I was too young to have played WoW in the mid to late 2000s, but was it really as magical as everyone who did play it in that era claims it to be?
I was too young to have played WoW in the mid to late 2000s, but was it really as magical as everyone who did play it in that era claims it to be?
Yes.
/thread
Any particular memories you would like to share?
You had to be there
>half of my guilds officers stationed in iraq
>one day they get called into action during a raid
>they never log on again
serves them right
The scale was amazing.
The detail was amazing.
The music was amazing.
The animations were amazing and to this day most MMOs don't have the fluidity that WoW does. Try running and jumping during combat in most MMOs and it's extremely clunky and ugly. Only games like GW2, Wildstar, etc, have matched WoW's animations.
Another big part of it all was the people. The game exploded fast and servers were overloaded so you often had queues during peak hours, but that also meant the world was full of people and you might strike up conversations or form impromptu parties left and right. Just long enough to clear one area in one zone, like the Defias hideout in the abandoned town in Westfall, including the mines underneath it, which may then lead you into the dungeon with your new friends.
Days or weeks later you may have progressed to Stranglethorn Vale and you're getting camped by two enemy players near Nesingwary's Expedition, but you see one of the friends you made back in Westfall has also just reached the area so you team up to kill the campers and spend an evening hunting gankers and protecting other people questing in that area.
Maybe a week later they're looking for people to make the long run to the Scarlet Monastery, right next to the Undead capital city. The run itself is an adventure, but 45+ minutes later you're at the dungeon with 4 other people.
And so on and so forth. Everywhere you go, there's some content you can do and some content that can kick your ass, including PvP. But there are also other players to team up with. And before cross-realm play, it was only people from your server. People you might end up in a guild with.
They slowly killed a lot of this in the name of quality of life, and it mostly worked because the magic above had faded for most of the playerbase by then.
Their biggest mistake in those early days was that they didn't introduce competition mitigation like automatic loot rules or individual gathering nodes.
>i never experienced any of this
Maybe it's for the better. the nostalgia might've given me suicidal thoughts now
>you're trying to solo an elite quest but it's just too much for you
>after dying twice, you get back to your corpse and revive to see someone else trying to solo it and die
>you wait for them to run back, then invite them to a party when they revive
>you double-team the elite enemies, thank eachother, then part ways
>the next day, you're running by a dungeon and see them standing outside of it with 3 other people
>they whisper you: they need a 5th, are you in?
>you run two more dungeons with them afterwards, everyone gains some levels and awesome new gear
>a week later, another whisper: they're putting a guild together and splitting the gold cost across the founding members, are you interested?
>weeks later, you're questing together in high level zones, trying to recruit other players that have reached endgame so you can start tackling some of the 10-man raids
>months later, you're doing 25-man raids and the highlight of your week is getting on ventrillo with your guildmates and seeing how far you can progress that week
>there's drama and chaos and maybe even romance, maybe that sassy rogue lives in your state and you end up dating for two years after meeting in WoW (true story for me)
>sometimes people lose their temper
>sometimes people make dumb mistakes
>sometimes people ninja loot
>sometimes people have real world obligations that get in the way
>but then you conquer the next boss and take a screenshot with your guild and compare it to the screenshots you took when it was just 10 of you wiping in a small raid
>and the screenshots of when it was just 5 of you struggling with a dungeon
>and the screenshots of you and your bro finally killing that elite enemy the day you met
that Rag must've been piece of cake, when decked in AQ gear
's drama and chaos and maybe even romance, maybe that sassy rogue lives in your state and you end up dating for two years after meeting in WoW (true story for me)
What was his name?
She was a big tiddy horde gf named Trisha.
>Typical rainbow haired hot topic girl.
>Off-and-on drug addict.
>Enough mental illness to fill an appendix to the DSMV.
>Later became non-binary, after it became fashionable like 10 years later.
Didn't matter. She would grind BGs for me while I was at work and was so horny she could get off from GIVING head. One of her mental illnesses was legit nymphomania. She would jerk off far beyond the point at which it became painful. Even if she had more important things to do and she was so sore she was on the verge of tears, she'd feel compelled to stop and rub out an orgasm at random times. She later got awarded full disability by the government because she couldn't hold down a job due to having to jerk off or have sex an average of 15+ times per day.
>sometimes people drift apart
>sometimes the drama is too much and a guild fractures
>sometimes you take some time off from the game
>then, a year later, when you're leveling up in a new expansion, sometimes one of your old guildmates whispers you out of the blue and asks you if you want to run a dungeon
>they have their own guild now that's a mixture of veterans from your old guild and new faces
>you slide back into the banter instantly and start goofing off in dungeons like you used to
>the guild grows
>and so does everyone in it
>eventually you're recruiting to fill out your raid roster again
>eventually you're doing gear runs for new members again
>eventually you're powerleveling friends' alts again
>eventually you're having a blast wiping in raids again
>eventually the drama and chaos creeps back in
>eventually people start to get bored or grow apart again
>eventually the guild fractures again
it's a blessing and a curse really. One of the greatest feelings is getting that nostalgia rush but also hurts tremendously when you hear something or smell something that reminds you of the past. Mostly happens during the weekends at night for me for some reason.
Listening to this
takes me back to a time when my parents were still together. Before my siblings ran away. When the future didn't look so bleak. When life was exciting and felt like an adventure. But you can't be a teenager forever. I guess it's what the Portuguese call Saudade.
t. clinically depressed schizoid who literally refuses pills and therapy
>Before my siblings ran away.
That sucks, ever tried finding them again? They are your blood after all. Hope you will recover one day
Growing up in an abusive household was fricked but we eventually reconnected after some years (late 2000s). Still, the scars are there but at least we still talk to each other. Could be better, but could be way worse.
Good to hear, man. Better than being all alone, having no siblings or having no contact with your siblings suck
It gets worse when you remember actual life. The women and the raves and all the sets you used to play. Techno and Internet. It was paradise.
I though techno was a 90s genre?
I played with an undead warlock named Msdeathmetal who was a girl and had a Boston accent. Eventually she made a FacesOfWoW account and was super hot.
You can't /thread your own post, morono
yes, the game itself wasnt that different to classic. Its just that people back then were different
>Its just that people back then were different
not only that, social media was restricted to websites like myspace and AIM. in most cases you also couldn't take your social media on the go
> the game itself wasnt that different to classic
It was different in a lot of ways. no charges on retaliation or sweeping strikes, retaliation worked while stunned. A lot of abilities worked differently. Also there was hardly any spellpower but everything that did spell damage scaled like 1:1 so if you had 50 fire damage and your cloak deals 11 fire damage every time you are hit it actually did 61, and some people got their spellpower to like 150 so attacking them in melee was dangerous.
There were a lot of little things like that which were cool but ironed out into the "no fun allowed" safe patch of 1.12
yes and a bis tbc server is releasing soon based on the patch 2.0 called felmyst.
wwu
>the reddit crusade
>bis
No. I was a freshman in high school in 2004 and bought WoW on launch day and had to buy a video card for the first time (WoW started my journey into PC building) to run the game. Luckily my birthday had just happened so I had money to buy my first GPU together with a copy of Half Life 2.
Because I was in high school, I was too busy to play WoW. I got to level 40 and didn't play again until Wrath in college. I had way more time to play in college so Wrath was the first time I hit level cap and actually dove deep into the game.
Did you miss 2019 as well? 2019 Classic Launch was better than 2004 launch. I played so much Classic in 2019 that I stopped going to work. My job wasn't great, so I just stopped going and played WoW for 2 months.
I recently rolled a character on Whitemane and that server is fricking packed. Classic Era is still alive, just look up what the most populated servers are, because everyone has hopped on to one server for the region.
yes, if you came from everquest or some other janky ass shit mmo wow was something that blew fricking minds
kys zoomie
If you came from EverQuest and completely sucked at it, WoW was great for you to noob it up and pretend you actually have a clue.
My grandma bought my mom a pc when I was a teenager and it came with EverQuest. I wanted to play it so bad but my evil mother wouldnt let anyone touch the computer
>freshman in high school in 2004
that makes him mid 30s you fricking moron
zoomer obsession is real
I played WoW throughout high school, how did you not have time? High schoolers have tons of time.
>get good enough grades to get in to 9 out of 10 colleges I applied to
>playing on an ice hockey team with 3 practices during the week and games on weekends
>practice MMA the other 2 days per week
You must fricking suck at WoW, because doing anything meaningful in wow takes hundreds of hours. I went to a good high school so I probably had more homework than average.
It's also an objectively bad decision to commit all you gaming time to WoW from 2004-2007 when there are so many fricking good games to play that are not WoW. WoW is a massive time suck and I played MGS3, SotC and other stuff with my free time.
You did all that and still browse Ganker in your thirties?
Either lying or you just failed massively.
shatner and taylor swift browse Ganker btw
>trips
Please Taylor let me give you a facial.
I dated a guitar playing taylor-like who was legit hot af for 3 years, but she was really boring. The humor. It is critical to have a good humor, and she did not "get" my humor. A shame.
>The humor. It is critical to have a good humor, and she did not "get" my humor. A shame.
It is really nice to find someone who is attractive and shares your strange mix of offbrand humor
Whoa I just looked into this, interesting if true.
>ur on 4chin u must b a loser incel!
Tons of successful older people fart around on here.
I got to lvl 40 and getting to lvl 40 in 2004 is easily 100+ hours. Don't site some 2023 speedrunner numbers. Getting to lvl 40 in 2004 took way longer than you think.
See
>High schoolers have tons of time.
>Because I was in high school, I was too busy to play WoW
Funny, because in my high school, everybody was too busy playing video games to do high school stuff.
>no time in high school
I finished with straight A's and I had a ton of time to play video games or do what I want. What kind of loser were you?
>I played so much Classic in 2019 that I stopped going to work. My job wasn't great, so I just stopped going and played WoW for 2 months.
sounds, interesting
It was good for the time, a lot of it was a novelty, you could raid with 40 people, have them all on screen with all the effects showing and it didn't look like shit or crash constantly unlike a lot of games of the time, it was a decently optimized online game that was streamlined to appeal to a wider audience in an era where that wasn't extremely common, there was also a real sense of community since servers were so isolated and small at the time you would see the same people over and over, you could legitimately ruin your reputation and people actually cared back then so it made it feel like a real world, until we get true brain embedded SAO tier VR you'll never get that feeling again because nothing will ever have that combination of new, streamlined and novelty all at once with our current internet
>2019 Classic Launch was better than 2004 launch
Literal bugman opinion
>until we get true brain embedded SAO tier VR you'll never get that feeling again because nothing will ever have that combination of new, streamlined and novelty all at once with our current internet
This, MMORPGS are dead until we get something similar to happen in real life
what a worthless meandering blogpost
you also sound brown
>2019 Classic Launch was better than 2004 launch.
remove LARPing zoomers
>Because I was in high school, I was too busy to play WoW.
Wat. I too was a freshman in high school and I pretty much went to school, slept, and played WoW. On the weekends I'd play 12 hours straight.
It was a game that introduced an extremely large demographic to a relatively niche hobby (Online gaming) and an even more niche genre (MMORPG). There was very limited knowledge of the game and no established orthodoxy and so people played in all different kind of ways.
So yes I would say it was magical
The game was marketted very well, even people who didnt play video games knew World of Warcraft.
I really doubt Blizzard invested heavily in advertisements before the game launched. It grew on good-will and word of mouth. It wasn't really until BC and WotLK that Blizzard went into viral marketing with shit like celebrity endorsements and stuff like that.
Nobody, NOBODY who wasn't a nerd/geek talked about vidya up until the late 2000s. Not even about WoW.
this. Vidya was a bad word for a long time, and only the most nerdy of people talked about it outside of the context of "think of the children" and "time wasting nerds"
And that's a good thing.
This. Same things for anime, manga, comics, etc...
He said knew of, not talked about. Absolutely delusional to think normies didn't know what wow was with the mr. t/mini me/etc commercials topped off by the south park wow episode.
I'm not from the US so I never knew about those commercials, but the SP episode came out years AFTER WoW, IIRC.
>but the SP episode came out years AFTER WoW, IIRC
nah it was in 2006
A ton of normie girls at my school knew about and relatively regularly talked about things like Tetris, Super Mario, Pokemon, Tony Hawk, Counter-Strike, The Sims, GTA, WoW, etc. Where the frick are you guys from that those weren't even talked about, even from normies?
t. Scandinavian
USA, California specifically. Even the most alt of chicks knew nothing of gaming outside of tertiary experience.
>Even the most alt of chicks knew nothing of gaming outside of tertiary experience.
That sounds so foreign to me. Did girls where you lived not even have Gameboys either?
I was pretty social as a teen, and not a single female friend had a gameboy. Now that I think about it that is pretty weird.
The only people that actually think this is true didn't have friends
>no one talked about nintendo, playstation, gta, halo, doom, quake, half-life, etc
>I never played video games until 2016
I was born in 2000, my step brother had it and I tried it. Made a character.
It was a goblin, like level 23. It sucked shit.
Scrap it.
Make new character.
Some dark mage thing. Like just starts off level 600.
What the frick is even the point then? Am I remembering this shit correctly or what?
>I was born in 2000
Opinion completely disregarded. You weren't even sentient for 9/11. You have no clue about anything. By the time you were 10 years old, gaming was already on a very steady decline.
Opinion discarded entirely. I was still born early enough to browse the internet on pic related and run into screamers that almost made me shit my pants.
Also the pre/post 911 analogy is reddit söy btw.
>Also the pre/post 911 analogy is reddit söy btw.
You are a fricking moron who has absolutely no clue how dramatically the entire world changed after 9/11. You will never know what it was like growing up in an era without everyone having 24/7 access to the internet and everyone having phones on them.
Your dislike of the world you live in is not reason enough to take it out on anon. Tie your balls in a knot and rope yourself homosexual.
I don't dislike the world we live in at all. I don't know why you'd get that idea. I am extremely happy that I now have internet 24/7, I have a phone in my pocket that's basically a mini computer, I can be connected to people across the globe, etc. etc. because I know what it was like without those things.
>You will never know what it was like growing up in an era without everyone having 24/7 access to the internet and everyone having phones on them
Stopped reading there. In school really no one had phones. Some ultra rich kid might have an ipod MAYBE.
All I had (and this wasn't until way later) was a blackberry where I could access the internet on a small screen and had to listen to voicaloid songs on loop on the bus ride home since I didn't have data and just had the cache from where I preloaded it before I left home.
And yes, believe it or not, israelites still hated you and ran the world pre 911.
Post 911 as you like to call it made yoy submissive to Black folk.
In fact, being sentient post 911 probably means you were mind cucked into fear and submission, so I can understand why you're so upset right now
>In fact, being sentient post 911 probably means you were mind cucked into fear and submission
The irony here is that you couldn't differentiate pre/post, and you literally just ended up describing yourself.
I meant pre 911 therefore you're actually the one btfo here, nice try though
>I meant pre 911
Yes, that is what I said. I called you out for being stupid.
>All I had (and this wasn't until way later) was a blackberry
This sentence exposes how young and naive you are. Blackberry phones were extremely advanced compared to shit like the early Nokia phones which literally could not display any colors.
Before the blackberry all I had was this for a short time. Behold. This advanced technology.
Believe it or not, being a redditor 90s kid or whatever you are doesn't make you cooler.
Believe it or not, your "LE IMMORTAL ROCK BLOCK NOKIA CHONG" doesn't make you more relevant either.
In fact. It makes you more cringe.
You're at the same level of cringe of all the gigazoomies who did the fortnight flossing dances.
Also calling out a typo when you've already gotten btfo is peak reddit.
So these are the brains of pre 911 subrains...
Unfortunate to see that this what Ganker has turned into...
I fricking miss my Razor so much. I wish I could still use it today.
you realize everything that happened "because" of 9/11 would've happened anyway right? america was in a cultural, spiritual, moral and economical decline since the 60s or even earlier. we would've been were we are now with or without 9/11. 9/11 only accelerated the inevitable. so yes, the whole "everything was sunsine and rainbows until LE BIG BAD 9/11 HAPPENED" is a shitty moronic lolbertarian reddit take.
>Also the pre/post 911 analogy is reddit söy btw
>Also the pre/post 911 analogy is reddit söy btw.
Pure unfiltered underage homosexual cope. You were trembling while typing this.
>LE PRE 911
>LE POST 911
I'm laying in bed drinking mio water and laughing my ass off you fricking millennial morons are the funniest shit lmao
Was ur family poor or were you using the internet at like 2
kys
b8
>It was a goblin
noice
Black person
I only played wow in a private server
It was cool af, the best stuff aside the story it was how the world felt huge, you had a sense of scale and danger
Only mmo that makes me feel that now is gw2
really? you somehow feels danger despite being able to heal yourself all the way from 0-100% and having a downstate to save your ass?
>but was it really as magical as everyone who did play it in that era claims it to be?
Yes. The whole internet and everyone on it was like a completely different world compared to what it is now.
Yes, imagine a world where social media doesn't exist and the vast majority of the population are tech illiterates that have never heard of forums are chat rooms. Now imagine their only exposure to forums/chat rooms being MMOs. That's why MMOs were so good during that era. Also no idpol obviously.
If I try to put it into words, you won't understand. Everything I say will seem stupid to you.The social connections you'd form over menial stuff like knowing how to solve quests or where to get a certain armor just can't be done today.
There's too much information available, and culturally we are too averse to struggling. We've essentially turned every game into a job, and it's impossible to actually enjoy them with other people.
As it is, you can play to max level without making a single friend. Every internet friend I have today I made more than 10 years ago, and most of them over 15.
love u anon
It had really amazing graphics and gameplay for an MMO, still an MMO though so pretty boring according to most people. "grindfest' etc.
Build an AzerothCore server to play it. It's worth it.
https://www.azerothcore.org/wiki/installation
You can also play repacks which is the very, very easy way to experience the game; thou I'd not rec and it's up to you if you think it's safe or not.
I just wanna play a solo version that you could play with anything class. If only so I don't have to go beg for help with my shit for 3 hours so I can beat one dungeon.
>github.com/ZhengPeiRu21/mod-individual-progression
This is the most reliable repack and might be the only one included in AzerothCore's catalogue. Still I'd suggest you guys building your own server the way you guys want.
>Some nerds can string this together.
>Blizz can't add this as a realm option 20 years in.
It really is sad, isn't it? Most complaints would go away if players could just play the whole game. Maybe let them "save" a gearset per expansion so they can load that to replay sections with the old balance/systems.
Is there a list of per-patch world state changes/videos of per-patch exclusive content? As neat as exploring it all would be, most of what changes is just NPCs being added/moved/removed, some dialogue and quests becoming inaccessible over time.
Can you replay time limited events this way, like TBC's pre-launch event?
Wow funded my studies during TBC powerleveling players to Gladiator. Good times doing PvP while making money.
When i look back that's the only good memory i got from that game.
I have much better memories from lineage 2 or MMOs that released after cause i got in a guild with a much better spirit. People you play MMO with is much more important than the game itself.
What set it apart from other MMOs was that quests had a strong narration that made you feel like you were actually part of the world and doing something in them. Outside of that context there really isn't anything special about the game and in actuality it gets boring after a while.
>Outside of that context there really isn't anything special about the game
It was incredibly special because it was the first time that an MMO wasn't just for extremely sweaty nerds doing number crunching all day every day. It was an MMO that opened up the possibility for both hardcore MMO players and casuals to play together in an MMO for the first time.
In addition to that, the gameplay and the graphics were leagues above anything else at the time. It was absolutely insane how smooth and fluid everything felt. Still to this day, 20 years later, no other MMO has even managed to match the fluidity of WoW's movement and combat.
>no other MMO has even managed to match the fluidity of WoW's movement and combat.
Seriously whoever designed WoW's character movement was a mad genius and needs so much fricking recognition.
> no other MMO has even managed to match the fluidity of WoW's movement and combat.
Have you played other MMOs or are you one of those people who has only ever played WoW because you're emotionally attached to it?
I have played 90% of MMOs in existence. Yes, even all the trashy weeb ones and obscure ones. The last 10% are MUDs and non-english ones that I didn't play.
Yes.
It ruined people’s lives.
THIS, I was in college during the full time I played, but if I didn't I would have been fired from many jobs and would have a lot of self-worth issues by now.
I nearly became homeless when classic launched, had to bust my ass after that just to keep up with rent
We were wiping on broodlord lashlayer and then our guildleaders said she'd show us her breasts if we got it this pull
we did lol they were pretty great especially when you're 17
The thing about old MMOs is most of the games weren't actually all that good. And even so, most of the big named MMOs were mostly the same.
What made these games great were the community around it as well as some other factors.
>Most development teams were avid players of the MMO they played so t hey had a better understanding of it
>Data Mining was at an all time low so the element of discover was far greater than it is today
>Less available resources online to outright spoil all the game has to offer to add to the above point
>Meta Min / Max gaming was not the norm so communities were more willing to simply have fun playing the game instead of being autistic
>The novelty of multiplayer games (especially ones with huge liveable worlds) was still in it's infancy. Most of these games were really enjoyable just using as an interactive chat room to frick around in a game while you hung out with people
So whenever I see people claiming that this next big MMO #5123 coming out is going to recapture what used to make MMOs great I'm of the opinion that it is literally impossible to do. The gaming community (especially ones that play MMOs) has changed so immensely over the past 20+ years that you just aren't going to be able to recapture that magic. It won't happen.
Are there any ways to fend off datamining?
Being absolutely annoying as frick as a developer and hosting your game in a completely self contained environment that your playerbase is unable to access. Think something like a MMO as a service hosted entirely in the cloud where the playerbase is unable to access any files in any way and everything is decrypted on the fly as users access it. That's the only way I can really think of and from a resource perspective would probably be impossible to implement at scale.
>Remove any kind of PTR/PTS
>Slow down patch cycles to ensure that no WIP shit makes it to live servers
>Heavily encrypt game files
First option is counterintuitive because every MMO needs people to test content for free (because devs almost never play their own game over and over again)
Second option is counterintuitive because people need to be drip-fed content constantly or they will leave (this is why BattlePasses will NEVER go away)
Third option is literally a waste of time and resources, plus has the potential to affect performance if the encryption is structured like DRM.
In short, it's just not worth it. Especially when almost every online game has dozens of brontometer content creators that need to make 10min videos about patch speculation, which in turn brings more attention to the game.
>In short, it's just not worth it. Especially when almost every online game has dozens of brontometer content creators that need to make 10min videos about patch speculation, which in turn brings more attention to the game.
Yeah that's the true bullshit pill that's tough to swallow. Datamining ruins the experience for the player but it's generally profitable and beneficial for the company as it keeps their game in the news and their communities actively talking about them during patch cycles when content is lacking. Companies really don't have any incentive to prevent datamining. It's the opposite where they're incentivized to "leak" information about their game.
This. The closest I've gotten to this feeling recently is when I play extremely niche titles. Tiny shitty indie games with 30 players or less, with no online database or fan wiki to speak of.
You get to actually connect with other players a bit when you have no choice but to ask them how to do something.
I started playing WoW in MoP with my friends. It became our main game but we almost never did content together. They were obsessed with PVP while I was much more drawn to becoming a loremaster and the occasional raid.
When classic came out, I was actually amazed at how much better questing felt but quit shortly after because the community was incessantly toxic. I would love to experience OG vanilla through Wrath and meet normal people but I doubt it will happen.
If Blizz ever decides to make the Corrupted Hippogryph mount a twitch drop I will delete my account. Giving away TCG mounts is the biggest frick you to people that actually went out and bought the cards in the first place.
.
That last bit is peak mental illness.
Yes but more due to the nature of the internet back then
Kek I always wanted to get into it during that time, I was the perfect age and had a best friend in 6th grade who was obsessed with it and convinced me to buy a copy. The problem was that my family computer was a 2003 Sony Vaio laptop lol. I tried installing the game but there wasnt enough space so I tried to delete some of those shitty computer games like freecell and pinball and shit to make room, which didn't end up working and I was never able to boot the game on that pc. Weeks later my dad burst into my room SCREAMING at me about "where the frick is freecell, that is the only game I play, why did you delete it" etc and then told me and my little brother we'd never be allowed to play WoW after that. We did eventually get a nicer PC that could load the game but by that time I had gotten a 360 and was mainly into XBL with newer friends and never really had any incentive to get back into it.
It was honestly good, but I was already a Warcraftgay since almost a decade before WoW came out, so my opinion is biased. Also, people worshipped it only because back then it was their first MMORPG. Truth is, it NEVER reached the greatness of Ultima Online, and I'd say both FFXIV and TESO are better than WoW ever was.
No. It was tedious as shit, if you didn't have a guild (that would eventually succumb to drama once the couple that leads the guild breaks up because one of them has been caught flirting with another guild member) you were fricked, you geared your ass up only to be fricked up by a PVP-geared frost mage the moment you left any city
Classic was fricking garbage, it only became good around WoTLK
Frost mages weren't even considered good.
There weren't half as many players on a server back then also.
On release? They were overpowered as frick, you could easily one shot people
No, I hated it. Ultima Online in the other hand.
Yeah, it was really fun at the time to explore and make friends online.
So, Ganker was created in October 2004, while World of Warcraft was released in November 2004. I wonder what Ganker was like back during those last couple of months of 2004 and the very first months of 2005. I don't think anyone that fricking old is still in here, right? Right?
haha no way
>I don't think anyone that fricking old is still in here, right? Right?
I joined Ganker in very early 2005. 32 years old now. The amount of zoomers, third worlders, schizos, /misc/ rejects, etc. that have steadily been filling up this place since 2016 has made it completely unrecognizable in every way.
Ganker from 2004 - 2010 was completely unrecognizable compared to today. It was never good, though.
in 2006 nobody talked about wow. It was WoW, call of duty, Halo, etc that would get you chased off of Ganker
h-haha nope
I joined in 2007, when I was 18. this place had gone down to the dogs completely. The fappening and then the elections were just the final nails in the coffin. It happened much earlier than that with the fall of /tg/. It was a sign of things to come.
>no fun allowed
>board culture being cracked down on while at the same time politically charged "current year topics" not being moderated or offtopic threads flourishing, overmoderation for some things and no moderation at all for other
The writing on the wall was when Ganker banned dubs and the dogshit /LULZ/ and /misc/ boards were created and then moot let, kek. moronic cuck just left to work at google where he was ruthlessly mocked and bullied when instead he could have been a millionaire if he had kept the website for himself and been a positive force for the freedom of the web.
It was pokemon, half life, fighting games, jrpgs, and shmups.
is right. The most popular games and console warring weren't allowed on Ganker so /b/ had half of Ganker's video game discussion.
No, Runescape was the superior MMO that was actually unique and not the same usual shit like WoW where all you do is raids and every quest being 'collect x amount of bear claws' or 'go kill x'
All you did (do) in Runescape is mindlessly grind skills which is why it became autism central
There were quests that actually required thinking and understanding. An actual story. Dialogue with NPCs. I've played both games. RuneScape is still better
imagine that same image with with real people hanging around, dueling, talking, drama, etc... it was alive, it was literally a second life
no, it was boring as shit. But a great soundtrack absolves many sins and WoW had a great soundtrack.
you know it was fun, played it vanilla, i wasnt leveling that much and had much more fun exploring the world since you didnt really knew it then. But it didnt get me addicted, Its definetly a milestone in gaming and for mmorpgs i would say
It was good because the everquest nerds migrated to it. Unfortunately it was very quick to be taken over by the PVPMMO teens and tweens. Then the moms and girlfriends came. Soon after Burning Crusade the official formula everyone loved but pretended to hate had been altered to cater to the forum crybabies and PVP homosexualry.
The game had a chance to establish a dynasty of kino and become a serious contender. Now its a fricking furry troony corporate joke.
Enjoy. All the original developers left by 2009-2010 everyone left afterwards was a moneygrubbing frickwad.
Kevin jordan is a frickwad also.
EQ era was packed with momgamers grooming preteen boys, you don't know what you're talking about
WoW did attract the e-prostitute demographic though
It was babies first MMO, even back then. If you'd played other MMOs like Asherons Call, Lineage 2, Ultima, etc. then no it wasn't magical. If it was your first MMO like it was for a lot of people (because it was probably by far the most casual friendly option) then yes probably.
It was shit.
Warcraft 3 was better.
If you want something truly magical there was OoT.
no. Warcraft 3 was shit. All it was basically was loretesting for WoW. All the original developers wanted to make an MMO game after WC2.
Warcraft 3 was great and the custom games were fun.
Warcraft 2 was great also.
The custom games were the only reason to get warcraft 3. I wont lie I ladder climbed the shit out of WC3 but SCBW and SC2 are where it's at now. I wish I was still good. I am shit. Barely gold now.
They were a big enough reason, they were plentiful, varied and creative. The campaign was worth it also. I agree i wasn't much of a fan of the ladder either.
I still get on DotA 2 sometimes even though my win is 45%. I just sit there and try to farm and nostalgia trip back when my korean friends carried me. Also Footman Frenzy and Tower defense maps were my shit. Probably a popular opinion.
The only reason I use twitch is to watch these eastern european guys play WC2 and to watch Grubby play WC3
>It was babies first MMO, even back then.
I hate that draenei are stuck in WoW holy FRICK
Original WoW was magical because it was not yet ruined by pervasive min-maxing and data-mining. It was a social phenomenon, a lot of normies were playing and most of us were clueless. There was no wowhead yet and everything was still mysterious and discoverable.
Thing's like the quest giving you Dartol's Rod of Transformation were not widely known, so you'd discover this only by word of mouth.
There was no Questie, no Atlas, no Maps. If you had a question you would have to talk to people. Groups for quests were abundant and finishing a dungeon was actually difficult (because players sucked). No cleave meta, no rushing, no mage farming.
The game is still the same, but the playerbase and environment has completely changed.
>There was no wowhead yet
but there was thottbot
>Have you played other MMOs
have you?
>but there was thottbot
Yes, but it sucked in comparison. There was a lot of misinformation in there. Also it was not used pervasively (yet).
>Also it was not used pervasively (yet)
This is probably the biggest mentality shift that has happened in gaming. Back then people reacted to things like Thottbot with "Why would I want to ruin my own fun by spoiling things?"
Fast forward to today, and every single game is datamined and min/maxed with 200 big content creators making "how to" guides before it even comes out.
Fair enough points, I just think it's weird I never see mention of it.
Yeah I remember being stuck on some quest I would ask in the general chat and Thottbot was suggested so rarely i always forgot it even existed
>Original WoW was magical because it was not yet ruined by pervasive min-maxing
First sign you didn't play it at all
Not true at all. I was in a guild that used a very fair form of DKP where no undercutting or drama could happen.
We had a core of 26 people and PUG'd the rest. Best in Slot was only ever talked about by mages because everyone knew the game wasnt that hard to manipulate. But I was able to poopsock that game for about 2 years straight after release.
Is this mutt-level reading comprehension at work? There was always min-maxing, but it was confined to a few forums and guilds. Most people back then (early 2005) were clueless normies.
It was as magical as any other fresh quality product you could've consumed. Blizzard captured the imagination of the impressionable youth. And the effect is stronger the less experienced a human is.
In the end it could've been math or architecture or whatnot, but happened to be a waste of time a corporate stole from us.
Same thing happening with tiktok and the current youth.
>was it really as magical as everyone who did play it in that era claims it to be?
No.
It was however babby's first MMORPG.
Similar to Halo, it introduced normalgays to MMOs and in typical Blizzard fashion it was polished in a way that lots of other MMOs at the time weren't. It didn't introduce anything different like say City of Heroes.
One thing that gave WoW an extreme edge to other MMOs though was that it had an established world and a decent playerbase that would be interested to find out what happened after Warcraft 3.
>but was it really as magical as everyone who did play it in that era claims it to be?
>normal people who didn't grow up with the internet
>coming out of the 90's, which by all standards and especially compared to today's world was basically a paradise at least if you were in the 1st world
>a time when online interactivity was novel enough that seeing other people in a virtual world was mind blowing
>chill, no attitude gaming with people who had no expectations of "QoL" or endgame or pvp or balance or anything that plagues current mmos
>zero or almost zero guides except databases(youtube wasn't the juggernaut it is now), very little in the sense of parasitic entities piggybacking on the popularity of the game by offering "guides" so everyone did what they knew best and very few people knew what they were doing
>talented team of game designers who made what they wanted to play and had no social engineers or armpit gender diplomas trying to shove commie sexual racial freak shit
I could go on but this is off the top of my head. It was really magical, especially if you were like 15-17 when it came out.
it was quite magical coming from warcraft 3 to wow and being hyped with the boys. but ngl i had more fun with guild wars back in the day. ironically i enjoy retail wow (from legion onwards) the most. best combat in any mmo.
No, it was like a second job. The quests were uncreative as frick (grab X, collect Y, go to Z), leveling was a god damn chore (like in literally any MMO) and classes were basically "Do you want to hit hard, get hit hard, or heal hard?" but because the game was easily accessible to normalhomosexuals, rode off the hype of old blizzard, and warcraft 3 homosexuals, like me, wore rose tinted glasses while playing it, it was an overnight hit. Let's not talk about the fact that, at launch, a lot of shit wasn't even available, and then they immediately killed world PVP like the next major patch by saying you could only PVP in small spaces so that you don't inconvenience the normal players on the pvp servers from questing because they're on a pvp server and don't want to pvp.
>and then they immediately killed world PVP like the next major patch by saying you could only PVP in small spaces
What are you talking about?
That's clearly someone referencing something they read on reddit. They didn't actually experience anything they are talking about.
battlegrounds you frickin idiot. Soon as they implimented those, they made it so the town guards respawned much quicker, and spawned elites, basically killing world PVP because taking over towns was pointless
World PVP was alive and active in 2019 Official Blizzard Classic Vanilla servers. Maybe even more than it was in 2004. What the frick fricking game were you playing where "taking over towns was pointless". Did you play on some unofficial modded server that had different rules and only moronic players? You have no fricking clue what you are talking bout. The fricking classicwow subreddit was littered with people angry that flight paths and NPC's were being camped in WPVP. Seriously stop posting.
>2019 classic wow is exactly the same as 2004 wow
So you never played wow when it came out.
I was drilling home the point that even 2019 had active WPVP. You imply that a patch in 2004 ruined WPVP. No it did not. I joined many raids and killed many players and even got the Black War Bear (maybe during wrath?). And even in 2019 WPVP wasn't ruined. You are just a garbage player that should play a different game if it makes you so upset that NPC's don't stay dead for 24 hours.
So you're saying in 2005 nobody formed raids to kill the 4 leaders of the enemy faction? Sounds like you never played WoW.
you never played
I played on Stormreaver EU, which was nicknamed Finnreaver. I played with some guys from the guilds <sauna> and <Reign of Chaos> which had people in it that would later go on to form the infamous world first guild called Paragon.
Sure you did
I used to be a regular on #Stormreaver on Quakenet, back when IRC was all the rage still. I don't know why this is such an unfathomable thing to you. I remember being amazed when they implemented weather effects into the game and I saw rain for the first time.
Good for you. You still didn't play it.
>You still didn't play it
You are fully convinced that I somehow didn't play the game, despite all the contrary evidence, just because I told you that world PvP still existed after BGs were introduced. Don't you see how ridiculous you are acting?
Convinced? No I know you didn't
>No I know you didn't
I am more convinced that YOU didn't actually play, because you are the one claiming that world PvP just instantly ceased to completely exist after BGs were introduced.
The most laughable part here is that you're convinced that people stopped ganking in places like STV, The Barrens, Tyr's Hand, etc. just because of BGs. You're also convinced that people didn't gank each other 24/7 during the "LOL SAND" events in Silithus for the AQ opening.
>I am more convinced that YOU didn't actually play
>no u
lmao
>lmao
There you go. I just gave you irrefutable proof that world PvP still existed post-BGs and now you are so out of your depth that you have resorted to just reply with "lmao" because you know deep down that you are objectively wrong.
Dude, you need to assume everyone you talk to on the internet is either a 10 year old, or a 99 year old. You do not know how moronic that user is. This guy is clearly a level 100 moron. Why are you still replying? It is not necessary for you to defend yourself. IRL you should just turn and walk away from these people. Please stop subjecting yourself to these awful interactions with awful people. They will never change their mind because they ignore facts. Learn to walk away.
BGs didn't really change much in terms of world PvP. It was still very much alive.
Yeah you never played in 2004
I did though. BGs made the 1% poopsockers go there to farm their weekly HKs instead of doing ganking, but BGs didn't really change much for world PvP overall. World PvP was still very much alive post-BGs.
Maybe your server was a special case, but I highly fricking doubt it. BGs killed world PVP everywhere.
Quite wrong on many accounts.
> town guards respawned much quicker
Most likely not a thing.
>spawned elites
Was never a thing.
The only relevant thing would be the mechanics of civilians calling guards changing. Iirc (18 year old memories) at some point, the amount of guards that would spawn from a civilian calling for help increased, or rather, the civilian would call guards for each player in the range. As a result, you'd get swarmed by guards.
Anyway, that wasn't particularly relevant when it came to world pvp. And by world pvp, I mean large scale world pvp. For that, there are 3 distinct phases
1) Pre-honor system
2) Post honor system, but pre DK/BG patch
3) Post DK/BG patch
During the first phase, large scale wpvp was mainly for the novelty and fun factor. There was nothing you'd gain from it. It happened because it was novel, but it would've ended eventually regardless, once the novelty faded. You had town raids, city raids, etc.
The second phase is well-known for the mass hillsbrad fights. This is what most people think when they think of vanilla wpvp (although many of them never were there). It still had a novelty factor to it, but also had a practical gameplay gain in form of honor.
The third phase is where it died for the most part. DKs were actually the killers of all town/city raids. Any accidental civilian kill would remove a large chunk of your progress, and everyone who cared about their rank steered clear of them. BGs made them obsolete in terms of honor efficiency, but DKs killed any chances of them happening for the novelty factor.
Then there was an additional change later on (warmasters), which removed the skirmishes you'd have in the zones with BGs while sitting in queue.
But large scale wpvp wouldn't have remained even if there were no BGs or DKs. The real issue was that they were fun for the novelty, and once that ends, it's over. If you had been forced to grind honor without BGs, you'd have gotten classic p2 eventually.
And since I hit character limit, I couldn't fit in a section about the other kinds of wpvp.
The wpvp that wasn't large scale, but consisted of ganking, competition over mobs/nodes, smaller scale fights because you called your friends, etc never really died. It may have decreased a bit when people had fewer reasons to exit the capital, but it was very much alive.
This was something that also stayed alive in classic. In fact, in some ways, it got better. This is the only thing that I'm grateful to world buffs for. They forced you to go out in the world, and they provided a very good griefing opportunity. I never cared for dispelling (hardly pvp), but killing people with them, and the sense of danger when you had them yourself was great.
Yes, not because the game was anything ahead of its time (it was ok), but because just going online and watching/playing with other people was still novel and not everyone was hiding behind 18 layers of irony / on edge about saying word money stolen.
play turtle wow
you can still have a similar experience
Or you can play something that is 1000x more vanilla on a blizz server with 5000 players. Turtle isn't even the same game and it takes 2 seconds on their website to figure that out.
>Ignore new quests and dungeon finder.
>Get to play Vanilla.
You guys really don't get it
The reason you loved vanilla WoW so much back then was because it was NEW
Because you and everyone else had never experience it before
It doesn't matter how many times you try to recapture that feeling with a "faithful" version of vanilla WoW it will never happen because it's the same old thing and everybody playing it already knows it inside and out
That's what Turtle WoW offers, a new experience but still based on the original
That's why it's the only thing that can recapture that feeling
It was also because most of us were in school of some sort so we played it at a time in our lives when we were carefree, and also had the time to devote to it. When you're younger you can really immerse yourself in something and for some reason as you age you start to take a more analytical approach to everything you experience.
>Turtle WoW ad
Yikes
I remember watching it while it aired with everyone in game and seeing their reactions.
it's also because the world was very different back then, the people were different, the internet was different
it's impossible to replicate that experience and feeling even if a new game comes out
the world is shit now
>have a similar experience
To retail Wow where the devs are all malding trannies yeah, but we're discussing Vanilla here buddy
No you can't.
Classic/Vanilla was great for reasons that had nothing to do with the gameplay. It was a good game on its own, but nowadays its nothing special. It is a solved game with balance issues and bad design decisions that have aged like that.
What made vanilla wow so good back when it was actually current was that it blurred the line between fantasy and reality like no other game before or since. Before it, games (especially MMOs) were some cringe shit for nerds - and "real life" talking and hanging out with humans some cringe shit for extroverts that were too normie for vidya.
Wow let these two sides become one. You unironically had people from all walks of life get together in one world, and it felt like an immersive real MMO world. We will never have this again.
No, but it was pretty good and very novel. As long as you have basic social skills you can relive most of what made it good via private servers. The most popular vanilla and WotLK servers are populous enough that you can still socialize and do casual content. Additional perks are that most of the playerbase is
>Smart enough to not give Blizzard money
>Mostly old players who miss the atmosphere or kids who want old game experiences
so it ends up being pretty nice.
>grew up with WC2/3, and WoW
>WoW was a way for dad and I to communicate because parents were divorced
>Made a lot of friends in WoW who would teach you cool things from faster/easier paths, where to get a good item, or just how to play better. Sometimes just gave me good shit to help me level because I was a moronic kid who didn't know how to work the map until for far too long into WoW.
It was certainly magical for me. A ton of good memories, and hours wrapped up in that game. I have so many that playing WoW has become a craving like some might get for food. sometimes there is an urge just to kill defias in westfall, and reminisce. I finally dropped it, for the most part, last year. I don't enjoy retail, and classic variants are okay, but just not the same. only reason I would want to play it is to go questing and level but without other people to interact with around your level it doesn't feel like much of a point.
Fricking 2016 kotor blew my mind so
>kotor
I remember that era in late 2000-early 2010's where everyone was making MMOs to capitalize of WoW's success, and everyone in WoW was screaming about "X game is going to be the WoW killer!" and then nothing happened. WoW was a giant, and like many giants the only thing that was really going to kill it was itself. It did feel like it spawned a new form of "hype marketing". It feels like I often see games being marketed as "X-game Killer" and every time they fail to live up to that expectation. I just know a game is going to be mediocre at best when it's marketing is directed on other products compared to trying to sell itself.
There was nothing quite like it.
For the most part, it was the community and the social interactions within it that made it what it was. The small interactions that you might have with random people you ran into that could blossom into friendship. The friends, enemies you made. Communities in which you could belong. The web of rivalries between guilds and players on the server, players who became (in)famous for various reasons.
The scale of it all was amazing at the time. Participating in pvp raids for the first time. Even after the introduction of BGs and DKs, my server had organized wpvp events that ended up crashing the server. AQ event which caused the game to run at 0.2 fps.
The gameplay had a certain magic to it as well, which still can be seen somewhat considering the how many people just keep playing fresh over and over, and the popularity of classic servers at the start. Fluid combat, very good sfx, which is what most other mmos fail at. I've yet to find a single mmo with combat that feels as good as wow 18 years ago.
Once a year, we get together with some guildies irl. After several drinks, the conversations seem to always drift to vanilla wow. It's just too memorable - the players, the guilds, the zones, the dungeons, everything.
Early 00's MMO just hit different.
It also helped I was a teen with no friends and infinite free time compared to now where I'm a shallow husk of a human being working 60 hour work weeks.
Didn't we have this thread last week? Fricking payed shills. Sage
>payed
Hello Rajeesh. How is the weather in India today?
>Paid shills for nostalgia and a game/time frame that can never exist again
Vanilla WoW was fricking incredible, mostly because nobody knew what the frick they were doing and nobody cared about doing things the "right" way. The graphics, music, setting, gameplay and overall mystery of not knowing what was coming next was so great. You'd find some random quest and if it gave you an item you could use at the end of the chain, it felt so rewarding.
Now the game is basically on autopilot and points you where to go and treats you like a moron.
>Vanilla WoW was fricking incredible, mostly because nobody knew what the frick they were doing and nobody cared about doing things the "right" way
this. its why nothing like this will ever happen again unless a billionaire decides to fund a mmo full of secrets and content, and keep any of the secrets from leaking out. And even then, give it a year or two and everything would have been mapped out and optimized.
Greatest mmo of all time and nothing has managed to surpass it in 2 decades
No. MMOs were never good, and I remember trying the trial disc that came with my Warcraft 3 box and being immensely bored by it. I wish we got Warcraft 4 instead.
>and I remember trying the trial disc that came with my Warcraft 3 box
I have never heard about this being a thing. Can you show some sort of proof or find a link to this?
those demos were given like candy to hook you little Black folks into subscribing to pay a game. still cannot believe how many people were ok with that and fond of the game now.
Blizz has just announced that they're launching official Classic Hardcore servers. If you missed out on the experience of leveling during Vanilla WoW, those servers are your best bet of recreating it today.
Obviously the downside is that if you die, it's over and you have to start from scratch. But it refocuses the game into purely being about the adventure, getting out in to the world and meeting other players. And that was always the best part of the vanilla game.
The experiences people had during the 2000s, with WoW and other games, are not able to be replicated in these times, because if you read this thread, you will know that the game itself is not the entire reason people have such fond memories of those times. External factors like youth, more time to play, less responsibilities, still being in school, life not sucking as much as now, the infancy of the internet and just more general incoherency is what makes people here look so fondly back on their experiences.
I don't want to go too far into this, but this is also why I believe that remasters and remakes are not he right way to do things, because those old experiences are not able to be replicated properly. I see a lot of Battlefield players asking for a BC2 and BF3 remake and things like that, because they think that it will be the same like it was over a decade ago, but it can't ever be. They'll play that shit, quickly realize that and then abandon it.
I kind of agree and disagree simultaneously. Yes a large part of nostalgia is obviously longing for things you can't get back like youth, the friends you had at the time, having less responsibilities and being more carefree.
At the same time, the whole reason a lot of people played WoW in the first place was because it was an escape in to a fantasy world. The outside world doesn't really matter when you're immersed in that fantasy and that's just as true now as it was back then. And you're also assuming that everyone who played vanilla was a teenager, but there are plenty of players who were older and already had responsibilities, jobs, families, etc back then. The appeal of the fantasy world for those guys hasn't changed.
It really boils down to how jaded you've became since that first ride and it's going to be different for every player. And for a lot of players it will be the first chance for them to experience it at all. Honestly I can't stand retail but the HC servers sound really appealing and I'll probably drop in for at least a month to check them out.
it's a zoomer game that killed the soul of old MMOs, whilst not actually doing anything actually fun and interesting as it's contemporaries.
literally made because of a screeching minmax homosexual who wanted Everquest to focus on raiding, so now see how WoW's entire content cycle is based around raiding and "we can't add [insert literally anything fun] because we have to make raids" despite only like <10% of the population giving a single frick about raiding.
but it's popular because the Blizzard brand and it's made specifically to cater to dumb kids and bored housewives. WoW classic is fake MMO boomers playing their turgid shit and thinking its >le true oldskool hardcore MMORPG, although they've literally never experienced anything else, inside or outside the genre. They usually only ever have a singular point of reference for everything in comparison and criticism - and it's WoW. WoW fans demand any new MMO IP to cater to them, play it for a month at most, then go right back to WoW.
>zoomer game
yeah i aint gonna bother to read whatever other moronic shit comes after
yeah i know, zoomers have trouble with anything more than a 10 second tiktok.
don't you?
>wanted Everquest to focus on raiding
>t. never played Everquest
It WAS focused on raiding. WoW took raiding and casualized it, putting everything in an instance. All 3 Everquest games had boatloads of contested mobs.
It was a big social thing but the game was awful and it still is.
There were a bunch of WoW clones from 2000s to early 2010s
also kys
I was born in 95. My parents split in 08 and my mother met my stepfather over WoW.
Frick, must have been 04 they split. I was 9.
How was it? Growing up in a household of WoWhomosexuals? Did your mom ever dress like a nightelf on a friday night?
Wow made the perfect white european fantasy world audially and visually
It absolutely oozed atmosphere or adventure from every nook and cranny without being over the top tacky in regular zones
Everything they ever did they borrowed from warhammer, too bad the warhammer dudes never knew what they had.
impending cliché answer:
Yes, but it wasn't only the game (mostly), but the times and people. As such it is impossible to replicate, no matter how much "classic" shilling you might hear.
I played the stress test beta a year before launch and it got me hooked. For the first time I was playing with hundreds of other people in the same gameworld. 2004-2008 WoW was a true MMORPG experience. Servers had their ownl little world and you got to know people. You'd hear exploits of top players. You awed at the dude who got the epic Undead mount afk in Orgrimmar bank roof months before anyone else in the server had an epic mount. Gold actually meant something. Same with Crafting, Guilds, Dungeons & Raids. They all had special meaning back then. WoW was a unique expereience back then.
i watched my college roomate throw his life away, and fail out of school with a .6GPA, coming from a 4.0 in highschool
I did the same thing. The world of WoW(heh) felt like it was so much more important, to the point that I felt I didn't even need anything in real life anymore.
I almost did this. When I got into WoW, I noticed I did not care anymore about anything in real life. Job, school, whatever it is, I just stopped caring. In a moment of clarity, I deleted the game and threw away the discs (yes, for you zoomers, it came on discs originally). In about 2-3 days I came back down to reality and resumed my regular life.
There is something fricked up about WoW. Without getting too much into /x/ tier stuff, this shit is a dark portal indeed. Fricks with your brain. There was a married couple who let their baby starve to death because they were so comsumed by WoW they stopped feeding their child. There was that Chinese guy who sat in the same spot for 3-4 days straight and kept playing non-stop till his heart stopped and he died. There is something fricked up about WoW.
mmos ruined my life
No, you ruined your life, but it isn't too late to change.
people who blow hundreds of hours into MMOs and complain about all the time they wasted would have wasted that time somewhere else if MMOs weren't around.
>people who blow hundreds of hours into MMOs and complain about all the time they wasted would have wasted that time somewhere else if MMOs weren't around.
Not true.
I disagree. They already proved themselves willing to do it in the first place which means they didn't care enough about healthier alternatives at the time. Removal of MMOs would just mean they are likely to just find some other thing to waste time in, and it isn't likely to be something like playing the piano, or studying.
I don't get why people spend thousands of hours into something, and claim it ruined their life. They chose to dedicate the time into it, and they, hopefully, had fun with it. If they weren't getting something out of it the time you spent then they wouldn't have done it in the first place.
>If they weren't getting something out of it the time you spent then they wouldn't have done it in the first place
If they weren't getting something out of the time they spent then they wouldn't have done it in the first place*
If you removed all the Black folk from the USA you'd see a huge reduction in crime
If you removed MMO's, you'd see a larger number of people doing more productive things with their lives.
Just facts.
>crime statistics vs how a group of people spend their time
Those are not the same at all, and can't be compared and you know it.
Go head and be moronic if you want.
They are comparable in a way. If you remove the source of the problem, the problem goes away. I think you are genuinely moronic though. Even a stupid child understands that when mommy takes his games away, he'll probably actually get around to doing his homework now. But you don't even have a child's sense, you worthless trash.
I liked it enough to not play any other games for 4 years, so yeah.
It was entry level slop for secondaries and casual normalgays even back then. If you came from a real MMO like Ragnarok Online or Lineage 2 it wasn't all that magical. It was just "Same thing, but casualized and more enjoyable to play".
>real MMO
>koreashit
You're too young to understand.
Odds are I'm older and played MMOs before you.
You already admitted WoW was your first, so no.
I never said that, so no. Of course, everyone here IS the same person, so I guess you're right, schizo.
YOU are too young to understand. There were plenty of other real MMO games out there that were infinitely better than your asiaticshit, like the list
mentioned.
>real MMO
>Ragnarok Online
>Lineage 2
jajajajaja
lol homosexual. I had a good laugh.
>If you came from a real MMO like Ragnarok Online or Lineage 2
You could have at least mentioned ACTUAL REAL MMOs like Ultima Online, Everquest, Star Wars Galaxies, Anarchy Online, Asheron's Call, Dark Age of Camelot, Shadowbane, etc.
Sorry, I don't play western pigslop.
Datamining and the fact that people today are asocial shitbags who all love snide irony is the reason Classic WoW, despite being 1:1 the same fricking game, feels like ass.
If WoW can't be a fun game in its own rite and relies on how people behave at all times means it's a shitty game. It always was a shitty game, other people made it fun.
Imagine logging on and you immediately have several guild members saying hi to you, you get whispers from some dudes saying hi to you, you friend list is FULL and you see you have 20+ friends online, if you need help just ask your guild or literally ANYONE on your friends list and I guarantee 90% of the people you ask will ALWAYS say yes, if not immediately available to help you they will come when ready, imagine having party invites for a dungeon immediately after logging on, imagine just stumbling on a PvP raid to Crossroads or Goldshire in general chat and joining it and making more friends, that was what WoW was like, it wasn't some autistic dead asocial single-player game where nothing happened and everything that did happen was the result of some shallow non-committal user interface element
The game WAS great
The game WAS magical
The game WAS amazing
And operant word is WAS
Because as people have said here you can never ever go back to that time. It was the times that made it. And the times were earnest, they were real, they weren't ashamed, nerd culture was up, people were cool, no arguing, trolling was about in-game parameters or being stupid not politically offending everyone, it was a great time.
The game itself was good for an MMORPG. But it was made awesome by the people. If you weren't there you cannot know. It's like describing colour to a blind guy. You can sit here with all your fancy zoomer logic like you're some wise Buddha and you're the first person to have thoughts with all your logical reductionism about how "it's a shitty game and other people made it fun" but it was a good game and it was made legendary by the people.
>It's like describing colour to a blind guy
I've seen the color, it was pretty cool. But it's still a shitty game. I had just as much fun in other MMOs at the time, it was a different time. People treat WoW like it's something special because of how many normalgays picked it up but it really isn't, the game doesn't hold up at all.
Vanilla - WotLK is like a 7 even with no community and like an 8 or 9 with a good one and if you're willing to play however you like instead of blindly focusing on "progress". It's strength was in variety, atmosphere and simple but interesting writing.
WotLK leaned more towards endgame additions but kept the overall design priorities. Cataclysm broke the game by redesigning and "streamlining" all of Vanilla without considering how this both hurt player choice and fricked up TBC and WotLK content. Pandaria and Legion were fun in a vacuum, but the damage was done and the actual "world" became less important.
These days the overworld is a broken mess, the game encourages new players to ignore it, and almost all expansion content is based around making something you burn through fast and then grind until next expansion. It's an entirely different game and the community reflects this.
Choose any expansion right now and host a local server of it, play it for a couple of months and tell me if you still think it's a good game.
If you do, I can guarantee you that you're a massive fricking moron.
Vanilla is a great virtual world to tour around even in an empty game. It doesn't fall for most of the traps of open world games and has great art direction.
Of course a multiplayer only game isn't as fun without other players, but it's definitely more fun to frick around in than a lot of single player RPGs are to play. The only way you could honestly say the early versions of the game are outright bad are if you only care about shit like dungeons and raids.
It was the most addicting game then and It's still the most addicting game, now. There is nothing quite like questing with your friends until daylight hits. The modern stuff doesn't work because they fundamentally got rid of that gameplay that made the game magical. It doesn't help that every quest is now figured out and everyone knows where even mankrik's wife is.
>but was it really as magical as everyone who did play it in that era claims it to be?
nobody knew how to play the game, so they had to learn how to play it and ask in game about stuff, instead of following an online guide
thotbot existed but was just drop locations and quest guides
actual information about rotations/best stats/etc were all gatekept heavily by secular raiding guilds with mmo experience, who wanted to exclude normies for as long as possible, and they were mostly successful until around the time WOTLK came out and online guides became commonplace
I played in vanilla 2004 on and off but I never socialized so I never raided and I missed pretty much all the important events people talk about like Zul'Gurub, Gates of AQ, etc.
I was a hardcore quester and did all the Alliance quests multiple times though on multiple classes though. Even after I leveled out of an area I still went and did the quests. I did all the niche dungeons like mara many times.
It was magical, but if you played anywhere between the rise to 6 million players you generally got the same experience, and I think that lasted until wotlk, because the game was still pulling enough new players at that point that you still met random new low level questers if your server was high pop.
Back then night elves were all the rage because they had to make the long trip from Teldrassil all the way to Stormwind. My friend was being paid gold just to /dance in their underwear in the Lion's Pride basement.
Every zone had active chats going on, and not spam, people asking for groups for quests like Hogger, or even mundane things like Defias in Westfall near the deadmines entrance because they respawned so fast and were so easy to aggro and die to. Duskwood too was great felt spooky and safe at the same time. Stitches going down the road towards Darkshire was an event even though he didn't drop any real loot.
STV was basically that generation's 'nam.
More memorable moments, having to make the run to get the Southshore flightpath, everyone did this to get to SM. I actually explored everything as an alliance player, a kot of zones intended for Horde, like Stromgarde keep with a bunch of silent non-hostile human NPCs.
First MMO I played was Ragnarok Online. When I started playing WoW it blew my mind, it was leagues better.
>join RP server
>ERP with fat/ugly women
Sorry, boomer chad here
Jesus, you reminded me of something
>2002
>9 years old
>no idea what sex is
>get invited to cyber in an IRC channel with a man and a woman
>no idea what's going on
>just keep "kissing" the woman (who is is half fox) while the other guy "fricks" her
>didn't realize the implications of it until much later
>21 years later, I wear a wiener cage and eat creampies
Not really, but I do have an unhealthy obsession with grandma aged women
Nina Hartley and Kathy Jones are sexo.
even moreso.
i played it in 2005
it sucked
immediately went back to runescape
only poors who couldn't afford wow played runescape
I didn't know buyers remorse could apply to a 20 year old game
anon you don't really think runescape was a better game than vanilla wow right? It's just not. You can't even argue against that. It's okay if your parents/you were poor, many were
Yes. I remember playing it at a friend's house, getting a paper round to pay for the subscription (parents wouldn't pay for a game monthly) and then sharing my account with 1-2 people in school. We only got to 45 I think in classic. Then everyone in school ended up playing tbc/wotlk and it was great. I'm playing ers now during work hours and it's pretty fun but I'll quit at 60 because raiding on a schedule is gay
people born after 2000 should be in camps
>people born after 2000 should be in camps
People born after 2000 will be the one to put people in camps. Zoomer Hitler can't come soon enough.
>the gayest generation where everyone is a they/them troony nonbinary genderfluid deerkin
delusional
Zoomers will be radicalized by having to live in austerity their whole lives picking up after a system that tried to destroy them. The normal ones who manage to pass the great filter that is leftism and globohomosexual will be the most radical generation ever.
Maybe if you were some sort of normalgay slopper that only realized MMOs were a thing when WoW got aggressively marketed and shoved into everyone's face. To anyone who had actually played video games prior to WoW's release it was simply a more dumbed down, modernized take on what they had already played.
I learned to jerk off in Goldshire Inn
Looks like pastel homosexualry in both. What's the difference?
America has more biomes than Europe. And its bigger too lol your 30 countries combined are small compared to my one.
>euroshits
>drive
They're all sitting in shitskin crowded trains.
never paying a monthly subscription for a game
My game was always Everquest Online Adventures anyway. There's a private server in the works for it right now. I can't wait until it's finished. I love that game to pieces. It's been well over 15 years since I played that game. Now THAT was a magical MMORPG, it didn't even have an in-game map or any mounts or anything. If you wanted to go somewhere you had to ask people for directions for where you wanted to go and optionally request a Shaman or Druid or Ranger to buff you with Spirit of Wolf for increased run speed.
It had no instances and every boss and grind spot was in-world, and it had a proto-faction system by way of good and evil-aligned races (evil was more fun tbqh), and you had to manually allocate your stat increases (STR, WIS, AGI, DEX, INT, CON etc) upon level- up, meaning if you statted wrong you could permanently frick up your character, but if you statted right you could make a God-tier tank or DPS or healer or whatever.
It also had perks at engame by way of class masteries... if anyone's played EQ they already know what that is. And you could also do a long questline to become an Epic Class (i.e. Warriors could be Defenders for tank role, Hero for DPS role, Mages could be Aeromancers, Pyromancers etc etc you get the gist). And it actually changed your in-game class tooltip which seems like nothing but it felt epic as frick.
For me the class which seemed the coolest was Enchanters because they had a master class called Animator and it could summon the best tank pet in the entire game. And also Enchanters did a role no other class could do, they were CC specialists.
It was on the PS2, it was casualized Everquest but not by much, it was pretty damn hardcore actually, if you died you had to pay off EXP debt so if you died a lot you had to spend like hours or days or weeks or months in some bad cases to pay it off before you can level up again and there was NO loot rolls and loot was basically free for all so you had to be disciplined in groups.
I liked doing /wave while moving back and forth so you looked like an utter moron, or /bowing and running forward so you did a stupid ass autist headbutt.
No more than EQ1 was to me, just like Ultima Online was to someone else, just like any of the numerous MUD's that were online were to someone else. You never forget your first, and feeling like you're apart of something bigger than just your living room.
No it was shit and on old Ganker you couldn't make a wow thread without getting flamed to death because a) it was baby's first mmo and b) mmos aren't videogames
>babby's first
It was essentially the only MMO for years. WoW had the market hostage. You had your "WoW killer" every year that got hyped, all for each one to die a month or two in.
It's because that's what Blizzard does. They make a mediocre entry in a genre that normies flock to. Nobody wants to play the good games because they want to play with their normie friends. Then the genre dies. They did it with RTS and FPS as well.
I was glad for lockdown because I could finally put my childhood to bed. I got to see all the places I wasn't able to as a kid and do all the raids except Naxx because the game lost steam for me at that point.
It was a real diamond in the rough, it had so much potential which was never realised. I'm glad I played it then, and I'm glad I played it a few years ago.
>tfw you're an essential worker
I was unemployed during lockdown on bennies. Was bliss
>job had massive layoffs during lockdown
>got unemployment plus severance
>went on vacation with gf and spent two weeks sightseeing and then fricking for hours in the evenings
>came back and helped parents with general labor stuff they're getting too old to do
>did volunteer work for the first time in my life right up until I got a job again
the first few months of covid were genuinely the happiest I've ever been in my entire life, turns out money is in fact the solution to literally every single problem
I did this on Nostalrius, but man. I went in to be nostalgic, and got it for a bit. You walk into Orgrimmar/Ironforge and you see all those people in UBRS gear or dungeon gear, it gives you a rush. But then you quickly realized Nostalrius was something completely different, and memorable in its own way. Not even in normal classic could you experience the hundreds of horde vs hundreds of alliance trying to do a world boss. Missing out on Nostalrius is on par with WoW classic.
I was just glad to put my mmo rest to itch. The friend I no lifed it and had never touched wow really reignited a fire i didn't know I had to go ultra degenerate gank mode or large outdoor pvp in general with enough people to be worth the time and there wasn't another game that could really give you that experience, well except archeage unchained that released closely to classic which was vastly superior in that aspect but couldn't be stomached for more than a month with how poorly it was handled and most people had already dropped off. Between those two though I'd say the itch was thoroughly scratched especially with wu flu in effect giving the perfect reason to go full autist for a short(in terms of mmo)time. He talks about that ashes game which sounds really cool in theory but I'm skeptical of it from what I've seen and don't know if I could even dump that much time another time eating game like that again. It was far from the same but it was good in its own way I've got memories and moronic stories on par with those from vanilla
id go with the hours of fricking over money, but you cant really get that without it either
Yes, it was the most magical gaming experience of my life playing from 2006 to 2008. And I'm 35 almost 36 years old.
I really despise zoomers like you who never got to experience the good days before everything went to shit, I mute CSGO voice chat when playing shit like zombie mods or surf because it's nothing but zoomies born after 2005 and they never experienced the real joys of Counter Strike community servers or gaming in general.
Yes moron, it was better back then, every multiplayer game was better back then because the culture was different, everything went to shit when justin.tv turned into twitch, facebook became popular and youtube's most watched videos were let's plays. Gaming never recovered, I'm glad I got experience life before all that shit, can't say the same thing for you
i would have prefered going to parties, having a girlfriend, having genuine hobbies like fixing up cars instead. but this was there for people who couldnt have those things
I just finished 4 years of Uni, parties get old after the first year
People still doing it in their mid20s onwards are bigger losers than any WoW player ever was
I stopped playing at 26. At least I'm not like those people I knew during retail wotlk who were playing in their 30s
Yes
There was a south park episode. That alone should tell you it was something very unique
That episode is what made me try WoW out.
Nah. It's the first pleb MMO for casuals and kids that hit it big. As a certified boomer, Ultima Online was the true wild west frontier of gaming before it was separated into Trammel and Felucca. The kids of today literally have no idea that they missed the absolute peak of MMO interaction before the big companies stepped in to completely neuter the experience and force a carebear environment where nobody can lose and everyone is on a treadmill.
UO had real wealth that you could spread in so many different ways. Gambling, scams, theft, murder, organized crime, vigilante groups, honest monster hunting, and everything in between. Every day in Ultima Online was a true adventure where anything could happen. World of Warcraft, by comparison, is a very tame and stable Disney rollercoaster ride where you never go off the rails. It has no real freedom.
game sucked, RO was leagues better
I've played MMOs for most of my life, 2002-2021, nonstop. This shit genre destroyed my life. I finally dropped it after I noticed I spent 5,000 USD in some shit game for two years and asked myself why am I even playing this genre I hate. Now I own a house, have good savings, and a good job. Frick MMOs. If you ever have children NEVER show them online gaming. 50% chance it will destroy their lives.
I was too young to know what I was doing and I was the definition of a casual (I only reached 60 after TBC) but I had the time of my life.
My best gaming memories are stuff like my fathers entire guild camping the barrens for hours to humiliate a group of hordeBlack folk who camped me earlier.
Classic made me aware if the many flaws I was too stupid to understand back then, but I would go back if I could
I don't think it was only wow itself that was good but that whole pre/early internet era was. The internet was fairly new and everything was a mystery, you didn't know what things were and you were lucky to even find information about it online, the only way you could figure things out was to explore and try things out. Everything had a sense of mystery and adventure to it, things just don't have that anymore. But I also think games generally were better back then because game studios were isolated from each other, so they just created what they wanted, which gave everything soul. Now, everyone follows trends and create the same slop over and over again just to make money
Zoomers will never know how different the world was prior to the internet, never, and it's a real pity
World of Warcraft was released in 2004.
The internet was still very small in 2004
No it wasn't you dumb homosexual.
yeah, you're a dumb zoomer. Go worship Black folk
Itself wasn't small with over 50% access in the us but with dial up still being a thing at that time it was nowhere near as commonplace just a couple years later when it was much improved
It didn't exist until Apple invented it in 2007, moron.
>but was it really as magical as everyone who did play it in that era claims it to be?
Yeah. It was like Everquest but a million times bigger and better (sorry poopsockers). It was an international phenomenon. My fricking grandparents knew what World of Warcraft was. Ozzy Osbourne did a tv commercial for it. If every single person in my country played WoW it still wouldn't reach the upper limit of the playerbase at its top.
>bigger
No.
>better
If you're a noob.
I remember people being nice, forming groups when clearing out caves (they used to be tough). I remember having to socialize and organize in order to meet in front of instances. I remember leveling through all the regions and having a blast just slaying mobs.
The world and gameplay had yet to be autistically documented and numerically solved. There was a real sense of wonder and mystery to the world, challenge to figuring out encounters, and excitement to see what kind of loot you might get.
There were lots of people just playing casually and having a good time. People actually socialized inside the game and you could meet people and make friends.
I think it was just that most people were new to the genre and the game itself. A huge fricking world with so much to do and you being a noob then seeing people do BT/SSC while you were questing in STV thinking that one day you may get there.
I played TBC for its ENTIRE 2 years. I have never done that since and never will.For its time it was great and fresh and somehow I had stuff to do every day for 24 months on just 1 character.
No, it's a low IQ RTS in disguise full of cringey references to pop cultire and it looks like a child ate a box of crayons and threw it up on their brother's D&D books. Blizzard has never made a good game and WoW is one of their worst. It was mostly played by normalgays who had never heard of an MMO before but saw one of the many celebrity endorsements on TV and grognards with rapidly fading neurons. Any other MMO would've been preferable.
WoW is the millennial equivalent to Fortnite.
No, because Fortnite is actually good.
One thing that is important to remember is that there was a strong connection between warcraft 3 and WoW. People were thrilled to explore the world that they played through in warcraft 3, and just be a "normal soldier" aka "grunt" of the Horde and Alliance. Your own identity was not important, you wanted to see the world with a "boots on the ground" point of view.
WoW was incredibly magical, anyone saying otherwise just didnt play it. Our card shop had around 15 computers. Almost all the computers were UT2004 or FFXI 24/7. End of 2005 It was all WoW and like 2 of us on FFXI. WoW overtook everything. The first opening months we had college kids keeping our 7-11 card shop open 24/7 paying for computers to play it.
Alright. Why? It looks gross and doesn't feel like an RPG at all, so what was magical about it?
It's like when you're 15 and you clumsily frick that fat girl that nobody likes on her bed as quiet as possible so her parents don't hear, and you have that weird memory of it being better than it actually was.
That's due to inexperience, which you weren't because you were already playing two better games, and nostalgia, which is only in hindsight.
A alternative station came back online in my area, playing Linkin Park, the killers, and other songs from the wow era. Gets me really nostalgic for those times. Things were more simple because we were young and our nations weren't completely degenerate and fricked.
Just getting lost in the moment was so great. You pretty much maximized fun. You didn't play this autistic min max game where you have to run these dungeons over and over to ensure you got pre bis, and getting world buffs for raids wasnt a mandated thing.
Playing wow classic want the same. People barely interacted, and because everyone is an adult now people just min maxed... Raid logged, etc. I'm convinced wow was again only magical because the game was developed by people who poured their soul into it, because we were all young, and because of the times. Nothing like it will ever happen again.
Playing wow classic wasn't the same*. I'm a phone posting pleb.
>was it really as magical
This is a moronic zoomer thing only the zoomers did. The zoomers also did the whole "Ocarina of Time is the "best" Video Game of all Time." If you are still using these zoomer propagandas you are controlled by zoomer demons like that Cacodemon kid who loved being a flying meatwad.
I know of Roman Catholics who get emotional when they think of the Pope, and that one time they actually went to meet the Pope at the Vatican or whatever and they got Pictures taken of them staring at him like he is Jesus or even God and they are all emotional looking about to cry.
I can understand people who get a little emotional about Darth Vader, or Prince Arthas Menethil, but not people who get emotional about The Emperor Palpatine. That guy is HIDEOUS. And so are the popes. Pope means papa, Jesus said call nobody that on earth.
The Equivalent of Darth Vader would be the King of England, the Dracula King guy. Not the pope. We can kind of feel sorry for people who feel a little emotional about the fall of England and all of its trespasses over the years. They killed William Wallace in the Scottish War for Independence during a time when there was no such thing as America to go to to be free. They were just white pagans wanting to be free.
They literally wrote a video game story where you are FORCED to play as a character that was supposed to be good, and they sent him to hell with appearances like they might still save him and he might still save his people. It like mocking England that the King Arthur went to hell and is never coming back even though he was christian and his people are still christian and white and want to be ffriends with real christians in the west and acknowledge their traitorous actions of the past.
WoW is literally enslavement of computer through communist collectivist only online game that persecutes the individualist. Zoomers are claiming the individualistic leveling from 1-60 was kino, nothing more.
Yes.
Vanilla WoW was decades ahead of it times.
It is still the biggest game ever made and still put modern games to shame.
The amount of love and care that went into vanilla wow was insane, the devs didn't need to go that hard but they went even harder, the amount of zones, classes, spells, details is insane and all the zones are insanely detailed and crafted with what you can tell was pure love.
If you never played wow go play classic and try it out it is easily the best video game of all time and the only people that think otherwise are shitters who still seethe because they got ganked back in the day.
>shitters who still seethe because they got ganked back in the day.
I kind of don't blame them if they got camped by rogues the first time they entered redridge.
WoW was a slow game. Almost all games of the era were slow.
The world was a slower place in a way difficult to explain to younger people, its just impossible explain.
Go play a game from 2005, go watch a video from 2005, watch a news coverage. Anything from the era prior to super fast, permanently available internet is noticeably slower.
This is the key, everything now is in such a damn rush it makes your head spin. A rush to get nowhere, there is the secret to the magic.
It's very easy to explain actually. You could afford to have a slower life because everything was less expensive, the noose of the megacorporation owned governments wasn't about your neck just quite yet and every average joe could afford to have his own personal webpage because hosting was dirt cheap.
You can still host a site for like $12 a year.
Yes, you can, but that site will be bombarded with spam, ddos and worse. Back then you didn't need fricking cloudflare protection if you wanted to write your own fricking blog and you didn't need to sign up for 'Protection services" not to receive google mail docs links with pdf's that have viruses encoded inside of.
I've been running a site just fine for a while. It's not popular, but old personal sites never were.
14yo me literally had better focus than 28yo me it's insane.
>"I was too young to have played [LONGEST RUNNING SKINNER'S BOX IN HISTORY] in the mid to late 2000s, but was it really as magical as everyone who did play it in that era claims it to be?"
It's cringe and cliché to say, but it really was more than "just a video game" for many. Tons of friendships, relationships, etc have formed because of this game. There are thousands of people married right now purely because they met their significant other in a guild or randomly ended up in a party with them. It was also a social outlet for literal millions of autists who weren't good at socializing otherwise. Logging in each day to talk to your friends, guilds, that girl you liked, and going out to explore the world with them and progress together was just a magical experience. Between this and Runescape, these two games just held something special for young adults of the era.
>talking to that girl you liked
Really? You knew confirmed girls on WoW back in the 2000s?
I was 14 when I played and I joined a guild. A lot of the members were late teens or early to mid twenties. A lot of the guys would give me shit for being so young, one of them would get really nasty about it which in retrospect seems pretty pathetic since he was like 24 or something. But anyone one of the girls in the guild who was also in her mid early to mid 20's started playing arena with me. I played an undead SL/SL warlock and she played Beastmaster hunter. At the time it was super broken braindead meta so even though we were just winging it we climbed pretty high. She was real nice to me and would ask me questions about girls i was interested in and give me advice and things. It was nice.
nta but there were, not many though. Sure, "gamer" girls are either peak poser garbage or dedicated landwhales with a decent personality but there certainly were cases with them getting married to another player, etc
They were all over the place. Was just hard to find out for obvious reasons.
There was no social media back in the day so WoW had tonnes of girls comparatively, the only game I can think of with a higher % female playerbase was/is the sims
To put it in perspective even me a lonely neet had my only gf (resto druid) from WoW, but I was a broke student and couldn't fly overseas to seal the deal
It was digital crack. Literally a life destroying product.
Because of how limited internet communication was, you couldn't access most people outside of the game unless you knew them really well and they added you to their MSN or what not, so it actually felt like stepping in to a new world seperate from your real life.
Yes.
yes but it was also the time that we played it. I was 14 when I was playing burning crusade. I got it just as the summer began so I got to really dig into it. The gigantic seamless world, the world PvP, the tie in to Warcraft 3 which i loved when I was younger; It was all incredible. Plus it was just a novel game at that time. There was everquest and ultima but WoW was so much more accessible and popular so for a lot of us it was our first truly realized 3D mmo. I sitll have lots of stories i remember from playing that game and I only played for like a year
It was mediocre trash then that took all the worst parts of the genre and put them at the forefront and it's mediocre trash now.
Part of the magic of WoW was also seeing this many strangers play a video game together for the first time. More than ever it truly felt like a video game "world" where you're thinking why is this random person also playing a video game at 2 AM in the morning while questing in Stranglethorn Vale.
You don't get that feeling anymore now that everyone is always active and saying something on social media.
I ran from Stormwind to Teldrassil just to see the world
>was it really as magical as everyone who did play that era claims it to be
It was even *more* magical
Imagine all of the schizos you see on social media with no outlet but an online videogame, now imagine these schizos crossing your path every day while in the most immersive fantasy world to ever exist, words cannot describe how unique and amazing it was
You can still play classic but it's only the game half without the community so while still good it will never hit the same
there was something special about sitting on the bottom floor balcony of the zeppelins and watching the world go by.
To be honest I think it was THAT magical simply because I was too young to be playing it. I didn't know how to play for shit but that didn't stop me
Yes. I am currently running my own solo server that has classic > TBC > WotLK progression and allows you to do everything solo as well as use GM commands and have instant flight. It's pretty awesome too.
did you keep normal exp or bump it up?
Kept normal. I thought about bumping it up but not having to physically run to every new zone across continents cuts down enough time. I just teleport to the main hub in the zone whenever I need to go to a new place. Frick the run to desolace.
Did you use mangos or something else?
As in to do the server? I use azerothcore and I downloaded a progression repack so it basically streamlines the process. You still need a few different programs though I think to run in the background.
Cool, I was going to do Mangos but I will check out what you said first
https://www.wowsingleplayer.my.id/p/azerothcore-individual-progression.html
He has a youtube video on how to do it as well. Fairly straight forward to set up.
you a real one
i played in 2010 for the first time, no addons, didnt know shit, it was magical to me, idc what anyone says
The difference was the internet. Now its trash people either don't communicate or talk explicitly in memes.
It was extremely soulful as it was completely uncharted territory, and to this day WoW is still the app/program etc that got me laid the most even though I quit in like 2012 lol. There were a LOT of lonely nerd women on there that would give it up to any guy actually using deodorant
it was pure bliss. Warcraft 3 was so much fricking fun and the idea of going into actually experiencing the world in 3D was unbelievable. The actually vanilla years were absolutely amazing.
is it true they don't have housing still?
lat nub wull neber be ash reel uruk
no lmao
it's just the people who played it were little kids and young teens
Internet culture during the 2000's was magical. WoW had little to do with it.
>Internet culture during the 2000's was magical
all of it would be considered "reddit" today, you goofy fricking zoomer.
Yep, because they kept putting our memes and content on t shirts for profit. Now all we have is wojack and pepe
After playing classic because I missed out I can safely say that I fully appreciate why people went apeshit over WoW. It was really a goddamn amazing game.
it was for me. part of it was because i started at age 7 or so though, when everything is magical. playing classic recently was fun but not the same
>but was it really as magical as everyone who did play it in that era claims it to be?
yup, I was playing everquest before vanilla back in those days and interacting and running into other players in the same large world was mind blowing back in those days. We were poor so we can only afford one online game/ sub at a time and when everquest 2 was coming out around the same time I had to decide between everquest and warcraft. I played all the warcraft games so it was a hard decision, but I still do not regret it, vanilla through wrath was the best experience of my WoW life. I didn't get the same feeling again until I played MoP for a while then took a shit load of long breaks and played Legion as the last fun xpack I ever had with WoW.
not vanilla
if you were young you would have been fricked if you didn't have any school friends to play with because it was so fricking hostile if you wanted to do any pve content at the time, that you had to literally have a shitton of free time and abandon the idea of doing your homework completely
no one knew jack shit and the many of the guilds were fricking jackals, only morons like vanillagays believe in the community feel, but that was only because they never tried the game back then and believed the homosexuals who were already taking advantage of the system back then
so you had guilds with dkp and officers + gms hoarding all the loot while every other poor cuck in trial and raider tier eating the scraps
plus because nobody knew what the frick they were doing, people just pressed buttons randomly for doing stuff even in raids and they took a lot longer because most people were incompetent fricks
also if you were a solo player back then, good luck, you'll need to make ahem friends that you'll only need to do content with and don't give a shit about
>so you had guilds with dkp and officers + gms hoarding all the loot
dkp is the most fair loot system
loot council is basically communism where a group of corrupt morons decide to split it to each member based on who needs what, and what a coincidence they and their friends need all the best loot.
yea loot council was gay and so was dkp, the issue I ran into with dkp was if you needed a piece of gear and no one else bid (you whisper someone to bid) they would still take points away instead of just giving it away thus fricking you over on bidding against other players on other loot. I ran a guild for original Wrath and managed raid loot and did it as fair as possible, any new kill bosses/ loot has older member priorities, because we would have frickers join guild to kill certain boss to get a couple of things then leave in a week so we had no choice but to do something for any new kills/ loot progress, any boss on farm is open for anyone even new members day 1
So you hate dkp, hate loot council, but think funneling loot to your buddies is ideal? Your guild sounds like shit.
>but think funneling loot to your buddies is ideal
I never funneled loot to me or buddies, I cant tell you how many times i lost a roll on a badass 2 hander for my DK main tank and lost to someone that left next week or never raided again. I b***hed, but it was just a game at the end of the day. everything was pretty much open except for new boss kill loot, if older members was rolling on loot and someone that just joined day 1 rolled and won he would not get it because we had the problem of people leaving the guild as soon as they got what they wanted. I thought it sucked I had to do something like that for progress nights, but if you at least stuck around for 3 raid nights or more you had equal chance to win any loot no matter what.
eq on tallon zek pvp was deluxe as a young shit, but it was also incredibly miserable. Play Rust if you want a taste of what real pvp feels like, and even that is 1/4 of the griefing that went on daily. Training, corpse camping, 4 hours of some subhumans sending /tells to you about how they would frick you and your parents in the skull till they all died, etc. Like it was considered entirely legitimate to just exp kill your enemies to get your camp... these terms are already outdated. Oh well.
I tried playing Classic in 2019, and I dropped it somewhere between 30 and 40. The exploration and adventure aspects of the game are nice, but I have no friends, so playing on my own got old quick. I was just questing, no dungeons. Maybe if I had friends, it would have been a different experience.
You have to talk to people by partying up for quests or dungeons. It helps that I can’t shut the frick up online but I’ve met a lot of people in classic.
here's a hack for making internet video game friends...
find an annoying and intrusive player who pesters you into doing dungeons, old raids, guild activities etc. with them and a group...
and use them as a stepping stone to meet other people in that group.
It'll suck and probably eventually blow up with drama and whatnot, but it's worth it for connections.
It's still magical, you just have to use it correctly as a tool for social interaction...
for example, choose a good private server, and use WoW to socialize and do other things like practice a foreign language, or make friends...
the fun is in the learning.
Not as magical as OG SWG