When tribalism dies

Something that I'd perhaps subtly understood before came into stark relief with the last patch for WoW, and that's that change, which is so often gradual in RL, is distinct and identifiable in a world that is defined by software. Patch Tuesday is like a virtual Sept. 11 or the assassination of JFK - there's a before and an after, and each side of the demarcation has its own assumptions.

The deployment of the 1.12 patch, which brought cross-realm battlegrounds to WoW, will be looked back on as a point when, for valid and defensible reasons, Blizzard sacrificed the sense of server community on the altar of shorter BG queues. And, while I'm generally pleased with the new world we're living in, the change was abrupt enough that I'm a little sad, or perhaps nostalgic, for what once was.

I've been playing in the Khaz Modan BGs now for several months, long enough to get to know names on the Horde side, and a lot of the regulars on the Alliance side. I read through the Khaz Modan forums regularly, know a lot of the regular forum trolls there, and generally feel like part of a larger community, even if I didn't contribute much to it directly. 10,000 people, or whatever a WoW realm holds, actually felt like a much smaller town when I ran in the BGs, or the forums, because of the smaller subset that frequented those areas.

Now, however, going into WSG is kind of like flying into LAX - there are 12 contests going at any one time, and there's little or no expectation of seeing anyone you know. Sometimes the group is good, sometimes not, but what's interesting is how anonymous it can feel. The Horde I kill feel a lot like the person I cut off on the 405 - I'll never see them again.

But I love the speed of the queues, so complaining is a little silly. As a game, the change was a superior choice; as community, it reminds me of the arrival of air travel or railroads to the rural dwellers - a whole wide world opened up, but at the same time, something got a little lost too. Fascinating.