To Pokimane, pt 18

The age results here are hilarious: https://youtu.be/LA3bWH44u9k?t=205

I stopped watching Pey's stream today after her group ganked a player who was soloing an elite mob, around 2:56:00. She said she felt bad, but she didn't emote to the player to communicate that she was sorry! It's an expansion that I didn't really play; I think I reached lvl 66 on a public test realm, playing by myself (no one but me, and the person whom I know as Sam Sam, would bother to level on a server where all progress will eventually be wiped), and disliked how easy the mobs in that zone were to kill despite their size. But I know there were many players who did like the expansion.

I scarcely need to point out that if you had not said something on Chirp Club, then I would have watched more of Pey's streams even if she was streaming modern WoW, which I would enjoy even less than The Burning Crusade.

Most people would just go to the website and check the results directly, instead of pausing a video that shows results for half a second. Humans being the most popular race is not a surprise; they always were, with the WoW census website. I wonder if warriors being the popular class is because of their broken scaling, though, and people having more awareness of how warriors perform in groups as a result.

I had said that "World of Warcraft is mostly played by old people". To a certain degree, the data shows that this is true. The reason it's so funny is the dropoff above a certain age. A "Classic+" version would most likely be based on the lvl 60 game version, which differs in important ways from even the 1~60 leveling experience during the Wrath of the Lich King expansion (level cap 80). For example, many players get a 31-point talent at lvl 40 and then start putting talent points in another tree, but in TBC and WotLK, there are additional talents that require 40 or 50 talent points in the same tree.

So original WoW ended in ~2006, with TBC launching in January 2007. This survey's largest age group is 31~36 (which overlaps with 36~40, badly designed survey); someone who is 36 now was 16 in 2006.

This really seems like, "someone who saw older people playing WoW, but was not able to play themselves as much as they would like". College students were much more likely to have the freedom to play WoW (and ruin their grades; the email address I made at the time was "wowaddict", but maybe you're familiar based on your story of how you got into LoL) as much as they wanted.

So why is it that those college students, now ~42 years old, have a much smaller representation in this survey? I think it's because they enjoyed WoW and had a pretty good understanding of why it was fun, saw it become worse with TBC, and took that as a general lesson about games and life. The people who are most excited about Classic+ are those too young to have played much before TBC.

The guild Death and Taxes was pretty famous in original WoW. It got a bunch of world first raid boss kills in original WoW and early TBC, and also featured in the Alliance Most Wanted video, filmed on 21 April 2005, two days after the honor system was released on 19 April. They were responsible for a forum or website post about bugs in the Ahn'Qiraj raid instance, which was an obvious and deliberate mockery or parody of an extremely similar post by one of WoW's most important designers at the time when he was playing and raiding in Everquest. (Also Mei joined it towards the end of 2006, though I didn't know that was the server she had transferred to until much later, as she didn't tell me — she just said she wanted to be in a family-style guild, rather than a guild that treated her poorly.)

After getting several world-first kills in the early 25-man raids in TBC, a few months later Death and Taxes announced they were, basically, quitting. I'm sure the post could be found, but along with the image of a nuclear fireball in the shape of a rude hand gesture, what was notable was their references to "people coming back to try and save the guild". It showed that many people stopped playing during the six months of TBC before that post; players from original WoW, with lots of time to dedicate to the game, i.e. the college student demographic at the time, who are poorly represented in these Classic Plus survey results.

It's possible that the idea won't be used for another year, or won't ever be used, and if I don't try to influence WoW Classic Plus now I won't be able to improve its direction and it will be permanently worse than it could have been. I'm fine with people giving zero importance to this outcome, though wasted time is still wasted time. I remember my ~2011 blog comment, to the (I think) NCSoft US executive who was worried that the failure of Tabula Rasa would lead to decreased funding for MMOs in the future and a decline of the genre, that people who enjoyed MMOs when they were young would grow up and get important jobs and wonder why the genre was bad, then doing something to try to fix it. "Sorry to say this to you now", was what I said. But it's true. Even if WoW might never again be fun to the players who enjoyed it the most in 2004~2006, if there is a profit motive there will always be an opportunity to make something just as good, even if it takes 10 years to get the funding and five years to make.

"Something is funny when there is a large group of people who will be wrong about it, and it doesn't matter that they're wrong." If I had guessed, I might have said that the 41~46 group would be larger than the 36~40 group. So I expect many other people might make the same mistake, and they would be wrong, and it is funny.

My friend Hime would fall in the 51~56 age group, which is only 0.7% in these survey results (which could change with more responses). Around 2008 I think (2010), she mentioned a gryphon plushie which she bought or was considering buying.