video first, before commenting, since the infos in the video about the psychology behind the “Nostalgic” moments is mainly caused by players coming from work/school or other stressful activities and using their freetime to play games and to relax in those games.

I am sure everyone knows the feeling as a school kid or as an adult, coming from work, after a hard day of work and feeling the rush (Dopamin) of starting your PC or console and playing some games either alone or with friends.

That simple mechanism in our brain is called “Brain Reward Structure” (how original)

Source: https://www.simplypsychology.org/brain-reward-system.html

And this mechanism delivers our brain said Dopamine, which causes our brain chemistry to change our behavior and how we experience and expect things to be in the future.

To put it simple for everyone… You eat your favorite ice cream? Dopamine rush. You are feeling well while getting a hug from your partner? Dopamine rush. You are feeling great playing your favorite game? Dopamine rush!

Each of those 3 examples have something in common. And that is the Dopamin, which does bind memories and experiences together, to push our brain and behavior towards “more of that!”. But if you can’t get “more of that!” anymore, the “more of that!” becomes Nostalgia , which can blind our future experiences and memories we are making every day.

Nostalgia is basically the enemy of every gamer, because it limits our range of fun experience in games to “back then everything was better”, making new games appear bad or in the worst case, make our favorite games “look bad”.

Example! As some of you might know, I am not that long part of this games community. I joined mid BfA. SL is my first expansion I play from the beginning of its uptime. I have no nostalgic relationship to WoW Classic or any other part of the game. Lucky me!

However, I come from (and still play) Destiny 1 and 2 made by Bungie. And those games are tied to me with nostalgic experiences. Why? Because I grew up with them while I was still at school.

When we look objectively at Destiny 1 and how Destiny 2 does many things better than Destiny 1 in case of features, grind and gameplay. It is easy to say that Destiny 2 is the more polished game, since more features are optimized and the game also having more features that make gameplay easier and more accessible.

For instance, weapons and armor required in Destiny 1 gaining XP through combat/activities to unlock upgrade nodes on said gear and then additionally materials to actually upgrade the gear for more damage/defense, higher stats and especially for the gears perks to work. In regular, this could take an entire week for a single gun or armor piece. But if you lacked the materials for upgrading too, then it could take several weeks to get one piece of gear done (not even to mention the 3 times gear was sunsetted). Meanwhile in Destiny 2 this leveling is not existent. You just slap on your gear and are ready to roll, since all gun perks work intrinsically and don’t require leveling or upgrading to make them work at all.

Objectively, the gear leveling is just another timegate and timesink to make players play longer. That’s why it was fasten up towards the end of Destiny 1 and also removed in Destiny 2 entirely. But when I look at it subjectively, with my Nostalgia in mind, I will always say “gear leveling was a much better experience back then than instant-perks are today”. And why do I say that, despite knowing it better? Nostalgia! I grew up with that type of long gameplay and had no issue with it, simply because back then I was a child at school, having lots of time after homework for playing Destiny 1. If I would never have played Destiny 1 and would it come out today, while I am an adult, I would for sure not enjoy the gear-leveling system. Not. A single. Bit…

Another example, this time in regards of WoW… For those WoW classic/Vanilla players that still stuck around in the forums here or still play the game today… You surely remember how proud you were of the gear you grinded days for, right? Maybe you were a young adult back then or even a Kid coming home from school to play WoW. If you would start a new game that is not WoW today and would have to grind the same amount of days for it, would you still enjoy the grind or would you rather say “Eh, this games sucks. Everything is taking so long”?

Or for example the classic-WOTLK looks of gear. Compared to Tier 3 sets from BfA, Shadowlands and even Legion they look just not good anymore. Not from a personal perspective but from an objectively perspective (as someone learning 3D-Design piece by piece). Todays graphics are way better than back then in 2004+. But you Classic/Vanilla players will certainly still say they look good because your Nostalgia tells you “this does look good”, because you grew up with those graphics. Some parts of you know that the todays graphics look better, but the other parts will not look at it with a disgusting feeling in mind, as I do as someone who never played WoW before mid BfA.

See, I know objectively WoW is not in a good state at the moment, because it has not being innovative for a long time and especially because of many parasitic systems being implemented and removed from the game over the last expansions, but maybe the main reason why you are not enjoying WoW that much anymore, is, because your Nostalgia blinds your expectations, telling you that the game gets worse and “back then was everything better” even when objectively it is not like that.

The 9.2 Tier sets can be taken as an example for that effect. Most outright complained they don’t like the looks of the tier set gear for most/each class. But ask yourself, do you think that because it is really bad designed or because you have a nostalgic expectation for each class identity that just simply doesn’t match up with the designs we are getting with 9.2?

It is nothing new that we Humans are creatures driven by personal interests and needs and especially by our own experiences. But for some it might be not that obvious, that our own needs and interests and especially our memories and experiences do sometimes blind our own future expectations, new made experiences and especially our future fun in activities like Games.

Maybe I am talking into the wind here and you already know all of that. Maybe you don’t. But I do hope that I maybe did move your eyes towards a topic of your life experience you ignored for a long time while playing WoW.

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Thanks! Going to watch this later.

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Except that’s a very narrow view of looking at things, and doesn’t cover other more subtle influences. Ever heard of social designs? Social psychology? How that’s a fundamental part of our instincts, needing that part fulfilled? Basically, if you live completely alone with no contact with the outer world, you’re at serious risk of dying from loneliness and the things it can cause in our brains.

So that way the brain rewards things, heavily includes social fulfillment. It makes us seek it out. But the game doesn’t scratch that itch the same way it did back in the day, and that’s just fact. Everything is designed in a way that provides the illusion of community, yet it’s infinitely harder to find people to regularly play with now compared to back then, and you’re less incentivized to even talk to other people compared to back then.
Which, funny enough, causes the brain to think it’s socially excluded while playing the game, instead of feeling socially fulfilled. Human beings values closer social interaction a lot more than what the game offers now.

The amount of guilds left that provides this experience is also likely fewer now compared to back then, since the game’s reward design is heaaavily focused on tryharding and drawing out the engagement metrics as much as inhumanly possible. Not to mention the fact how CRZ and the Group Finder (both the automatic queues and the manual “group finding”) empowers those fleeting, often socially unfulfilling, encounters with people, thus enforcing the feeling of social exclusion.

It also affects your ability to remember other people. It has been mapped out how we remember and form relationships with other people (relationships includes anything from strangers which is what most of the world is to us, to acquaintances, to lovers and so on) and that chance to remember and to get to know someone increases the less we’re “spammed” with faceless strangers.

Our brains have a limit on the amount of people we can even remember. It has an even lower limit on the amount of people we can maintain relationships with at any one time. Once we reach above that limit, the brain filters out those we haven’t interacted with for a while, thus causing that effect where you start to go “Don’t I remember you from somewhere?” if you ever encounter them again.

It’s basically like comparing a life in a cement jungle, compared to a wooden village. In a small village, it’s not uncommon for folks to grow close, because of the effect of repeated encounters thus making it easier to remember and then to get to know each other, while in a cement jungle you’ll filter out people like they’re white noise, because the brain isn’t capable of remembering as many people that you encounter each day in such an environment.

These breeds habits in our brains, making us less willing to get to know other people in the game, because we grow used to the idea that they’ll be replaced soon anyway, thus making them “white noise” due to a force of habit.
But if we’d encounter familiar faces/names when we play, have no convenient way of communication-free grouping/raiding, and don’t have overcrowded servers, we’d get a more socially fulfilling experience. So, back in vanilla we had servers with sizes around 2500-3000 characters when full, while in Classic, we had sizes of around 10,000-12,000.
In retail, we have people swapped out every time we enter a different phase, every time we enter a different instance, and an effect that basically tires you out if you try to get to know everyone every time you enter/form a group in the “manual” part of the group finder.

What do you think that does to our brains, mr. OP?

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There are a few factors that affect it so let’s not be simplistic about it; the video does include though a factor that I agree with for many years; e.g. in terms of a WoW expansion:

  1. You may love the expansion that had the best external factors “accidentally” as the video says; e.g. your life was great at the time or your had the best in-game friends at the time; the friends thing is the biggest one I think.

  2. The expansion itself plays a role; e.g. WoD had a follower mini game that I personally liked but I understand they did a huge mistake; they went extremist with a gigantic number of followers.

  3. This is huge but I know nobody else that noticed it; the players have cycles of burn-out; e.g. most players who ever played WoW subbed around TBC/WotLK so cata was hated by the burnt.

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First:

Then:

Sure, ok. In my first account I quit at the start of the ICC patch, because I felt epics had lost their meaning when 5-man automatic queues could reward basically a full gear of them that even had good ilvls, and then I deleted the account when it got “hacked” in the wave of accounts that got hacked in that patch, when a 3rd-party website for WoW had used the account information on the website to get into the WoW accounts (I know, I was dumb, but it was a long time ago and I learned my lesson since then).

Then I made this at the start of Cata. My guild was gone, the leveling process was boring, and I basically quit again once hitting max level, until I returned for Dragon Soul together with IRL friends to form an “IRL guild” as they’re called, and I’ve played since then to the start of BFA, where BFA made me wanna quit the game again because I’ve only been playing for the PvP since the end of MoP and BFA was just… no.
Then Shadowlands came, and the game is very boring and exhausting with its way of pushing PvE chores down PvPers’ throats just to be able to PvP well, but I pushed through the pain to push some rating. But I got tired of sitting in the group finder to keep replacing the 3rd member of our team due to a variety of reasons each time, and healing just wasn’t fun, so I tried to go through the mundane PvE stuff on a new character that’s less frustrating to play, but then the first scandal came out and so I decided it wasn’t worth providing money to people like that.
A lot has happened since then, I’ve gone through some things IRL that made me want to go all-in to do a new social project in the game for stress-relief, and so I decided the positives outweighs the negatives of returning to the game and so I did.

But sure, it was because of “burnout” that I quit. Had nothing to do with the gameplay or social experience. Sure, ok.

By the way, the automatic queuing for groups became a thing in the ICC patch of wotlk. Cata was the first time an entire bundle of dungeons were new, instead of just the 3 that came with ICC, and that had a big impact on the queued-for experience the game provided.

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Alright, time to nitpick.

I use old item transmogs because I think they look better; they’re more suited to my tastes. They have more vibrant colours and I like the “minimalist” look. I like platekinis and “slutmogs”, I like the look of my characters skin.

New sets aren’t designed with that in mind. Instead, the new philosophy is “platekinis bad, gotta cover up”.

I fairly recently played Valheim, I put more time into grinding things to build my house than I ever did into grinding wow. So… No.

Here’s the thing: If the game is enjoyable, the grind doesn’t feel like a grind, it feels like a part of the game. That’s what modern WoW is lacking, the grind is just there as a timegate to stop hardcore players from completing the game too quickly.

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I wasn’t talking there about the absolute experience of everyone. I was talking about what I feel is a resultant force of a big part of the average playerbase; wotlk and tbc had objectively the most subscribers that played for a lot of hours per day the game has ever seen and it comes to reason that it had a gigantic amount of players that started burning out after or during WotLk; I see something similar in other aspects of the wow culture like MoP (and Legion) being clearly overrated because I believe those overrated expansions come usually after a “purge” of old burnt out players who found an excuse at hating way too much the previous expansion (in a way that was underrated more than it deserved (e.g. Cata was not as horrible as most haters cried back then)).

I didn’t follow that pattern personally either by the way; I also had quit right before ICC; the main reason I had at the time was mainly a combination of burn out (I was in hard core raiding all through Ulduar and ToC (or least in terms of time I was consuming on them)) and real life becoming more demanding.

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10 characters.

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I think while your point is not terrible, you definitely overrate a bit the importance of subsystems that affect grouping in terms of how people experience the game at a personal level and especially on what I said there about “burn out”.

Burn out specifically is so clearly almost unrelated to the subsystems; I have a very strong memory of anything in the game since mid-TBC at least; I can assure you: a gigantic part of those millions of players around TBC and WotLK were burning out into dungeons and raids and they did not need an extra carrot on a stick.

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Alright, I’ll explain it a bit further. Rewards were taken up a notch for doing 5-man content, the end of wotlk was the time they redesigned the talent trees to a transitional look between what we have now and what we had back then. Cata also replaced that “pruned” talent tree, with a big influx of passives to compensate.

Then the dungeons of course, since they were all new, and being such an integral part of gearing up at the start of an expansion, combined with an increased difficulty which was nerfed a bit later into Cata, made for a very unwelcome experience to many players, since the people queuing had a tendency to be playing alone, which made the complexity of what you needed to know to beat the encounters into fuel for conflicts. Conflicts between strangers. Fun, right?

But yeah, no, it was burnout that caused people to quit. Sure.

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OK I think that statement consolidates to your point of view well (and it reminds of the opinion of an ex-Blizzard employee on youtube by the way).

I still think it might not be of a huge impact , because I remember during TBC to do 5mans with complete strangers and it wasn’t friendly.

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To cut a long story short I’d say he’s both right and wrong.

Yes for each of us it is a “feeling” but the game itself (atleast in this case when it comes to WoW) is worse than it’s past iterations as well. Sure that’s subjective but judging by sub-numbers and things I’d say the majority of people agree.

Him saying “the game itself was never the star of the show” is just wrong imo.

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Very insightful, spells out a lot of things I couldn’t really put my finger on. Would agree with most of his analysis.

I see people write this all over the forum but have yet to see any even remotely reliable estimate for WoW sub numbers. Not saying they have not declined but yet have to see even a shred of credible evidence…

/Btw, thanks for posting! I am now watching video number 5 from this guy, very interesting channel. It is always so nice to listen to people talk about something they actually really do know a lot about because they have been doing it professionally for many years. So rare these days…

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Since I can’t provide you with credible evidence as only Blizzard have that info I’ll rephrase; Judging by how empty the game feels.

Atleast that’s something we all experience right?

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I agree with you.

Our tastes / tolerances have changed in certain areas, particularly around level speed. Vanilla to Wrath leveling took a lot longer. I remember in TBC it taking about a week per level for me, to roughly ten weeks to get from 60 to 70.
But back then rep grinds were less mandatory and could be done in dungeons or ground out with collect X (Coilfang Armament etc.) and hand them. So they were often shorter (although some were long such as Orgrila as there were only a couple of dailies, but not sure why we did Orgrila, I did it for the 100 Exalted reps achievement not sure I ever got anything else.

The World Zones themselves have changed a lot (and not for hte better). The zones used to have open spaces and areas where there weren’t dozens of mobs.

So we have changed but so has the game.

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god there is is a lot of text in this thread lol…

i’ll just keep it simple…

when companies start vouching for nostalgia over originality…

players get bored.

nostalgia is a fix… unless you are a oddball which actually likes living in the past because they cannot face reality.

but speaking for most people…

nostalgia is fun for a couple months… then its gone.

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Except the group finder changed the dynamics and the habits, which has solidified itself over the many years since then. Because once the dungeon queuing became a thing, and instant teleport to the dungeon, it became a much more attractive option to just quit the group at the sign of trouble. In TBC the option to quit the group wasn’t as common, because it wasn’t as convenient to do so.

The motivations became very different, which changed our habits into what it’s like today.

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Be that as it may, they can still support an argument that not much has changed in terms of manual group creation itself.

In order to do end-game you do need a guild for 20man and a team for m+ and back then pugs were also impersonal.

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Watched it and don’t agree fully with it. It just doesn’t apply to me and the situation I was in when I started in 2005.

WoW was my first MMORPG ever in this kind of setting when I started playing. Played alot of games before, but never like WoW. My first game experiences were the small handhelds and C64 in the 80s. And from there the gaming addiction started.

WoW combined, for me at least, all the different kind of aspects I liked in other games. It was not the life I led outside of gaming that made me enjoy and create good memories about the game. It was the combination of all the games I liked stuffed in one.

Or how Boyka would say it: “I am ze most complete fighter in ze wurld.”
Boyka being Blizzard back then. But that is pretty clear, I hope.

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It matters. It had a very significant impact over the years as well, as pretty much every WoW player is familiar with these days.
Also, the increase of convenience robbed people of time where people would naturally start chatting occasionally. For example, travelling to a dungeon and organizing the group took time, for some more time than others, and that gave people a natural place to talk in order to kill the time.

There’s no real room to talk much when you’ve just teleported to the dungeon as soon as joining the group, and pulls are almost immediate and constant.

Not as much. Sure, outliers existed, but how average it is for nobody to even say a word now compared to back then, is wildly different.

Also, this space to talk when travelling and such, served as a very common space for guilds to recruit others while getting along.

That isn’t a thing now, with cross-realm “convenience”.