Classic WoW Gatekeeping and Making Mountains out of Molehills

Note - This is an abandoned script and done in notepad with no spell check.

Classic WoW Gatekeeping and Making Mountains out of Molehills

    -Topics to address
-Classic wow should be experienced in 1 certain way
-Complaints about classic based on this assumption.
-Loot trading
-Shading in starting zones
-Make sure to add disclaimers
    -Negative fallacy
    -Complaining in of itself isnt bad. In fact its needed to an extent, otherwise nothing will change. The problem is compling a coupious amount over small things, and making them seem like bigger problems than they really are.



    I should start off this video with a few things. For 1, I am excited about the classic wow servers, and as someone who has made a ton of videos on vanilla wow and earlier parts of wow, in fact wanting to learn about how the game was before I started playing was a big part in why I wanted to start making videos in the first place. So I am very intrested in Classic wow servers and the sucess of its launch. However, the community around classic wow has a few major problems that I hope to adress in this video.

    The 2 biggest things I've noticed, is a rampant amount of Gatekeeping, and making  mountains out of Molehills with every change. And I think those 2  points are intermingled a bit.

    So first off, what is gatekeeping?  Gatekeeping is when someone takes it upon themselvs to deiced if other people are allowed to have acess or rights to a community or identity.
Take this example from Urban dictionary

"Oh man, I love Harry Potter. I am such a geek!"
"Hardly. Talk to me when you're into theoretical physics."

In this example, speaker number 2 is gatekeeping the term "geek" and person 1 cant possibly be a geek from merely enjoying harry potter. They need to be into hard science as well. And the most common use of gatekeeping in the classic wow community, is that if you did not physically play wow in vanilla, you are not allowed to have opinions on classic wow, or your opinions dont matter.

And here are the common examples of gatekeeping I see when it comes to the classic wow community.In order to have the correct opinion of vanilla wow, you need to have..

-Played in vanilla wow when it was current
-Enjoy grinding
-Enjoy the community aspect and or Enjoy grouping up to accomplish goals


And if you dont share all 3 points, then your not a true classic wow fan.

Now before I go more into this topic, a little side note. So instead of trying to edit this video to only fit my narrative, I'll be showing both sides of all these arguments to give a little bit of nuance to these statements.

That being said, there is some merit to these gatekeeping points. If you played vanilla wow when it was current, your more likely to know more about how the game was played in that area and will probably have more credence to your statements than someone who did not.

If you dont enjoy grinding or at least tollerate it, your not going to like vanilla wow as that is what 90% of the game is.

And if you dont enjoy the sense of sommunity or grouping up to accomplish goals, your not going to be able to raid or pvp at the highest levels and have a hard time with certain quests.

So it only seems logical that a classic wow fan should share all 3 points. Except for the fact that people can look forward to classic wow no matter what. If you didnt play in vanilla, its fine to want to see what it was like. Hell lots of people who play private servers pretend they played in vanilla anyway so its not easy to figure out who really played vanilla or not. It shouldnt be the be all and end all point of having an opionion on how classic wow functions

If you dont like grinding, your probably going to quit classic wow really fast. I cant help but agree with the gatekeepers on this point.

If you dont enjoy the community aspect or grouping up, well good news! Vanilla wow has tons to do for solo players, its just going to be a little difficult. And at max level if you want to progress, your going to have to interact with people, you dont have a choice in the matter. But heres a thing about wow that a lot of people who gatekeep this 3rd point refuse to admit. WoW is a fun single player game. They will vehemently defend this point, and say if you dont enjoy the community aspect your shouldnt play an mmo and try another game. But at the same time, wow is just a strait up good single player game to some people. And the gatekeeping for this argument is nasty. The gatekeepers on this topic hate it if you call wow a good single player game, and will cite the genre of game wow is as some kind of magic be all and end all point to the matter, that wow is a massively multiplayer online game, and you cant play a multiplay game by yourseld. And you know what? You sure can, and lots of people enjoy doing it. They just dont speak up very much because this topic is gatekept so hard core. And I can see why, if they start to admit that wow has lots of single player content, they might think blizzard will put more effort into making the game more single player friendly and kill the community aspect, which is kind of what they did do to the game to an extent.

    See? presenting both sides of the argument even if it goes against my narrtive. Something I do not see if the many negative videos I see on classic wow being thrown around youtube. Which kind of goes into my 2nd point. People making mountains out of molehills.
    Now this sint something unique to classic wow, pretty much all video game communities fall into this trap in some way or another. And once the majority of videos and posts made about something is negative, saying anything positive is met with backlash. Theres this unique problem with human psychology, where we are hard wired to remember negative things more strongly than positive. If someone is rude to you at the bus station, your more likely to remember that a week later, rather than 99% of people who were pleasant to you, or the person who help you pick up your ticket after you dropped it. Because people being nice or at least indifferent is the norm, and negative situations arent as common, and something about the way our brains are wired makes those negative situations have a stronger impact on our memeory and makes them more memorable. And because of this, people like to think negative things are more "real" than positive
    If you buy a new hat, and 3 people you know say it looks good, but 1 person says its ugly, you are more likely to think the 3 first people where just lying to you and that it was actually ugly the whole time, rather than maybe the 4 person just had different tastses in hats.
Now I explain this negative type fallacy to move onto this next point.
    If all feedback on classic wow is bad, then that means anyone saying something positive is obviously just a blizzard shill or fan boy. Because its not negtive, and therefore not "real" like all the people complaining.

    So when blizzard said there will be loot trading in classic wow, the clasic wow community went with this point and just kind of ran with it. The argument in opposition to loot trading is 2 fold, 1 is the "no changes at all camp" where they want everything exactly the same and dont welcome any changes. And the other are people who arent as extreme, but want pretty much all of the vanilla wow experiences and dealing with ninja looters was part of the vanilla wow experience.
    I personally think the reasoning blizzard gave for this change was pretty reasonable. The thing was you could eventually trade loot in vanilla wow too, its just you needed to send in a ticket and wait a couple of days for a GM to give you the item. Adding loot trading strait to the game just saves blizzard time and money. And the whole thing is a pretty minor point. Your still going to obtain the gear in the same way, the only change is that ninja looters will have to try a little harder to steal gear, but they still can, and you dont have to be inconviened if you accidently give the loot to the wrong person.
    The argument against loot trading wants all the inconviences though, but if its at he cost of blizzard wasitng more time and money on loot disputes which dont really affect the vanilla experince that much anyway, I can see it as a very reasonable change.
    But no, this is such a huge deak to the classic wow community that pretty much all of the people who make videos on classic wow have already made videos about it claiming that the sky is falling and that the game is dead in the water because of this 1 minor change. Which is just so counter-productive to thier cause in my opionion. If blizzard sees such a large outcry over such a minor problem, it just cheapens the outcry when you need to complain about an actual problem.

    Because I am by no means saying they shouldnt complain. Complaing can be a positive thing and you cant expect to see change if you dont do something about it. My complaint is that constant large outrage over small problems just cheapens the power of launching massive complaints.

    The other major complaint people have currently is the sharding. And this one is for the community people. I'll tell you strait up that I do not care 1 bit about the community aspect of vanilla wow. I am a solo player, and I play and enjoy wow by myself as much as possible, and only finally joined a guild when I wanted to try raiding. That being said, I do understand the complaints from the classic wow community who enjoys that aspect. and I wont dismiss thier arguments in favor of a strong community just because I personally dont care, even if I know for a fact they do not care at all about the solo players. And sharding does go against the...

(It just stops there mid sentence)