Too much convenience?

I'm an old-school WoW player.  I've been playing since the AQ patch.  I participated in the war effort on my old baby paladin, running dungeons to gather cloth to turn in.  Ah, those were the days, when I had no idea what I was doing, when a paladin's "taunt" targeted other players instead of the mobs, when there just weren't any buttons to press.  I was our four-man group's "tank," such as it was.

Remember those days, readers? 

WoW isn't the same game as it was then.  Truthfully, almost everything has changed.  Even the world I leveled in is long gone, swallowed up by the Cataclysm.  Judging seals, auras, the mount quest, leveling Holy because it was literally the only way to get a ranged pull...

Is the game better now?  No question.  But there was an article posted on WoW Insider today that got me thinking.  It was specifically talking about dual spec, and how it might not have been the most awesome thing in the world for the game. 

The core of the argument is that too much convenience turns Warcraft from an alternate reality simulation into, well, a game.  Things like getting to fly everywhere, quests all conveniently taking place in the same zone, automatically learning abilities as you level, being able to "reinvent" yourself at the touch of a button...all of these things take away some of the tedium that used to be part and parcel of playing the game, yes, but...

To be honest, I have to agree.  Making the game so "convenient" took away a lot of the immersion.

Even LFG.  Man, I love that feature.  So convenient for antisocials like me.  But I gotta say...I miss the days when you'd make friends by PUGging.  I met a lot of cool people back in the day, especially since our four-man group didn't have a healer.  We picked up recruits for our guild that way, we made friends that way, just grabbing random healers and bringing them along.

Maybe having to run to a trainer was a hassle.  Maybe having to assign a new talent point every level wasn't ideal.  Maybe not being able to switch from your PVP to your PVE spec, or your tank spec to your DPS spec, at the drop of a hat wasn't ideal.  But the little annoyances, they made it feel like you were living in the world.

I'm sure I've talked before about how I miss the quests that used to take you all over the world.  The Linken quest.  The Scepter quests.  Even some of the upper-end leveling quests would send you to the other level-appropriate zone on the other side of the world and back.  Little drips and drabs for the end-game people in the lower-level zones.  Give you a reason to go back to them, kept the world alive and relevant.  Villages full of elites.  All gone in the name of convenience.

What's that, you say?  All that horsing around the world just served to pad the leveling process, delaying entry into the endgame?  True.  But if the goal is to get to the endgame as quickly as possible, why bother with the leveling process at all?

All the focus these days is on getting people raid-ready, so they can go be selfish assholes in LFR.  And that's cool and all, but it kinda ruined the game for me a bit.  Once upon a time, the journey was the worthier part, and seeing endgame content meant having to make the kinds of social connections that I've been missing ever since.

We'll never go back to that in WoW.  We might never see that again in any MMO.  Having to interact with other people just doesn't sell these days.