For everyone, the good old days are different.

Before I get started, let me just say that I'm talking about your personal "Good Old Days" of SoL. Not real life.

For some of the older members, I'm sure their good old days start at 2005 or 2006. For me, my good old days are 2011-2012. The first two or so years of my time here on SoL.

A simpler time, when nobody was frothing over politics or religion. We spent all day shitting up this once-peaceful board with constant faction wars. We'd argue for hours on end with each other, Horde and Alliance, without stopping. Sometimes about mundane shit like lampposts. We'd occasionally come together in our mutual dislike of one poster (Soldrethar, Salandrin, etc.) and just bash on them until they left or were banned.

I know I'm guilty of trying to troll/bait people into getting themselves banned. It even worked once or twice, if I recall correctly.

As much as I'm embarrassed by many of the posts I made back then, I still can't help but feel a sense of nostalgia and happiness. Purely from a lore perspective, things are much more peaceful nowadays. Back then, the anger was hot and fresh. People calling each others nazis and shit over video game preferences. It was pretty ridiculous. We don't really have those problems now.

It seems the hostility is now coming from a more meta perspective these days, rather than being purely driven by story choices and pure factionalism. I see people argue about the lore as if it were a proxy for real-life politics. It's weird.

I'm interested in hearing about your good old days. For the older members, this is your chance to tell us how much better SoL was before the wave of Story Forum refugees turned this place inside out.

The Keen Software House Forums have a "No Politics"-rule and a "No Religious Topics"-rule. It gets attacked as cencoring sometimes but... it works. It just works. Our worst flamewars are tame by comparison to what SoL can dish out. (It's an actually moderated forum which obviously helps.)

I miss Cantus, Volkrin and Archimedes.

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I dunno, the good old days were pretty shitty when Fojar was so obstinate you could only want to throttle him. Fuck those debates.

Still there was more camaraderie that is true, but I am not sure it has so much to do with the forums as it was or just the way I was then. Plus Kir and I used to talk a lot but then the Fire Nat... Russia invaded and things got crappy and he isn't really here any more.

Our flame wars are very tame by internet standards. Probably because we are quite a small forum so in a sense "everyone knows everyone" and this familiarity doesn't allow people to go full asshole.
Things could be better though but it is up to us all as individuals to make that happen. I sure prefer freedom to talk over what inevitably becomes biased and arbitrary moderating.

I also miss Kir.

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Me too.

Honestly, these past few years have seemed pretty good. A lot more fun than when I started posting back in 2012.

Maybe I just like it when things get weird.

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See WoW in a way you've never imagined it.

"He came to Ahn'qiraj for the strife... instead, he found a wife! She's my qiraji love-bride, next on Sick Sad World of Warcraft!"

I feel the same, except for the internet in general. The internet was a lot more fun 5 years ago. I'm of the opinion the social justice wave severely reduced the fun of online communities. It's not just SoL, many forums I used to visit are the same and worse. I lost some good friends over this whole thing, mainly a dude from Ireland who came out as trans and spent several months ranting about privilege and usual tumblr stuff. It was like he became a completely different person, lost to a damn cult and I cut ties with him completely. These days he's even more of an emotional wreck. I want back the days when bronies we're the biggest plague of the web.

As for SoL, what's the point now that we know the developers just do whatever sounds cool on that moment to them. Theories and ''political'' debates are rendered moot when dev#321 comes up with ''Hey now they're at war, but in this zone they're not! Oh hey they team up to fight big baddie. And now they kill each other in this zone. Check that out, Varian has a bro handshake with Sylvanas after she soul raped a bunch of Lordaeroni peasants.''

'member linguistics lore threads? 'member fun speculation threads? 'member a higher quota of high quality posts in general?

I 'member...


edit: Forgot an obligatory song reference.

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The good ol days was pre 2010 Internet.
Back then there was no SJW.
Hell pre 2007 there was no Tumblr.
There was only lulz and stuff seemed so much simpler.

I'm only involved in a few Internet communities, so I've dodged most direct interaction with hardcore social justice types. Guess I'm lucky.

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See WoW in a way you've never imagined it.

"He came to Ahn'qiraj for the strife... instead, he found a wife! She's my qiraji love-bride, next on Sick Sad World of Warcraft!"

We were more creative, and old posters like Euphie still posted, but the good new days ain't too bad either. Just different, with different faces.

Any year before 2016.

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Back in the good old days, we didn't have that bastard ijfdrei.

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This is not a signature.

Author of the Pink Engine.

before i joined.

December 2014 was pretty good.

At least he's better than that awful ijffdrie.

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We grew up.

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I'm not sure if I would totally agree with the premise of the thread about there being long-lost good old days, I think its pretty common for every generation since time immemorial to feel that times were funner and simpler back when they were younger and more naive. That kind of nostalgia can be ingrained in people; even when the old days in question weren't necessarily much different than current times.

I don't personally feel like there has been a noticeable change in tone or comradery in Scrolls of Lore since I began posting. People still data-mine, rant, flame, troll, spam, discuss, debate, analyze, create and appreciate all the same as before - the only difference seems to be quantitative rather than qualitative. Like I remember way back in 2010 when things could get pretty heated between Bolvar and I in the General Discussion board, but that wouldn't have been all that different than what you would sometimes see on here now. Chances are that it isn't the forum's that changed, but you have.

I do miss reading some of the old accounts that have left/gone MIA though. There's too many to mention, but it is a bit sad not seeing folks like Volkrin or Lowtide around anymore. They were colourful. D:

I was naive and optimistic

Edit: I do miss a lot of the old posters even without much detail, Volkrin, Cantus, etc...

Still see Bryn from time to time in other channels

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My Worldbuilding:
http://bloodinkworlds.tumblr.com/

I feel like back then, we were all more heavily invested in the story. I think people are pretty burned out nowadays. Sure, people still argue and data-mine just as they did before... but there's a certain fatalistic pessimism permeating lore discussions these days. Maybe it's just me... but I feel like back when Cata dropped, we were all a bit more naive. We still expected great things from Blizzard.

I remember how hungry we used to be for new lore. People going apeshit whenever someone got a novel early, posting lore tidbits from it and resulting in long ass threads. Now it feels like people just dread new developments. Compare the atmosphere surrounding the new Illidan book to the one surrounding Wolfheart. You'll see what I mean.

There was a certain electricity in the air back then.

I don't deny that I (or we) have changed/grown up. I'm just interested in reminiscing about the good old days. It was a fun time, I think.

Yeah, I gotta agree with that. I still love/like Warcraft and enjoy reading/seeing news and spoilers, but a part of the "passion" for it is simply gone.

Yeah, WoW felt like it had limitless possibilities back in the day. For me, the magic started dying in Cataclysm. WoD killed off what remained.

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See WoW in a way you've never imagined it.

"He came to Ahn'qiraj for the strife... instead, he found a wife! She's my qiraji love-bride, next on Sick Sad World of Warcraft!"

If Legion came out after WOTLK I would have creamed my pants in excitement. Now...I only watched the Illidan lore video and the broken shore cinematic. 5-6 years of orc filler does that to you.

Pretty much.

I'm still happy to tag along for the ride, but I'm no longer seriously invested one way or another in WarCraft as an IP; it's been treated too casually and, frankly, shitty, by Blizzard at this point for it to ever be what it once was again.

SoL has definitely changed but I'm not sure if it's for the better or worse.

The fact is we know so much more about the Warcraft setting now. The chronicle and Legion have pretty much wrapped up all the old remaining mysteries and plotlines.

We used to speculate about where the old gods were, how many there were, whether night elves evolved from trolls, how to get into the Emerald Dream, where the Ashbringer was.... we know all that now. We're solving mysteries faster than we can make them, and any mystery introduced in the game we know will be visited in an expansion or two and wrapped up nicely with a bow.


Lore discussion is best when you can speculate both into the past and the future. With less to speculate into the past about, we're more and more certain of our future and so instead we tend to focus on what's in the game right now.



I also thing a big change to the social fabric of the board, for good or ill, was that at one point we really did try to raise the quality of lore discussion on the official Story forums better, positing ourselves as a source and an exemplar. By now we all know that's a sisyphean task and so have stopped bothering.

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