Kirise
OG
Get comfortable -- it's story time. I see a lot of vitriol in the Twinkinfo forums and the WoW forums concerning non-60s playing in the 60-64 bracket. Players often talk past each other, because they don't know of the background of the 60 bracket. After an enlightening conversation with a couple of players last year, and after seeing this issue come up yet again in the forums, I want to shed some light about what's really going on in this bracket.
Players twinker for different reasons. One of the most popular reasons is to push the limits of what a character can do within given constraints and likewise one of the most popular constraints are the boundaries of a given bracket. Whatever you can do to make the most of your character, do it. Armor, weapons, consumables, macros, you name it. Be all you can be, within your bracket. Twinkers within the x9 brackets followed this approach for years -- it really built up steam during the Burning Crusade era, refined itself during the "dark ages" of Wrath of the Lich King, and continues to this day. But that's not how it was for the x0 brackets, 60 and 70.
When the no-XP patch landed (3.2) in August 2009, x9 twinkers scrambled to figure out how to get games. Over the next several months, 19s, 29s, 39s, 49s, and 59s all migrated to particular battlegroups to take part in the new (at the time) all-twinker games. But 60s and 70s, with their capped accounts, still played in the XP-on battlegrounds. They ruled Alterac Valley, and they handily took on the challenge of opponents many levels higher than them in Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin. 60s and 70s didn't get moved to XP-off brackets until late 2010. Moreover, 60s ran into a horrible glitch that took Blizzard months to fix: the bracket couldn't get more than three games a day, because the random battleground finder insisted on trying to fill an Alterac Valley on the fourth game, even though there weren't enough players available to pop AV. The 60 bracket didn't really get restarted until April of 2011, when 4.1 finally resolved the ridiculous bug.
Basically, 60s didn't get consistent XP-off games until more than a year and a half after many other brackets. Why does this matter? To answer that, you need to understand what Vanilla WoW was like, before TBC, before WotLK, and definitely before Cataclysm.
Vanilla WoW was a much harder game in many respects. No random dungeon finder. No plethora of flight points. No battleground finder. If you wanted to do something in the game, you did on your server, and you went to that part of the world. Getting a group together to run Uldaman took an hour or two just to get organized, because it took that long to find people, and then to get a couple of people out to the summoning stone to get the rest of the group. Many of the instances required you to fight your way to the entrance in the first place. There was no timer on WSG. Arathi Basin went to 2000 resources. Alterac Valley...battles went for literally days.
Raids were hard. Like, really hard. There was no "heroic mode", because by default everything was heroic. 40 players had to perfectly coordinate for even a miniscule chance at a drop. There were no 10-player raids.
Everything took forever. Leveling, PvP, raiding, instances...we're talking hours at a time. And because everything took so long, vanilla players formed a bond. If you took part in an x9 bracket in TBC or WotLK, you know what that bond is like: players you recognize. Players who put the time in the same way you did. Players who pushed you to do better, to win more, to elevate your game. Years later, you still know them by name. Now understand, everyone who played vanilla shared this bond. Doing anything in vanilla WoW took so much work that just to be in the game automatically engendered some respect.
Players at 60 did everything together, not just PvP. They spent much more time together in difficult undertakings, from raids to world bosses to ridiculous farming tasks, much more than x9 players typically do. The focus of 60 was not PvP, but on everything.
When TBC came out, 60s stayed together. x9 brackets changed, 60s mostly did not.
When WotLK came out, 60s (and 70s) stayed together. x9 brackets changed a lot. 60s (and 70s) mostly did not, other than losing a couple of major raids.
When Cataclysm came out, everything changed.
This is the difference I want everyone to understand: 60s who came from vanilla are essentially endgame players who share the bond of taking on the most difficult content WoW ever offered. This is not the same bond as x9 players who took on an exclusively PvP challenge. Understand the difference, and you will understand the roots of the conflict in today's 60-64 bracket. To be even more clear: most 60s are casual PvPers. They don't twink in the same way that x9 players or 70s and 80s twink. For most 60s, PvP was only a part of their overall experience. To be sure, there are some excellent PvPers at 60, but the approach and attitude to games at 60 more closely resembles endgame.
Fast forward to the middle of 2011, when twinkers from other brackets began to discover 60s. The first (and natural) question from the newcomers was, how do I make the most out of a character for this bracket. The answer, from experienced 60s who shared a bond since vanilla, was, "Come raid with us. Come PvP with us. Come take part in what remains of the best that WoW had to offer." But the other answer from experienced x9 players was, "Holy crap, look at the possibilities for gear and gems in this bracket!" Most x9 players never experienced the "vanilla bond", and didn't understand or care about what many 60s valued. They still don't.
So why didn't this happen at 70 or 80? Three reasons. One, the game took less work for players who joined during TBC and especially during WotLK, so there was less likelihood of forming that kind of bond. Two, Blizzard created much more powerful PvP sets, almost on par with raiding tier gear, at 70 and 80. And the PvP sets were cheap both in terms of price and time invested to get them! Three, the difference between higher and lower levels in a bracket was much less dramatic. 71s, 72s and 74s are stronger in some ways, weaker in others. Same for most 81s, 83s, and 84s.
These three reasons combined to obliterate the culture of the 70 bracket. When word got out about how easy it was to get a full PvP set and walk on the field at a competitive level, the 70 bracket saw a deluge of new twinkers. Oldschool TBC player culture got wiped out in a few short months, and complaints of "74s ruining the bracket" subsided relatively quickly.
The 80 bracket saw a less dramatic shift. Because of Blizzard's unusual choice of making the scaling of 80-85 the equivalent of 80-89 plus the introduction of the mastery stat and reforging in Cataclysm, the sheer complexity of choosing a level and gearing for that bracket threw the bracket off balance. You'll still see complaints about "84s ruining the bracket", but half the players haven't yet figured out how to gear themselves at 80, and another 20% don't realize that they're in an XP-off bracket now.
60-64 is a different story. Thanks to gear from one expansion after vanilla, gems from two expansions after vanilla, and a bracket change from three expansions after vanilla, going to 64 has a lot of allure to most twinkers. Twinkers who never experienced what the vanilla players did. Twinkers who don't understand why the 60s don't just level to 64. And vanilla players who don't understand that purposefully staying at 60 makes no sense to most twinkers, when 64 clearly offers a better battlefield advantage for many classes and specs the same way that grandfathered T3 and using wrath enchants on 60 gear offers an advantage.
The tragedy for the 60-64 bracket is that the bracket may never resolve this. There aren't enough 60s left to keep games consistent. And there aren't enough 64s to keep games consistent. Both sides of this conflict are correct. But Blizzard's choices led to a conflict with no resolution, and I see only one way out: Blizzard must follow through with an item squish.
Level requirements on wrath gems won't do it. Bringing back old raids won't do it. Not even putting 60s in their own bracket will do it (though it will help some), as you will still have players who use TBC socket gear at 60. No, the only chance the 60-64 bracket has of regaining its culture and reclaiming its history will come from item squishing. When old-school raiding gear ascends once again as BiS for the 60-64 bracket such that secondary stats scale better on the lower end of the bracket like they do for 70 and 80, then you will see 60s rise again.
This concludes my highly opinionated and (forgive me) oversimplified analysis of the 60 bracket. May Blizzard's conjectured plans for the item squish come to be.
Players twinker for different reasons. One of the most popular reasons is to push the limits of what a character can do within given constraints and likewise one of the most popular constraints are the boundaries of a given bracket. Whatever you can do to make the most of your character, do it. Armor, weapons, consumables, macros, you name it. Be all you can be, within your bracket. Twinkers within the x9 brackets followed this approach for years -- it really built up steam during the Burning Crusade era, refined itself during the "dark ages" of Wrath of the Lich King, and continues to this day. But that's not how it was for the x0 brackets, 60 and 70.
When the no-XP patch landed (3.2) in August 2009, x9 twinkers scrambled to figure out how to get games. Over the next several months, 19s, 29s, 39s, 49s, and 59s all migrated to particular battlegroups to take part in the new (at the time) all-twinker games. But 60s and 70s, with their capped accounts, still played in the XP-on battlegrounds. They ruled Alterac Valley, and they handily took on the challenge of opponents many levels higher than them in Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin. 60s and 70s didn't get moved to XP-off brackets until late 2010. Moreover, 60s ran into a horrible glitch that took Blizzard months to fix: the bracket couldn't get more than three games a day, because the random battleground finder insisted on trying to fill an Alterac Valley on the fourth game, even though there weren't enough players available to pop AV. The 60 bracket didn't really get restarted until April of 2011, when 4.1 finally resolved the ridiculous bug.
Basically, 60s didn't get consistent XP-off games until more than a year and a half after many other brackets. Why does this matter? To answer that, you need to understand what Vanilla WoW was like, before TBC, before WotLK, and definitely before Cataclysm.
Vanilla WoW was a much harder game in many respects. No random dungeon finder. No plethora of flight points. No battleground finder. If you wanted to do something in the game, you did on your server, and you went to that part of the world. Getting a group together to run Uldaman took an hour or two just to get organized, because it took that long to find people, and then to get a couple of people out to the summoning stone to get the rest of the group. Many of the instances required you to fight your way to the entrance in the first place. There was no timer on WSG. Arathi Basin went to 2000 resources. Alterac Valley...battles went for literally days.
Raids were hard. Like, really hard. There was no "heroic mode", because by default everything was heroic. 40 players had to perfectly coordinate for even a miniscule chance at a drop. There were no 10-player raids.
Everything took forever. Leveling, PvP, raiding, instances...we're talking hours at a time. And because everything took so long, vanilla players formed a bond. If you took part in an x9 bracket in TBC or WotLK, you know what that bond is like: players you recognize. Players who put the time in the same way you did. Players who pushed you to do better, to win more, to elevate your game. Years later, you still know them by name. Now understand, everyone who played vanilla shared this bond. Doing anything in vanilla WoW took so much work that just to be in the game automatically engendered some respect.
Players at 60 did everything together, not just PvP. They spent much more time together in difficult undertakings, from raids to world bosses to ridiculous farming tasks, much more than x9 players typically do. The focus of 60 was not PvP, but on everything.
When TBC came out, 60s stayed together. x9 brackets changed, 60s mostly did not.
When WotLK came out, 60s (and 70s) stayed together. x9 brackets changed a lot. 60s (and 70s) mostly did not, other than losing a couple of major raids.
When Cataclysm came out, everything changed.
This is the difference I want everyone to understand: 60s who came from vanilla are essentially endgame players who share the bond of taking on the most difficult content WoW ever offered. This is not the same bond as x9 players who took on an exclusively PvP challenge. Understand the difference, and you will understand the roots of the conflict in today's 60-64 bracket. To be even more clear: most 60s are casual PvPers. They don't twink in the same way that x9 players or 70s and 80s twink. For most 60s, PvP was only a part of their overall experience. To be sure, there are some excellent PvPers at 60, but the approach and attitude to games at 60 more closely resembles endgame.
Fast forward to the middle of 2011, when twinkers from other brackets began to discover 60s. The first (and natural) question from the newcomers was, how do I make the most out of a character for this bracket. The answer, from experienced 60s who shared a bond since vanilla, was, "Come raid with us. Come PvP with us. Come take part in what remains of the best that WoW had to offer." But the other answer from experienced x9 players was, "Holy crap, look at the possibilities for gear and gems in this bracket!" Most x9 players never experienced the "vanilla bond", and didn't understand or care about what many 60s valued. They still don't.
So why didn't this happen at 70 or 80? Three reasons. One, the game took less work for players who joined during TBC and especially during WotLK, so there was less likelihood of forming that kind of bond. Two, Blizzard created much more powerful PvP sets, almost on par with raiding tier gear, at 70 and 80. And the PvP sets were cheap both in terms of price and time invested to get them! Three, the difference between higher and lower levels in a bracket was much less dramatic. 71s, 72s and 74s are stronger in some ways, weaker in others. Same for most 81s, 83s, and 84s.
These three reasons combined to obliterate the culture of the 70 bracket. When word got out about how easy it was to get a full PvP set and walk on the field at a competitive level, the 70 bracket saw a deluge of new twinkers. Oldschool TBC player culture got wiped out in a few short months, and complaints of "74s ruining the bracket" subsided relatively quickly.
The 80 bracket saw a less dramatic shift. Because of Blizzard's unusual choice of making the scaling of 80-85 the equivalent of 80-89 plus the introduction of the mastery stat and reforging in Cataclysm, the sheer complexity of choosing a level and gearing for that bracket threw the bracket off balance. You'll still see complaints about "84s ruining the bracket", but half the players haven't yet figured out how to gear themselves at 80, and another 20% don't realize that they're in an XP-off bracket now.
60-64 is a different story. Thanks to gear from one expansion after vanilla, gems from two expansions after vanilla, and a bracket change from three expansions after vanilla, going to 64 has a lot of allure to most twinkers. Twinkers who never experienced what the vanilla players did. Twinkers who don't understand why the 60s don't just level to 64. And vanilla players who don't understand that purposefully staying at 60 makes no sense to most twinkers, when 64 clearly offers a better battlefield advantage for many classes and specs the same way that grandfathered T3 and using wrath enchants on 60 gear offers an advantage.
The tragedy for the 60-64 bracket is that the bracket may never resolve this. There aren't enough 60s left to keep games consistent. And there aren't enough 64s to keep games consistent. Both sides of this conflict are correct. But Blizzard's choices led to a conflict with no resolution, and I see only one way out: Blizzard must follow through with an item squish.
Level requirements on wrath gems won't do it. Bringing back old raids won't do it. Not even putting 60s in their own bracket will do it (though it will help some), as you will still have players who use TBC socket gear at 60. No, the only chance the 60-64 bracket has of regaining its culture and reclaiming its history will come from item squishing. When old-school raiding gear ascends once again as BiS for the 60-64 bracket such that secondary stats scale better on the lower end of the bracket like they do for 70 and 80, then you will see 60s rise again.
This concludes my highly opinionated and (forgive me) oversimplified analysis of the 60 bracket. May Blizzard's conjectured plans for the item squish come to be.
