Happy Friday Everyone!!!
In part 1 of this entry I posted that I decided to rebuild my first toon again due to a shortage of tanks on my server & in my guild. Well as of yesterday he's 17 level and enjoying the breadbasket of westfall and the craggy hillsides of the Redridge Mountains. If I have time this morning I'll get him his first pair of shoulders!
The second part of this post covers a phenomenon that fascinates me both in Real Life & WOW. I love spotting the remnants of the old world that are still present. For example where my wife & I live in Northern New Jersey once was all vacation homes & farmland. Now its all developed into Office Parks, Malls, Condo Developments etc. But every so often you can still see remnants of how this area used to be. A building here, a road sign there, etc. These vestiges seem puzzling, seem out of place unless you know what this area was like up to the early 1980's. In my travels I always like to spot these relics of the past because it reminds me that change isn't instantaneous, its a evolutionary process in which the old is gradually replaced by the new.
This messy process also extends into digital creations. I know this first hand from work. My current application has vestigial parts to it that absolutely make no sense unless you know how the business ran 15 years ago. This also holds the same with World of Warcraft.
Although the developers have done major design changes to WOW since it's launch in 2004, if you look carefully you can still see and experience remnants of a much older version of WOW. Now make no mistake you can miss them if on your treadmill to level 80 if all of your focus on is getting to end-game. But if your aware of where you are in the game they stick out like historical roadsigns. This is coupled with the fact that some of them are literally tied to the mechanics of the application, and unless blizzard makes a WOW II and rebuilds the game from scratch them they will be with us through every expansion.
For example lets start with white gear. Now whether your a level 1 toon in a starting zone or an end game raider purchasing thread in Dalaren, 90% of vendors only sell white gear (the 10% that don't sell white gear + uncommon gear that replenishes over time.) I never really thought about this until I was leveling Turndow & was in ironforge learning how to use guns & having to purchase a gun from a vendor. It got me thinking; no player after X level (usually 14-16 from my own experience,) uses white gear. It has no stat bonus it doesn't make you more powerful. Still though the vendors sell it like it's going out of style. Yet every vendor sells it.
This paradox (white gear is everywhere / no seasoned player uses white gear) lead me to thinking about Vanilla WOW. And by Vanilla WOW I don't mean 1.x or the beta release candidates, I mean the first build that started it all. It sits somewhere in Blizzard HQ, gathering digital dust, only seeing the light of day as an example of design changes. My instincts tell me that initially Blizzard was designing WOW to be a very magic poor world. This is radically different than today's game where you can give your alt's epic gear etc.
There may have been a time when white gear was base gear & uncommon really was uncommon. This game environment would have made a lot of sense considering the Lore. Magic after all had caused most of the major cataclysm in the game. However as the game was refined through in house play testing, the developers made magic more commonplace.
Yesterday I mentioned this at lunch to a co-worker who's played WOW since 2004. Ironically he had also been talking about white gear to a guildie on vent the previous night. Now he's not true 'old-school' which we both define as WOW players who play tested the alpha and beta clients. He started about a month after launch. But he did confirm my instinct. Back in 2004 he like a lot of players, rolled a rogue (hunters & rogues were easiest characters to play at launch.) Being a rogue he wanted to use fist weapons for the talent build but couldn't find any. They just didn't drop until you got to higher level dungeons. So he purchased a white fist weapon & had a guild member enchant it for him.
This historical fact brings me to enchanting. If I recall originally enchanting was going to be a little different. There was talk that enchanting could be used on regular gear to make it better. And by better I mean transmute it into a sword of the eagle or the monkey etc. When I discussed this with guildies who did Alpha testing they recalled this being talked about in the forums but it was scrapped because the costs to make a white weapon comparable to a green weapon were prohibitive. It simply didn't make sense to disenchant magical items to make a non-magical item magical.
In addition there is one more little gem of vanilla wow that supports this hypothesis; Blacksmithing starter quests. Against my better judgement I chose mining\blacksmithing for Turndow (I know a smart tank either goes mining\engineering or herb\alchemy.) Regardless of this faux pas, as you level blacksmithing you may be asked to go to Ironforge which will lead you to a blacksmithing quest.
Now by the time your able to get to Ironforge & do the quest. your character is usually between levels 11-12. Yet the recipe learned from the quest produces gear that's minimum level to use it is level 6. I know of no level 11-12 toon that will use level 6 gear,since by then you can purchase greens off the auction house that have better stats. So why is this quest in game? It doesn't make sense except if you view it as an original quest from the start of WOW development.
In this light, a level 6 longsword with + 1 enchant would make a lot of sense since it gives a player comparable damage to a level 12 white weapon. And since Blizzard has said in the past that it wanted to keep old quests in the game to preserve the history of WOW, this vestige will still be in the game until the servers are closed
So you may be asking yourself, OK I get the old quests are still in game, but why is white gear being churned out by end game vendors? I also discussed this with my co-worker & he confirmed that my hypothesis on this little quirk is probably correct.
WOW design is client/server based as we know from when the world server goes down. Some of the pieces are on your computer, some are on the server. The vendor objects are all on the server. From my experiences with server clients IRL, my instincts tell me that some components of the game universe are from the original vanilla builds. And since these components are stable, (and a core rule of client server architecture is that if something is stable you don't mess with it!) they are left alone.
Ergo white gear will be churned out by vendors ad infinitum until the servers are closed down.
Until Another Day
The Musing Moonkin
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