Why is twinking fun?

Ryadasu

OG
(Note: I haven't twinked or played WoW in over a year, I've just been thinking about this recently)
I apologise in advance if this is a bit messy and not as well structured as it should be, I'm brainstorming a little bit here..

So what's been on my mind lately (probably thanks to Diablo / studying game design at uni) is why is twinking fun? I'm obviously not talking about the people who just enjoy the immense power that comes from decking out a low level character in the best gear and destroying everything; I'm talking about what, for me, made twinking one of the most enjoyable experiences I had in WoW:
(Not a comprehensive list, I'm just brainstorming and attempting to figure it out)
  • Not spending endless hours grinding quests in order to get to the 'fun' part of the game
  • Extremely simple gear progression - wasn't too difficult to get on near even footing with other players, and when you were, it was really straightforward what you needed next
  • Once you had gear you were happy with, it would STAY that way for a long time, you didn't need to keep upgrading your gear every two weeks to keep up with everyone
  • Really high sense of achievement for earning the difficult/grindy items (fishing gear, etc.) which, in a community setting (next point), felt great
  • When I first started twinking (start of BC I think) I was part of this epic community (epic as in great, not large.. there were about 10 of us) who were fantastic to play with - when I twinked later on (Wrath/Cata) I lost that fantastic sense of a warm, helpful community of likeminded players to twink with (twinking on my server died). I love that sense of community, where I was part of a group of likeminded players (including the people we fought, who, rather than get frustrated with for killing me [I don't know about you guys, but I despised the enemy team in high level bg's], I respected for getting the better of me through skill, not epicl00tz)
  • (Almost) even gear footing for all players, it wasn't so much about who spent 1000 hours grinding for wtfpwn gear as it was the person with the highest skill (class skill, strategy, use of environment, etc.)
  • SIMPLE controls (19 was my favourite because of this) - you only had a small range of skills to use (unlike endgame with thousands of skills all over your screen) which meant you only had a few different things you could do in various scenarios (when I PvP'd at endgame I sometimes felt a bit panicky trying to hit the right skill for that scenario and a lot of the time forgot about a lot of skills - I was obviously bad at endgame PvP :p), which leads on to
  • Mindgames - because of how little skills everyone had, you pretty much almost knew everything everyone had in their arsenals, and could try and anticipate what they were going to do - at endgame I hardly knew all of the skills I had, let alone everyone elses
  • The competitiveness of the community as a whole didn't feel aggressive like it did in normal PvP, it felt more like a group of friends getting together to have a friendly match. There wasn't any childish bickering, no ragequitting, no abuse being thrown around; just fun times.
I know there's a lot I'm forgetting, so if you guys can think of anything else please reply and I'll add it in

Leading on from this, I was thinking about getting to the core of what makes twinking great and attempting to design a game featuring them (or look for games that have those core ideas), or, to start, try and create a private server focusing solely on those ideas.
So yeah, well done for getting through that with me (I apologise again if it was messy), please let me know your thoughts..
 
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