If you have lost the fun of WoW, visit the newbie channel

Lost the fun of WoW, Explore the Newbie Channel

Have you lost the joy of World of Warcraft? Cortyn knows a way to fix that – if you want to.

When you’ve been playing World of Warcraft for almost two decades, you can eventually run out of steam. Somehow you’ve seen it all and no matter what the developers come up with, it’s been there before in some modified form. You get a little jaded, everything becomes routine, and you often catch yourself thinking: why was it so much more fun before? Was the game simply better? Or is it up to you after all?

A rather salutary remedy for this fatigue is the “Newcomer” channel in World of Warcraft, or the “Beginner’s Chat”.

Because as a veteran, simply dealing with the joy and problems of complete newcomers brings a lot of joy itself.

After almost 20 years, you lose sight of the details

For as long as there’s been the option, I’ve been in the “Newcomer” channel with my characters. This is the channel that new players are automatically thrown into when they are freshly starting World of Warcraft. Veterans who have completed a number of achievements can offer themselves there as “mentors” to help newcomers with tips and simply answer questions that come up.

And what kind of questions those are sometimes is hard to imagine when you’ve been so deep into World of Warcraft for 18 years that you wouldn’t even recognize the issue.

On the island of the exiles newcomers experience their first adventures.

Most of you have played the “Isle of the Banished” by now. This is the newest starting area that was implemented with Shadowlands and is meant to provide a consistent start to the game. The quests there are quite linear, comparatively simple and serve as a tutorial. No one should have much difficulty there – right?

One of the most common things to see in the “newbie” channel are chat lines from newbies who post something like this here:

“wave”
“wawe to gorgroth”
“type /wave to gor’groth”

The reason for this is the one quest on the island where the character disguises himself as an ogre and leads supposed prisoners through the ogres’ camp. As an intermediate step in this quest, you must wave to one of the ogres to signal that you are bringing fresh prisoners.

And exactly this quest step turns out to be a clear blockade.

Elite veterans might roll their eyes here and think, “Anyone too dumb to type an emote, I don’t even want to see in the endgame.”

But you have to keep in mind that there are simply extremely many newcomers who may have never played another MMORPG or had no previous contact with video games on such a scale.

And from my own experience in the newbie channel, I can say that this quest line is quite a barrier, which in addition is not particularly well explained by the game. Because for the quest you not only have to enter a chat command for the first time (“/wave”), but you also have to have targeted the corresponding NPC. Both of these are explained comparatively poorly by the game and, if you think about it more carefully, are quite a break from the previous missions.

Completely haphazard in World of Warcraft – that’s how many newcomers feel.

But when you’ve been learning to use emotes on and off for over 18 years to tease each other, thank someone for an enchantment, or threaten the nasty rogue in PvP with a swinging fist, the quest is a complete triviality.

It’s incredibly hard to imagine that you might not have been able to complete the quest on the first try, even in the past.

It’s difficult to help those players who may not be paying close attention to chat yet. But when you succeed, the reward is the nice feeling of having helped a fellow player who doesn’t end the game frustrated with that quest line because he can’t solve it.

That’s just one of the reasons I think WoW is too hard for newbies.

Absurd joy over the smallest things is contagious

But by far the most fun is experiencing the joy of other players who are happy about the smallest things that you yourself could only smile tiredly about.

So it happens every now and then that a beginner asks with clear enthusiasm in the newbie channel:

“How do you get that black unicorn as a mount! That’s so cool!!!”

From this, conversations develop again, telling you about the great puzzles that reward you at the end with mounts such as the Lucid Nightmare.

Also memorable for me is a Druid player who apparently had his own personal Christmas in the middle of summer when he announced on the Newbie Channel (in Capslock):

“I CAN TURN INTO A CAT!!! THIS IS SO AWESOME!!!”

It’s such a mundane basic ability of any druid, but for someone who hasn’t played MMORPGs before, this was apparently the best thing ever to happen. This almost childishly exaggerated joy is simply infectious and you can’t help but grin a little.

Turning into a cat – so simple, really, but some people rejoice greatly.

This always reminds me of my own beginnings in World of Warcraft. I remembered taking a quest in Ashenvale back in the “vanilla” days with my mage, where you could turn into a furbolg with a quest item. That was the first quest of its kind for me, and I was so excited about that transformation that I never completed the quest.

I kept the quest item because, unlike many other quest items, you could use it anywhere in the game world. Whether it was later in Molten Core while raiding or in the Battlefield of Warsong Gulch. I could show up everywhere as a Furbolg Mage, and I thought that was really great at the time.

So my tip is, if you’re a long-time WoW veteran yourself and maybe you’ve lost your enthusiasm a bit, sign up as a mentor to help newcomers with advice and support. But of course only if you really intend to help the newcomers a little bit.

This innocent joy is simply contagious – and at the latest when someone writes “wave to gorgroth” in the chat channel again, you also have to smile a bit.

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