World of Warcraft

What was it like to play WoW in the early days?

Sometimes.

Same as playing a private server today, except you would go to school and talk to your autistic little friends about what you did in wow and what you were gonna do later that night.

fun_________

Best days of your life

got me laid

very fun because it was new and i was a kid.

I'm listening

boring as shit at the core and you only played it because of the social aspect
just like all MMOs

teached it me there are more and better mmos but they all died because they tried to copy wow

Pretty much this. I could go on about how much fun it was, but thinking back it's mostly just nostalgia. The biggest difference tho, is that there are no longer so many noobs on private servers. Most people know how to play and that wasn't the case in vanilla.

Had to play runescape because my computer couldn't run it.
>TFW poor parents

filled with wonder and questions unanswered by dataminers and large community websites

shit

Good thing blizzard never listened to the vocal minority and continues as hoped with retail.

eventually this thread will be filled with nostalgiafags telling you how great it was, but the truth is that vanilla wow was legit fucking terrible from a gameplay perspective. It was a chore to play, filled with bugs and glitches, unstable servers, SHIT quests, "raids" like MC where you spent all your time clearing trash, pvp was unbalanced to the point where I think even people that didn't play wow has heard about world of roguecraft.

It
Was
Shit

people have fond memories because it was their first MMO and they had not experienced a game of that scale combined with social elements before.

Everyone was a beginner and would teach each other little tricks. Where as if you play now, even on a private Vanilla server, everyone has run each dungeon dozens or hundreds of times and has played every class and knows every talent build. There's nothing left to discover so the game is just a chore now.

its not that interesting, just played wow all day together so we kinda fell in love, went to visit, banged, but lived to far away, shes married with kids now, i cut all contact when she got married

Tons of people hooked up in WoW.

These days it's just insane sluts and jaded couples doing shit together.

it was very different from the current private server experience

vanilla wow playerbase was a mix of normies, everquest/daoc veterans, and lots of kids.
private server playerbase is a bunch of middle aged hardcore fanboys who know the game by heart and have played it for over 10 years.
apart from that, obviously everything was new and nobody knew what they were doing, so everybody played a lot slower and way less optimized.
also, people were generally optimistic and happy about the game, while today everybody is a jaded cynic.

Just search elysium project and play the original vanilla wow there.5000-11000 player online on average

Nothing like "vanilla" servers.

so shit to some evequest players but good to the majority of players

fish lvl?

best memories

I know that feel man. I played runescape and a bunch of korean f2p mmos because the thought of paying a monthly fee for just one video game would have been obscene to my parents.

27

Exactly

It was magical

>What was it like to play WoW in the early days?

Long queues. For the first couple weeks there was a "looting bug" where you'd be stuck in the crouching / looting animation and couldn't do anything until a random animal killed you.

The average players that you'd group with for dungeons didn't know anything about power gaming, min/maxing, or the like (because they didn't come from D&D or Everquest and were often in their teens anyway) so nobody knew what the fuck they were doing, plus they were specced for leveling or for random shit.

Consequently grouping sucked dick, monsters would always go on the healers, etc etc.

Raiding took hours upon hours, even getting attuned to raid took hours, grinding pre-raid for soul shards, or making water, or getting money for consumables / repairs / reageants, or conjuring food and water, all took hours.

Leveling on a pvp server meant you had to endure a lot of bullshit, but it also made you hard as fuck and improved your reaction time 800% compared to PvE shitters (as evidenced centuries later by the LFG / cross server dungeon tools).

Like Nostalrius/Elysium, except no mods that hold your hand through the game (until you reached raiding tiers anyhow, then DBM/BigWigs does that for you) a lot more clueless fucks wearing spirit leather and agility cloth, and an overall better and tighter knit community that you couldn't afford to be an unrepentant shitstain in without finding yourself walled off from content because nobody wants to take you.

Grindy.

>so shit to some evequest players but good to the majority of players

What are you even trying to say? WoW was a fucking breeze compared to Everquest, but it still copied lots of really shitty things from Everquest (just not EVERY shitty thing, like losing exp on death, or needing to spend 20 minutes self buffing, or a hundred other retarded things).

that it's all about the frame of reference; if the majority of players have no clue about what went on in other MMOs, then WoW will seem good to most players

Nice

Great, regardless of the flaws.
You saw people trying to tank dungeons with hunter pets, hunters looting everything not nailed down, warriors ninja looting intelligence rings because it improved their weapon skill.
You got lagspikes whenever people got into any large areas, meaning low levels could become sergeants by hiding in the middle and spamming AOEs. Events in particular meant that you'd phase in and out constantly due to disconnects.
It was unpolished, meaning end game required constant maintenance and busywork, it was a pain to traverse the world, and some classes were sub par.

But despite that, the fact that most people were clueless was a good thing, because people did whatever was fun, fucked about constantly, and found every way to mercilessly break the game.
The guide sites were in early days, so people would actually explore and ask people in order to complete tricky quests, certain quests required co-operation. You made friends, discovered red flags for shit players, learned the ropes and guided other people to do the same.
the fact that the end game required so much work forged very strong links between guilds, which were mandatory for anything above 10 man, and helped people get off the ground

Spergers will tell you it was horrible, but their like is the cancer that kills MMOs, because MMOs are supposed to be primarily about the social aspect, which is why WoW died when it cut it out.
Seeing the entire fucking server in one place together, because the community was actually a thing, far outweighs minmaxxing bullshit.

The best two years of my life.

WoW from its release to about halfway WOTLK was a game in the most perfectly fit place at the most perfectly fit time.
You don't have to look at it like a game, more like a sociocultural occurrence where every single element defining "good" co-existed in a perfect blend between time, place, game and players.
Half the globe was getting internet at home for the first time around those years, people and especially young people where experiencing and discovering for the first time the marvels of internet, everything was new and amazing: things that were unthinkable until 3-4 years before were now possible in a mere minute or less. In all of this came WoW, a huge game from people all around the world with immense map that got people thriving with excitement at every login, with its exploration, its lively community. To 90% of the playerbase it was the first of a kind experience, even if you had consoles before having internet a good pc to handle it, you still didnt experience anything like that.
And if you were into games, and you never had internet nor played a MMO before, those probably felt like the best years of your life.
Why? Cus back then everything matched perfectly, the time, the kind of game, the historical moment, the generation, the mentality we had, everything.

That's a good point.
Early WoW would be ruined now, because everything would be catalogued and have guides up within a month, if not sooner.
You'd also have a much more no fun allowed reaction to things like the corrupted blood incident.