Also, since you already own the game - free to play for characters from Level 1 to Level 20, and several of the xpacs are now included (all but the last two maybe?). Your higher level characters will be locked until you resub though.
I'm not sure if I'd be able to recover my account now even if I wanted to. I haven't had access to send anything from the e-mail address it was registered to in about a decade, and while I set it to forward to the one I use now, I'm not 100% certain that it does. For all I know, my account could have been hacked and stolen years ago and I'd never know it.
I was considering starting fresh. From Blizzard's site, it looks like it's free up to level 20, then a subscription alone is sufficient up to 110, and you only need to buy an expansion beyond that. Having bought the box for the original game wouldn't benefit me at all now. And leveling from 1-60 is probably also massively faster than it used to be. Is there some reason why that would be massively inferior to trying to recover my old account?
A few years ago some people I worked with wanted to me to play WOW with them again. I had not played in like 8 years. I was able to call Blizzard and get my account back without too much headache. I think I needed to email a picture my DL and the CD key. I may not be remembering correctly. I was able to get it done in one phone call though and they waited while I sent the info.
“It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.”
Also, since you already own the game - free to play for characters from Level 1 to Level 20, and several of the xpacs are now included (all but the last two maybe?). Your higher level characters will be locked until you resub though.
I'm not sure if I'd be able to recover my account now even if I wanted to. I haven't had access to send anything from the e-mail address it was registered to in about a decade, and while I set it to forward to the one I use now, I'm not 100% certain that it does. For all I know, my account could have been hacked and stolen years ago and I'd never know it.
I was considering starting fresh. From Blizzard's site, it looks like it's free up to level 20, then a subscription alone is sufficient up to 110, and you only need to buy an expansion beyond that. Having bought the box for the original game wouldn't benefit me at all now. And leveling from 1-60 is probably also massively faster than it used to be. Is there some reason why that would be massively inferior to trying to recover my old account?
A few years ago some people I worked with wanted to me to play WOW with them again. I had not played in like 8 years. I was able to call Blizzard and get my account back without too much headache. I think I needed to email a picture my DL and the CD key. I may not be remembering correctly. I was able to get it done in one phone call though and they waited while I sent the info.
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
I can only speak for myself. WOW is not worth getting into at this point. The skill system is pretty much garbage, or was when I played a couple of years ago. That kind of killed any chance that I return.
“It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.”
It's downloading now. Thank you to the people who took my questions seriously rather than assuming that anyone who didn't already know all about the latest version of WoW must be trolling. I know where Mankrik's wife is (or at least, where she was), but not things that everyone who ever logged into Cataclysm would already know.
For now, it's a trial account, attached to the same account that I once played Hearthstone on. I don't see any dire need to recover my old account that had WoW on it. If I don't run into something that kills the game for me pretty quickly, I'll probably attach a subscription. Using a gamepad means that I sometimes find some peculiar thing that blocks gamepad use to be completely game-breaking, even if most people who play the game aren't aware of it. I don't see any point in buying Battle for Azeroth anytime soon.
It looks like the different specializations within a class are so different as to practically be different classes themselves. That certainly wasn't the case in Vanilla. Good thing Blizzard doesn't try to charge people who like alts $15 per character slot. Meanwhile, the Death Knight and Demon Hunter classes start at high levels, so I'll ignore them for a while.
Thank you to the people who took my questions seriously rather than assuming that anyone who didn't already know all about the latest version of WoW must be trolling.
I'm still trying out how anyone on this site has not seen you post, it's like somehow you and Kyleran are in every single thread. Anyone who has read anything you have ever posted would know you weren't trolling.
I'm actually fairly well known for writing walls of text. When I played WoW in Vanilla, I once made a very long forum post that was several thousand words. Someone chopped the first ten paragraphs off of it, removed all other paragraph separators, and posted it elsewhere. For a while, copy/pasting that mangled version of my post was a popular way to troll the forum. At its peak, Google found over 200 hits for it.
The download is done. I expect to try the game tomorrow. My expectations going in are:
1) The combat won't be very good, but won't be that bad, either. That would be a significant improvement from Vanilla.
2) Crafting will still be terrible, just like Vanilla. But it will still be readily possible to ignore it. My plan is to take gathering professions and auction house the stuff.
3) The gear system will be poorly suited to my tastes, just like Vanilla. But also like Vanilla, it won't really break anything other than PVP and the endgame, which is to say, things that I don't particularly care about.
4) The rest of the game will be pretty good, which would be an improvement over Vanilla in some ways and not others. Blizzard is famous for their polish, which is something that was also good in Vanilla apart from server stability being awful and about half of the escort quests being broken in one way or another.
Point (1) is the key thing to evaluate, as a mostly combat game lives and dies by its combat. FFXIV managed to do pretty much everything well except that it was a mostly combat game with bad combat, and that meant I didn't like the game.
I think @Quizzical you should try a rogue or paladin. Rogue because you can perhaps use more combat options and the paladin because you need to renew seal use different seals and attacks and can also tank , dps and heal so that gives you quite a lot of options that don't involve standing still and casting. I am not sure about the demon hunter or deathknight because I have never played them but they might also alleviate some of the boredom associated with combat in WoW.
Now that I've played it for a bit, the look and feel of the game is still very similar to Vanilla WoW. WoW in its latest incarnation is much, much closer to being Vanilla WoW than it is to being Guild Wars 2, FFXIV, Neverwinter, or any other particular game that is not WoW and never was.
But if you really like a game except for one small thing that completely wrecked it for you, fixing that one thing can make a huge difference in your enjoyment of the game, even if the game is objectively almost the same as before. I haven't seen any reason to doubt the claims that a lot of the things that I disliked about Vanilla WoW are improved or even completely fixed by now, and plenty of reason to believe them.
For me, probably the biggest problem with Vanilla was the time it took to do a group dungeon. The description of grouping in WoW now makes it sound more like Elsword (the game with a group finder that actually works) than Vanilla WoW.
That said, it seems vanishingly unlikely that I'll really love WoW in its latest form, mainly because the combat still isn't going to be that good. I'll play it a while longer, but I have no idea how much longer. I was also planning on giving Secret World Legends a try sometime, and considering returning to Elsword, Tree of Savior, Trove, or Kritika, all of which I quit for reasons other than disliking the game or being tired of it:
Elsword: ran out of content other than endgame grinding; more has been added since Tree of Savior: playing too much made one particular spot hurt, forcing me to back off Trove: I was playing a different game at the same time and decided to drop Trove and just play that other game Kritika: my gamepad broke, so I had to quit and play a game that worked without it, and I had moved on by the time I replaced the gamepad
Now that I've played it some, my verdict on some of the original complaints:
1) Combat is definitely faster and more active--and much less dependent on auto-attack than it was in Vanilla. I still don't think it's good exactly, but it's not bad, either. That's an improvement.
2) In most situations, this is completely fixed by level scaling, with the possible exception of the endgame content at the level cap. But endgame content doesn't matter. Not having the narrow, harsh level ranges in which content had to be done is a huge deal, and without that fix, I'd probably have quit again by now.
3) I haven't gotten there yet. We'll see.
4) Travel is still slow, but less slow than it used to be. They also give you mounts sooner, which helps. Maybe travel will seem fine once I get a flying mount. So it's perhaps still a problem, but less so than it was in Vanilla. Having to travel does give you a sense of where various places are relative to each other, unlike a game such as Kritika where everything feels disconnected. But Champions Online demonstrated that you still get that same sense of place if you let players travel very fast (but not instantly), and without annoyingly long wait times to get where you're going.
5) I haven't tried this yet.
6) Seems fixed, as I haven't yet had any downtime other than the scheduled maintenance. Gilneas is incredibly laggy, but people say that's because the zone is broken, not because of server problems.
7) I haven't tried this yet.
8) This is likely fixed by the level scaling system, but it will take a while to see how it plays out.
9) This doesn't actually matter very much. From what I've read, it sounds like this isn't fixed.
10) This is fixed for mana and not for health. At least at the low levels, you have a practically inexhaustible supply of mana, to the extent that it makes me wonder why it even exists as a resource. Maybe that changes as you get to higher levels, but for now, it seems like healing spells are the only ones that take meaningful amounts of mana. If you can heal yourself, that means it'x fixed, period. If you can't, then having to stop and wait for a minute for health to refill now and then is annoying.
11) This is unchanged from Vanilla. It's still rare, but it still happens. And while rare, it's still annoying to be told that you can't play the area that you wanted to today because Blizzard decided it would be a good idea to encourage griefing.
12) I don't see much non-English text from other players, but that's largely because I don't see much text from other players at all. It seems to have gone the way of most MMORPGs, with communication among players basically non-existent. So I have no clue what fraction of the players don't speak any common language with me.
13) The base UI is substantially improved from Vanilla, but still much worse than most MMORPGs. After all these years, why can't Blizzard find someone competent to build a decent UI?
14) The gear system is completely redone since Vanilla, and greatly simplified. A player might want different gear for different builds, especially when changing specialization. But the old specialized resist gear seems to be impossible now, which is a good thing.
15) I haven't tried this yet.
16) This is not substantially changed from Vanilla.
Playing for a while has reminded me of some other things that I disliked about Vanilla:
1) Kill stealing. In the sense of killing mobs, this is now fixed. Rather than tagging mobs as happened in Vanilla, if multiple players damage a mob, they all get credit for killing it. But picking up quest items is not shared like that, so fighting over quest items that are not mob drops sometimes happens. So in the quest item sense, it's not fixed, but it is much improved since Vanilla.
2) Stealing harvesting resources. Now it seems that resources are personal, but despawn and respawn around at various points in order to move around. That means that someone else can't steal your herbs or minerals, but occasionally you run over to one only to have it despawn. That's an occasional annoyance, but one that I don't really see a way for them to fix. It's definitely much better than it was in Vanilla.
The game is more on rails than it was in Vanilla in one sense and less so in another. It used to be that you'd go to a quest hub and pick up eight quests, then go do them all. Now you go to a quest hub and are only offered two quests. Do both of them and they'll give you two more. So the quests have to be done in a particular order that wasn't previously enforced by quest prerequisites.
But in Vanilla, the time when you had to do a quest was enforced by the quest level. Now that's a much weaker restriction, to the degree of being nearly gone. Instead of a level 42 quest needing to be done sometime between level 40 and 44, now you can do it whenever you want between 30 and 60. You can even do entire zones in different orders. I think that that is, on net, a considerable improvement.
The game is also less polished than I expected. As MMORPGs go, it's pretty polished in an absolute sense, of course. But I've run into several outright bugs, some of which strike so commonly that it's hard to imagine that the developers don't already know about them. (Have they really never talked to an NPC who offers multiple quests?) UI nuisances aren't game-breaking, but why can't Blizzard fix them?
Now that I've played it some, my verdict on some of the original complaints:
13) The base UI is substantially improved from Vanilla, but still much worse than most MMORPGs. After all these years, why can't Blizzard find someone competent to build a decent UI?
I think because of the addon support, they don't see it as a priority. Check out twitch and you may be able to find something you like better than stock.
With some additional experience, my verdict on some other things that I skipped over above:
3) If you're a tank, finding a group is really fast. Otherwise, it's not really faster than it was in Vanilla. The basic problem is that they're trying to enforce a group ratio of 1 tank, 1 healer, and 3 damage dealers, but that's not what the playerbase plays. Classes being able to switch specializations seems on paper like it would be able to fix this, but in practice, it doesn't. I seem to get wait times of about 10-15 minutes if not a tank.
Perhaps one underlying problem is that the game wants 1/5 tanks, but only 4 of the 31 specializations are tanks at the low levels. Once you move to higher levels, that becomes 5 of 34, and eventually 6 of 36. But even 1/6 is still less than 1/5.
That's not to say that the group finder doesn't have any advantages. That 10-15 minute wait can be while doing something else rather than sending whispers to a ton of people. And having the group directly warped to the instance rather than needing to give everyone 15 minutes to get there also makes a big difference.
So while the group finder is a major improvement over the grouping situation in Vanilla, it's not really a solved problem in WoW the way it is in Elsword.
5) It seems that Captain Placeholder has returned, though they don't call him that. Rather, it's now portals that instantly teleport you to your destination. Oh, and the portals are unlabeled on maps, so they're hard to find. And if you ask people where they are, you get a wide variety of contradictory responses. Wikis and Internet search engines mostly can't find them, either, as they'll give you information from before it was changed with the release of Battle for Azeroth.
The way to travel to another continent if you don't already know exactly where to go is to ask a guard. Then he'll mark it on your map. The thing to look for in the initial chat menu is "Other Continents". But while that's the nearly canonical correct answer, it's not the answer that anyone would give me in chat, nor on wikis or search engines. Search engines could find people asking how to get from here to there and being given a variety of answers, none of which was to ask a guard.
7) The dungeons I've done so far seem shorter than I recall. I think that the difference is primarily that combat goes faster. I'm inclined to say that it's fixed, though there are still a lot of higher level dungeons that I haven't reached.
8) Yes, this is fixed by the level scaling system.
15) This is completely fixed. The new loot system doesn't have competitive rolling for loot at all. It just gives you some stuff that you can use here and there. It does give you the ability to trade an item you loot to anyone else who was in the group when the boss died, which is a nice touch. But keeping the loot that the game assigns you can't really be called ninja looting.
Now that I've played it some, my verdict on some of the original complaints:
13) The base UI is substantially improved from Vanilla, but still much worse than most MMORPGs. After all these years, why can't Blizzard find someone competent to build a decent UI?
I think because of the addon support, they don't see it as a priority. Check out twitch and you may be able to find something you like better than stock.
Add-ons aren't really a viable replacement for having a working default UI. The can make the problem less bad, but they're not a complete solution.
Someone can be using a variety of add-ons that conflict with each other. Add-ons that intend to change one thing can accidentally change and break something else--and it can be really hard to figure out that something is broken if you never knew how it worked in the first place. Add-ons that work at one point in time can break with the next patch. Add-ons that work at one point in time can become unsupported and eventually stop working entirely as their creator loses interest in the game. Amateur add-on creators don't have the testing resources of a big game developer, so while he may verify that it works as intended on his own computer, that doesn't mean it will work on everyone else's. Even if there's an add-on that does what you want, it doesn't necessarily mean that you can find it.
The upshot is that a heavy reliance on add-ons to fix a woefully deficient base UI means that each player has to do a lot of work to get the game into a reasonably playable state. Most MMORPGs don't have this problem. Why can't Blizzard fix it in WoW?
Sorry but hat is all I saw when I read that Wall, and I played WoW since Closed Beta 2003 myself.
They said they were going to make it as Authentic as it was back then, minus the bugs and game breaking aspects. (look for 1.13).
Time and lots of it is what made Vanilla...Vanilla.
You have no business in Vanilla if you want your hand held as it is now.
Vanilla = World of Warcraft
BFA= World of Whiners (Not directed at you Op)
Since when was I asking them to change anything about Vanilla today? The original question was to state that I hadn't played since Vanilla, and was wondering if the current retail version fixed the things I disliked about it.
I have exactly zero interest in playing the upcoming "Classic" version of WoW and don't care what Blizzard does with it. That has nothing to do with this thread.
The thing I remember about vanilla was having to save up for a lot of things. 1st mount when I could buy one I didn't have the money. Had to pick skills carefully because I had to save to buy skill books and cold weather riding skill was really expensive.
"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
I think @Quizzical you should try a rogue or paladin. Rogue because you can perhaps use more combat options and the paladin because you need to renew seal use different seals and attacks and can also tank , dps and heal so that gives you quite a lot of options that don't involve standing still and casting. I am not sure about the demon hunter or deathknight because I have never played them but they might also alleviate some of the boredom associated with combat in WoW.
Lol, what? Paladins haven't had to renew seals since BC lol. When was the last time you played Wow? BC?
Comments
--John Ruskin
"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
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
--John Ruskin
For now, it's a trial account, attached to the same account that I once played Hearthstone on. I don't see any dire need to recover my old account that had WoW on it. If I don't run into something that kills the game for me pretty quickly, I'll probably attach a subscription. Using a gamepad means that I sometimes find some peculiar thing that blocks gamepad use to be completely game-breaking, even if most people who play the game aren't aware of it. I don't see any point in buying Battle for Azeroth anytime soon.
It looks like the different specializations within a class are so different as to practically be different classes themselves. That certainly wasn't the case in Vanilla. Good thing Blizzard doesn't try to charge people who like alts $15 per character slot. Meanwhile, the Death Knight and Demon Hunter classes start at high levels, so I'll ignore them for a while.
1) The combat won't be very good, but won't be that bad, either. That would be a significant improvement from Vanilla.
2) Crafting will still be terrible, just like Vanilla. But it will still be readily possible to ignore it. My plan is to take gathering professions and auction house the stuff.
3) The gear system will be poorly suited to my tastes, just like Vanilla. But also like Vanilla, it won't really break anything other than PVP and the endgame, which is to say, things that I don't particularly care about.
4) The rest of the game will be pretty good, which would be an improvement over Vanilla in some ways and not others. Blizzard is famous for their polish, which is something that was also good in Vanilla apart from server stability being awful and about half of the escort quests being broken in one way or another.
Point (1) is the key thing to evaluate, as a mostly combat game lives and dies by its combat. FFXIV managed to do pretty much everything well except that it was a mostly combat game with bad combat, and that meant I didn't like the game.
But if you really like a game except for one small thing that completely wrecked it for you, fixing that one thing can make a huge difference in your enjoyment of the game, even if the game is objectively almost the same as before. I haven't seen any reason to doubt the claims that a lot of the things that I disliked about Vanilla WoW are improved or even completely fixed by now, and plenty of reason to believe them.
For me, probably the biggest problem with Vanilla was the time it took to do a group dungeon. The description of grouping in WoW now makes it sound more like Elsword (the game with a group finder that actually works) than Vanilla WoW.
That said, it seems vanishingly unlikely that I'll really love WoW in its latest form, mainly because the combat still isn't going to be that good. I'll play it a while longer, but I have no idea how much longer. I was also planning on giving Secret World Legends a try sometime, and considering returning to Elsword, Tree of Savior, Trove, or Kritika, all of which I quit for reasons other than disliking the game or being tired of it:
Elsword: ran out of content other than endgame grinding; more has been added since
Tree of Savior: playing too much made one particular spot hurt, forcing me to back off
Trove: I was playing a different game at the same time and decided to drop Trove and just play that other game
Kritika: my gamepad broke, so I had to quit and play a game that worked without it, and I had moved on by the time I replaced the gamepad
1) Combat is definitely faster and more active--and much less dependent on auto-attack than it was in Vanilla. I still don't think it's good exactly, but it's not bad, either. That's an improvement.
2) In most situations, this is completely fixed by level scaling, with the possible exception of the endgame content at the level cap. But endgame content doesn't matter. Not having the narrow, harsh level ranges in which content had to be done is a huge deal, and without that fix, I'd probably have quit again by now.
3) I haven't gotten there yet. We'll see.
4) Travel is still slow, but less slow than it used to be. They also give you mounts sooner, which helps. Maybe travel will seem fine once I get a flying mount. So it's perhaps still a problem, but less so than it was in Vanilla. Having to travel does give you a sense of where various places are relative to each other, unlike a game such as Kritika where everything feels disconnected. But Champions Online demonstrated that you still get that same sense of place if you let players travel very fast (but not instantly), and without annoyingly long wait times to get where you're going.
5) I haven't tried this yet.
6) Seems fixed, as I haven't yet had any downtime other than the scheduled maintenance. Gilneas is incredibly laggy, but people say that's because the zone is broken, not because of server problems.
7) I haven't tried this yet.
8) This is likely fixed by the level scaling system, but it will take a while to see how it plays out.
9) This doesn't actually matter very much. From what I've read, it sounds like this isn't fixed.
10) This is fixed for mana and not for health. At least at the low levels, you have a practically inexhaustible supply of mana, to the extent that it makes me wonder why it even exists as a resource. Maybe that changes as you get to higher levels, but for now, it seems like healing spells are the only ones that take meaningful amounts of mana. If you can heal yourself, that means it'x fixed, period. If you can't, then having to stop and wait for a minute for health to refill now and then is annoying.
11) This is unchanged from Vanilla. It's still rare, but it still happens. And while rare, it's still annoying to be told that you can't play the area that you wanted to today because Blizzard decided it would be a good idea to encourage griefing.
12) I don't see much non-English text from other players, but that's largely because I don't see much text from other players at all. It seems to have gone the way of most MMORPGs, with communication among players basically non-existent. So I have no clue what fraction of the players don't speak any common language with me.
13) The base UI is substantially improved from Vanilla, but still much worse than most MMORPGs. After all these years, why can't Blizzard find someone competent to build a decent UI?
14) The gear system is completely redone since Vanilla, and greatly simplified. A player might want different gear for different builds, especially when changing specialization. But the old specialized resist gear seems to be impossible now, which is a good thing.
15) I haven't tried this yet.
16) This is not substantially changed from Vanilla.
Playing for a while has reminded me of some other things that I disliked about Vanilla:
1) Kill stealing. In the sense of killing mobs, this is now fixed. Rather than tagging mobs as happened in Vanilla, if multiple players damage a mob, they all get credit for killing it. But picking up quest items is not shared like that, so fighting over quest items that are not mob drops sometimes happens. So in the quest item sense, it's not fixed, but it is much improved since Vanilla.
2) Stealing harvesting resources. Now it seems that resources are personal, but despawn and respawn around at various points in order to move around. That means that someone else can't steal your herbs or minerals, but occasionally you run over to one only to have it despawn. That's an occasional annoyance, but one that I don't really see a way for them to fix. It's definitely much better than it was in Vanilla.
The game is more on rails than it was in Vanilla in one sense and less so in another. It used to be that you'd go to a quest hub and pick up eight quests, then go do them all. Now you go to a quest hub and are only offered two quests. Do both of them and they'll give you two more. So the quests have to be done in a particular order that wasn't previously enforced by quest prerequisites.
But in Vanilla, the time when you had to do a quest was enforced by the quest level. Now that's a much weaker restriction, to the degree of being nearly gone. Instead of a level 42 quest needing to be done sometime between level 40 and 44, now you can do it whenever you want between 30 and 60. You can even do entire zones in different orders. I think that that is, on net, a considerable improvement.
The game is also less polished than I expected. As MMORPGs go, it's pretty polished in an absolute sense, of course. But I've run into several outright bugs, some of which strike so commonly that it's hard to imagine that the developers don't already know about them. (Have they really never talked to an NPC who offers multiple quests?) UI nuisances aren't game-breaking, but why can't Blizzard fix them?
3) If you're a tank, finding a group is really fast. Otherwise, it's not really faster than it was in Vanilla. The basic problem is that they're trying to enforce a group ratio of 1 tank, 1 healer, and 3 damage dealers, but that's not what the playerbase plays. Classes being able to switch specializations seems on paper like it would be able to fix this, but in practice, it doesn't. I seem to get wait times of about 10-15 minutes if not a tank.
Perhaps one underlying problem is that the game wants 1/5 tanks, but only 4 of the 31 specializations are tanks at the low levels. Once you move to higher levels, that becomes 5 of 34, and eventually 6 of 36. But even 1/6 is still less than 1/5.
That's not to say that the group finder doesn't have any advantages. That 10-15 minute wait can be while doing something else rather than sending whispers to a ton of people. And having the group directly warped to the instance rather than needing to give everyone 15 minutes to get there also makes a big difference.
So while the group finder is a major improvement over the grouping situation in Vanilla, it's not really a solved problem in WoW the way it is in Elsword.
5) It seems that Captain Placeholder has returned, though they don't call him that. Rather, it's now portals that instantly teleport you to your destination. Oh, and the portals are unlabeled on maps, so they're hard to find. And if you ask people where they are, you get a wide variety of contradictory responses. Wikis and Internet search engines mostly can't find them, either, as they'll give you information from before it was changed with the release of Battle for Azeroth.
The way to travel to another continent if you don't already know exactly where to go is to ask a guard. Then he'll mark it on your map. The thing to look for in the initial chat menu is "Other Continents". But while that's the nearly canonical correct answer, it's not the answer that anyone would give me in chat, nor on wikis or search engines. Search engines could find people asking how to get from here to there and being given a variety of answers, none of which was to ask a guard.
7) The dungeons I've done so far seem shorter than I recall. I think that the difference is primarily that combat goes faster. I'm inclined to say that it's fixed, though there are still a lot of higher level dungeons that I haven't reached.
8) Yes, this is fixed by the level scaling system.
15) This is completely fixed. The new loot system doesn't have competitive rolling for loot at all. It just gives you some stuff that you can use here and there. It does give you the ability to trade an item you loot to anyone else who was in the group when the boss died, which is a nice touch. But keeping the loot that the game assigns you can't really be called ninja looting.
Someone can be using a variety of add-ons that conflict with each other. Add-ons that intend to change one thing can accidentally change and break something else--and it can be really hard to figure out that something is broken if you never knew how it worked in the first place. Add-ons that work at one point in time can break with the next patch. Add-ons that work at one point in time can become unsupported and eventually stop working entirely as their creator loses interest in the game. Amateur add-on creators don't have the testing resources of a big game developer, so while he may verify that it works as intended on his own computer, that doesn't mean it will work on everyone else's. Even if there's an add-on that does what you want, it doesn't necessarily mean that you can find it.
The upshot is that a heavy reliance on add-ons to fix a woefully deficient base UI means that each player has to do a lot of work to get the game into a reasonably playable state. Most MMORPGs don't have this problem. Why can't Blizzard fix it in WoW?
Utterly no point in worrying about what the game was like because you are stuck with what it is like.
IMHO, retail is a 1000x worse than Vanilla. You could do so much with macros back in the day that retail... even with all it's add-ons... cannot beat.
WoW is just a cash grab these days. It ceased being a game the middle of WotLK.
The only way to fix it is to shutter the doors at Blizzard.
"My Fantasy is having two men at once...
One Cooking and One Cleaning!"
---------------------------
"A good man can make you feel sexy,
strong and able to take on the whole world...
oh sorry...that's wine...wine does that..."
I have exactly zero interest in playing the upcoming "Classic" version of WoW and don't care what Blizzard does with it. That has nothing to do with this thread.
"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