I played DAoC in 2001-2004
I agree. Definitely an art style.
Although, the feeling OP gave me DAoC gave me first, for the most part. I will say the first time playing WoW release month was something else.
Night Elf starting zone captivated me. The world after that had some amazing zones and art. and I did have fun... but to be honest months in I just wanted to go back to DAoC. Shame every MMO from around that time got completely fractured and there wasn't much to go back to.
Because it wasn't a Skinner-box for training players to raid. There were so many paths for potential before it was pushed down just one. >Jeff Kaplan was a nepotism-hire that started the company on the path to ruin >bullshit got so bad even he quit
>There were so many paths for potential
no there wasnt at all lmao
best gear was in raids, everything else was a stepping stone or a random 1 off badly designed item like MCP
It was the only time in the game's history in which there was a whole game's worth of world to explore and quests and dungeons to do, not just 5-7 zones all of which exist to facilitate your journey to endgame where you sit in the major hubzone waiting for your raid to start.
To add to what these are saying
raiding was just for the theorycrafters and people who had time to refit themselves to the needs of the guild. People who just played vanilla just played the game and enjoyed the novelty of it. There really wasn't an entitlement to seeing all the content because you were for access to and maintenance of the server. People stated freaking out about not being able to see raid content sometime in TBC.
levelling to level cap and grinding the cash for an epic mount was like 95% of the gameplay for the majority of the playerbase. even the few people who made it to level 60 on a character spent most of their time just running strat or ubrs in those 10/15 man zergs. most people liked the idea of getting epix but had no idea how to actually play the game and were intimidated by the coordination involved with wrangling 40 keyboard turning morons
by TBC it became pretty clear new raids were the majority of the new content the game was going to get, the community wanted the standards lowered to make raiding more accessible, the devs started streamlining the much more open ended experience of vanilla to make raiding less opaque, and here we are all these years later and the game has become an antisocial lobby game where morons pay money to speedrun diablo 3 greater rifts shoved into the carcass of what used to be mmo dungeons
It became clear sometime in TBC that raid content was the focus of the game going forward and this "engage with the whole world and do everything" style gameplay slowly went away one update at a time until we arrived at WoD in which you literally sit in your solo home instance by yourself and queue for dungeons, and things only got worse from there.
But to put things another way, I would argue that degenerative game design is what truly took away what made WoW special. And by degenerative, I mean as time goes on, everything not related to or facilitating the current patch content becomes obsolete, eroded, forgotten. There is no good reason to engage with ANYTHING in the game except the current patch content because it's designed to be the thing that progresses your character the most. All other, older content will not meaningfully progress your character.
And it is designed that way intentionally in order to sell the latest expansion pack, which before microtransactions was the game's biggest money maker.
So literal decades of updates fall by the wayside because there's zero reason to do any of it. There's no reason to engage with the world, there's no reason to explore. You just go do whatever's current because that's the most efficient thing to do to progress your character.
There was never a reason to explore, there wasn't a single thing of note to find and more likely you step into a higher level zone and get 2 shot
There was no reason to engage in the world in vanilla, you could power level in dungeons all the way to cap and not miss out on anything, as classic has clearly demonstrated
Transmog is more of a reason tontouch any of thst shit than Vanilla had.
>b-but you could do it for the sense of wonder
You can waste your time on inane shit in any version of WoW. And each successive expansion has more inane shit you *could* do
The discussion was about GOOD reasons to engage with content. And vanilla doesn't have any, it's almost always a mistake and waste of time
my friends and I explored the entire world map and zones you werent supposed to be able to access like hyjal in classic, the point was the experience of exploring a virtual world
it was fun to look for easter eggs and get sneak peaks at high level zones or enemy zones when they game was fresh or to compare how easy it was to become immersed in the levelling experience and then exploring those fringes where you can really see the designers at work - geometric borders of maps, getting under the map, finding places still in development. it made you appreciate the finished zones more
You can explore in every version of the game if you just want to sight see, there's still no actual REASON to do so in vanilla
You're literally resorting to things devs explicitly didn't intend to be seen like bad zone edges and test spots as some kind of better game design
The min/maxer attitude was brought back from retail into classic which is why you think that. Was there a *mechanical* reason to explore? No, not per se, but it was something the game design encouraged you to do because of how big the gameworld was. In the original release people didn't have this preconceived notion that the goal of the game was to hit max level and gear grind, thus the world and its content *was* the game. That's what you're not understanding. Keep in mind that Molten Core was thrown together in a couple days as an afterthought.
Sometime in TBC attitudes changed and raids became the focus, both in the minds of players and the designers.
So there was no reason, thanks for confirming >game design encouraged you to do so
Except it doesn't, because again you step in a higher zone and get 2 shot and even if you got around there was nothing special to find >people didn't have this preconceived notion
Except they did, everyone who ever played an mmo before knew that leveling up was a goal so corpse running pointlessly was a waste of time.
YOU might have been a dumb frick kid at the time but that's not part of the game design and not true for everyone
Molten Core being last minute is just another testament to how dumb the devs were, had they not coasted on the Warcraft name and evolving tech the game would have flopped and died like many other mmos
The min/maxer attitude was brought back from retail into classic which is why you think that. Was there a *mechanical* reason to explore? No, not per se, but it was something the game design encouraged you to do because of how big the gameworld was. In the original release people didn't have this preconceived notion that the goal of the game was to hit max level and gear grind, thus the world and its content *was* the game. That's what you're not understanding. Keep in mind that Molten Core was thrown together in a couple days as an afterthought.
Sometime in TBC attitudes changed and raids became the focus, both in the minds of players and the designers.
Hi, I assume you are a zoomer based on your mentality.
You should be aware that back in 2004 most people played games to have fun, not to grind out content completion or achievements.
There's nothing fun about corpse running to inch your way forward and get nothing
There's nothing fun about shallow dumbed down gameplay where you spam 1 button
>as classic has clearly demonstrated
Black person you never played vanilla and it shows.
classic is not vanilla. Classic runs on the 1.12 talents and debuff slots. It runs on the pre-TBC itemization and enemy numbers. It is a vastly nerfed experience compared to 2004-2006 vanilla. Fricking zoomer.
Your also forgetting that classic didn't have phasing which makes a radically different gameplay difference. Running into the same person leveling and becoming buddies was pretty awesome that can't happen with phasing. Instead of people just randomly appearing and disappearing all over the place like they're on Marty McFly's photo. Phasing is the WORST thing to ever happen to WoW.
raiding was just for the theorycrafters and people who had time to refit themselves to the needs of the guild. People who just played vanilla just played the game and enjoyed the novelty of it. There really wasn't an entitlement to seeing all the content because you were for access to and maintenance of the server. People stated freaking out about not being able to see raid content sometime in TBC.
levelling to level cap and grinding the cash for an epic mount was like 95% of the gameplay for the majority of the playerbase. even the few people who made it to level 60 on a character spent most of their time just running strat or ubrs in those 10/15 man zergs. most people liked the idea of getting epix but had no idea how to actually play the game and were intimidated by the coordination involved with wrangling 40 keyboard turning morons
by TBC it became pretty clear new raids were the majority of the new content the game was going to get, the community wanted the standards lowered to make raiding more accessible, the devs started streamlining the much more open ended experience of vanilla to make raiding less opaque, and here we are all these years later and the game has become an antisocial lobby game where morons pay money to speedrun diablo 3 greater rifts shoved into the carcass of what used to be mmo dungeons
>no autistic anti-social people
come on now, anon... this game was THE neckbeard game from the very get go. even the south park creators knew that all the way back in 2006
My point is that those 2 are not an authority on what is and isn't pathetic.
Plenty of losers played any videogame and still do. Doesn't mean anything.
my point is that the game was so well known for its neckbeard playerbase that even the southpark creators picked up on its instantly all the way back in 2006, you fricking autist. are you really that bad at discerning the meaning of what i am trying to tell you?
1 year ago
Anonymous
The Korn anon shit on you already stfu.
1 year ago
Anonymous
The overwhelming majority of the playerbase were just normies, you homosexual. It was a totally mainstream game, not some niche game only known and played by nerds or losers.
goddamn, either i am bafflingly terrible communicator or you guys have a serious reading problem. im done replying since you insist on misinterpreting everything i say.
1 year ago
Anonymous
>gets btfo >"g-g-g-guys stop!"
lmao
1 year ago
Anonymous
The overwhelming majority of the playerbase were just normies, you homosexual. It was a totally mainstream game, not some niche game only known and played by nerds or losers.
>only neckbeards
do you just pretend to have shit reading comprehension or are you for real? when did i ever say ONLY neckbeards played it??? i also dont know if you were actually around back then because despite being popular, it wasn't a "normalgay" game. in the sense that you absolutely could not talk about it openly, lest in the company of other nerds. if you did, you would be perceived as the biggest loser virgin homosexual on the planet.
>it wasn't a "normalgay" game. in the sense that you absolutely could not talk about it openly
What the frick are you smoking? All the kids played it in school and everyone talked about it.
maybe it was different in america but here in euroworld everyone knew about the game, but if you revealed that you did indeed play it, the normalgay kids would deem you a gay nerd
It wasn't designed solely around raiding yet. The focus on raiding has done irreparable damage to MMOs as a whole, everything else suffers because people treat everything else in the game as filler and only instance logging is the real game.
Same reason all old mmo's were based and great, it was a group of dudes making fantasy worlds they personally wanted to play and live in.
Corps weren't also aware of homosexualry like MAU, MxT, battlepasses, and woke homosexualry.
And every normie piece of shit wasn't on the internet yet so the target was legitimate fans of video games and rpgs and not just everybody in the world.
I get it you're a newborn homosexual and didn't start playing mmorpgs until 2010. We use to have full access to all content within a patch the day it was patched in but today we have terms like time gating and drip feeding that were born out of the MAU metric.
MAU (monthly active users) became a metric to force players to stay active no matter how skilled or long they played the game because the patches slowly unlocked over a 3+ month period (time gating + drip feeding) which in turn forces everyone to continue playing for 3+ months to fully complete and experience all new content, this was not in any older mmorpgs or vanilla WoW.
Time gating was present from day 1 you fricking moron, what do you think a raid lockout was? Vanilla had frick all besides raiding as patch content, there was nothing to gate if they wanted to
Thr first time they actually added a new patch zone with IoQD it came with phases
MAU is the exact same metric as sub count except they don't hope you forget they're charging your credit card. They did not want you to finish and unsub at any point and you're genuinely moronic for thinking there is a difference between the metrics
Damn you WOTLK babbys are so fricking moronic you guys literally just regurgitate what your homosexual streamers tell you and think it's gospel when none of you even played original vanilla. LMAO
>no argument >starts projecting
lmfao
I'm sorry your low IQ inbred ass couldn't figure out that raid lockouts were timegating. As were things like long boss respawns in other old MMOs
There were always restrictions to stop people from finishing the game because devs didn't want you to unsub
1 year ago
Anonymous
>moronic, illiterate, and a liar
Yeah waste of time, streamers have rotted your brain.
1 year ago
Anonymous
Nothing I said was a lie but keep coping
Vanillas reputation has been fully ruined by classic when people saw the game through an adults eyes instead of childhood nostalgia and everyone with a brain realized how bad it was
1 year ago
Anonymous
not my fault you're a lying shithead making things up, keep dreaming dreamboy.
1 year ago
Anonymous
>keeps screaming liar >can't actually name a lie
lol
1 year ago
Anonymous
>everything he "points out" is made up lies >"haha bro why are you calling me a liar?"
My son....
1 year ago
Anonymous
>still can't name a lie just deflects more
embarassing, vanillatards really are dumb Black folk
1 year ago
Anonymous
Stay mad you lying troony go back to your FFXIV raids.
I personally blame the whole datamining and youtube guide scene for obvious time gating.
The reason why time gating is much more annoying these day is because we know the information of the content even before the said content is released, some people are already formulating on how to break those content.
Not defending Blizzard here, but playerbase have fair share to blame.
I agree but obviously activision uses it to maximize profits as well, even the odd multiplayer games like GTA and regular old FPS shooters make full use of drip feeding to keep people logging in everyday to check the "daily shop" or when some mission will finally rng unlock.
besides the fact that it was a game of its time, the world of azeroth was so fricking huge (still bigger than anything made since) and very mysterious. it felt like a world you could spend a lifetime exploring. everything since has felt like you have been jumping between small island like "continents". it just doesn't compare to the OG world of Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms
>infancy of internet >large player base >lack of data/info dumps (initially) >interesting predecessor and lore via Warcraft 3 >game and sub was the only source of money for Blizz so they needed to actually make a good game and not a busy work casino >could run it on just about any potato computer, and even with dial up >literally just a different time in history
basically this with the added addition of it being the first time many people felt like they could have an interactive social experience with complete strangers over the internet. there was just nothing like it at the time except for turboautism games for neckbeards online. the fact that it could run on a potato meant that anyone could play with anyone in the whole wide world. it was incredible at the time but now anyone can just connect on discord or whatever and make friends. its simply an archaic style of game that just does not work anymore
I always hate this shitty arguement because by the time WoW released people were already playing mmorpgs casual wise since the late 90's, even the sega Dreamcast had a phone line port so you could play PSO online with dial up and that was the first true online experience for majority of veteran mmorpgs players.
By the time WoW released there were already 20+ mmorpgs on the market from around the world and most teenagers had access to cellphones with AIM tier instant messaging and chatrooms it was not some new marvel and many of the abbreviations and slang terms used within WoW were terms that were already half a decade old from games like Ultima Online (ganking etc), Anarchy Online, and Everquest.
yeah but those former mmos were nowhere near as popular nor well known as world of warcraft. world of warcraft swept the whole planet with its influence INSTANTLY. even the most normalgay airheaded girls in my school knew what world of warcraft was, fricking nobody knew what star wars galaxies or everquest was. are you just being obtuse on purpose, or...?
nta but you are a moron deliberately missing his point. south park did a whole fricking episode dedicated to wow.
1 year ago
Anonymous
Cool another moron, south park also did a whole episode on the shitty band korn does that mean all of the other thousands of musicians who never got an episode are not as popular as them?
yeah but those former mmos were nowhere near as popular nor well known as world of warcraft. world of warcraft swept the whole planet with its influence INSTANTLY. even the most normalgay airheaded girls in my school knew what world of warcraft was, fricking nobody knew what star wars galaxies or everquest was. are you just being obtuse on purpose, or...?
just because you grew up some shithole and attended 2nd grade with special needs morons doesn't mean that was the definitive experience around the entire planet.
>could run it on just about any potato computer, and even with dial up
This is what truly killed wow IMO.
Once integrated graphics on a laptop could no longer run it flawlessly, what was the fricking point anymore?
Why take away actual accessibility from the game if they want you to be playing it 24/7? Once work laptops could no longer comfortably run it on the lowest settings what was the point anymore?
And they replaced it with 2002 tier graphics which also aged like milk 2 seconds later, and took away the option to play in 2001 tier graphics.
And the model poly count isn't even the problem: They forced shaders, shadows and illumination on the lowest settings for literally no fricking reason, which is what potatoes actually struggled with.
I always felt like both EQ and WoW's "graphic upgrades" completely destroyed the soul visually in both games but to be fair a lot of WoW's new graphics do look good at times while compared to EQ where literally everything was such a massive disappointment people who still play it today prefer using the older character models.
The devs weren't political activists, the company wasn't a souless corporation, they weren't focused on twitter activism foremost. The devs weren't C tier hires that are constantly replaced by an actual skilled team that had a background in white nerd shit, whether that's D&D or classical fantasy art. You can't build an interesting world when the devs aren't passionate, think capeshit is the height of culture and the political culture that surrounds you demands an amorphous inoffensive blob because everything is offensive. Modern warcraft is Steven Universe. Old warcraft is unfortunately a product of it's time and we'll never see something like that again.
Wow Vanilla was made to feel authentic. There was very little hand holding. Everything was made to feel like you are genuinely a part of the world, consequences and all. Equippable items felt like they mattered. Meeting people nearby for quests felt organic. Game felt it treated lore with dignity and respect. Every race/class/quest/boss/area felt like it was adding to this unique rpg experience.
Every iteration after felt like it watered these aspects down more and more.
Yes bosses actually doing things and requiring good play is better
You ask someone what the best boss was and their answer is never going to be some vanilla shit
So the bosses have to be bad?
It's not like the world is any better, just repeating fetch quests over and over except sometimes it's bear asses, sometimes it's plagued bear asses and sometimes it's polar bear asses
Bad is an opinion, but yes they didn't have to be complex. People still remember Mr. Smite's "I'll have to improvise" and VanCleef's "Lapdogs! All of you!" twenty years later. They were fun without being mechanically complex.
because it was the sequel to one of the greatest games of all time that provided thousands of hours of custom games that were great and associated the warcraft models with quality games. This was drained away over they years sadly. and everything blizzard built up with their lineup from those days is a shadow of its former self
Reminder that vanilla wow/wow still has a bigger open world than any other mmo to this day
20 years later
You can go to tanaris from winterspring with 0 loading screens. No other mmo has that as everything else is instanced trash separated by loading screens
not being instanced doesn't make it fun or interesting. the zones were boring to traverse in wow and with the absolutely nonexistent sense of danger it wasn't like going through kithicor in classic EQ when night fell.
What a load of horse shit but this bit >with the absolutely nonexistent sense of danger
Is just complete trash. You could easily die if you pulled more than 2 mobs. You could easily die to patrolling elites rares. Remember the alliance patrol in barrens? Or stitchea in duskwood? Yeah, good times.
>You could easily die
yes and dying in wow is without consequence, without meaning. Death in wow is a minor inconvenience with a meaningless "corpse run" and enemies peppered around the zone haphazardly. I understand that no one wants to play a game now where corpse runs mean getting back your equipment with nothing on you or the danger of losing experience but getting killed in wow is meaningless and the mobs near pointless. Wow is and always was a massive casualization on the mmo format even on release. "good times" the patrols in wow are like a baby form of what came before. Getting blindsided by sergeant slate in east commons, when you suddenly see
"Sergeant slat hits YOU for 200 points of damage
"you have died"
"welcome to (previous level)!"
it's an experience that was admittedly drawn out but wow can't compare to it.
>through kithicor in classic EQ when night fell.
I have seen gays sprout this since 2001 and every time I have ran through kith at night I just hug the wall and had zero issues to the point where I afk auto run when I do it now on P99.
yes and you hug the wall because kith WAS genuinely dangerous and the lore behind why it was dangerous was cool and happened live. You'll take the long way through the zone because you know better than to frick around and bring that corpse run on yourself, because god knows you still have highkeep guards or whatever else you're working on ahead of you.
you hug the wall in most zones danger or not when I travel between qenoys and karanas I always hug the coastline because it's the better place to auto run afk without ending up bumping into some misfaction npc.
When I go to :guk I hug the wall in innothule because otherwise I have to slow swim through shitty swamp water for 30 minutes.
many zones have their dangerous pathing mobs run by the walls such as the one giant in oasis, ghouls which are devastating to low level players in the commons and tons of examples across others, but lets be fair we aren't hugging the wall in the swamp because it's dangerous. the swamp is well under the level you are most likely in guk for.
>through kithicor in classic EQ when night fell.
I have seen gays sprout this since 2001 and every time I have ran through kith at night I just hug the wall and had zero issues to the point where I afk auto run when I do it now on P99.
>play BDO for first time >do tutorial and get to first town >see player house >walk into the house >instantly put through load and into a instanced version of someone elses house
?????
you now remember the actual RPG parts of wow >class quests >poison quests >warrior stance quests that took you to remote areas >hunter had arrows/ bullets as ammo, dedicated quivers >you had to feed your pet to keep it happy and do dmg. >you were not tied to one talent tree
I just did this today on a private server
Even though we've had it on farm for months and could do rag in our sleep with no submerges, I still appreciate the soul that went into the fight.
It's not coincidence that the game really started to decline in quality as soon as the merger happened. Even me at 16 knew that this was the beginning of the end and the good times couldn't last forever.
yeah, almost everyone i met was a casual just playing to have fun. most guilds i joined were just people fricking around
there were certainly guilds with tryhards, but you could easily just avoid/ignore them like they wanted to ignore most of the playerbase
>take zg buff from yojamba isle >buy summon to dire maul >pay hunter for dm buffs >buy summon to songflower >take songflower >hs to org >take rend >take ony >logout in a hidden area where you cant be griefed by dispellers
Ah... home...
The game was new and exciting so people were happy to be there and invest. Like anything as time goes by peoples patience decreases and they want things easier and more streamlined, everyone gets more autistic because they dont want to frick around.
WoW was one of the first MMO's that didn't hold a gun to your characters heads if you let your sub lapse. Shit was fricking brutal with greedy ass SOE. And you could pick your own server and didn't get stuck with nips like FFXI.
because you were 12 when it came out
Not him but I was 18 when it came out.
It's actually the context of the internet and society as whole, not just the age
so it was
and also the internet was more basic back then
these days everything is data mined and nothing is new
no I was 25 and in college
I was in college you stupid zoomer. I played EverQuest and Asheron's Call 2.
Old WoW invented an art style.
I played DAoC in 2001-2004
I agree. Definitely an art style.
Although, the feeling OP gave me DAoC gave me first, for the most part. I will say the first time playing WoW release month was something else.
Night Elf starting zone captivated me. The world after that had some amazing zones and art. and I did have fun... but to be honest months in I just wanted to go back to DAoC. Shame every MMO from around that time got completely fractured and there wasn't much to go back to.
Because it wasn't a Skinner-box for training players to raid. There were so many paths for potential before it was pushed down just one.
>Jeff Kaplan was a nepotism-hire that started the company on the path to ruin
>bullshit got so bad even he quit
>There were so many paths for potential
no there wasnt at all lmao
best gear was in raids, everything else was a stepping stone or a random 1 off badly designed item like MCP
Instead it was a Skinner box where morons did fetch quests.
>~~*Kaplan*~~
Interesting.
It was the only time in the game's history in which there was a whole game's worth of world to explore and quests and dungeons to do, not just 5-7 zones all of which exist to facilitate your journey to endgame where you sit in the major hubzone waiting for your raid to start.
To add to what these are saying
It became clear sometime in TBC that raid content was the focus of the game going forward and this "engage with the whole world and do everything" style gameplay slowly went away one update at a time until we arrived at WoD in which you literally sit in your solo home instance by yourself and queue for dungeons, and things only got worse from there.
But to put things another way, I would argue that degenerative game design is what truly took away what made WoW special. And by degenerative, I mean as time goes on, everything not related to or facilitating the current patch content becomes obsolete, eroded, forgotten. There is no good reason to engage with ANYTHING in the game except the current patch content because it's designed to be the thing that progresses your character the most. All other, older content will not meaningfully progress your character.
And it is designed that way intentionally in order to sell the latest expansion pack, which before microtransactions was the game's biggest money maker.
So literal decades of updates fall by the wayside because there's zero reason to do any of it. There's no reason to engage with the world, there's no reason to explore. You just go do whatever's current because that's the most efficient thing to do to progress your character.
There was never a reason to explore, there wasn't a single thing of note to find and more likely you step into a higher level zone and get 2 shot
There was no reason to engage in the world in vanilla, you could power level in dungeons all the way to cap and not miss out on anything, as classic has clearly demonstrated
Transmog is more of a reason tontouch any of thst shit than Vanilla had.
>low IQ troon had/has zero sense of wonder and has fallen victim to minmax homosexualry
yikers
>b-but you could do it for the sense of wonder
You can waste your time on inane shit in any version of WoW. And each successive expansion has more inane shit you *could* do
The discussion was about GOOD reasons to engage with content. And vanilla doesn't have any, it's almost always a mistake and waste of time
my friends and I explored the entire world map and zones you werent supposed to be able to access like hyjal in classic, the point was the experience of exploring a virtual world
it was fun to look for easter eggs and get sneak peaks at high level zones or enemy zones when they game was fresh or to compare how easy it was to become immersed in the levelling experience and then exploring those fringes where you can really see the designers at work - geometric borders of maps, getting under the map, finding places still in development. it made you appreciate the finished zones more
You can explore in every version of the game if you just want to sight see, there's still no actual REASON to do so in vanilla
You're literally resorting to things devs explicitly didn't intend to be seen like bad zone edges and test spots as some kind of better game design
So there was no reason, thanks for confirming
>game design encouraged you to do so
Except it doesn't, because again you step in a higher zone and get 2 shot and even if you got around there was nothing special to find
>people didn't have this preconceived notion
Except they did, everyone who ever played an mmo before knew that leveling up was a goal so corpse running pointlessly was a waste of time.
YOU might have been a dumb frick kid at the time but that's not part of the game design and not true for everyone
Molten Core being last minute is just another testament to how dumb the devs were, had they not coasted on the Warcraft name and evolving tech the game would have flopped and died like many other mmos
The min/maxer attitude was brought back from retail into classic which is why you think that. Was there a *mechanical* reason to explore? No, not per se, but it was something the game design encouraged you to do because of how big the gameworld was. In the original release people didn't have this preconceived notion that the goal of the game was to hit max level and gear grind, thus the world and its content *was* the game. That's what you're not understanding. Keep in mind that Molten Core was thrown together in a couple days as an afterthought.
Sometime in TBC attitudes changed and raids became the focus, both in the minds of players and the designers.
Hi, I assume you are a zoomer based on your mentality.
You should be aware that back in 2004 most people played games to have fun, not to grind out content completion or achievements.
There's nothing fun about corpse running to inch your way forward and get nothing
There's nothing fun about shallow dumbed down gameplay where you spam 1 button
then don't die? then don't spam 1 button? men can never be women either. moronic Black person lover.
>don't spam 1 button
There isn't more to press
Shadowbolt spam is how you play warlock for the first 4 years of WoW
>as classic has clearly demonstrated
Black person you never played vanilla and it shows.
classic is not vanilla. Classic runs on the 1.12 talents and debuff slots. It runs on the pre-TBC itemization and enemy numbers. It is a vastly nerfed experience compared to 2004-2006 vanilla. Fricking zoomer.
Your also forgetting that classic didn't have phasing which makes a radically different gameplay difference. Running into the same person leveling and becoming buddies was pretty awesome that can't happen with phasing. Instead of people just randomly appearing and disappearing all over the place like they're on Marty McFly's photo. Phasing is the WORST thing to ever happen to WoW.
>Because it wasn't a Skinner-box for training players to raid.
lol moron
>soul
>skinner box
already off to a great thread where we just spout buzzwords in place of describing things normally
raiding was just for the theorycrafters and people who had time to refit themselves to the needs of the guild. People who just played vanilla just played the game and enjoyed the novelty of it. There really wasn't an entitlement to seeing all the content because you were for access to and maintenance of the server. People stated freaking out about not being able to see raid content sometime in TBC.
levelling to level cap and grinding the cash for an epic mount was like 95% of the gameplay for the majority of the playerbase. even the few people who made it to level 60 on a character spent most of their time just running strat or ubrs in those 10/15 man zergs. most people liked the idea of getting epix but had no idea how to actually play the game and were intimidated by the coordination involved with wrangling 40 keyboard turning morons
by TBC it became pretty clear new raids were the majority of the new content the game was going to get, the community wanted the standards lowered to make raiding more accessible, the devs started streamlining the much more open ended experience of vanilla to make raiding less opaque, and here we are all these years later and the game has become an antisocial lobby game where morons pay money to speedrun diablo 3 greater rifts shoved into the carcass of what used to be mmo dungeons
strawman arguments
The community was different then.
No discord. No autistic anti-social trannies.
>no autistic anti-social people
come on now, anon... this game was THE neckbeard game from the very get go. even the south park creators knew that all the way back in 2006
One of the southpark creators is a israelite and the other is raising his wife's black daughter
and? that is not my point. the point is that plenty of autistic neckbeard losers were playing it back then as well.
My point is that those 2 are not an authority on what is and isn't pathetic.
Plenty of losers played any videogame and still do. Doesn't mean anything.
my point is that the game was so well known for its neckbeard playerbase that even the southpark creators picked up on its instantly all the way back in 2006, you fricking autist. are you really that bad at discerning the meaning of what i am trying to tell you?
The Korn anon shit on you already stfu.
goddamn, either i am bafflingly terrible communicator or you guys have a serious reading problem. im done replying since you insist on misinterpreting everything i say.
>gets btfo
>"g-g-g-guys stop!"
lmao
The overwhelming majority of the playerbase were just normies, you homosexual. It was a totally mainstream game, not some niche game only known and played by nerds or losers.
>one of the most normalgay popular shows made an episode of another popular normalgay product
>that means only neckbeards played it
???????
>only neckbeards
do you just pretend to have shit reading comprehension or are you for real? when did i ever say ONLY neckbeards played it??? i also dont know if you were actually around back then because despite being popular, it wasn't a "normalgay" game. in the sense that you absolutely could not talk about it openly, lest in the company of other nerds. if you did, you would be perceived as the biggest loser virgin homosexual on the planet.
>it wasn't a "normalgay" game. in the sense that you absolutely could not talk about it openly
What the frick are you smoking? All the kids played it in school and everyone talked about it.
maybe it was different in america but here in euroworld everyone knew about the game, but if you revealed that you did indeed play it, the normalgay kids would deem you a gay nerd
haha no
admitting you played wow was social suicide
even Ganker hated it, wow threads were sagebombed and deleted from vanilla to wotlk
>this anon got bullied and had to hide his hobbies because he was a weak b***h so he thinks everyone else had to also
wew
It wasn't designed solely around raiding yet. The focus on raiding has done irreparable damage to MMOs as a whole, everything else suffers because people treat everything else in the game as filler and only instance logging is the real game.
this is a giant meme image but ive always hated new zones that entirely replace any reason to be in old world except for leveling
wat r these guys doing now
Getting their balls fondled in Thailand by ladyboys.
god I wish that were me (not really)
making some gay and lame board game that nobody cares about.
vanilla wow was the most poopsocked of all the expansions though
Same reason all old mmo's were based and great, it was a group of dudes making fantasy worlds they personally wanted to play and live in.
Corps weren't also aware of homosexualry like MAU, MxT, battlepasses, and woke homosexualry.
And every normie piece of shit wasn't on the internet yet so the target was legitimate fans of video games and rpgs and not just everybody in the world.
>Corps weren't also aware of homosexualry like MAU
thats literally what a subscriber is you fricking moron
I get it you're a newborn homosexual and didn't start playing mmorpgs until 2010. We use to have full access to all content within a patch the day it was patched in but today we have terms like time gating and drip feeding that were born out of the MAU metric.
MAU (monthly active users) became a metric to force players to stay active no matter how skilled or long they played the game because the patches slowly unlocked over a 3+ month period (time gating + drip feeding) which in turn forces everyone to continue playing for 3+ months to fully complete and experience all new content, this was not in any older mmorpgs or vanilla WoW.
Time gating was present from day 1 you fricking moron, what do you think a raid lockout was? Vanilla had frick all besides raiding as patch content, there was nothing to gate if they wanted to
Thr first time they actually added a new patch zone with IoQD it came with phases
MAU is the exact same metric as sub count except they don't hope you forget they're charging your credit card. They did not want you to finish and unsub at any point and you're genuinely moronic for thinking there is a difference between the metrics
Damn you WOTLK babbys are so fricking moronic you guys literally just regurgitate what your homosexual streamers tell you and think it's gospel when none of you even played original vanilla. LMAO
>no argument
>starts projecting
lmfao
I'm sorry your low IQ inbred ass couldn't figure out that raid lockouts were timegating. As were things like long boss respawns in other old MMOs
There were always restrictions to stop people from finishing the game because devs didn't want you to unsub
>moronic, illiterate, and a liar
Yeah waste of time, streamers have rotted your brain.
Nothing I said was a lie but keep coping
Vanillas reputation has been fully ruined by classic when people saw the game through an adults eyes instead of childhood nostalgia and everyone with a brain realized how bad it was
not my fault you're a lying shithead making things up, keep dreaming dreamboy.
>keeps screaming liar
>can't actually name a lie
lol
>everything he "points out" is made up lies
>"haha bro why are you calling me a liar?"
My son....
>still can't name a lie just deflects more
embarassing, vanillatards really are dumb Black folk
Stay mad you lying troony go back to your FFXIV raids.
>raid troony
opinion discarded
I personally blame the whole datamining and youtube guide scene for obvious time gating.
The reason why time gating is much more annoying these day is because we know the information of the content even before the said content is released, some people are already formulating on how to break those content.
Not defending Blizzard here, but playerbase have fair share to blame.
I agree but obviously activision uses it to maximize profits as well, even the odd multiplayer games like GTA and regular old FPS shooters make full use of drip feeding to keep people logging in everyday to check the "daily shop" or when some mission will finally rng unlock.
Vanilla WoW was a special game because the internet hadn't been ruined by Steve Jobs and video games hadn't been ruined by Microsoft yet.
'twas a golden age
besides the fact that it was a game of its time, the world of azeroth was so fricking huge (still bigger than anything made since) and very mysterious. it felt like a world you could spend a lifetime exploring. everything since has felt like you have been jumping between small island like "continents". it just doesn't compare to the OG world of Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms
>infancy of internet
>large player base
>lack of data/info dumps (initially)
>interesting predecessor and lore via Warcraft 3
>game and sub was the only source of money for Blizz so they needed to actually make a good game and not a busy work casino
>could run it on just about any potato computer, and even with dial up
>literally just a different time in history
basically this with the added addition of it being the first time many people felt like they could have an interactive social experience with complete strangers over the internet. there was just nothing like it at the time except for turboautism games for neckbeards online. the fact that it could run on a potato meant that anyone could play with anyone in the whole wide world. it was incredible at the time but now anyone can just connect on discord or whatever and make friends. its simply an archaic style of game that just does not work anymore
I always hate this shitty arguement because by the time WoW released people were already playing mmorpgs casual wise since the late 90's, even the sega Dreamcast had a phone line port so you could play PSO online with dial up and that was the first true online experience for majority of veteran mmorpgs players.
By the time WoW released there were already 20+ mmorpgs on the market from around the world and most teenagers had access to cellphones with AIM tier instant messaging and chatrooms it was not some new marvel and many of the abbreviations and slang terms used within WoW were terms that were already half a decade old from games like Ultima Online (ganking etc), Anarchy Online, and Everquest.
yeah but those former mmos were nowhere near as popular nor well known as world of warcraft. world of warcraft swept the whole planet with its influence INSTANTLY. even the most normalgay airheaded girls in my school knew what world of warcraft was, fricking nobody knew what star wars galaxies or everquest was. are you just being obtuse on purpose, or...?
That's just your personal experience then, plenty of people knew about EQ and SWG and both were played and spoken about by both genders.
nta but you are a moron deliberately missing his point. south park did a whole fricking episode dedicated to wow.
Cool another moron, south park also did a whole episode on the shitty band korn does that mean all of the other thousands of musicians who never got an episode are not as popular as them?
NTA but again like the other airhead here
just because you grew up some shithole and attended 2nd grade with special needs morons doesn't mean that was the definitive experience around the entire planet.
>could run it on just about any potato computer, and even with dial up
This is what truly killed wow IMO.
Once integrated graphics on a laptop could no longer run it flawlessly, what was the fricking point anymore?
Why take away actual accessibility from the game if they want you to be playing it 24/7? Once work laptops could no longer comfortably run it on the lowest settings what was the point anymore?
because people got sick of the 2001 tier graphics the game had after a while
And they replaced it with 2002 tier graphics which also aged like milk 2 seconds later, and took away the option to play in 2001 tier graphics.
And the model poly count isn't even the problem: They forced shaders, shadows and illumination on the lowest settings for literally no fricking reason, which is what potatoes actually struggled with.
I always felt like both EQ and WoW's "graphic upgrades" completely destroyed the soul visually in both games but to be fair a lot of WoW's new graphics do look good at times while compared to EQ where literally everything was such a massive disappointment people who still play it today prefer using the older character models.
Because it was made by a bunch of white guys who just liked playing games.
Look at all those dirty, gross, chuds.
>east asian and white nerds that aren't weird twitter activists make good video games
WOW WHAT A SURPRISE.
But vanilla wasn't a good game?
You would think those nerds could do basic math but instead vanilla has classes doing 2-3x the damage of others
Anti-soul gas
The devs weren't political activists, the company wasn't a souless corporation, they weren't focused on twitter activism foremost. The devs weren't C tier hires that are constantly replaced by an actual skilled team that had a background in white nerd shit, whether that's D&D or classical fantasy art. You can't build an interesting world when the devs aren't passionate, think capeshit is the height of culture and the political culture that surrounds you demands an amorphous inoffensive blob because everything is offensive. Modern warcraft is Steven Universe. Old warcraft is unfortunately a product of it's time and we'll never see something like that again.
because the leveling experience made up at least 50% of the game, rather than 5% of the game as it does now
Wow Vanilla was made to feel authentic. There was very little hand holding. Everything was made to feel like you are genuinely a part of the world, consequences and all. Equippable items felt like they mattered. Meeting people nearby for quests felt organic. Game felt it treated lore with dignity and respect. Every race/class/quest/boss/area felt like it was adding to this unique rpg experience.
Every iteration after felt like it watered these aspects down more and more.
>90% of bosses are tank n spanks
Ahh yes a truly unique experience
It unironically was.
It literally wasn't, you just have a low IQ
Wrong. Modern WoW has lots of fancy mechanics for all of its bosses, and it STILL feels hollow compared to the boring tank and spank of Vanilla WoW.
yeah, that was acceptable back then. modern mechanics with classic design would be a great game
Disco lights with red circles and 1 shot wipe mechanics that ruin the entire raid if 1 mouth breather fricks up is better in your opinion?
Yes bosses actually doing things and requiring good play is better
You ask someone what the best boss was and their answer is never going to be some vanilla shit
Because it was designed to be a world, not a boss run lobby.
So the bosses have to be bad?
It's not like the world is any better, just repeating fetch quests over and over except sometimes it's bear asses, sometimes it's plagued bear asses and sometimes it's polar bear asses
Bad is an opinion, but yes they didn't have to be complex. People still remember Mr. Smite's "I'll have to improvise" and VanCleef's "Lapdogs! All of you!" twenty years later. They were fun without being mechanically complex.
You landlubbers are tougher than i thought!
Vancleef pay big for your head!
because it was the sequel to one of the greatest games of all time that provided thousands of hours of custom games that were great and associated the warcraft models with quality games. This was drained away over they years sadly. and everything blizzard built up with their lineup from those days is a shadow of its former self
Reminder that vanilla wow/wow still has a bigger open world than any other mmo to this day
20 years later
You can go to tanaris from winterspring with 0 loading screens. No other mmo has that as everything else is instanced trash separated by loading screens
not being instanced doesn't make it fun or interesting. the zones were boring to traverse in wow and with the absolutely nonexistent sense of danger it wasn't like going through kithicor in classic EQ when night fell.
What a load of horse shit but this bit
>with the absolutely nonexistent sense of danger
Is just complete trash. You could easily die if you pulled more than 2 mobs. You could easily die to patrolling elites rares. Remember the alliance patrol in barrens? Or stitchea in duskwood? Yeah, good times.
>You could easily die
yes and dying in wow is without consequence, without meaning. Death in wow is a minor inconvenience with a meaningless "corpse run" and enemies peppered around the zone haphazardly. I understand that no one wants to play a game now where corpse runs mean getting back your equipment with nothing on you or the danger of losing experience but getting killed in wow is meaningless and the mobs near pointless. Wow is and always was a massive casualization on the mmo format even on release. "good times" the patrols in wow are like a baby form of what came before. Getting blindsided by sergeant slate in east commons, when you suddenly see
"Sergeant slat hits YOU for 200 points of damage
"you have died"
"welcome to (previous level)!"
it's an experience that was admittedly drawn out but wow can't compare to it.
yes and you hug the wall because kith WAS genuinely dangerous and the lore behind why it was dangerous was cool and happened live. You'll take the long way through the zone because you know better than to frick around and bring that corpse run on yourself, because god knows you still have highkeep guards or whatever else you're working on ahead of you.
you hug the wall in most zones danger or not when I travel between qenoys and karanas I always hug the coastline because it's the better place to auto run afk without ending up bumping into some misfaction npc.
When I go to :guk I hug the wall in innothule because otherwise I have to slow swim through shitty swamp water for 30 minutes.
many zones have their dangerous pathing mobs run by the walls such as the one giant in oasis, ghouls which are devastating to low level players in the commons and tons of examples across others, but lets be fair we aren't hugging the wall in the swamp because it's dangerous. the swamp is well under the level you are most likely in guk for.
>through kithicor in classic EQ when night fell.
I have seen gays sprout this since 2001 and every time I have ran through kith at night I just hug the wall and had zero issues to the point where I afk auto run when I do it now on P99.
Black desert is FULLY open world and doesn't have shitty instances like WoW does.
>play BDO for first time
>do tutorial and get to first town
>see player house
>walk into the house
>instantly put through load and into a instanced version of someone elses house
?????
you now remember the actual RPG parts of wow
>class quests
>poison quests
>warrior stance quests that took you to remote areas
>hunter had arrows/ bullets as ammo, dedicated quivers
>you had to feed your pet to keep it happy and do dmg.
>you were not tied to one talent tree
My favourite part was griefing hunters by killing their pet over and over until it left them
TOO SOON EXECUTUS!
TASTE THE FLAMES OF SULFURON!
DIE, INSECT!
Sovl
I just did this today on a private server
Even though we've had it on farm for months and could do rag in our sleep with no submerges, I still appreciate the soul that went into the fight.
MMOs have always been soulless. You just didn't notice because you were born too late for MUDs.
>Level peacefully, taking in the lore and world until level 51
>Alterac Valley to 60 fighting back my enemies in days long battles.
Comfy Kino
Classes actually felt different from each other pre cata, now they are all feel the same
>Build resources
>Dump resources
yeah i liked it when my rotation was
>cast frostbolt
much better than how it is now
Pre Activision blizzard was a beast
It's not coincidence that the game really started to decline in quality as soon as the merger happened. Even me at 16 knew that this was the beginning of the end and the good times couldn't last forever.
The game didn't have nearly as much soul as the players did.
The sweaty min/maxing of the current day only existed in tiny niches.
yeah, almost everyone i met was a casual just playing to have fun. most guilds i joined were just people fricking around
there were certainly guilds with tryhards, but you could easily just avoid/ignore them like they wanted to ignore most of the playerbase
>take zg buff from yojamba isle
>buy summon to dire maul
>pay hunter for dm buffs
>buy summon to songflower
>take songflower
>hs to org
>take rend
>take ony
>logout in a hidden area where you cant be griefed by dispellers
Ah... home...
The game was new and exciting so people were happy to be there and invest. Like anything as time goes by peoples patience decreases and they want things easier and more streamlined, everyone gets more autistic because they dont want to frick around.
WoW was one of the first MMO's that didn't hold a gun to your characters heads if you let your sub lapse. Shit was fricking brutal with greedy ass SOE. And you could pick your own server and didn't get stuck with nips like FFXI.
woman start working on blizzard