Happy 25th anniversary, XP! Simpler times. Better games. Best LAN sessions ever. Windows XP was released on October 25, 2001.

"Effort and reward" have a massive impact on how I perceive the quality of a game, in particular any role-playing game and especially MMORPGs. Walk with me. Two things struck me early on when the original World of Warcraft was released. First, the size of the world. It felt gigantic, especially early on since you had to explore everything by walking. You felt tiny in a massive world, and that's exactly what made it so incredible. Second, the huge variety of gear. The various slots for weapons, armor, trinkets, rings, etc., and then of course the various qualities of gear, from the mundane grey items, to the better green, even better blue, and the eventual thrill of the first purple items (heck, there were rumors about legendary orange items). In both cases, size of the world and quality of the gear, it was effort (and skill) that rewarded you. Discovering a new area felt exciting. Equipping a hard-earned new weapon was a glorious moment. Sadly, two things happened with the first expansion, The Burning Crusade, that struck me and left a slightly sour taste. Soon after walking through the Dark Portal and entering Outland, your hard-earned purple gear was made obsolete by a simple quest reward (kill 20 boars); a new Outland-green item that put your good old Vanilla-purple to shame. It happened too fast and felt too random. Replacing a much-cherished purple weapon from the old days with a generic green sword from your first hour of questing in Outland was not a good feeling. Within the first day or two you could pretty much say goodbye to all your hard-earned old gear. The introduction of flying mounts was a great experience at first (seeing the world from above was also visually stunning), but it eventually led to epic flying mounts and dungeon finder teleports - which essentially shrank a once massive world into a set of waypoints. No incentive to explore the world anymore; you simply zipped from flight point to flight point, from instance to instance. World of Warcraft became a collection of dots on a map, with the beauty of it lost along the way. Now, I do understand the reason for this, at least partially. New players and casual players maybe didn't want to do the grind anymore; they wanted the better stats gear quickly. Maybe they started their journey with TBC, so in order for them not to fall behind too much, the new green items had to be better than the Vanilla-purples? Walking/riding along the big world can be tedious. A casual player doesn't want to spend 20 minutes or longer to reach a dungeon. Much more convenient to hit that dungeon finder button and boom, you're there. But all that came at a price. The wonder and glory from the early days were gone, and with each expansion (though I still enjoyed TBC and WotLK a lot) the world shrank more and more, and it became a straight-line hunt for BIS gear from instances and raids. The original relationship between effort and reward was diluted, which was always the main motivator to play the game back then - at least for me.