I wish Blizzard would be a little more careful about removing content from the game. All content has historic value and should be preserved for posterity.


IntroductionWoW is my favorite MMORPG ever. I've been playing it since 2004, and I'd count it among my top 5 favorite games of all time. But early on I didn't always have enough money to play it, and later on, I haven't always had the time to play it. So I've ended up missing out on some content that was added to the game and then removed later on. There's also content that I WAS around for, but is now gone, and I wish I had the ability to do it again.I returned for Legion last year, after being away for almost all of WOD. I spent all of the time WOD was out dealing with an awful breakup, two deaths in the family, and a severe illness - I didn't even finish leveling. But I was eager to return, and I started a level 1 character to start my journey from the beginning and relive some of WoW's golden age on my journey to the new stuff at the level cap. Along the way, I ran into (and heard about) quite a few missing pages of WoW's rich history that are no longer in the game. Yet I don't really see a compelling reason why they're gone. For people coming to the game for the first time, there's bound to be some confusion and disappointment at the fact that some things are gone forever that don't really have to be.VanillaThe old Azeroth. This is probably the one I'm least bothered by, because the content aged poorly and was already feeling clunky and old by 2007. Still, we lost a lot of really cool quests and lore when the old world was paved over - like the Onyxia quest chain. Blizzard should have preserved the old world somehow, perhaps accessible through the Caverns of Time and made difficult to access on accident by new players.The Burning CrusadeBC has actually survived pretty well into 2017, with one notable exception. With the introduction of the new Karazhan, the old Kharazan quest chain that began in Shattrath and led players into heroic dungeons and into the catacombs beneath Deadwind Pass was removed. The quest chain provided plenty of lore about the tower, the Kirin Tor, and Khadgar himself. The new Kara is rad, but with phasing now commonplace in the game, there's no reason this quest chain had to go.Wrath of the Lich KingBlizzard's decision to remove the final closing chapter of the Wrathgate saga, the Battle for Undercity, has always struck me as bizarre. Without it, the Wrathgate quest chain suddenly just ends with you standing in front of Alexstrasza, who has nothing to say while the Alliance and Horde armies lie dead all around you. You then mount up and fly to Grizzly Hills because there's nothing left to do. Striking back against Putress was a satisfying conclusion to the storyline. When Cataclysm came out, Undercity and the Ruins of Lordaeron were changed, and instead of adapting the quest to the new layouts or having the Battle for Undercity take place in an instanced version of the old Undercity, Blizzard just yanked it out.CataclysmThis is where things really break down. With every subsequent expansion launch, more and more things break in Cataclysm content, and Blizzard won't fix or replace them. In Mount Hyjal, certain quests pop up that you must accept immediately - log off without accepting them, and your only hope of completing the zone is to find someone who has the quest and will share it with you. The epic boat ride to Vashj'ir, in which your vessel is attacked by sea creatures and your character is abducted by Naga, is gone - instead you teleport directly to a sunken ship at the bottom of the ocean, surrounded by injured sailors who are happy to tell you how epic the battle you skipped was. The zone's epic conclusion, in which you board a submarine and witness the final confrontation between the water elementals and the Naga, has been replaced with a simple quest to kill 15 naga. Deepholm and Uldum are intact, thankfully, but the introduction to Twilight Highlands for Alliance has suffered the worst fate of all - a dozen quests went the way of the dodo with Legion, due to its reconstruction of the destroyed Park district. Instead of using phasing or changing the locations of quest NPCs, players now skip entirely past the spy story starring Jack Bauden and no longer unmask the traitor in Stormwind Keep.Mists of PandariaThere's an entire zone that's missing from modern-day Mists of Pandaria. The Vale of Eternal Blossoms, now corrupted by the Sha, used to be a beautiful and golden valley with an almost entirely different set of quests and exclusive storylines. This zone was available for less than a year, disappearing entirely when Garrosh's actions ruined the vale. The old version can still be explored through a bug in a scenario, which I will not repeat here or encourage people to use, but it has no NPCs or quests available within it. It does prove that Blizzard has (or had) the ability to preserve the old Vale, but decided instead to remove it forever. Also worth noting is the removal of 32 quests from the Legendary Cloak quest chain, which could have been left in the game, even if Blizzard removed the legendary cloak as a reward.Warlords of DraenorSimilar to the legendary cloak quest chain, the legendary ring quest chain in Warlords - nearly 40 quests long - was deleted from the game with the release of Legion. As with the previous legendary quest chain, these quests could have remained in the game but provided a different reward, if Blizzard was intent on making the legendary unobtainable.LegionWe haven't had Legion for a year yet and we've already lost quests. I haven't played Legion content yet but I've been keeping up to date with it. The Obliterum Forge used to require players to complete a series of quests to unlock it. Blizzard has changed it so that it no longer needs to be unlocked, and the quests have been removed forever. There may be other things that have already been removed from Legion, and who knows what else will be permanently removed when the next expansion rolls around.ConclusionThere are a lot of people out there who don't care about any of this. Either they experienced the content when it was still around and thus don't care if it's removed, or they don't care about anything that doesn't directly negatively affect their character's progression in Legion's endgame. That's fair enough.But Blizzard obviously cares about the fictional world they've created. There are dozens of Warcraft novels and graphic novels for people who want more lore and plot than the games can provide. There are people - like me - who had FUN getting Loremaster, who continued questing even after they had all the related achievements, just because they love exploring the world and playing through the stories within it.I doubt that Blizzard will do anything so drastic as restore old quest chains or design new cutscenes to replace old bugged ones they can't fix for whatever reason. But maybe there's hope for the future. There are reasons to remove rewards from quests - I'm not a huge fan of it but I can understand why Blizzard wants to create an artificial scarcity. But the quests and zones themselves, which only serve to provide more gameplay to players, don't need to die along with the retired rewards. They provide players with more content, more lore, more things to do. Don't delete them - set them off to the side, make them accessible only to people who know what they're looking for. WoW is a legendary video game, one of the most important in the history of the medium, and as much of it should be preserved as possible.I feel very strongly about this. Maybe I'm literally the only person. But if I had the power to bring all this content back, I'd do it in a heartbeat.Even if it cost a raid tier.(rofl)Thanks for reading.