With the recent announcement of the 3.2.2 Patch Notes, containing within it the revelation of a throwback Onyxia raid, it caused me to think on the severe emotional attachment many of us in WoW feel towards the Good Old Days. I'm personally not one of these people. I joined World of Warcraft just prior to the dropping of The Burning Crusade on our collective lap, and didn't set foot into serious endgame territory until everyone's favorite Hamlet wannabe was good and dead. I have no idea what it was like to wipe endlessly on Neltharion or C'Thun, or grind for weeks on end for an honor title. I'm also pretty sure I never want to know anything about those things. It is, however, hard to miss the near endless pining of those who would trade everything to have Vanilla back in their arms.
How are we to explain this kind of Nostalgia? We've all experienced it in one form or another, but we usually get over it fairly quickly. Some others aren't so lucky. Psychologists and medical professionals have spent a few centuries throwing the nostalgia/homesickness tag on a variety of medical illnesses. Beyond the obvious anxiety and longing for the past, other attributed sympoms have included insomnia, anorexia, loss of thirst, weakness, palpitations of the heart, smothering sensations, stupor, and fever. Heavy stuff. Some of the most severe nostalgia cases have involved individuals committing crimes or murdering their children in an attempt to return things to the way they were before.
Surely no one would go to such extreme lengths to get 60 capped servers or return to the old days of Southshore/Tarren Mill pvp, but I suspect the same type of emotion is there. The vast majority of instances of nostalgia have involved homesickness to one degree or another, and what is Warcraft to many of us if not a second home? We spend more time and invest more energy into it than some people put into their own families. We work there, we play there, and some of our best friends are there right along side us. Taking that away from someone could imaginably be a serious emotional blow. It's very little wonder that some people who spent their lives and soul in Vanilla could be asking who moved their cheese.
How, then, could one treat this sort of nostalgia? It is pretty well agreed that the best way to help homesickness is sending someone home. It tends to work very well. It does, however, come with consequences. Sending a college freshman home at the first sign of homesickness is usually counter-productive. In the case of Vanilla, Blizzard has made it very clear that they will never give these people the classic servers they crave. It makes no sense for them to invest those kind of resources into content that's become old hat.
There are ways to get around this, though. In military situations, psychologists have found that straight up lying to people can get the job done just as well. Counselors would actually forge leave documents for soldiers, letting them think that they would be going home, but never actually being able to do so. While this likely sucked for the soldiers when they discovered the truth, and would probably lead to the counselor getting fired/gang beat today, these soldiers suddenly felt much better. Yay for scientific progress through lack of ethics.
Although I doubt it was intended in quite that way, letting us run Onyxia again is doing just that. People will get to experience the same content, get deep breathed moar by the same deep breaths, and heft around the same hefty sword. Although people will never really get to go home to Vanilla, they can at least get a piece of that experience back. And who knows, maybe riding around on the back of that experience for a while will help keep people focused on an even brighter future.
Source: McCann W.H., 1941. Nostalgia, A Review of the Literature, Psychological Bulletin, 38:5, 168-182
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