How did people even find dungeon groups back in the day? I struggle to make a group sometimes on classic servers even though I'm playing on a server that is 5x bigger in population than the original servers were.
Would people really sit in capital cities spamming trade chat for 3 hours just to run deadmines?
You had to actually talk to people.
FPBP
OP cannot comprehend human interaction
The question wasn't even about communication but the amount of time it took to from groups back in the day. People still directly whisper tank and healer classes for a group
>make guild
>hey guys we're going this dungeon on saturday at 5PM, join up 🙂
maybe because people in past enjoyed clearing dungeons, not minmaxing every second doing as much dungeons as possible in shortest amount time possible to reward their fried up reward circuits with 0.000001% greater chance to get loot they desire
not having flying mounts also added a lot of time yet it was infinitely more soulful, especially regarding world pvp, than flying shit we have now because ADHD kids can't spend 10 seconds to move from point A to B
Maybe a half hour to an hour, but it was all part of the fun.
it's not your fault that you're young.
I remember being 12 and whispering every fricking level 35-40 druid and warrior online asking if they'd come tank my dungeon. I think the longest I waited was 2 hours to start an SM run only for it to fall apart at the last hallway before Herod.
To answer your question OP, yes, we fricking did.
the dungeon meta has changed a bit in classic as most people only run them once to do the quests then move on which kind of sucks, in OG i would dungeon spam even if the exp was shittier cause i just loved 5mans but it is what it is
1) It's not about population per se but about level-appropriate population. You'll have more luck finding people to do SM or RFD on FRESH 2k pop server or a 200 pop server level-locked to 40 than a year-old 20k pop server, because despite lower overall population there's in fact are more population at your own level. Since the game was experiencing growth during retail vanilla era, the effective leveling population on a typical "high" (~2k) server would have been higher than non-FRESH 20k pop server.
2) Strictly on mechanical terms, vanilla dungeons with few exceptions are a trap option (a counterexample might be for instance Zul'Farrak, which has a number of good quests available close to the dungeon entrance, endgame-relevant drops, and most players tend to visit Tanaris when they are at appropriate level to do ZF), and since people nowadays tend to know this, and at this point dungeons also aren't a novel experience for most players, people tend to skip them.
3) People are generally more inclined to do content with their in-group than randoms.
How you would go about finding people is to ask them, either in whisper, or in public chat channels.
everyones in their own discord group and no one talks anymore. So thats why MMOs are pointless
Unironically, the norf trilogy covered this well
Also Classic A SHIT.
I think classic was fine the first 3 months it launched. I got bored and quit when it became MC raid logging shit but the leveling was the best bits.
You'd be hardpressed to find people to run a 5hr long BRD in current year and we did that in 2019 so that was fun.
First 2-3 months of classic were some of the most fun I've ever had gaming. I honestly regret not recording any of it because we had some of the funniest shit happen during our leveling experience, between starting our own guild, a friend quitting the game as soon as they won the roll for Robes of Arugal on alliance characters to world pvp at level 30.
But once we all hit level cap it just kind of turned into another minmax private server experience as the world buff meta settled in, and blizzard refuses to make changes to problems in classic until a year later. World buffs, dungeon boosting, and most recently cross-realm arena. Nothing was ever like the high of the first few weeks.
>5x bigger in population than the original servers were
Current servers, so 10 people? People took it easy back then and didn't care about racing to the end. Zoomers can't even say hello without rushing towards the exit.
moron
>People took it easy back then and didn't care about racing to the end.
>ZOOMER OOMER COOMER
Generationgays are so fricking delusional its unreal. There were plenty of tryhards in WoW's hayday ranging from EverQuest refugees poopsocking raids to pvpgays playing 24/7 to even TRY reach gladiator rank. More people only blast through levels nowadays because they've already played through 6 different private servers throughout multiple characters that they've already seen every quest and dungeon at this point
You'd make friends with people while leveling and invite them to come to dungeons with you. Desirable roles like tank and healer wouldn't even need to look, you'd have people from past groups whispering you all the time and adding you after dungeons if you did a good job. There was also general chat in the zone of whatever dungeon you wanted to do. The fact that you couldn't spam dungeons all day and had to make effort into putting together groups added to the mystery and you really felt like you were exploring some forgotten area that few adventurers had seen.
>Desirable roles like tank and healer wouldn't even need to look, you'd have people from past groups whispering you all the time
there's also those people who would /who all the classes at their level that could heal/tank asking them if they wanted to join their group
You whispered all your online friends and/or asked in the general chat of whatever zone your dungeon was. I never struggled to find anyone tbh.
or /who a level range and whisper them
I leveled a priest and took like 9 months to get to max level, pretty much every time I logged in I would get whispered asking me to heal whatever dungeon. There were a ton of people I met going as slow as I was so I could also ask them if they wanted to run whatever dungeon if I was in the mood.
The reality is you need new players and ultra casual shitters to make an MMO feel alive, with how progression oriented everyone is people will only join dungeon groups for unique or long-lasting pieces of gear, and then usually only once per character.
When was the who list added to wow? I remember getting people to join groups and they'd join on a lvl 60 character and say that they did have a lvl 20 whatever and when the group was ready they'd hop on it and when the group was ready they'd be AFK and then the other group members would start whispering on to kick the lvl 60 guy or not if he really even did have a lvl 20 to run deadmines ... and then we'd find someone else and be halfway through when he'd start messaging the group
Good times, the only QOL improvement I liked in wow was having connected flightpaths. I had a map I printed out to show me what paths I had to go on so you didn't go on a wrong path; having to check back in on the computer every few minutes to get the next path going was annoying
frick you. I'd rather play everquest mods
I miss my glass Canon "Caldanus" elf that summoned and nuked. rip everquest
no everquest private servers can bring the rings back
they all suck