Was vanilla WoW really as good as people make it out to be?
Also does the Vanilla content still exist in the current game? Because I keep seeing stuff about using private servers to play older versions but shouldn't you still be able to access all that content?
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It was the best take on Everquest-style gameplay available at the time, and was a good mix of sandbox and themepark gameplay.
The only vanilla content still available in the retail version of the game is a few dungeons and raids, most of which have been updated to be nothing like what they were back in Vanilla.
By and large, Vanilla content is not available through legal means.
Fuck no it wasn't. We tried to find things to do all day, everyday. Raids revolved around numbers of participants to down content. My small PVE server didn't even have twenty five people willing to raid, let alone forty.
Some of the old content I assume is still on retail but after Cataclysm, you know.. get fucked Stormwind
most vanilla content is gone because they redid the world in an expansion, vanilla was actually worse than modern wow but it had a better community so it was actually more fun to play than modern wow
FFXI was always better, when WoW first came out FFXIfags laughed at it just like vanillafags laugh at current WoW
>Was vanilla WoW really as good as people make it out to be?
go play kronos and find out
it's alright but it's pretty grindy, personally i like it more than retail since you socialize with people a lot more and i can't stand bloated stats
>Also does the Vanilla content still exist in the current game?
no they revised it with expansions, really the only vanilla content left is old raids that never got revamped and some items
>Because I keep seeing stuff about using private servers to play older versions but shouldn't you still be able to access all that content?
blizzard doesn't think so
It's a different game under a different design philosophy. It's grindy, it's time-consuming, and it's an unbalanced mess with several classes only having one real viable spec, but the way the game was designed encouraged a lot more player interaction and made accomplishments feel a lot more rewarding. One thing about it is that the top raids were seen by less than .1% of the population, and that created a sort of mythic appeal to those areas, and seeing someone that had been to and conquered them was always kind of cool.
Some of the old content can be accessed, but the way the game has been fundamentally changed makes it all a joke, and you wouldn't be able to find 40 level-appropriate people to band together to do it anyways.
tl;dr it's probably not what you're looking for, but it's still what a lot of people want
it was the first mmo I had played but I was addicted to diablo 2 lod and warcraft / starcraft before it came out. For me it definitely lived up to the hype. The huge community of people that loved blizzard made it even more amazing. Wish there was a game as good today.
False flagging this hard makes you too obvious, user.
They recycled most of the old content to the point where you can't play most of it anymore. The game mechanics have also changed so much the game might as well be completely different.
The vanilla raids are still there but the years of balancing and stat changes makes raiding them at 60 a totally different experience to what they were in vanilla.
There are people that still do Wrath raids on level 80 characters but even then they have to set it to 25 man mode while only bringing 10 people to keep it remotely challenging.
I'm so tired of arguing the merits of Vanilla WoW and Everquest with people.
There have been many good changes to the game over the years, many of which are just UI improvements but the fact is the game has been stagnant for many years now.
There is no market for a game like Everquest right now, which is really sad but its the truth
>tfw Blizzard has admitted that 1-90 content is completely fucked and they have no idea how to fix it
>joining the game as a new player gives you a very warped view of how it plays, as you just one-shot everything all the way up to WoD content
There's no market for a game LIKE Everquest or Vanilla WoW right now. The average MMO hopping player is much too impatient for a game like that. They want to be hooked right away and they want to play the game mostly single player.
There is however a small niche audience for WoW Vanilla itself, as there was for classic Everquest.
>as you just one-shot everything all the way up to WoD content
They actually fixed this for 1-40 with a hotfix shortly before 7.0
It's still not hard by any stretch but you at least have to spend a few seconds fighting stuff, even with BoA
>stat crunch in WoD was supposed to bring shit down to a reasonable level
>legion is already past MoP levels of absurdness
wew
If you dont give a shit about raids; it was the best WoW ever was, except BC
If you care about raids; its still the best. Raids are for faggots.
At a certain point they have to decide to
A. have a stat squish every xpac
B. Not increase player power every xpac
C. Just let players learn to live with big numbers
they fucked themselves over with the stat increases of BC and wrath, if it had been more gradual like vanilla's 1-60 we wouldn't have this problem
It was not about the fucking content, it was about there being no normalfags playing it
There is no real relation between modern and vanilla wow anymore. 99% different games for different audiences.
If you are curious you can go play a private server. Nost was the best at recapturing the great community that older WoW had but the other privates do okay at that. Just remember older WoW was an MMO, talk to people, group up, do stuff together.
I would not say it was that great, but what made it great (for me) was feeling being part of an virtual world where people would look after me for party or help or here and there.
Classes were a mess, I really wish they didnt drop many assets from the Alpha because they were really cool, also gear drops were a mess, I remember when some Warrior would use spirit because they believe it helped with their rage management, now correct me if I'm wrong but there's no more warrior plate with spirit, right? Also no agi on plate? (except for lv60s i believe). I'm not going to deny I miss pre-wiki and pre-youtube era.
I also remember everybody being afraid on Alterac Valley or raids in general, now you see people rushing through everything.
>I remember when some Warrior would use spirit because they believe it helped with their rage management
well this was to do with the lack of information and everyone was a newfag, not to mention coming from WC3 people would think every stat is useful because every stat was useful for heroes in WC3
>now correct me if I'm wrong but there's no more warrior plate with spirit, right? Also no agi on plate? (except for lv60s i believe).
itemization in retail is so boring and standardized now, there's like 8 stats in total
Spirit is gone from all armor and everything.
Mana regeneration is standardized now, so as to avoid having healers struggle at low gear and have infinite mana at high gear.
Pretty much nobody in vanilla knew what they were doing. That's what made it fun. Hell if you mouse turned and didn't click your spells you'd wreck 90% of people in PvP.
people who say it's only nostalgia can be disregarded. vanilla's content was subpar compared to the standards of today, yes, but it had a very different design philosophy. quest design, dungeon design, raid design: the original WoW team approached all of these things differently.
which you prefer is mostly preference, but I look at the ambition behind stuff like BRD and wonder what the current team could do with that same willingness to experiment and potentially frustrate and confuse players for the sake of world building. modern WoW has become too much of a formula
yeah, the virtual community was like nothing I'd experienced before or after it. Also can't forget my first stepping foot in places like the barrens or stranglethorn vale.
>Because I keep seeing stuff about using private servers to play older versions but shouldn't you still be able to access all that content?
Three specific raids- Zul'gurub, Onyxia's Lair and Naxxaramas- have been removed from classic because they were refreshed, plus the game is not at all like what it was when it first came out.
>Was vanilla WoW really as good as people make it out to be?
Classic era WoW got something right that the current game seems to be clueless about- community. If you wanted to do anything at 60, you needed a guild. You needed a well stocked friends list. You had to know people. Game wouldn't do shit for you, so part of the meta- this is a social game, mind you, and not a single player romp- was actually meeting people. Pugging was an exercise in futility because it was what mouth breathing morons and anti-social- and I'm using this in an extreme sense. You had to try hard to not meet people- who refused to learn to play the game did.
it wasn't just the content, it was also how you interacted with the content, the game felt like a traditional RPG but with a ton of people around you
go play on kronos and level to minimally level 20 and you'll know what i'm talking about
Group Finder ruined the social aspect of the game, which was a major factor
It's not an end user experience issue. Once numbers get high enough it becomes a latency issue as the server struggles to computate the numbers.
During the Garrosh fight in SoO, Garrosh's health resets twice because they couldn't make the fight last long enough with their then technical limit on how much health a unit can have. It's jarring and makes the whole thing feel very scripted and played out.
Consider that in Vanilla WoW, Ragnaros had about 1 million health. Archimonde, WoD's final boss, had 232 million.
Power creep has had a ridiculous, astoundingly irrecoverable effect on this game.
No, if it came out today, people would throw a shit fit and call Blizz casual and lazy and demand a diablo mmo.
Oh wait they do that now anyways
The way Legion's dungeons work is essentially just 3D Diablo anyhow.
The technical health limit is gone since they fixed that part of the old ass engine.
Comparing Ragnaros health to Archimonde is really meaningless. Sure Archimondes number is far larger, but that means literally nothing in practice.
The social aspect was, but everything else sucked.
Solo grinding was just awful. Literally everyone in the day referred to sites like ThotBot because many of the quests did NOT make it easy to find your target.
I honestly think that wow as a games, is pretty bad.
Tab targeting combat is simply too boring.
But wow got some things right:
>world is massive
>Interesting pre stabilished lore behind it
>Hard so you cant progress without player interaction
>Very mathematical combat, it is which allow people going full autism with the numbers
Which helped the game to grow.
Some of it was lost past wotlk, but the game had already gone past critical mass and could sustain itself from bad expansions for years.
If player health and damage scaled to content, it would be meaningless. It doesn't, and the game is continuing its upward climb toward ridiculous levels of power creep in Legion. We're already at the point where any class can solo just about anything, though, so you might have a point in that it can't actually get any worse.
>Was vanilla WoW really as good as people make it out to be?
Yes, as long as people aren't claiming it was anything more than a literal 10/10.
>since they fixed that part
They just now fixed that part, with 7.0.
> this is a social game
This. People helped and talked to each others. Most of the players were beginners, ressources and informations were limited. There was a little magic in it, to me at least.
Anyone remember watching this shit?
I'm assuming all the little references to Mario and Zelda are gone now.
Leveling was fucking atrocious in Vanilla. You would run out of quests in almost every zone. Part of the leveling experience was heading to other races starting zones to get quests with only negligible XP so you could get pushed up into the next tier.
The Mario/Link reference in Un' Goro got blown the fuck up by Deathwing.
I don't think he appreciates reference humor.
>Also does the Vanilla content still exist in the current game?
Levelling content doesn't (vast majority of it, anyway, some zones are largely unchanged), many dungeons don't because they've been "revamped" (including 3 raids) and even if they were still there, indirect changes would have rendered them completely and utterly obsolete due to classes being an order of magnitude stronger than they used to be at the given level.
As for the quality of the game? It depends on how you look at it. For example, a lot of the content was perceived very difficult at the time, with only .1% of players seeing it in full and such, but even if you magically removed the memories of how each particularly boss is ought to be done, it would turn out players with thousands of hours of experience and general WoW know-how as well as most "serious" guilds playing far more hardcore than even the top guilds at the time would turn the content utterly trivial (go read Nihilum retrospective blogs, they're an interesting read, with players being introduced to the concept of using flasks for the first time at C'thun, calling players that had quit months ago and asking them to join Kel'Thuzad world first because the guild's roster was such garbage etc).
Continuing
how the fuck does this even happen?
I mean, how hard is it to balance gear so that you don't end up almost literally thousands of times stronger than you were in the previous expansion?
However, that's a good example of how it worked at the time: the tuning was appropriate to garbage players and is not a sign of the general design philosophy, which I'd argue is the largest difference. Consider levelling content, for example: Zones don't have strict level ranges (you can enter Barrens at level 10 and finish the highest level quests at Southern Barrens at 30, and a few quests bring you back even in your 50s), there's no clear-cut route through the zone, not everything has an obvious purpose, you do thematic quests that act as a tool for worldbuilding rather than progressing through grandiose story in which you're the hero at every zone etc. And that, I'd argue, is a FAR superior design paradigm: while at this point I'm familiar with the content to the point of remembering some quest text word-to-word so there obviously is very little to nothing for me to discover, a game world designed this way still feels like, you know, an actual world.
And this general attitude to design affects all areas of the game, others have without doubt already argued in favour of things like designs that would strongly encourage players to build a social network of friends and acquaintances as opposed to crawling through menus to teleport to a faceroll difficulty mode dungeon that you already have beaten by default since it's designed to be don even by the worst and least committed groups. In general, neo-WoW is hardly an MMO or an RPG at this point. Yes, WoW has always been accessible, WoW has always been a themepark, but it hadn't lost its identity yet.
Yeah shit was rough but at the end of the day you knew most of the map, paths and most of the dungeons which actualy helped you learn how to play.
Moreover, while we tend to talk about the merits of different design paradigms in these sort of threads, when you ask whether or not legacy WoW was good, it's worth remembering that especially in terms of art direction, yes it is. Many of the most beloved vidya zones can be found in it (make a thread asking for "comfy winter levels" and odds are the first response is Dun Morogh) for example, and WoW got its fundamentals right from the very beginning, ranging from responsiveness (in terms of clear and immediate feedback from sound and animations as well as the netcode) to interface customization (default UI has advanced a lot, but with all the backported addons, vanilla today beats pretty much every other MMO).
Also, TBC shares the benefits of the original design paradigm while being a direct upgrade in most areas (encounter design, tuning, professions, class balance with specs made viable by giving them something unique rather than making everyone the same as seen in WotLK and beyond, you name it).
They half-assed it so hard, is how. They just retuned numbers for all the old content and gear, and stopped caring once they got to what was then current content.
I never played it but my friends did when it came out and the way they talk about makes me think the nostalgia glasses are thick with wow players.
>Part of the leveling experience was heading to other races starting zones to get quests with only negligible XP so you could get pushed up into the next tier.
this never happened in start zones
however it happened in most other zones, since the xp given by quests was pretty shit in comparison to how much you got from mobs
i think blizzard knew this which is why quest items didn't have a 100% drop rate so you'd be forced to grind
Gameplay and game design wise it was godawful. But it was one of the first few games that managed to make a big world you can explore with others that had huge production values.
Questing in wow was and still is complete dogshit. PvP is fun, raiding is okay I suppose if you want wow to take your soul. Exploring comfy zones and more importantly the social interaction was always the best part of wow.
Like other Anons said: World of Warcraft during Vanilla was awesome, as it was very radically different. The only other MMOs that it had to compete with at the time, that I remember and are worth noting, were Everquest and City of Heroes. Considering CoH was still in the rise of development and droves of people were leaving EQ because of its recent expansion Gates of Discord, World of Warcraft released at the exact right time in history to make itself a hit, especially since many WoW devs were largely inspired by EQ itself. For the time, the graphics were amazing, the fluidity of the game was amazing and things felt very streamlined.
Most Vanilla content, sadly, was purged from the game with the expansion of Cataclysm, and any remaining content would not / is not worth visiting in terms of enjoying what the game currently is trying to offer. Private Servers work as they do because they run older versions of the game while World of Warcraft's retail servers do not offer any form of "legacy" servers. This is how Everquest is, after TWENTY-TWO expansions, still afloat.
This
People don't miss the vanilla wow gameplay, they miss the vanilla wow community.
Simple. You need early expansion gear to be stronger that late previous expansion gear. It ramps up fairly quickly from that rule alone.
Community was better, rest was improved during some expansions.
Yes. No nostalgia here. Played vanilla for first time a year or so ago.
The modern game is structured to zoom you past vanilla content, and even then much of it has been replaced, or if it does exist, it is piss easy. For example, one of the best dungeons, Scarlet Monestary, was "updated" to fit their "standards." Not to mention the gameplay, statistics, and class abilities have been changed drastically for what I feel is for the worse, so even if you do manage to assemble, say, a dire maul team in the correct gear, you won't be getting the Vanilla experience.
Better than people make it out to be.
There has never been a game i would put 8 hours a day into for 2 whole years.
Vanilla was pretty fucking great, and there's a new vanilla pserver that's out called Elysium so you can still jump on the start train valkyrie-wow.org
Or suppose you weren't expected to go through a logical route at each zone and then proceed directly into the next, but instead, for example, treat Barrens+Ashenvale+Stonetalon Mountains+Thousand Needles as a large superzone in which you're expected to backtrack quite a bit. After all, they had major overlap in both quests and level ranges. If you headstrongly try to do one zone to completion, you've outleveled early quests on another zone and will miss out on XP, but there is ample experience there.
And should you "fuck up", it's not exactly a problem, you can go to Hillsbrad instead to finish up (indeed, a number of quest chains make you travel around the world, like quest "Forsaken Aid" leading you from this tauren/orc superzone to Tarren Mill where you can do quests if they seem to interest you or if your levelling progress is in dire straits and you feel you need to, or you can return and bomb the Venture Company flying machines). And experienced players can, of course, come up with even more efficient levelling routes.
At higher (30+) levels you had to do most zones to some extent (not all, and not necessarily completely, there was still room to skip quests and zones you didn't like) but by that point it should have become clear you're not expected to go from zone A to B to C but do quests across a variety of zones. At launch there were some level ranges that really were tough with questing alone, but after some patches (I think 1.7 for example introduced a lot of new Horde quests in Hinterlands) this was largely solved, even more so after new quests introduced in TBC (even if it wasn't for reduced XP requirements in patch 2.3).
of course the problem with this is how long it could take to go back and forth between zones
though doing this you'd find stuff or areas you normally wouldn't
group finder is just a symptom of blizzard's unwillingness to deal with server pop issues
WoW's progression revolves around a constant stream of new content requiring ever-increasing levels and stats to tackle. Power levels in WoW ramp up exponentially. Tier 2 is 20% stronger than tier 1, tier 3 is 20% stronger than tier 2, etc.. To keep numbers low, power levels would need to be grow linearly, but then the relative power increase from each new level cap or tier of gear would become smaller and smaller.
>it becomes a latency issue as the server struggles to computate the numbers.
What the fuck are you talking about?
Vanilla was fucking amazing. Only time WoW was ever good. It was actually challenging, and having 40 man raids was way more fun and epic. The only down side was leveling. There weren't enough quests do at 55-60 it became a grind which was pretty shitty.
bigger numbers are harder to fit into internet cables
blizzard needs to get wider cables
Diablo 3 has the same problem.
IMMA LET YOU FINISH AND ALL
because vanilla wow was fantastic and i still play on kronos 2 to this day
BUT....
the real "cant go back/it will never be as good/the sequel ruined it" is pic related
Bringing up the heartstomper GW2 this early in the morning are we? No game will ever disappoint me like that one did.
...
It was the best balance between hardcore grindfests like lineage to well.... what it is now.
Because you spent more times in the zones leveling up and finding profession things, pvping ect. You had more chances to meet people. The game was soloable to level 60 but it encouraged you to group up for a lot of harder quests,
The world was dangerous and had an adventurous feeling to it.
The game had problems but it was a far far far better RPG and MMO overall.
Always playing with your server, and running into lots of people in the world helps create the community.
They took the WORLD out of world of warcraft.
>99% of wow players have a mental illness
He's right.
12000 ach points is a bonafide sign of autism.
vanilla wow was fucking amazing, but it did have downsides
>pros
>you actually were a meaningful person on a WoW server
>each class had a different mood to it, with different capabilities and quests
>yes some classes only had 1 ""viable"" spec, but it was always awesome to see that one person who had made other specs viable
>yes the vast majority of people didn't get to see certain content, that's what made it awesome, that's what players want
>you had a reputation to maintain
>the game basically doubled as an exploration game
>world pvp
>social darwinism, the best players with the best personalities got the furthest, the social outcasts who wanted to try and solo everything and never talked to better players about their class were always bad
>all sorts of broken shit to discover like rogues being able to pickpocket instances
>the overall grind and adversity of the game brought players together in a friendly way, sort of like dark souls, but the atmosphere of the game was overall very light and enjoyable
cons
>no arena
>now that we play nost/kronos we know that the content was actually trivial if everyone was specced and geared right
>professions were less meaningful
>because you had to be more social you also ended up having to suck dick, pander, or help retards alot
>some elite quests were harder than dungeons of equivalent level which was always retarded
>having to farm consumables for a raid was brainnumbingly boring
>if you accidentally needed an item in a big raid, you might as well just uninstall bc nobody will ever group with you again on that server
>hunters were all retards dont ask me why its not even a meme its just the truth
>your real life suffered
>having to explain to your parents that you're video game "guild has a schedule to raid"
>no reddit for normies to complain or gripe (this is actually a big one)
This is why enjoyed Vanilla leveling so much. The quests itself were nothing special, but the pacing was great.
I'm tempted between this and a FFXI private server but the one's I've seen barely make 100 players.
Horde or Alliance?
I had a level 58 Shammy on Nostalrius and he would have been my first 60 if the kikes at Blizzard didn't jew us all.
your problem pal
man i played horde for years and only recently did i realize that the
>ALLIANCE ARE ALL KIDS/CAREBEARS
thing is a total meme. horde is literally the cesspool of humanity of all ages. my experience is that horde players were more pvp focused, however they also performed worse in pvp rofl
I AM ALLIANCE FOR LIFE NOW
Right on the money, user.
>>no reddit for normies to complain or gripe (this is actually a big one)
Gonna assume you meant this as a pro...
Reddit has actually ruined a whole litany of video games for me. The democratization of complaining to developers has really not been a favorable thing. I wish reddit would fucking die.
>no arena
But balancing for the arena was what started killing a lot of the fun and leading to shitty balance changed like putting death wish in arms.
When WoW came out i had already been playing mmorpgs for 7-8 years (im 32). I remember what my, and other mmo players, initial impressions of WoW were when it was new. Let me tell you about it.
I cant really break things down into 'good' and 'bad' because thats subjective, i can point out things that were new and novel and interesting and generally noteworthy about the game, and point out some complaints people had about it as well.
The first thing to point out is the way WoW handled quests. WoW really created the idea of 'questgrinding', where you just do filler quests forever. When WoW first came out there was no built in option to skip quest dialogue in the UI, you needed an addon for it. It wasnt a thing in any game prior to that and there was no reason for blizzard to add it in their initial UI because untill WoW every quest in mmos was considered something important that you actually read and paid attention to. This goes to show you how different WoWs quest system was. In other mmos you almost exclusively ground to level up, and quests were special things you did to get special equipment or unlock class progression. Some mmos had repeatable 'things' you could do, but they were just turnins. A famous example would be some of EQs turnin npcs, like bone chips for some exp. You would farm bone chips and then turn them in for a boost. Other games would have hidden kill counters tracking how many of a certain mob you killed, and you could show up to get a bonus reward based on how many you killed. But nothing like the endless chain of very similar yet non repeatable one off filler quests WoW had. As another example, it took people a few days after WoW released to realize you should just accept all the quests and do them in a big swoop through the zone. People were just so used to quests being important that they were doing them one at a time.
Overall i think a lot of people dislike filler quests, but it was something never seen before.
This
Except I was one of the
>social outcasts who wanted to try and solo everything
because of
>having to explain to your parents that you're video game "guild has a schedule to raid"
Thankfully the PvP ranking system allowed one to grind independently of schedule.
It really needed to be tuned down a bit though, getting entry tier (ZG, AQ20) PvE epics matching the top tier PvP epics was way too easy.
i.e. the Warlord and High Warlord titles ¨were reserved for super virgins who grinded ten times as hard as PvE players raiding the endgame instances
Then Blizzard further fucked this up by adding the idiotic Resiliance stats which divided PvPers and PvErs and really made you choose one path
>now that we play nost/kronos we know that the content was actually trivial if everyone was specced and geared right
This relies on a few assumptions.
1. Nost/kronos is scripted right. Damage values, stat values, armor values, etc for bosses/players may or may not be accurate. Mechanics in general were fine on nost, at least, but the hidden things can be harder to get right.
2. 1.12 client doesn't make things easier. Most classes got a lot of changes during vanilla. Remember having to put 15 points into arcane to get your arcane explosion to be instant cast and 11 points to get evocation? Remember lacerate? All the class changes could've caused the content to become easy.
>if you accidentally needed an item in a big raid, you might as well just uninstall bc nobody will ever group with you again on that server
>group loot in raids
The next big thing you would notice with WoW was the instances.
Instanced dungeons were not invented by WoW, but using them so heavily was. Typically the dungeons you did for loot and exp in mmos were open world, with instanced stuff only existing for certain quests. An exception here would be City of heroes, who had you leveling mostly in randomly generated instanced dungeons. I dont count CoX as 'filler quest grinding' because it was more like 'random instance dungeon grinding', if you were wondering why i didnt mention it in quest grinding in the previous post.
The first time i fired that cannon in deadmines i was blown away, as were most people. There was something really special about instances like that, and while ive come to dislike them for their removal of open world dungeons, and think the novelty has more than worn off by this point, it was something new and interesting and definitely was not a bad thing to do.
You leveled in WoW stupidly fast, and mostly solo. In the early days people tried to group up still because thats just what you did in mmos, but after a while people realized soloquestgrinding was the most efficient way to level unless you had a permanent leveling partner, in which case duo questgrinding worked well. Of course there was aoe grinding but compared to true grinding mmos that employed aoe grinding it was basically sort of like 'why bother?' just do the quests in the optimal order.
Everything in WoW felt streamlined and shiny, and was generally well appreciated (even with the looting bugs that plagued the game early on)
Thats mostly it. The last thing it did of note was change the EQ combat model in one way (WoW is an EQ clone), it removed the real holy trinity (tank, healer, CC), and made really only tanks and healers required (dps are not part of the trinity, they were the random trash peasants you picked up, the trinity is what you need to start a group, not every component of it.)
Quest grinding is pretty is a great thing. It was awesome to have a neutral quest hub in Stranglethorn Vale and have loads of both faction fight for control of the quest npcs and the zones actually felt alive throughout the entire process of leveling.
One thing that people don't always include in their reasoning why vanilla was so much better was the living server aspect as well as no cross-server pvp. People socialized all over the world and people actually connected. You even began to make connections with the opposite faction just by seeing them in the wild so often or later in battlegrounds. Rank 14 was a real achievement and everyone on the entire server had run ins with the opposite rank 14 and players gained true notoriety.
One of the biggest reasons why vanilla WoW was considered so good was because of how hard it was to gear or obtain anything substantial like epic mounts, also in that era of the game balancing changes were minimal and the game still had mystery to it. By the time BC rolled out most people had a pretty good feel for the game or at least knew most of the good "secrets" like how to get Benediction on a priest, the legendary quests, and all the raid unlocks. During this time most people didnt know the game and werent spoiled by content they didnt know about. The spirit of the game died once arena killed world pvp and ilevel meant most in pve with people pugging everything.
No one says vanilla wow was good
Oh, there are two final things:
WoW was the first mmo i played that made crafting so simultaneously worthless and required. It was the first mmo i played where everybody crafted, but crafting didnt actually reward you with much. I cant remember if the craft specific bop items were in right at launch or not, but they made crafting required, while at the same time the stuff you actually crafted was not that good. Compare to EQ where crafting was not so great nor really required, or DAoC where crafting was the source of endgame gear, but not something everyone did.
Lastly bind on equip/pickup items. WoW started the trend of not being able to hand down or sell off your high value items. I still dont agree with this. In some mmos i played there were items so rare that only a hand full existed and everyone knew who owned them, and when one changed hands everyone knew about it, and each item had a history of users and it was really an important part of the community. Going hand in hand with this, WoW really pushed towards complete item-centricity when it came to character progression as well. Even EQ which had item-centricity had their AA points, and in many mmos items were seen as utilitarian stuff, with the majority of character power coming from the characters own stats and skills.
Also this
Thottbot and the like mapping out every aspect of the game and took the mystery out of it sucked
t. time
fite me irl faggot
meh, private servers are still fucking full
try kronos 2 for vanilla
>living server aspect
The funny thing im seeing here is people are saying things about vanilla wow compared to modern wow, which sound exactly the same as things i would say about old 90s era mmos compared to eq/wow and its clones.
Living server? Try an mmo with isometric graphics with zones that the gms can edit on the fly to reflect changing conditions during an event, and then stream to everyone's clients in real time. Literally move a mountain.
WoW is an EQ clone and the EQ/AC era of mmos really solidified what i would call 'dead unchanging' worlds, with no real gm interaction, no players changing anything. no real progressing story because theres no feedback
It is true that the social aspect of mmos was still around, and i do blame WoW for killing that off, but not with vanilla. As you say cross server pvp and pve really killed that, and nobody complained because at the time people were so engrosed with their guild-centric microcosms instead of having a real 'server identity' like people did in the past, another example of WoW. Before WoW came around the idea of throwing random people togeather who were lfg and doing higher end content was not unheard of, generally to be at that content you had to be at least somewhat capable. But after WoW dumbed everything down, and people started rolling only with their friends, the social aspect of mmos just tanked. So yeah, vanilla wow was better than modern wow for that reason, but i think more in the sense that modern wow has just ruined the mmo genre completely, you cant credit the things that used to be before it did that as 'vanilla wow used to be good' when it was more like 'mmos used to be good'
not him but i'm done with vanilla after losing 30 days on scriptcraft and another 30 days on nost. p server shutdown is too gut wrenching to handle again. i'll just sit here and wait for a wow killer.
Crestfall when?
To clarify, it was vanilla WoW in a sense to kick that off.
In older mmos you just did not make it to the level cap if you were an idiot, or an asshole (unless you had a group of asshole friends). Just leveling took enough time, and required grouping, you everyone would be fed up with you by the time you got to the endgame. This meant that it was really quite surprising to find someone inept at the level cap in an mmo. WoW really turned the leveling process into a tutorial, even vanilla WoW. It should take 6 months of hardcore play to reach the level cap in an mmo, minimum. And that should require grouping and team work.
If i could pick one thing i blame WoW for the most its that. WoW was the first mmo i ever played where you could level to the cap with out having a clue how to play your class in a group. All the other problems stem from that, the 'dumbing down' of pve that later came, the cross server stuff. It was all a requirement due to that first domino of casualizing the leveling process, both time wise and group-requirement wise by creating solo questgrinding.
Yes it was.
Just go for official legacy servers that they'll announce at blizzcon.