Well those stories do sound nice and the type of game i like to play, i did not find any of that within Wow ever. He mentions asked to group but yeah with one person,hardly a group and WOW content is not exactly group content anyhow.He likely missed being in a group simply because soloing is boring as heck but that is Wow's desing in a nutshell. Now having currency...lmao,comparing Wow to say FFXi is a lol.In FFXI having currency was really tough,you had to do a lot of work to get Gil.In wow you simply run a quest and you get gold.You got VERY little gil in FFXI from anything,even some of the bigger longer quests offered meaningless gil.You had to earn it through selling items on the auction house.
As to the main topic of Wow vanilla versus now,the ONLY reason there is difference if because you are not level 1 anymore lol.It is still the EXACT same game,run around doing some meaningless quests get rewarded with gold/xp maybe some loot ,rinse and repeat.Want to feel l33t then go run instances,yep same game it has always been.
Now in comparison,FFXI has changed and by a lot,makes Wow changes look like meaningless.FFXI went from a predominant grouping game to where now you also solo just like Wow 99% of the time.Even worse inside of ow even during Vanilla MANY players were multi boxing so they could even solo group content.So yeah Blizzard created the ANTI MMO and called it a mmo lmao,,good job Blizzard.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
LOL, the very same things can be said about one's own childhood... that's why it's called nostalgia. Doesn't mean it was better or worse, just that the times have changed.
I remember being able to go to a 7-11 and buying 2 pieces of candy for half a cent... that's right, 2 pieces of candy for half a cent they charged... of course you had to purchase 4 pieces because they couldn't break change!
I remember riding a bike without a helmet... and it was legal!
I remember being driven around in cars that didn't even have seat belts... as a small child... and I lived!
I remember when the parking lot at a high school had like 5 spots for students and 30 for the staff... now it's like 200 spots for students and 30 for the staff!
See what I did there? I went down memory lane. It's called nostalgia.
Reality check my friend... but I sincerely doubt you (or whoever wrote the piece about vanilla) will be playing it nearly as intensely or for as long as those who did it back in the day. Times have changed. If the microwave takes 30 seconds to heat our food, that's 30 seconds more than we are willing to wait for it.
Now having said that - this was 10 years ago, my circumstances are very different today.
I don't have the time nor desire to play any mmo the way I played wow.
So bottom line - vanilla wow was a good fit for me 10 years ago, it's not something I would want to play today.
Pretty much.
It isn't just nostalgia like some people are saying. I played 3 expansions of WoW in total (TBC, WoTLK, Mists) and none of those experiences were ever even close to vanilla.
The big reason for me is probably the lack of metagame and knowledge about the game that was present for both myself and the community when I started up Vanilla. In other words: everyone was sort of clueless, which was also why you got the "help me kill this lvl 16 bear" requests in the OP.
When I come back to a new expansion of WoW or even start up another established game, the meta is already established, the knowledge is already there. Even new players are usually required by social pressure to inform themselves of the current meta, or they are told directly by tutorials in-game.
Ultimately this leads to the game becoming more like a number crunching act and ticking boxes off a checklist for me. Leading to me quitting.
Sadly, the same would be true if I came back to Vanilla. I'd already know everything that you needed to do. So while I might enjoy the nostalgia trip for a bit, it would soon become a checklist in my head once again.
Personally, the only game in recent times where I could really relive that feel of vanilla was Age of Wulin, a Chinese game. Pretty much because that one too was so alien and new that most people had to figure things out from scratch.
Feel free to use my referral link for SW:TOR if you want to test out the game. You'll get some special unlocks!
If wanting a game that allows a better Social interaction is being nostalgic, you are saying that being Social is a thing of the past and today it is irrelevant. On the other hand, if being Social is still relevant today (like I hope it is) then we should bring back those mechanisms that allowed more Social interaction in MMOs. EQ and Vanilla WoW did it very well.
Spamming trade and LFG chat is "better social interaction"?
You are not looking for "better social interaction", you are looking for specific ways that MMOs worked in the past and call it "better" just due your bias. It is indeed nostalgia.
LOL, the very same things can be said about one's own childhood... that's why it's called nostalgia. Doesn't mean it was better or worse, just that the times have changed.
I remember being able to go to a 7-11 and buying 2 pieces of candy for half a cent... that's right, 2 pieces of candy for half a cent they charged... of course you had to purchase 4 pieces because they couldn't break change!
I remember riding a bike without a helmet... and it was legal!
I remember being driven around in cars that didn't even have seat belts... as a small child... and I lived!
I remember when the parking lot at a high school had like 5 spots for students and 30 for the staff... now it's like 200 spots for students and 30 for the staff!
See what I did there? I went down memory lane. It's called nostalgia.
Reality check my friend... but I sincerely doubt you (or whoever wrote the piece about vanilla) will be playing it nearly as intensely or for as long as those who did it back in the day. Times have changed. If the microwave takes 30 seconds to heat our food, that's 30 seconds more than we are willing to wait for it.
You are avoiding the debate with bullshit. There are many posts here talking mechanics and why the game was drastically different than it is today. It is not nostalgia to discuss obvious differences. Your analogies are childish.
Vanilla Wow and modern Wow are 2 completely different games. Add different skins and lore and you wouldn't even know the 2 games were the same other than calling it yet another themepark clone.
Can you contribute to the debate other than tossing ignorance and irrelevant analogies? I fully recognize the differences in my lifestyle and interests as I have aged. This is what maturing is ... the understanding of the impact and spectrum of time. These responses devoid of construction fall apart by this very fact:
I played classic Wow the EXACT same way I play mmos today ... I was, and always will be a casual player. The fact remains that vanilla Wow was much more fun for me and all of my friends (who had jobs and even family back then that took more of their lives up because some had small children who are now grown up). My age group is entering a period where we have MORE time now than we had then yet the games we want simply do not exist now.
That is the true debate here. There is an undeniable group of players who want a certain type of game now just as much as they did then. This is not nostalgia but an understanding of where their interests lie and we do not give a single shit if people like you have lost interest in such games and reach for naive reasons to validate your lost interests. Don't play. Leave. Do not bug us. Bye bye ... but stop discounting other's opinions that do not align with yours like a child does.
Ya, and take a wild guess whether he'll be playing Legion or sticking with Vanilla in September. Vanilla is fun for a visit, but that's the extent of it. Also, I will never miss 40 man raids.
LOL, the very same things can be said about one's own childhood... that's why it's called nostalgia. Doesn't mean it was better or worse, just that the times have changed.
I remember being able to go to a 7-11 and buying 2 pieces of candy for half a cent... that's right, 2 pieces of candy for half a cent they charged... of course you had to purchase 4 pieces because they couldn't break change!
I remember riding a bike without a helmet... and it was legal!
I remember being driven around in cars that didn't even have seat belts... as a small child... and I lived!
I remember when the parking lot at a high school had like 5 spots for students and 30 for the staff... now it's like 200 spots for students and 30 for the staff!
See what I did there? I went down memory lane. It's called nostalgia.
Reality check my friend... but I sincerely doubt you (or whoever wrote the piece about vanilla) will be playing it nearly as intensely or for as long as those who did it back in the day. Times have changed. If the microwave takes 30 seconds to heat our food, that's 30 seconds more than we are willing to wait for it.
You are avoiding the debate with bullshit. There are many posts here talking mechanics and why the game was drastically different than it is today. It is not nostalgia to discuss obvious differences. Your analogies are childish.
Vanilla Wow and modern Wow are 2 completely different games. Add different skins and lore and you wouldn't even know the 2 games were the same other than calling it yet another themepark clone.
Can you contribute to the debate other than tossing ignorance and irrelevant analogies? I fully recognize the differences in my lifestyle and interests as I have aged. This is what maturing is ... the understanding of the impact and spectrum of time. These responses devoid of construction fall apart by this very fact:
I played classic Wow the EXACT same way I play mmos today ... I was, and always will be a casual player. The fact remains that vanilla Wow was much more fun for me and all of my friends (who had jobs and even family back then that took more of their lives up because some had small children who are now grown up). My age group is entering a period where we have MORE time now than we had then yet the games we want simply do not exist now.
That is the true debate here. There is an undeniable group of players who want a certain type of game now just as much as they did then. This is not nostalgia but an understanding of where their interests lie and we do not give a single shit if people like you have lost interest in such games and reach for naive reasons to validate your lost interests. Don't play. Leave. Do not bug us. Bye bye ... but stop discounting other's opinions that do not align with yours like a child does.
I enjoyed vanilla WoW because it was new. I enjoyed finding my favorite class and the adventures I had leveling that class. Now it's just more of the same which I've had enough of. I've always avoided gear treadmills so getting and having the latest gear of the moment means little to me. The new class that's coming looks good so I'll probably try it out.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Vanilla WoW was far ahead of it's time in terms of smooth gameplay and server ping. Hell even today it's the smoothest MMO to play BY FAR, that just isn't enough to spend $15 a month anymore.
It wasnt that good actually. It was only good considering the time and circumstances when it released. If the same game realesed today, everybody would shit on it and laugh how bad it is.
Playing Vanilla WoW is fun, but playing it back then was epic. I've been having a lot of fun on a vanilla private server, but I still look fondly back of my memories of the first time experiencing a new zone or dungeon. I was soo new at MMO's when this released I had a blast dying alot in an elite area.
Vanilla WoW was good for me at that time. I wanted new, flashy, and quick back then. I really wanted fast action combat in an mmo, and i got it and loved it.
These Days i want something more like EQ 1. Long term, tough, merciless. Vanilla was never that. It had some small remnants of those qualities, but not many.
That guy nailed it. Every thing he said only made it more clear that it was gameplay, not nostalgia, that made older MMOs more enjoyable. Also to note, the aspects of the game he liked so much were mainly derived from EQ.
People use the nostalgia to shutdown the conversation. Essentially saying it isn't real.
The nostalgia is real. Tawess explained how that works. It's just not enduring. It's temporal and the appeal fades.
Saying what the people experienced isn't real. Saying that it is nostalgia and not really what they are thinking/feeling. Shutting them down on what they are thinking. Basically a big "F U, you didn't it experience it that way it was nostalgia and who would know more about what you experience you or me?". The me being the person declaring it nostalgia IN CASE THAT WASN'T CLEAR.
So to reiterate. I never said nostalgia isn't real. Get that?
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what
it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience
because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in
the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you
playing an MMORPG?"
the OP answers his/her own question. Nostalgia. That's why anybody likes an old game. If WoW released today with it's vanilla content it would be shat on and everyone would hate it. It wasn't that good. It was just all there was.
The leveling in WoW has always been a strong point for it. The leveling in WoW, while boring and tedious a lot of the time, was not the biggest issue in vanilla. The difficulty during leveling wasn't the issue.
It was that you played the game until 60 and then the game completely changed for the worse. Suddenly you needed 39 other people if you wanted to do the best content. The dungeons went from being somewhat fun, not too long, to being long, tedious and boring, especially with the case of BRD. That place would take hours to finish and more often than not, groups would disband once they got to the room with the endless dwarf spawn and having to light torches because of how hard it was.
But of course, you had to go there for everything. Your MC attunement, quests, crafting, yada yada.
Plus getting groups together wasn't exactly easy. No group or raid finders. Basically just had to /who and message everyone you could to see if they might wanna do the same content if your guild fell through (which was easy, since players were more spread out at the time, rather than all having multiple characters capped). I don't remember shouting being too helpful overall. In the end, was 50-50 if anything got done at all.
Not to mention, assuming I did find 39 other people to play with, every time I actually got into MC with people, everyone seemed to be so pissy like it was a job and they were in no way having fun. This may not have changed much for some people, but imo it was worse back then.
If you wanted to PvP, the best, if not all gear was out of range for most people because it was based around being the "best", or ranking up, which went up and down depending on your participation, so it would go down as you were logged out becuse others were advancing, so to be the top rank you actually had to play the maybe 3 BG's non-stop all day every day or risk losing the momentum and rank.
You Prefer it because you never belong playing WOW in the first place. I can tell you that YOU are the reason you had problems in BRD. What it long? Yes it was. How many times did I do it in the 2 years, maybe 40+ times. Did I ever do it all in 1 run? Fuck no I knew it was a long ass run so my friends and I only did the parts that we needed, the game was not designed for people like you with ADD that cannot handle dedicated game play. Today this is EXACTLY why we have MMOs in the toliet and EXACTLY why we will never see a good game again. We have Kickstarters today which are going back to mechanics that sucked like Permadeath, and XP losses when you die, or even corpse runs or else you loose your gear. Its because of YOU these retarded mechanics are coming back. I played with hundreds of people I had a huge social network of people on my server for 40 man raids, 20 man raids and yes I will AGREE that getting that many people was a PAIN. BUT thats it, It could have been better with 10/20 man raids because it wouldnt have taken an ASS hole like myself to raid lead.
You bitch about having problems finding groups yet you FAIL to understand the simple rule of MMOS. SOCIAL CIRCLES MATTER and AUTOMATED GROUP FINDER TOOLS KILLED THAT. If you cannot or are not willing to make friends, GO PLAY A SINGLE PLAYER GAME. Because you wouldnt we have complete crap today for MMOS, we have to go to P2W because they are cheap on the content, so boring and mind numbingly easy because people like you wanted it. Well guess what that got us? Yep a bunch of CEOs and Marketing managers running the game to get people like you to part with your hard earned money for a pile of shit for a game. You should not be in an MMO if you are not going to work at playing with other people. Period end of story as much as you want to bitch about time, so do I. But guess what the future brings. Instead of MMOs with Depth we get MMOs that are either going to be nothing more than MOBAS OR Kickstarters that will be dead servers with moronic gimmicks like Permadeath but if you give us another $10s you can start your character over shit. Remember IS PEOPLE LIKE YOU THAT CAUSED IT.
Was Vanilla/TBC perfect? No. But it beats anything on the market with the release of WOTLK and on. Period you have 0 facts to back it that WOW today is better than the first 4 years. Just today in my FFXIV FC we talked about how Casuals who never belonged in MMOs has hurt this industry. ALL of us never touched Naxx 1.0, or Sunwell. Yet we loved ever bit of the content, the only consistent grip about the first 4 years of WOW is raids were a little too large, they could have done a little better tuning on CC in dungeons to the point you didnt need more than 3 at most BUT you would still need CC, and had a much better Group Finder tool that was like FFXIVs Party Tool or todays WOW Group Finder tool. You never needed LFD/LFR.
the OP answers his/her own question. Nostalgia. That's why anybody likes an old game. If WoW released today with it's vanilla content it would be shat on and everyone would hate it. It wasn't that good. It was just all there was.
Yea thats what you think. Thats why WOW is dying. Yes it will go up for the next Xpac but you know what it will be under 5 Million if not 4 Million about 6 to 9 months into the next Xpac. I called WOW being under 6 Million with WOD. Why? Because I played the beta and its the same bitchy players that dont want to lift a finger in the game for anything. Now they are bitching just to have gear mailed to them. Why? Because people like you think there is no room for a Vanillia LIKE MMO. Do we need large raids 21+ members NO. Do we need LFG tools? NO. Do we need instances that are like WOD where you are just mashing buttons as fast as possible? NO. Do we need Vanilla WOW or WildStar like Attunements? NOPE.
So what do people who want Vanilla or TBC WOW really want? Dungeons that are not like the new Legion dungeon in this video. Trash is just useless today, we should be CCing 2 to 3 mobs like In Vanilla which require a bit of TEAMWORK. Today its, CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK as fast as you possibly can. No real thought to the content.
We want Separate Content between 10 and 20 man raids NOT LFR RAID 1, NORMAL RAID 1, HEROIC RAID 1, MYTHIC RAID 1. Thats Boring as hell and is just designed to fail. you dont believe so then why is WOW Bleeding Subs? Why cant we have for example ZG, AQ, ZA, Kara all 10 man and MC, NAXX, SoO, 20? Why do we need to have 4 versions of the same raid. Again its boring and pointless.
We also want more than 8 Dungeons. I am thinking like 16 normal for an expansion (This could be LFD but should still require at least 1 to 2 CCs for trash O and trash packs should be a lot fewer. More like a training dungeon) and 16 Heroics like TBC heroics with CC is a must BUT not as Hard as TBC was because some of the dungeons were hard. Maybe like Vanilla Dungeons were. And NO LFD tool here. If you want to use this as a gearing path then great find friends
I am Tired of you people not understanding what people are saying when they say they miss Vanilla and TBC WOW and thinking that was a terrible time. It was only Terrible for you because you refused to take responsibility for your own game time. I had good and bad times in this 4 year time frame. However its 100 times better than any time I had since WOTLK or and other game I played. The fact still remains that WOW is dying because people like you 2 that usher in players that want to play games like Farmville or Dragon Age and NOT an MMO. Because of that we have a SHITTY MMO future ahead of us at least for the next 2 to 3 years if not more.
I enjoyed vanilla WoW because it was new. I enjoyed finding my favorite class and the adventures I had leveling that class. Now it's just more of the same which I've had enough of. I've always avoided gear treadmills so getting and having the latest gear of the moment means little to me. The new class that's coming looks good so I'll probably try it out.
It was made a gear treadmill in my mind once WOTLK came out. Here is why. The first 4 years of WOW was Vanilla WOW and TBC, Yes you had to do 1 tier to get to the next tier. That is what is call Progression right. You can argue well its a treadmill. Here is why I say its not. Since WOTLK you did 1 version of the Raid just to do another Version. (I am not pointing at Hard Mode Instances and Normal Mode instances because one is leveling and training and the other is a gear up progression.) There is where you started the treadmill, the minute you had to do the SAME Raid over and over. Thus the treadmill. Now its not a Size difference of the same raid, its just a Welfare Mode and a Hard Mode. This is because players from Single Player games wanted an Easy and Hard Mode So we got it now. So now we have the TreadMill. Do LFR SoO or Highmaul or any of the other Raids today, then do Normal Mode, Then Do Heroic Mode, Then Do Mythic. If you are lucky you start at Normal then go to Heroic. Still its a Gear TreadMill.
When I went from ZG to AQ20 I was like WOW A NEW RAID. From Kara to ZA WOW A NEW RAID, MC to BWL, WOW A NEW RAID. A completely new raid not the same raid OVER AND OVER AGAIN. Thank you people who dont belong in MMOs for ruining our games because you wanted your ass catered too.
I am so tired of this shit like many of the friends I played MMOs with. I think its time I too leave the Genera. Hell I still keep in contact with....O around 210 or so people. 30 or so are playing any MMO right now. The rest all go back to WOW for the Xpac and hope that WOW gets back certain things from Vanilla and TBC but get disappointed after a month and leave. Just about all of those 210 people played either Vanilla or TBC WOW. All miss certain core features that people like Muffins89 and Ghavrigg thinks are better in WOW today than what it was like in Vanilla. And no while some do miss the 20 and 40 man raids, most really miss Kara, ZA, ZG, AQ20, Hell even Gruuls SCC and MC. BUT they all agree smaller raids are better.
Welcome to what people who do not belong in MMOs want today. This is why MMOs are in a state of shit and we are going to see more Publishers shut down MMOs like we have in the last 2 years, and we will not see any new AAA MMO for a few years. Because it should have been left to people who want to play with other people and want some level of their brain to be used when in a dungeon not today's Mash Button As Fast AS possible bs. They think of things like Why do we need sheep just AOE shit down.
Fine....it's "nostalgia"......I don't care....call it "Fishing on a Sunday afternoon" for all I care. I just want someone to release something like that again.
What you want is something that makes you feel like that again. Releasing that again may not do it.
The problem with the OPs argument is that guy had a nostalgic experience and took a snapshot of it. We don't know if it's still delivering that. We don't know if that will really last. Tawess made a great point about the nostalgia. He's enjoying it, but will he continue that over time?
Except that I am having fun playing a game that we can't discuss here.
The whole "it's nostalgia goggles" is BS! For many people, including myself, the game was truly better to us back then. The reasons why it was better back then may vary from person to person but for me vanilla and TBC WoW, EQ, Shadowbane, etc had immersion, which every game basically lacks now with fast travel, dungeon queues, raid queues, etc. In addition to games lacking immersion most also lack the emphasis on the "multiplayer" aspect as well. Just because there are other people roaming about doesn't really mean you are playing with them.
The real problem with this genre is that the industry has decided for us that people don't want to be forced to play with other people so that they can sell more games to people that aren't fans of the industry to begin with, which obviously makes no sense to the MMO gamers but makes perfect sense from a money making standpoint.
What once made this genre so incredible to me was the community experience, which is all but gone for the most part. I never played any MMO because the solo play and story was so amazing, I played because I loved the community aspects of the games.
You always hear that WoW negatively impacted the community and I agree but not for the reasons that most people say, I think WoW hurt the community (and itself) by being so successful. When you have 12 million subscribers and you are raking in that kind of money the focus shifts from wooing the people that love the franchise to wooing everyone which is an impossible task. As for other developers the focus has been either lets do another WoW, or more common recently, lets do the anti WoW and neither approach really makes much sense. WoW became what it was because it expanded on and improved upon the priciples of it's predicessors, which is typically the way progress happens in all aspects of life.
I'm a big lover of Vanilla/TBC as well. WotLK turned me off the game and now I probably don't have the time to play it anyway so it was probably for the best.
The reason I liked it though hasn't been touched on much in this thread (at least through skimming it). I wasn't really one for the journey. I raced to 60 as quick as I could and I think it took me 13 days of game time, which wasn't bad back in the day. I never read the quests and I spent many an hour grinding to avoid zones if possible.
Where the game shined for me was end-game, Onyxia attunements, UBRS/LBRS runs, server firsts. I was lucky enough to be in a progression guild that didn't take itself serious, so while we rarely got servers firsts, we would get there 2-3 weeks later which was still better than 90% of the server.
The epicness of the dungeons has surely been lost. Someone mentioned earlier that they found BRD boring. I found exploring it to be probably my best time in WoW. I loved how you came in with varying objectives and the place was so big that you worked out shortcuts to get to the bit you wanted. Then there were also rare bosses, so occasionally you'd come across one of those and get some gimmicky item. Brilliant!
There was something about working together and getting good loot. I remember I'd be standing around in the bank and someone would say "Holy shit! Where'd you get all your purples?" I'd be like, "Molten Core" and you'd think I'd told them I was the 2nd coming of christ. Then the devs went down this track of making content for everyone to see. While I understood the concept of it the game was up to something like 11M players before they did that. While I was rolling through AQ40 and Nax, others were getting their groove on in ZG and Molten core. If you couldn't organize 40 man raids there was still ZG and AQ20. Everyone had something to aspire to. Sure some people felt like they were missing out, but in the end almost no-one saw all the content. Moist of the whingers were just jealous.
I also think that Youtube has kind of wrecked it now as well. One of the best things about content back then was figuring it out for yourself. We debated for hours on the best methods for tanking Onyxia or clearing the adds of Ragnaros. Now you just get up to a new boss and go watch some semi-professional nerds tell you how to do it. /snore.
lets be honest. gamers want to be spoon feed these days. that's why WoW changed with the times. there are very few complex games that give risk/reward.
Questing and leveling was much more group-oriented back then. Nothing else has really changed in a huge way like some people think, except for faster leveling.
Your taste in music tends to be set by the first music you buy for yourself.
It shouldn't be surprising that most people tend to favor the features of the first game they really enjoyed.
But what's good for [Billy Joe Bob] may not be good for the [MMO Genre]. And if too many Billys are still living in the last century, the genre may find it difficult to evolve.
Stasis is never good for an industry.
Funny thing that, I listen to popular alternative with a touch of hip hop.
Evolution is fine if we are really moving forward, but I question that making everything more simple and casual is moving the genre forward, in fact MMORPGs appear to have almost died off.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Comments
He mentions asked to group but yeah with one person,hardly a group and WOW content is not exactly group content anyhow.He likely missed being in a group simply because soloing is boring as heck but that is Wow's desing in a nutshell.
Now having currency...lmao,comparing Wow to say FFXi is a lol.In FFXI having currency was really tough,you had to do a lot of work to get Gil.In wow you simply run a quest and you get gold.You got VERY little gil in FFXI from anything,even some of the bigger longer quests offered meaningless gil.You had to earn it through selling items on the auction house.
As to the main topic of Wow vanilla versus now,the ONLY reason there is difference if because you are not level 1 anymore lol.It is still the EXACT same game,run around doing some meaningless quests get rewarded with gold/xp maybe some loot ,rinse and repeat.Want to feel l33t then go run instances,yep same game it has always been.
Now in comparison,FFXI has changed and by a lot,makes Wow changes look like meaningless.FFXI went from a predominant grouping game to where now you also solo just like Wow 99% of the time.Even worse inside of ow even during Vanilla MANY players were multi boxing so they could even solo group content.So yeah Blizzard created the ANTI MMO and called it a mmo lmao,,good job Blizzard.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I remember being able to go to a 7-11 and buying 2 pieces of candy for half a cent... that's right, 2 pieces of candy for half a cent they charged... of course you had to purchase 4 pieces because they couldn't break change!
I remember riding a bike without a helmet... and it was legal!
I remember being driven around in cars that didn't even have seat belts... as a small child... and I lived!
I remember when the parking lot at a high school had like 5 spots for students and 30 for the staff... now it's like 200 spots for students and 30 for the staff!
See what I did there? I went down memory lane. It's called nostalgia.
Reality check my friend... but I sincerely doubt you (or whoever wrote the piece about vanilla) will be playing it nearly as intensely or for as long as those who did it back in the day. Times have changed. If the microwave takes 30 seconds to heat our food, that's 30 seconds more than we are willing to wait for it.
It isn't just nostalgia like some people are saying. I played 3 expansions of WoW in total (TBC, WoTLK, Mists) and none of those experiences were ever even close to vanilla.
The big reason for me is probably the lack of metagame and knowledge about the game that was present for both myself and the community when I started up Vanilla. In other words: everyone was sort of clueless, which was also why you got the "help me kill this lvl 16 bear" requests in the OP.
When I come back to a new expansion of WoW or even start up another established game, the meta is already established, the knowledge is already there. Even new players are usually required by social pressure to inform themselves of the current meta, or they are told directly by tutorials in-game.
Ultimately this leads to the game becoming more like a number crunching act and ticking boxes off a checklist for me. Leading to me quitting.
Sadly, the same would be true if I came back to Vanilla. I'd already know everything that you needed to do. So while I might enjoy the nostalgia trip for a bit, it would soon become a checklist in my head once again.
Personally, the only game in recent times where I could really relive that feel of vanilla was Age of Wulin, a Chinese game. Pretty much because that one too was so alien and new that most people had to figure things out from scratch.
Feel free to use my referral link for SW:TOR if you want to test out the game. You'll get some special unlocks!
You are not looking for "better social interaction", you are looking for specific ways that MMOs worked in the past and call it "better" just due your bias. It is indeed nostalgia.
Baffling, to certain individuals.
Vanilla Wow and modern Wow are 2 completely different games. Add different skins and lore and you wouldn't even know the 2 games were the same other than calling it yet another themepark clone.
Can you contribute to the debate other than tossing ignorance and irrelevant analogies? I fully recognize the differences in my lifestyle and interests as I have aged. This is what maturing is ... the understanding of the impact and spectrum of time. These responses devoid of construction fall apart by this very fact:
I played classic Wow the EXACT same way I play mmos today ... I was, and always will be a casual player. The fact remains that vanilla Wow was much more fun for me and all of my friends (who had jobs and even family back then that took more of their lives up because some had small children who are now grown up). My age group is entering a period where we have MORE time now than we had then yet the games we want simply do not exist now.
That is the true debate here. There is an undeniable group of players who want a certain type of game now just as much as they did then. This is not nostalgia but an understanding of where their interests lie and we do not give a single shit if people like you have lost interest in such games and reach for naive reasons to validate your lost interests. Don't play. Leave. Do not bug us. Bye bye ... but stop discounting other's opinions that do not align with yours like a child does.
You stay sassy!
Your opinion is just like it.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
These Days i want something more like EQ 1. Long term, tough, merciless. Vanilla was never that. It had some small remnants of those qualities, but not many.
Vanilla WoW was my poisoned Apple.
Saying what the people experienced isn't real. Saying that it is nostalgia and not really what they are thinking/feeling. Shutting them down on what they are thinking. Basically a big "F U, you didn't it experience it that way it was nostalgia and who would know more about what you experience you or me?". The me being the person declaring it nostalgia IN CASE THAT WASN'T CLEAR.
So to reiterate. I never said nostalgia isn't real. Get that?
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
Terrain was immersive; took time to cross, mountains and forests were obstacles, not decorations.
Enemy camps were dangerous. Pathing, aggro radius, casting mechanics, etc, were all tuned to create real danger.
Consumable resources; food and drink, ammo, potions, etc, were expensive and important.
It was that you played the game until 60 and then the game completely changed for the worse. Suddenly you needed 39 other people if you wanted to do the best content. The dungeons went from being somewhat fun, not too long, to being long, tedious and boring, especially with the case of BRD. That place would take hours to finish and more often than not, groups would disband once they got to the room with the endless dwarf spawn and having to light torches because of how hard it was.
But of course, you had to go there for everything. Your MC attunement, quests, crafting, yada yada.
Plus getting groups together wasn't exactly easy. No group or raid finders. Basically just had to /who and message everyone you could to see if they might wanna do the same content if your guild fell through (which was easy, since players were more spread out at the time, rather than all having multiple characters capped). I don't remember shouting being too helpful overall. In the end, was 50-50 if anything got done at all.
Not to mention, assuming I did find 39 other people to play with, every time I actually got into MC with people, everyone seemed to be so pissy like it was a job and they were in no way having fun. This may not have changed much for some people, but imo it was worse back then.
If you wanted to PvP, the best, if not all gear was out of range for most people because it was based around being the "best", or ranking up, which went up and down depending on your participation, so it would go down as you were logged out becuse others were advancing, so to be the top rank you actually had to play the maybe 3 BG's non-stop all day every day or risk losing the momentum and rank.
I much prefer the WoW of today to vanilla WoW.
You bitch about having problems finding groups yet you FAIL to understand the simple rule of MMOS. SOCIAL CIRCLES MATTER and AUTOMATED GROUP FINDER TOOLS KILLED THAT. If you cannot or are not willing to make friends, GO PLAY A SINGLE PLAYER GAME. Because you wouldnt we have complete crap today for MMOS, we have to go to P2W because they are cheap on the content, so boring and mind numbingly easy because people like you wanted it. Well guess what that got us? Yep a bunch of CEOs and Marketing managers running the game to get people like you to part with your hard earned money for a pile of shit for a game. You should not be in an MMO if you are not going to work at playing with other people. Period end of story as much as you want to bitch about time, so do I. But guess what the future brings. Instead of MMOs with Depth we get MMOs that are either going to be nothing more than MOBAS OR Kickstarters that will be dead servers with moronic gimmicks like Permadeath but if you give us another $10s you can start your character over shit. Remember IS PEOPLE LIKE YOU THAT CAUSED IT.
Was Vanilla/TBC perfect? No. But it beats anything on the market with the release of WOTLK and on. Period you have 0 facts to back it that WOW today is better than the first 4 years. Just today in my FFXIV FC we talked about how Casuals who never belonged in MMOs has hurt this industry. ALL of us never touched Naxx 1.0, or Sunwell. Yet we loved ever bit of the content, the only consistent grip about the first 4 years of WOW is raids were a little too large, they could have done a little better tuning on CC in dungeons to the point you didnt need more than 3 at most BUT you would still need CC, and had a much better Group Finder tool that was like FFXIVs Party Tool or todays WOW Group Finder tool. You never needed LFD/LFR.
Yea thats what you think. Thats why WOW is dying. Yes it will go up for the next Xpac but you know what it will be under 5 Million if not 4 Million about 6 to 9 months into the next Xpac. I called WOW being under 6 Million with WOD. Why? Because I played the beta and its the same bitchy players that dont want to lift a finger in the game for anything. Now they are bitching just to have gear mailed to them. Why? Because people like you think there is no room for a Vanillia LIKE MMO. Do we need large raids 21+ members NO. Do we need LFG tools? NO. Do we need instances that are like WOD where you are just mashing buttons as fast as possible? NO. Do we need Vanilla WOW or WildStar like Attunements? NOPE.
So what do people who want Vanilla or TBC WOW really want? Dungeons that are not like the new Legion dungeon in this video.
We want Separate Content between 10 and 20 man raids NOT LFR RAID 1, NORMAL RAID 1, HEROIC RAID 1, MYTHIC RAID 1. Thats Boring as hell and is just designed to fail. you dont believe so then why is WOW Bleeding Subs? Why cant we have for example ZG, AQ, ZA, Kara all 10 man and MC, NAXX, SoO, 20? Why do we need to have 4 versions of the same raid. Again its boring and pointless.
We also want more than 8 Dungeons. I am thinking like 16 normal for an expansion (This could be LFD but should still require at least 1 to 2 CCs for trash O and trash packs should be a lot fewer. More like a training dungeon) and 16 Heroics like TBC heroics with CC is a must BUT not as Hard as TBC was because some of the dungeons were hard. Maybe like Vanilla Dungeons were. And NO LFD tool here. If you want to use this as a gearing path then great find friends
I am Tired of you people not understanding what people are saying when they say they miss Vanilla and TBC WOW and thinking that was a terrible time. It was only Terrible for you because you refused to take responsibility for your own game time. I had good and bad times in this 4 year time frame. However its 100 times better than any time I had since WOTLK or and other game I played. The fact still remains that WOW is dying because people like you 2 that usher in players that want to play games like Farmville or Dragon Age and NOT an MMO. Because of that we have a SHITTY MMO future ahead of us at least for the next 2 to 3 years if not more.
It was made a gear treadmill in my mind once WOTLK came out. Here is why. The first 4 years of WOW was Vanilla WOW and TBC, Yes you had to do 1 tier to get to the next tier. That is what is call Progression right. You can argue well its a treadmill. Here is why I say its not. Since WOTLK you did 1 version of the Raid just to do another Version. (I am not pointing at Hard Mode Instances and Normal Mode instances because one is leveling and training and the other is a gear up progression.) There is where you started the treadmill, the minute you had to do the SAME Raid over and over. Thus the treadmill. Now its not a Size difference of the same raid, its just a Welfare Mode and a Hard Mode. This is because players from Single Player games wanted an Easy and Hard Mode So we got it now. So now we have the TreadMill. Do LFR SoO or Highmaul or any of the other Raids today, then do Normal Mode, Then Do Heroic Mode, Then Do Mythic. If you are lucky you start at Normal then go to Heroic. Still its a Gear TreadMill.
When I went from ZG to AQ20 I was like WOW A NEW RAID. From Kara to ZA WOW A NEW RAID, MC to BWL, WOW A NEW RAID. A completely new raid not the same raid OVER AND OVER AGAIN. Thank you people who dont belong in MMOs for ruining our games because you wanted your ass catered too.
I am so tired of this shit like many of the friends I played MMOs with. I think its time I too leave the Genera. Hell I still keep in contact with....O around 210 or so people. 30 or so are playing any MMO right now. The rest all go back to WOW for the Xpac and hope that WOW gets back certain things from Vanilla and TBC but get disappointed after a month and leave. Just about all of those 210 people played either Vanilla or TBC WOW. All miss certain core features that people like Muffins89 and Ghavrigg thinks are better in WOW today than what it was like in Vanilla. And no while some do miss the 20 and 40 man raids, most really miss Kara, ZA, ZG, AQ20, Hell even Gruuls SCC and MC. BUT they all agree smaller raids are better.
Welcome to what people who do not belong in MMOs want today. This is why MMOs are in a state of shit and we are going to see more Publishers shut down MMOs like we have in the last 2 years, and we will not see any new AAA MMO for a few years. Because it should have been left to people who want to play with other people and want some level of their brain to be used when in a dungeon not today's Mash Button As Fast AS possible bs. They think of things like Why do we need sheep just AOE shit down.
The real problem with this genre is that the industry has decided for us that people don't want to be forced to play with other people so that they can sell more games to people that aren't fans of the industry to begin with, which obviously makes no sense to the MMO gamers but makes perfect sense from a money making standpoint.
What once made this genre so incredible to me was the community experience, which is all but gone for the most part. I never played any MMO because the solo play and story was so amazing, I played because I loved the community aspects of the games.
You always hear that WoW negatively impacted the community and I agree but not for the reasons that most people say, I think WoW hurt the community (and itself) by being so successful. When you have 12 million subscribers and you are raking in that kind of money the focus shifts from wooing the people that love the franchise to wooing everyone which is an impossible task. As for other developers the focus has been either lets do another WoW, or more common recently, lets do the anti WoW and neither approach really makes much sense. WoW became what it was because it expanded on and improved upon the priciples of it's predicessors, which is typically the way progress happens in all aspects of life.
The reason I liked it though hasn't been touched on much in this thread (at least through skimming it). I wasn't really one for the journey. I raced to 60 as quick as I could and I think it took me 13 days of game time, which wasn't bad back in the day. I never read the quests and I spent many an hour grinding to avoid zones if possible.
Where the game shined for me was end-game, Onyxia attunements, UBRS/LBRS runs, server firsts. I was lucky enough to be in a progression guild that didn't take itself serious, so while we rarely got servers firsts, we would get there 2-3 weeks later which was still better than 90% of the server.
The epicness of the dungeons has surely been lost. Someone mentioned earlier that they found BRD boring. I found exploring it to be probably my best time in WoW. I loved how you came in with varying objectives and the place was so big that you worked out shortcuts to get to the bit you wanted. Then there were also rare bosses, so occasionally you'd come across one of those and get some gimmicky item. Brilliant!
There was something about working together and getting good loot. I remember I'd be standing around in the bank and someone would say "Holy shit! Where'd you get all your purples?" I'd be like, "Molten Core" and you'd think I'd told them I was the 2nd coming of christ. Then the devs went down this track of making content for everyone to see. While I understood the concept of it the game was up to something like 11M players before they did that. While I was rolling through AQ40 and Nax, others were getting their groove on in ZG and Molten core. If you couldn't organize 40 man raids there was still ZG and AQ20. Everyone had something to aspire to. Sure some people felt like they were missing out, but in the end almost no-one saw all the content. Moist of the whingers were just jealous.
I also think that Youtube has kind of wrecked it now as well. One of the best things about content back then was figuring it out for yourself. We debated for hours on the best methods for tanking Onyxia or clearing the adds of Ragnaros. Now you just get up to a new boss and go watch some semi-professional nerds tell you how to do it. /snore.
Evolution is fine if we are really moving forward, but I question that making everything more simple and casual is moving the genre forward, in fact MMORPGs appear to have almost died off.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
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