Well, a lot of people are just naturally nostalgic. There's a feeling you get when you play your first video game that later games just can't beat. For me, the Pokemon red version was the first RPG ever played. I know the game play, mechanics, and basically everything else is far and away better in later games but I just can't shake the feeling that the first game was the most fun for me.

It's the same with WoW. People will usually have their fondest memories of the time they first started and only see a decline beyond that. Yeah, the way raiding and pvp were set up was horrible and talents sucked and everything was unbalanced to hell but it was new and fresh and exciting. Now, for people that have been playing for a while, we've gone around the block a few times and it really just feels too familiar, too linear, too straightforward.

It's like walking down a childhood street. Yeah, they put new street lights in and they repaved the sidewalk and a couple homes were renovated. But you remember that one part of the old sidewalk that had chihuahua paw prints from the neighbor's dogs walking on it long ago. And that one home that belonged to one of your childhood friend's family that was bought up and replaced. Yeah, your childhood wasn't all that different from someone else's childhood in another time and place, but it was your childhood.

Give it enough time and you'll just forget all about the bad things in the past.

I can't help but feel that blaming it all on nostalgia is a bit of a cliché. Of course, nostalgia is always involved when looking back at a fond memory, but when it comes to Vanilla WoW (or other expansions, for that matter) anyone who even attempts to make a claim that something was better then than it is now gets shouted at to remove the rose-tinted goggles.

Saying that it's just nostalgia is also saying the game has either A: not changed a bit or B: only changed for the better. Any reasonable person would agree that both options are impossible. And accounting for the vast changes that has happened to the game, it's very likely that, by now, a quite large amount of the players did in fact prefer the older versions over the new one, nostalgia or no nostalgia.

"I can't help but feel that blaming it all on nostalgia is a bit of a cliché. "

Cliche or not, it's still probably true.

So you would actually argue that every change in the game has been for the better for everyone? I find that -very- hard to believe.

When I think back to the time when I was waiting for everyone to arrive outside of UBRS, I have lots of fond memories. I learned to know a couple of very good friends that way. Those memories are filled with nostalgia to such an extent that I can't say if I'd like that back or not. Most likely, I wouldn't - standing there waiting for sometimes 30+ minutes wasn't that fun. I just remember it fondly because of the rare occasions when I had fun getting to know a new friend.

On the other hand, say I preferred 40 man raiding over 10 and 25 man raiding, simply because I like raiding with as many people as possible without making it too crowded. Who are you to say that 25 man raiding IS better, and that my preference of 40 man raiding is just based in nostalgia?