As someone who quit the game during Vanilla due to friends stopping, when exactly did WoW go to shit?

As someone who quit the game during Vanilla due to friends stopping, when exactly did WoW go to shit?

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The exact moment when they introduced cross-realm battlegrounds, raid/group finders and flying mounts.

Depends on who you ask. Some say TBC, WotLK, Cata, MOP, Draenor, or Legion's Beta.

WOTLK

Every patch note where they traded or introduced a feature for convenience of the mentally neutered masses.

When your friends stopped playing.

Only friendless turds cried about LFR and shit

Well, every expansion killed a bit of the essence of the game slowly.

TBC focused on instanced content in favor of outdoor open activities (you know, being an MMO and all), also daily cancer, and pvp-only stats

WotLK further focused on hard mode instances and started streamling roles/classes to a breaking point, then LFG shit.

After this point, it escalated much more.

There isn't a single point where WoW went to shit. The developers mentality of slapping in quality of life was a slippery slope that inevitably led to it becoming a facebook clicker. MMOs should have nuances, it should be difficult to achieve things. So that you have an incentive to be social and play with the server. That's the entire point of an MMO.

Blizzard mistook the point of an MMO being a daily grind, therefore making the grind more automated was an improvement to them.

When they introduced battlegrounds in the summer of 2005.

I still think its pretty good, but then again I have never been hardcore af

The heaviest shit I've done is heroic raids. I never PvP.

I level alts and use them to make gold and occasionaly do dungeons or quests with friends.

I find it fairly easy to gear up characters by pugging normal/ heroic and doing mythic dungeons.

My main is ilvl 725 and im happy with that until legion drops.

The time invested/ reward ratio severely drops after you've cleared normal and are ready to start grinding the next teir. I cant be fucked with spending time on that shit for very long.

>I never PvP

Opinion disregarded.

they did this so the server wouldn't go to shit so often because of all the major pvp battles in the world (namely around Hillsbrad)
so they just made everyone addicted to point farming in small scale zones instead of fixing their server architecture

Everyone I've met that's into PvP is either underage, a manchild or a bongrat.

The moment they expanded the level cap.

Arena faggots are shitters yes. Just don't let this generalization spread to other games pls.

WOTLK
It was roller-coaster, went from excitement to disappointment to hope then anger and lastly content.

That's arguable. WotLK was good before 3.3, hell when the expansion went live it felt just as good as passing through the dark portal as well.

I didn't really like how much of a hard on they got for phasing zones and the mini-game like scripting for some of the quests they implemented, and then they just amplified it during cata and made everything a joke.

Late reply but I agree with a lot of this post. Blizzard has removed three very important things that keep players playing in the genre, incentive, investment and reward.

WoW's potential went to shit when TBC came out with a level cap increase. I'm not saying vanilla was the most stellar time and everything was primrose and sunshine. But the bones were solid and the core was great. But this was the beginning of the end for content relevancy that steadily had gotten worse as the game has gotten older.

Sadly when you peel back the layers you realize everything they've done has been solely to push as many boxes as possible. Invalidate the previous content to force the player to buy the box.

all the facts prove you wrong
wotlk was the best expansion ever, closely matched only by tbc
everything went downhill after that, as the general quality wasn't on the same level of wotlk

At no particular point in time. Every expansion had its ups and downs. Even Blackrock Foundry in Warlords is a good raid.

when they added LFR, CRZ and welfare legendaries.

3.3 was good if you only look at ICC, which for a patch is all that would really matter.
A year and a half of it sucked don't get me wrong and while it was the beginning of the end, LFD was hardly a problem at that point.

holy shit.... everything you said....so true dude. Literally the ease of everything made it so that no one would have incentive to be social and play WITH the server!!! THIS!!!!!!!!

Yeah that Naxx reskin, Malygos and Obsidian Sanctum were terrific raids

>siege of orgrimmar: black edition
>followed by siege of orgrimmar: green edition

I can't prove you wrong because WOTLK indeed had a lot of lazy raids with just a boss in a single area or retarded reskins, but still it had two of the most beautiful raids ever made for the game.

You are the golden standard of the post-wotlk WoW userbase that changed the game. The game was rebalanced specifically for you.

If everyone is wondering why WoW changed, read that post. There's a ton of people who see an MMO as candy crush where you should just log in for 20 minutes a day and do some minor grinding then move on, with as little obstacles as possible and instant gratification.

Yeah those were awful but every single expansion plus vanilla had poor raids and good raids

I hated LFD. Hell I hated flying mounts all together. I still think if they didn't decide to do all these stupid quest scripting sequences and mini-games and gave Northrend a more classical approach to how they created the Plaguelands it would have been fantastic.

I have no love for 3.3, but when Wrath first went live? It was very impressive.

youtube.com/watch?v=85JLNFc4eT4

I hope you're not saying Icecrown was good because it wasn't

Basically it had the Lich King fight and everything else was a shitheap

When you left. Because you left.

It wasn't bad at all, considering that they really spent a lot of time making the whole stuff cinematic.
Still, Ulduar is elder gods tier, along Karazhan.

>they're pulling the same music\ambient vibe with the fucking vrykuls on the broken isles
FUCK YES

those things didn't happen at the same time

I love that track. Something about it is absolutely perfect in conjunction to the boat trip over to Northrend. Pulls you into the somber atmosphere of the new cold journey.

the correct answer is whatever expansion came after i played is when wow became shit

Cross realm everything

WoWfag since 2005 here and the general consensus and most popular answer seems to be by the end of the WoTLK expansion.

It was when the game peaked and subsequently lost it from there.

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The patch which added LFG Finder. I had spent months raiding Ulduar with my guild and I organised Malygos pugs which succeeded weekly before this patch. Then people who just bumbled through dungeons could get gear which was as good as mine for one fraction of the time and effort I had put in.

There was a mage with Tier 8 shoulders in my first heroic group for the patch. We were talking about our DPS before the dungeon started, and this is what he said.

"I don't care about DPS, I just want to finish this dungeon quickly"

I was at that new jousting place not long after. I had just finished getting a Sunreaver Hawkstrider. Then I realised that the game wasn't fun anymore and just logged out forever. Later I find out that a chinese gold farmer stole the account, ensuring that I could never go back. That is for the best, I think.

WotLK launch patch was literally the worst patch in WoW history and set the tone for everything to come

Ulduar was an anomaly and nothing more

>Wrathbabbies denying that WotLK killed WoW

(im the guy that wrote that post)

You have to understand why theyve done this though.

Ive been playing WoW on and off since BC and have almost 4000 hours on my main.

When I first subbed I was 15, im 22 now and have a fiancee, a career, professional and personal relationships I want to maintain. I would having a wild fucking guess and say a lot of people picked up WoW between the ages 14-16 and have grown up with it. Now that we are all older we have less time to play. Bliz knows this and wants to keep that veteran playerbase by making it easier to get rewards. Its not a scheme to snag new players but an attempt to keep oldfags interested.

That's more to do with catchup dungeons than LFG. I think Group Finders only on your server is a good function as it takes away the "Let me sit in Org spamming for an hour to find a tank" and lets you meet new people on your server quickly. When it becomes cross-realm though, you end up losing the attachment as you'll never see those people again.

cataclysm killed WoW you dumb ass piece of shit double nigger

That rushing wind noise that used to play at the dark portal for BC and the boat music for WotLK are easily two of my favorite pieces of music (if the former could even be called that, I suppose) in this game.

They both perfectly captured the feel of the new expac and set the tone for what was to come, I really liked them.


I don't even know if Cata, MoP or WoD have something similar. If they did they don't stand out.

The subs started tanking three quarters of the way through WotLK. While Cataclysm was shit the game started dying before that.

ps dont get me wrong, i would rather sit down and play for hours than 20 mins. I wouldnt even bother for 20 minutes.

At the moment I can play 3-4 times a week, roughly 12 hours hours a week in total

The gameplay was considerably cheapened by most things implemented in WotLK and Cata if that's what you're asking.

I played all throughout vanilla too. Even bought the vanilla collector's edition. Played from day 1 and raided Naxx40. Then saw some of TBC and some of Wrath.

My opinion:

1. Flying mounts fucked over the world. Fuck exploring the world. Fuck interacting with other players. Fuck any possible danger. Just fly over that shit.

2. Raid difficulty levels fucked over raiding. No, not everyone needs to raid. Casuals should not be raiding. It's too demanding and it just turns them off. And having all these easy versions just makes people give up on doing the hard versions. And then when you're just doing the easy versions, it all just feels like a chore anyway. You're not accomplishing anything.

3. Arena fucked over PvP by making it so incredibly competitive that it's taken all the fun out of it.

For PvP, that might've just been the inevitable way of things though. Nothing Blizz could do about it. For raid difficulty levels and flying mounts, Blizzard just fucked up.

It was always shit and slowly got worse with every patch and expansion. Once the novelty of babbys first MMO wore off its flaws were horribly obvious, yes, even in vanilla. It's just not a good RPG, never was, never will be. The popularity it achieved with MOBA faggots who played it just to watch numbers go up, giving no fucks about the world or the depth of the gameplay guaranteed it would only get worse (as an RPG) over time.

>when exactly did WoW go to shit?

BC Patch 2.1

>daily quests added
>attunements removed
>massive difficulty reductions across all instances
>PvP gear buffed at PvP to the extent that even high-end PvE gear is absolutely useless
>gimmicky flying mounts added

This was the patch that killed the vanilla game. When BC was first launched it still felt like vanilla WoW.

PVP died in BC too be quite honest.

Instanced PVP killed PVP as a whole, PVP should have stayed as a faction vs faction thing, it should have been a trophy, a mark of honor ,they should have focused on actual world PVP objectives, conquerable towns in contested zones, to really bring the "war" to "Warcraft", but instead we get battlegrounds because honor 1.0 was actually terrible for world PVP, even though BGs only made the grind worse, as it turned a system focused around hunting other players, into one that is just about grinding killing blows in a bland instance all day long

PVE on the other hand stayed strong all the way until WOTLK, namely TOC, while professions were definately gimped in BC, consumables removed, alchemy nerfed hard, ect, ect, the core end game content was never comprimised, though vanilla end game was definately overwritten, as well was BC's with Wrath, but the core content was the same "Gather your friends and slay great dragons for loot"

TOC however really is where the focus on adventure was lost, TOC was designed entirely around the loot treadmil, with 4 difficulties, 3 of which no one gave a fuck about outside of the gear grind, it was at this point that blizzard focused entirely on the gear grind, rather then the content itself. ICC stands out at the end of the expansion, because if blizzard fucked up with ICC like they did with TOC, that would have been the deathknell of WOW right then and there.

The final straw though, was dungeon finder, while welcomed at first in WOTLK, it was introduced late in the exansion, where everyone knew exactly how every dungeon was, all they wanted to do is get their daily chore of welfare badges out of the way so they could move on.

Dungeon Finder however, did have its flaws, it proved you can't create even remotely challenging, or even slightly involving content for randomly queued groups, it was apparent with Occulus and Halls of Reflection that you simply could not create callenging LFD content.

>The popularity it achieved with MOBA faggots who played it just to watch numbers go up

We just gonna start retroactively throwing buzzwords around now?

I didn't emphasize enough that raid difficulty levels ruined raiding.

It seriously did. It turned raiding into a chore like never before, because it just makes everyone give up and turn to the difficulty level that isn't really a challenge, just a chore to get right.

>cater to casuals
>the game dies
Really makes you think....

When they removed attunements. I can understand why they did it if you were late to join in some shitty dead server so it would be impossible to do anything beyond Kara, but the simple fix to that would just be to introduce the LFR cross server shit earlier. I know pugging shit like SSC and TK would probably be hard, same with hyjal, but they could've tried different shit instead of just letting people skip 90% of the expansions content for no reason when they released the sunwell dailies and its welfare gear.

OP here, one of the main reasons I lost interest in the game is even in Vanilla I could see Blizzard was adding/changing things that worked against Open World PVP. I loved Warcraft and one of the reasons I even played the game was the Horde vs Alliance setting. I wanted to kill Alliance, attack their cities, one of my fondest memories of the game was killing Tyrande in a big pvp raid.

It's been around for 12 years, the fact that catering to casuals is still getting them subs is amazing to me. I figured it would've died a while back.

Replace it with whatever you like, FPS fags, RTS fags, whatever. Point is people who had no interest in roleplaying whatsoever flooded into it for the sole reason that their friends were playing it and it was a Blizzard game with PVP. That killed it faster than anything else, though it could've gone the other way if they had never gotten into it. The game was originally designed for a much smaller neckbeard playerbase.

>that second one
>those vocals

Look at your picture. Remember before you got instagrouped with LFD then transported in front of the entrance? How you have to get to the instance which is it's own experience? How you can have experiences that you will always remember the instance before even getting to the entrance?

That's all gone.

Black Desert has shown me that flying doesn't matter. Even if you have a huge world to explore 90% of it will be empty, because everyone will want to be in the handful of actual farming zones for gear and money while ignoring 90% of the rest of the world and using 10% of the world as the game. MMOs are destined to die as progress happens and even if the world is static people will stick to the handful of areas that make the most profit and nothing more. Because mmos are not about fun for people anymore shit has to "matter" exploring doesn't matter to them, pvp for fun doesn't matter, pve for fun doesn't matter, if it don't matter for them it's not fun. The mmo community is the epitome of Sup Forums in the sentence that fun is a buzzword to them.

That's why WoW along with every single mmo in all of history is destined for failure from day 1.

So it's like FF14 where you just unlock the dungeon and can teleport there through a Duty Finder?

Nothings stopping you from going yourself. Just because the majority of the game uses it doesn't mean you have to. Get a group of friends and walk over there.

>Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game
>Make it single player
>Take out RPG elements
>Add in grinding for the sake of grinding (Dailies, badges/valor/ilvl)

Its the same fucking problem with dablo 3.

It completely misses the point.

The game is supposed to be an adventure, a quest for power, sure you're metagaming to make yourself as OP as possible, but that required you to talk to other players, duel, interact, trade tips, raid together, share loot.

The game now focuses entirely on loot acquisition, but not on how to get players to work together and share experiences together, especially at a casual level.

Remember meeting that one guy in the world who was questing in the same area as you, where you'd group up, maybe do the quest chain together.

Remember that 4 man that brought you along and you added 4 more players to your friends lis.

Remember your first guild run where everyone is utter noobs but you still had fun even though you wiped all night long, because you left with some greens and blues.

That one nolifer in your guild who is actually a total bro and would carry you through low level dungeons to get the items you needed

All these elements have been stripped away from the game, replaced only by a pure, automated, guided, bland, boring, repetitive grind.

I mean, there is nothing wrong with a bit of grinding, but its better with friends.

The main problem with the game is the data-mining. Everyone knows everything before it even comes out and there is no air of mystery anymore. Get rid of that and all the mods out there these days and I bet people wouldn't be complaining as much.

Half of these points are just nostalgia posts. You can literally have the same thing happened today if you just now started. You've just outgrown the game and it's not new or interesting anymore.

Shadowfang Keep was the best low level dungeon.

>Half of these points are just nostalgia posts.
Except they aren't retard. He's right, by removing the social aspect of the game there is no reason to play. No community. Just log in, instant gratification, pug with people you don't talk to or even remember their names,etc.

>You can litterally have the same experiences today

Bullshit.

Except LFD, you never interact with another player until normal mode raiding.

I had all those experiences on Nostralius before it shut down, I even was the guy running friends through Deadmines and Wailing Caverns just because I had a stupid photo memory of those dungeons.

>Remember your first guild run where everyone is utter noobs but you still had fun even though you wiped all night long, because you left with some greens and blues.
>Remember that 4 man that brought you along and you added 4 more players to your friends lis.
>That one nolifer in your guild who is actually a total bro and would carry you through low level dungeons to get the items you needed

How are these not just nostalgia posts? You literally can have the same function in the game right now. There are social guilds out there, not everyone is fucking autists like half of Sup Forums seems to be.

Not him but I've played on private servers and live and the difference is fucking staggering with how much people group up and talk to eachother during questing.

Live is fucking dead and the people who are there are assholes
Vanilla private servers you have to group up and talk to people to get shit done. It's not nostalgia because I've never played vanilla when it was out.

>Nostalrius

Pure paradise for the first 6 months, and the chinese just ruined it

just took it, and ruined the whole thing

i hate the chinese

Yep, the pinpoint where WoW died was patch 3.2. ICC came after but I think that was actually what was supposed to come after Ulduar, but they stuck ToC in there to try to transition to the 'new' team. It was a pretty big taste of things to come. Liquid shit.

Yes. But people used to actually have to travel out to those places. And it felt like you were actually in some place far off, because you couldn't travel as easily. And you could PvP there without people just flying off and hanging 41 yrds in the air, completely invincible.

And while you're mostly right about the "fun is just a buzzword" phenomenon in MMOs, it actually does have a fix: People will do stuff that's fun that doesn't matter, if they can't do stuff that does matter. We saw this in Vanilla. Raiding was the only thing that mattered, but it was just too hard to coordinate for more than a few hours a night, and even then, you had to be pretty dedicated. The end result was people created their own fun.

Blizz fucked up by making raiding overly accessible. It made people do it too much and then burn out.

wow started its decline in cata.
they attempted to bring back challenging heroics, but people whined.

they tried to introduce unique zones like vashj'ir, but people whined.

they tried to have raids be a reward for people who put the work in, but people whined.

as a result, there's no more underwater stuff and they cut a whole raid, leaving plot open. heroics are braindead, and raid finder is a thing.

I quit in MoP.

You have to walk there if you do mythic dungeons.

People didn't wine because heroics were hard

They wined because Dungeon Finder was full of shitters.

When Dungeon Finder was added, it was at the end of Wrath, when everyone already knew what the fuck they were doing in each dungeon, even then, Halls of Reflection and Occulus proved that you can't have anything remotely challenging as random PUG content.

Cata was a perfect shitstorm of many problems.

One, Dungeon Finder was not designed with hard dungeons in mind, and because of it the community that did nothing but dungeon finder became absolutely cancerous, vote kicking anyone who didn't outgear a dungeon, tanks taking dungeons hostage if they didn't get their ways because it was an hour long queue for tanks, and overtuning dungeons with raid style mechanics focusing around DPS in many areas, despite dungeons being intro end game content.

Also the mana change at the beginning of cataclysm made group healing fucking abysmal, but dungeon finder wasn't made with off healers or off tanks or CC in mind.

There will never be another mmo like vanilla wow, and that sucks.

Cataclysm, T11.

I'd rather sit in chat for 3 hours to find a group for a fucking 5 man.

I'd rather do BC raid attunements for fucking shitters every week.

Even fucking vanilla raids are better than the shit spewed out during cata.

>Heroics
>Challenging

The only heroics that were remotely challenging was fucking magisters terrace, halls of lightning, and the fucking occulus.

Every Nostralius gameplay video I've seen on youtube has no music, was BGM not in the private server?

Around the end of WotLK because of the cross realm queuing shit, any semblance of a community was officially lost by that point on every server.

It was my favorite dungeon then they fucking ruined it with that god awful revamp. Fenrus' howl when you pull him will forever be engraved in my head. Scholomance was another of my favorites that was destroyed. Fuck revamps

Nice shirt.

around it's launch

You must've looked wrong. There are PvP movies, world boss movies, all with music.

The last 15 years fucked the mmo scene and made everyone cynical as shit.
I don't think it solves itself, people are not willing to make their own fun they rather just quit the game if they can't be of relevance.

This thread again?
>Paid name changes
>Paid race/faction changes
>Paid server transfers
>Dungeon finder and LFR
>X-realms
Basically anything that destroyed server community and helped anonymity. As we've learned from Sup Forums and the internet...the more anonymous you can be the more of a fucking shit you can act like which kills gameplay and takes the fun out of everything.
>Not to mention the watering and dumbing down of everything taking a 'Massive Multiplayer' game and turning into a single player one.

OP here, what is "Garrison", I have heard people say you log in and never leave it.

At least there will barely be any reason to run Heroic Dungeons in Legion so they must have learned something. Can't even get the Dungeon Achivements without doing Mythic which can't be queued for with the Dungeon Finder.

A failed attempt at player housing where you had your personal little base that gave you free gold with a shitty facebook game and crafting reagents; Ore and Herbs, even if you didn't have those professions. You could upgrade it to also have an AH so in wod there was zero reason to leave it because everything you'd want to go out in the world to farm for would show up daily.

One thing I remember about Vanilla WoW is how UGLY the armor sets were. I think Rogue was the only class that had good looking dungeon/raid sets. Did that ever improve?

Yes and No

>you will never take the zeppelin to northrend for the first time ever again

wotlk
don't listen numales and cucks

I can pinpoint the exact moment.
WoW went to shit precisely at Cataclysm.
Several things came to head in that expansion.

They tried to do too many things at once. They introduced five or so new zones (par for the course as far as expansions go), two new races, in addition to a completely revamped Azeroth. The revamping was wholly unnecessary, and ruined what was a perfectly interesting questing world. They removed or truncated some classic quests and went completely overboard with phasing.

Having to completely revamp the old world meant less time spent on the rest of the expansion, namely the Worgen and Goblin themed areas. Gilneas was the greatest loss of potential, as it had great design, music and overall theme they could have done so much with. A high level Gilneas zone would have benefited the game greatly, instead we see so many unique designs used only for the first 20 levels of one faction and never again.

The time constraints can also be seen in the quest design of the higher level areas, which was some of the laziest writing I have ever seen. You are given 5 disparate high level questing zones with a tenuous connection if any that links them all together. Recurring NPCs keep appearing but you are never given the overall context of WHY you are adventuring in that zone. Deathwing is attacking, time to set sail into the ocean, oh look old gods enslaving giant underwater crabs, oh no NEPTULON got possessed! Then it's off to ancient Egypt, why you ask? Nobody knows why now let's explore tombs with harrison jones lolol remember him? Uldum was unfinished as fuck which showed from the lack of NPC voices, and even zone music.

So basically out of the three tasks they set out to achieve, only revamping the old world was really accomplished whereas everything else was half-assed, yet the revamped old world content is also the thing that got old the quickest.

The most important part of an mmo imo are the quests and the story of each zone.

I prefer vanilla's conservatively designed armor over today's EPIC SPACEMARINEZ SPAULDERZ AND POLYGONS.

legacy servers when

...

Generally accepted answer is around the cataclysm release.
Wotlk was reasonable, but it did damage to the core game by introducing stuff like dungeon finder and cataclysm took those bad ideas and ran wild with them.

After Vanilla, you didn't miss anything OP.

The instant they nerfed heroics in Cataclysm because babbies couldn't beat them