Was it as good and magical as classicucks say?
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WoW experience back in 2004
Was it as good and magical as classicucks say?
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it was a time when mmo's were beginning to sprout and was riddled with a bunch of shitty ones
that, combined with the lack of online guides and less focus on efficiency/minmaxing and more about the journey/ building relationships with others
>lack of online guides and less focus on efficiency/minmaxing and more about the journey/ building relationships with others
i miss the good old days man. min/max dorks killed the game completely
These Black folk are in everything, too.
>friend wants to start up a minecraft server with some of his other friends and pal around
>decide to join in. Don't give a shit for modern minecraft but I like to dig so whatever
>the two guys I don't know locate a village, grind out a well known trade exploit for diamond gear, and have the Ender Dragon down in like three days
>progression over
>server is unused after about two weeks
I don't see the fun in it. What's the point if you're just going to bypass most of the actual game?
>What's the point if you're just going to bypass most of the actual game?
We've trained a generation to go straight to the guide or straight to the Youtube video and follow it in a rote pattern.
Without realizing it we've come full circle back to the days of High-Scores where all that matters is how well you scored or how fast you beat the game.
>umm sir your parse
>umm sir you have on the wrong piece of gear!
>umm sir you are not the right spec!
fpbp
Classic WoW was legitimately good, but a lot of the appeal was the game being one of the very first MMOs and there not being a lot of ways to get meta information, so people were more easily able to be immersed rather than minmaxing
It was, but only because it was such a new experience and it wasn't datamined to death. It didn't really begin to go into min/max consolidation until Thottbot happened.
The shitty ones didn't really sprout up until everyone saw WoW's success. Then the asiatics started churning out a new puppymill MMO every other week.
At the time, its only competition were City of Heroes, Everquest 2, Ragnarok Online and The Matrix Online. Dark Age of Camelot if you REALLY want to reach, but it was already pretty long in the tooth before WoW hit.
I get the sentimentality of that post but in reality TBC was a pretty bad expansion revolving around grinding rep and raid logging. Sure it was cool the first time we played it, and it was likely most of our first experiences with a raiding guild, but looking back, almost none of my fondest memories are from TBC. I think in the longrun I had a lot more fun with Wrath and Cata.
This. I feel that most of the TBC love is unironically nostalgia. Unless you're one of those people who enjoys the grinding.
The raids were kinda mediocre too. Nothing that gets me excited to play them.
What?????
TBC was the best iteration of wow ever. It took what was great about vanilla and expanded on it.
Flying should have stayed on Outland though
>It took what was great about vanilla and expanded on it
Saying this doesn't make it true.
TBC was what begun the downfall of the franchise. It fricked up the class balance completly, introduced stupid shit to PVP and gave us dailies. FRICK THAT. WotLK was the one that improved upon the disaster that was TBC, but its raids sucked ass.
>WotLK was the one that improved upon the disaster that was TBC
lmao
Sorry Mr. Reddit Take but its the truth, TBC invented all the shit things about the MMO's today and ruined class balance completly.
TBC is when my vanilla warlock went from erectile dysfunction to hard as fricking diamond. Warlocks at TBC launch were at the very fricking top of the food chain. Felguards were literal pocket warriors and now we had even more options to cc players. Hellfire peninsula at launch was so much fun. We weren't just mushrooms anymore, we were goddamn terminators. Early TBC was peak enjoyment for me as a warlock main.
Being a human SL/SL warlock with engineering and before the MS applying to lifedrains change was so silly. I could dumpster anybody and I knew it was because of the spec rather than anything resembling skill but god it was fun.
Try to imagine the effect of not knowing the future when playing an old game
The closes thing was Lineage 2, and that was a fricking grindfest (but there were elf bawds at least) Also very little story in comparison
i miss having a full clan party grinding in dragon valley caves all night every night
In hindsight I think the quest focused leveling experience was a mistake but it was fine back in the day since it was the first MMORPG to do that.
For the most part it was as good as they say.
t. started in EU launch
>Also very little story in comparison
That is how it should be. Irrelevant mini-story quests and single player style story telling doesn't belong in MMORPGs.
I wish we got something like a spiritual successor to SWG. A proper sandbox where the players make their own fun by interacting with the diverse systems of the game.
Lost forever.
I like to imagine that the broken sword she carries belonged to a human footman that she met and had polite greetings every night until after the third date, asked, "What would Admiral Proudmore do?"
And his name was Garth, Thornby's best friend. They both survived the fall of Lordaron, Garth joined the expeditionary forces led by Jaina Proudmore, while Thornby joined the Kul'Tiras elite marines led by her father. Garth survived the invasion of Kalimdor, partaking in the mission to capture that justifiably pissed Grom Hellscream and purge him of demonic corruption. I'd be pissed off too if some Moose centaur with wooden hands destroyed my abundance of LUMBER.
He was also there, alongside Duke Lionheart who led a squad of humans and orcs who ventured into Ashenvale forest to hunt down the remaining demons.
Though in this part, maybe the combined expeditionary forces could have enlisted the aid of a Night elven demon hunter, Not Illidan but one of those who decided to walk down that path, to help them hunt down said demons.
And the sight of a Demon Hunter assisting the outlanders would be enough for Night Elven society to drive the outsiders out.
Except Tyrande because she still has a soft spot for Illidan and her reason was because Cenarius was mounted on Grom's fireplace.
And then Garth dies during the battle for mount hyjal but not before protecting his Nelf GF from a devasting blow from Azgalor, which broke his sword.
Thornby, now a Captain, would never know of his friend's fate.
Deserves a (You)
It was great but it’s over now. Warcraft as an IP should have died a long time ago
it was unironically the worst mmo on the market flooded with normies
The online infrastructure held it back.
Yet it was still better than blizzards current infrastructure. Its pretty wild to think that their massive multiplayer game can’t handle 100 vs 100 pvp without crashing and burning. Unplayable lagfest. Meanwhile private servers hosted by dudes in Romania could handle it.
no. it wasn't
back in 2004 most people playing MMOs were still trying to grasp their minds over how not to just play it but also how to start stuff that's basic knowledge today like how to engage in quests to even how to activate the 9th hotbar slot to use your ability slotted there without using a mouse click
meanwhile most of the skilled mmo gamers back then were busy with other games like Ultima Online, Everquest, and even eve online.
World of Warcraft back then was being played by mostly teenagers and young adults who never touched a mmo and most of them only got interested in playing the game after watching one of those celebrity endorsement advertisements.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBra4pwlwUIcUHnuHJKEWuLEB3VqV82se
and since blizzard stop using celebrity endorsements commercials their pop count has still not reached the WoTLK numbers. which basically means that the game only became as popular as it did is due to how many celebrity endorsements commercial they did from Burning Crusade to Wotlk which I wont lie but my favorite one is Shatners endorsement, this one I mean:
the sad part though is those teenagers and young adults that stuck with WoW since then have been doing nothing but playing that mmo which is kinda sad when you think about it. Wow. I rambled abit too long, sorry but this had to be said
>meanwhile most of the skilled mmo gamers back then were busy with other games like Ultima Online, Everquest, and even eve online.
I started playing UO in 1997. Literally everyone I knew back then had moved on from it by that point. By the time WoW came around, everyone was playing either DAoC or CoH.
>the sad part though is those teenagers and young adults that stuck with WoW since then have been doing nothing but playing that mmo which is kinda sad
Most honest part of the post
I just wonder how so many kids managed to get their parents to buy it and then pay a $15 subscription for a video game. And back then, $15 were about $25 of today
My parents would've told me to gtfo
For many it was the prepaid cards you could buy. Many saved their allowances to buy game time. Some couldn't play every month because they couldn't afford it.
Jesus, if your hobby takes such a big toll on your finances maybe it's time to find a new one
Pretty surreal how some wow players are/were akin to drug addicts
Very easy to say in a vacuum when not being a part of the main pack is an easy way to end up ostracized and alone, and able to be corrupted and groomed by angry manchildren on a Mongolian underwater basket weaving forum... I mean, "Discord".
the game was and still is addicting, there can be no doubt.
that said, you simply had to be there. some of my fondest memories of that game is getting together with big groups of people to do stupid shit like raid cities or try to take down really high level enemies that weren't in raids.
For the amount of time they'd put into it per month it was a pretty good cost to entertainment ratio. A trip to the movie theaters cost more.
I didn't.
My parents even thought i was lying to them for drug money.
That's how alien the concept of a monthly fee to play a video game was for them.
My parents were wealthy and they saw it kept me out of trouble so they didn’t mind. I just had to make sure I finished high school with a good GPA which I did.
I used to steal time cards from Walmart as a teen. I'm white and WoW addiction forced me into Black persondom
>I'm white [Dominican]
How exactly does that work when those card aren't able to be used until they're scanned into a register and the transaction is completed?
I don't think WoW cards needed to be activated like that
That was bullshit to prevent theft, at least for WoW timecards. Trust me I did that shit for years.
>back in 2004 most people playing MMOs were still trying to grasp their minds over how not to just play it but also how to start stuff that's basic knowledge today like how to engage in quests to even how to activate the 9th hotbar slot to use your ability slotted there without using a mouse click
>meanwhile most of the skilled mmo gamers back then were busy with other games like Ultima Online, Everquest, and even eve online.
>World of Warcraft back then was being played by mostly teenagers and young adults who never touched a mmo and most of them only got interested in playing the game after watching one of those celebrity endorsement advertisements.
This is exactly what made WoW great back then and created a true MMO atmosphere. The older and more seasoned "MMO players" you have in your game, the less it feels like an MMO ironically because those people suck the soul and socialization out of everything they touch.
Frick I know, Sod Will be the same maybe.
sod makes it more exciting for sure.
Itd be impossible to do all the new discovery things without addons, or help from a loyal guild...which the population is so high its easy to get help!
I play with an old friend from school but we are far apart, he doesn't have many friends...me either. this game is the perfect thing.
wow sod is thriving with guilds and discords. Its healthy.
Frick off ESL moron
Sod is bleeding players as we speak
>"yass dude, eceleb said we would be back"
>"...any minute now"
you never experienced old wow and never will
>back in 2004 most people playing MMOs were still trying to grasp their minds over how not to just play it but also how to start stuff that's basic knowledge today
this guy gets it, we were so fricking moronic back in the days ;
you would gouge your eyes out if you saw how we played, it's like our brain couldn't think or project outside of what was directly in front of our eyes
it didn't make it that magical at all, because once you reach a certain point you see some players being super efficient for some reason (they won't tell you how, of course) and you simple can't grasp how they do it, so you retire and play something more simple like free online FPS, or go back to homework
Learning how to break the shoddy coding is what made it magical.
stunlocking people and using the same rotation in every opening sounds like absolute hell why would people play this class
>the fricking stunlock wheel
>the ring of death
Yea. Videos like this are proof that the game was shit and your humor was even worse than zoomers, somehow.
Please show me your newer, funnier video
It's just someone killing weaker players and playing omg so random sounds lol mixed with some gay.
It's a work of art by an auteur, whose production is fantastic. You ask too much of it, and I'd like the superior example in your mind. At least you could post SOD HYPE, which was funny but significantly cheaper.
That's not an authentic video. THIS is an authentic video:
>not somethingawf
Patlolboar
>mouse clicking
>highlighting 2.4k damage
>240p
>butt metal
>awful editing where you can't tell if the slow-down is lag or video toaster
TAKE ME BACK
HOLY FRICKING SOVL
this is one of those videos that literally everyone watched kek
I love looking back at old WoW videos that were super popular, almost every single one is straight-up awful.
>either outnumbers or VASTLY outgears the opponent
>is usually a poorly edited crit montage, bonus points if it's a shaman with a two-hander or a warrior with a personal healer riding his ass
>clicking abilities
>keyboard turning (guaranteed in the opponent, optional for the player as well)
>potion use to prevent them from losing a dual
>painfully unfunny RP, bonus points for reference to other videos
Finding a legitimately skilled player taking down multiple opponents of equal/greater gear level in a well-produced and to-the-point video was like finding a fist-sized diamond in the rough.
>Finding a legitimately skilled player taking down multiple opponents of equal/greater gear level in a well-produced and to-the-point video was like finding a fist-sized diamond in the rough.
world of roguecraft knew his class pretty well iirc regularly being outnumbered and fighting naked
If that's the one that was killing 60s using a worn knife, that isn't a sign of personal skill. It's a sign of how absolute dogshit rogue's design was.
Thank you, I forgot to mention the free-space on our "terrible WoW PvP video" bingo
>undead rogue
I was obsessed with these videos when I was a kid, I remember showing one to my friend at another friend's birthday party.
Was Drakedog the warlock or the mage? I remember the mage being actually good, but the warlock video that everyone jerked off I felt was just more of the same-old-same-old.
drakedog was the korean destro lock known for world pvp when no one played destro
the realization that teh succ could lead to one-shotting revolutionized how warlock was perceived
naturally everyone started bringing flame reflectors and charm breakers when dueling a lock or hearing about one in epl/silithus
but that only made the turbocaster imp destro build that constantly inflicts pushback all the more sexual when it appeared as a variation of 30/0/21
1sec Firebolts were insane in duels against casters in duels.
>Small brain
Using the Succ to le epig one-shot people with Soufile
>medium brain
Pushback 30/21 spec intended to annoy the frick out of casters
>big brain
Soullink spec with 5k+ HP that just shits on everyone except Rogues
>giga brain
Sticking to PvEing and ripping aggro off the MT with a double-Shadowbolt crit and getting one-shot
Frick. You got the song stuck in my head.
SAR
SAR
DO NOT REDEEM THE SHADOWBELT
>the realization that teh succ could lead to one-shotting revolutionized how warlock was perceived
This was never anything new. I played a lock in the mushroom era, it was my first 60. It was also on alliance, where the amount of warlocks was so minuscule, that I was immediately poached into the server's second best raiding guild the moment I hit 60.
Seduce stuff was very well known, liked by some, but not strong in the slightest. It was reliant on crits, and prior to resistance changes, the increased damage you could receive from negative resistances. As alliance, you were dealing with a very high undead population (~40%), who at the time had a 20 second wotf. So the strats were ineffective against almost half of the people you were up against.
Locks becoming good didn't come from any discovery, but class changes, the two biggest ones being death coil and demo changes. Death coil used to be on a 10 min cd and had no terror effect. It was simply deal some damage and heal you for the same amount. Soul link used to have a 30 second duration (and was dispellable), and master demonologist didn't even exist.
>naturally everyone started bringing flame reflectors
Never happened.
>charm breakers
Don't even exist outside select pvp trinkets (which were always used) and skull (didn't see much use, originally brought to attention by swifty)
It feels like people who didn't even play the game like to comment on it.
>skull (didn't see much use, originally brought to attention by swifty)
It's been so long I forgot that Swifty used to be considered good at the game and not some lolcow-tier Blizzard bootlicker.
i wonder if they've restored his npc yet
>lick blizzard's ass for years
>npc instantly deleted after mere allegations
I started playing right around either the AQ patch, or if that wasn't the patch that revamped the talent trees/T2 gear then that patch.
Looking at the old talent trees/class skills I cannot understand how anyone was able to clear anything, half the skills were fricking awful and the talents were twice as bad.
now you know why we had 40 people
Survival was a baffling tree. I liked the idea of a trap-happy melee hunter but
>77 damage
>at level 40
>over 21 seconds
Lacerate was just beyond the pale.
The strength of old fury warriors.
drakedog was the korean(?) warlock famous for seducing random people with his pet and oneshotting them with massive soulfire crits (which roguecraft debunked more or less)
the frick is wrong with you
I'm sorry that I don't find a HWL-geared warrior with a pocket-priest and a shaman with WF totem running around AB 1-shotting casuals in blue gear to be entertaining.
Why are you overanalyzing 20 year old videos to judge the player's skill? The frick is wrong with you lol
Overanalyzing them? homie this is surface-level stuff, I'm sorry that I'm not entertained by shit vids like you were. I understand it was a different time but c'mon man, have a little integrity.
>this is surface-level stuff
No it's not you're autistic
Mind poisoned by progressivism
drakedog the goat
I remember some guy released a warrior video showing off glitches and fun stuff that was only talked about on the forums and then like a month later Blizzard patched out all the best shit. RIP bloodrage cancelling into charge and glowy hands. The only benefit of not having a community manager that payed attention to warriors.
i loved the videos that had a "storyline"
>they said...that i could not do...it..
>but.... ...they wre wong!!!11
>Korn - Freak on a leash starts playing*
and then it stops halfway through and it's just him slowly walking through tanaris emoting while some level 43 hunter runs past him but he didn't want to do a reshoot so he left it in
Take me back take me back
>no addons
>no nameplates
what a noob
wow that was so cool
vanilla was full of hardcore and try hard gamers, the guy behind more dots was playing since beta alongside all his guild
also your ads are from tbc and above era
Now it's the only people playing though. I don't ever remember being inspected or interrogated or charged gold, or getting into petty arguments about loot rules in PuG UBRS runs, even pre 10-man UBRS. Now everything in wow is a fricking job interview unless you have an existing party, or a PUG against mind-numbingly easy finder content.
Yes, and they were often mocked. No one took dragonslayers seriously
OK buddy you really shouldn't just believe EVERYTHING you pick up on the internet.
yes and you'll never get to experience it with 80% zoomers playing sod
cope
It was never cool nor interesting.
I thought Kel and Arthas were bros.
Kel was never anyone's friend and the only reason the Lich King raised him in the Sunwell is because he needed the foremost expert on the Plague to help him build a badass zombie army, which is why Lordaeron got super wasted and the high elves turned gay.
Didn't Arthas raise Kel to summon Archy at Dal? I didn't think it had much to do with the plagues, but I guess Kel was the leader of the Cult of the Damned so he did know a thing or two about necromancy.
the dialogue in naxx was before they retconned arthas being taken over by the lich king when he put on the helm of domination
arthas was dead until they changed it in wotlk
I'm talking about WC3 friend. I can't recall the specifics but I thought that Arthas waged war against the high elves to raise Kel as a lich in the Sunwell, because Kel was the only sorcerer powerful enough to summon Archimonde into reality.
I know Arthas and Kel were chums, insofar as a lich raised in someone's service can be friendly, and Kel did also guide Arthas towards the helm against the wishes of the dreadlords, but I don't remember if the Plague of Undeath had anything to do with their relationship.
Kel’Thuzad was needed only for Archimonde. Remember that Kel’Thuzad was dead when the Scourge wiped out Lordaeron AND the high elves. They didn’t need him to create an army of the dead.
>Kel was never anyone's friend
The Lich King is a fusion of Arthas and Ner'zhul, IIRC. He's not really the same person since putting on the crown.
Lich King was never Arthas until they retconned it to piss on the rts players. Lich King was always supposed to be Ner'zhul, who viewed all the dead as slaves. Arthas came to view Kel as a friend and was on good terms with Anub.
>”Now we are one.”, implying that Arthas and Ner’zhul are now the same entity as the Lich King
Granted it is debatable if it’s even Arthas past the point when Frostmourne sucks his soul at the end of the human campaign, the Frostmourne being a part of the Lich King.
There certainly were more excitement about what the future held with expansions and all that. However when we got the details of Burning Crusade, having the first few clues to class homogenization and all that some people were already seeing the direction the game was taking.
The MMO comparisons/discourse were more diverse and WOW wasn't so all consuming in the discourse.
Classes in 2004 were the absolute worst they've ever been
eat a bag of dicks
In practice many specs were either useless, had 2 button rotations, or both. Let's not pretend vanilla was some sort of masterful design
There just wasn't enough focus on each class's unique utility. Most of the game has always been centered around "bigger numbers line go up", and this left things like hunters in a pretty shitty spot, because most of their kit rarely came into play.
And then... the classes were completly unbalanced all the way to Cataclysm and just as bad to play.
At least in Vanilla you had identity and everyone felt unique.
Honestly what's the fricking point in being uniquely useless? Don't you just want to have fun and not have to reroll because your class can't do anything??
Some specs were subpar in some situations but that doesn't make them useless
>pick hybrid class that can do anything over one with a more specialised role
>discover you're 1% less effective in ass-gaping than the ass-gaper class
>cry forever
same as it ever was
Viewmasters were so good
Shamans were never useless. Neither were paladins. Druids had their uses, too. The game isn't supposed to be about speedrunning boss kill times.
Druids were better at tanking dungeon bosses than warriors, but couldn't handle trash mobs nor become uncrushable.
Paladins were better at handling groups of enemies than warriors, but were mana-dependent, didn't have a taunt, and needed to be crit to get some of their effects to trigger.
Druids were better than priests at staying low on threat tables by healing with HoTs, at the cost of not having any real answers for emergencies beyond Swiftmend and Rebirth.
Paladins were better than priests at main tank healing than priests, but didn't have the ability to heal a large number of people easily and effectively.
Shaman were better than priests at healing large groups of people fast, but lacked sustainability and would go OOM quickly.
Hybrid was just that, a hybrid, meant to cover multiple bases if the primary role failed due to bad luck or poor planning. It's shameful that players went into hybrid classes expecting to be equal to the respective primary classes.
>Paladins were better at handling groups of enemies than warriors, but were mana-dependent, didn't have a taunt, and needed to be crit to get some of their effects to trigger
As someone who ran dungeon runs with guildees as a prot Paladin, I still don't get why they needed to be crit in Blizzard's mind in order to be effective. It's a shame too because AOE pulls and the mana management made them a bit interesting. Everything up to Dire Maul is pretty straight forward, and dungeons like Stratholme are fun with anti undead spells, but then you gotta put on the dress for raids.
Blizzard at the time didn't have a paladin class lead and most everyone on the dev team hated paladin, which is why it has so many massive handicaps to its functionality. The most obvious is the general lack of +INT / +SP on plate (whereas shaman had easy access to hybrid mail), but what's much less known is that Crusader Strike is cut content from vanilla.
>Paladins missing class lead
>Shaman has the whole busshock incident
It's no wonder both were neglected in their own ways.
There's no single class in vanilla that's useless. TBC just ruined the 'balance' by starting the homogenization of the classes (And making Warrior useless).
shaman was considered to be overpowered in vanilla
druids and paladins had their uses and you still wanted them around, even if they had shortcomings
Back then? Maybe. Now Paladin is like the best raid healer and the thing that makes Alliance outright easier in PvE lol.
me in the middle left
>every hybrid says healer
As God intended
deus vult cucks btfo
Yes it was. It was a global phenomenon for a reason.
Yes but if you were not into creating lots of alts, once you reached lvl 60 and farmed for a while the dungeons, the game went south real quick.
40men raiding is soul crushing.
same as it always was. fun to play through the game until you get max level. go through all the end game dungeons and then stop playing. as long as you stop its great
You didn't listen...
He never paid any heed to the ancient prophecies...
I wanna frick that gnome.
That's a great poast
>posted in 2006
Damn, this guy was a nostradamus with predicting the blizz life cycle of an expansion meme. The one where it keeps getting claimed problems will be fixed in whatever patch/expac right around the corner (it never does).
>this guy was a nostradamus
you mean Quasimodo?
You want compromise? How's this. Twenty years in Azeroth, I wanted Smoked Sagefish. I compromised. I ate Savory Deviate Delight off the floor instead. I wanted to frick a tauren, but I compromised. I jacked off in the Lion's Pride Inn.
You see where I'm goin'?
That's why MMOs need progression wipes and less vertical progression.
Nobody wants to be a new player on an ancient server full of veterans that have already beaten the game. MMO servers are always, without exception, the most active when they are new.
Yeah, private servers figured it out years ago.
>That's why MMOs need progression wipes
Progression wipes suck for anything that isn't a pure pvp game with seasonal mmr ladders. No one wants to take a break from a game and find out all the gear they've worked on is trash. It probably helps the no-lifers more than the casuals/newbies as you'd expect, since the no-lifers would be the ones grinding all over again the monent a wipe occurs while the others would just leave.
It's literally the opposite. Hardcore players lose their minds at the idea that any of their "work" be minimized
It's surreal to me how people can spend tons of hours and effort grinding gear that is guaranteed to be obsolete (and even outranked bybsome shitty quest gear) by the next patch or expansion
With transmog available it's more worth it though
You could adapt the design and progression of the game to fit the frequent resets. While it's not exactly an MMO, PoE made resets their entire business model. Blizzard has been trying to figure it out with their seasons but I think it could go much better if someone were to make a new MMORPG that's built from the ground up to use that sort of model. If the process of leveling and gearing up a character doesn't take months or years then doing it all over again isn't that big of a deal. Similarly if you change or update the game between each reset it gives players something new to be excited about. It also gives you reason to update the lower levels of the game as players are going to be re-experiencing those ranges of content. Usually it doesn't make much sense to spend time working on content that all the players have outleveled. I can see a lot of benefits coming from designing the game like that.
>Blizzard, for whatever reasons has begun to sacrifice reputation in order to drain as much profit as they can
Dude saw a decade into the future as every big publisher started doing just that around the mid 2010s and it just keeps getting worse.
It's funny when you see smaller games, or even volunteers output significantly more content
I think the a big problem is the concept of Item Level. For every MMO item level and player level grow equally until you hit the first level cap. Then the item level and stat growth starts outpacing the characters by factors of two to ten times more.
M+ exacerbated that tenfold
This is why it's much better to have item upgrades be something less frequent and their level scaling curve should be fairly flat. Ragnarok Online did it pretty well in the old versions. Lower grade items had more card slots and cards were very powerful which kept low level items relevant and many powerful cards came from relatively low level monsters. It did a good job spreading out the people in the world and gave a reason to kill some monsters that weren't giving you good xp anymore.
Couldn't play it for the first week I think, I remember it constantly crashing. Also it fricking sucked to actually play. Was more fun to dick around.
Yes. And you'll never be able to experience it.
Classic Era still has some of that feel if you are new https://streamable.com/nnhrig
Problem is that nobody else is new. You're playing with people who know everything about the game. If you don't know something you're told to look it up on wowhead or whatever.
He nailed the retail experience.
Holy shit, the Plott brother lives. Was that a fricking UHF reference? Boomer kino-tier
This is spot fricking on. Jesus Christ. Exile's Reach is a terrible experience for new players and forcing new players to go to BfA was also a fricking awful decision. BfA's whole plot depends on you being a years long veteran of the game, why did they try to make it the new starting point?
Bro. Exile's Reach is nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to leveling in Shadowlands and Dragonflight. Imagine Exile's Reach, except it's not over in half an hour, and every forced unskippable RP section takes twice as long and is even more cringe
These cinematic experience hugboxers that don't even like games, are beyond moronic
>forcing new players to go to BfA was also a fricking awful decision
It's such a glaring oversight and patchwork solution that I was 100% convinced the next expansion would include an Azeroth revamp, but no. Metzen's electric feefee boogaloo comes first.
very good explanation. they went all in on the theme park leveling experience after it was so well received in wotlk.
*received in TBC
wotlk is the one i remember where they went all in on the gimmicks while leveling. cata introduced a quest called The day Deathwing came and i view that as the modern template for every wow quest going forward, that's the exact moment when wow jumped the shark imo.
For time? Yes? Retrospectively? No.
It was about fun interactions with other people. Everyone knew everyone, there was a crafter guy, a funny guy, a moron, a village idiot, a serious guy etc.
Everything was more personal. Each server was like some community. People went into dungeons to see wtf it is and to have fun. Knowledge was discovered and spread word to word.
Current wow including vanilla is speed running and metahomosexualry. Everything gotta be minmaxed, all knowledge is shown on every website down to atomic level. No mystery, no social interactions, no soul.
When I search info for stuff from vanilla, I come across posts that were made around 2005/6. So even back in the days there were guides and min maxers. Ofc it wasn't as widespread, but still
Even today you'll find many people who don't give a shit about minmaximg
The big difference is that these days 80% of players are using addons that automatically solve the game for them as they play. Guides on websites are archaic at this point, the players have taken sucking the fun out of the game to another level.
That sort of powergaming mindset was only starting to pop up back then and much of the "theory"crafting was based on false premises. Nowadays everyone is expected to play like that and many new games get theorycrafted before they're even released.
It was superficial like a Discord server today
Better than FFXIV
You can never know because sharding and cross-realm battlegrounds prevented you from even approaching it.
Sex with vulperan women. Walking onaholes.
What’s she looking at?
Anons wiener
kys furgay
Dilate
It was okay.
Yes, but classic is not the same. the magic was from the context of the time period, not not because of any qualities in the actual game necessarily.
>not because of any qualities in the actual game necessarily
I agree but at the same time WoW had a lot going for it as an MMORPG. It played so fricking smooth compared to the competition. Even compared to many single player games of the era. The UI, player controls, everything just worked. The netcode was amazing for the time.
You can argue about the game design of WoW vs other MMORPGs of the era and WoW made a lot of controversial choices that in hindsight are pretty fricking bad but none of the others felt as good to play which is one of the major reasons why WoW gained so much traction.
>and WoW made a lot of controversial choices that in hindsight are pretty fricking bad
You can't say that and not give us some examples
The easy ones are the quests, raiding focused endgame and every expansion invalidating all previous content. Oh and flying mounts.
Honestly yeah I don't know how they did it back then and what sort of secret magics it is that most devs still can't do it. Battle.net was fricking mindblowing when they introduced it, first used in Diablo. There was nothing like that back then. I suppose the guy who coded it sold his soul to the devil.
yup playing 4-8 players with dial-up and pretty decent ping was amazing back then
WoW still plays smooth as hell and I'm starting to believe 2004-era Blizzard had sacrificed some babies to Satan because no other MMO has that same fluid yet tight combat and movement, you instantly get feedback. I've tried most MMOs from 2005 and onwards and not a single one get it right, I think FFXIV comes closest but there's still some jank there that breaks the illusion. Some games have amazing communities, customization, addon support, devoted developers, graphics etc but none come close to the actual gameplay. It's the one area Blizzard always hits it out of the park; Starcraft, Diablo, Warcraft, Hots even Overwatch was pretty good before they ruined quick play.
FFXIV would probably have it right if they upped the tick rate
It was developed by FPS fans (Quake specifically) which is why it ran so well
I really wish FFXIV wasn't held up by code from an unpaid intern. The code in that game is near untouchable because if they do touch it, the game will break.
I do wonder how much the dogshit code from the original release is holding back the modern version of the game. I have problems with how Yoshida directs the game but God bless him for somehow managing to salvage that flaming pile of shit.
SE needs to move him ASAP to work on a new MMO or next expansion has to break the game AKA fix their shit code.
early blizzard was literally carried by rob pardo's insatiable autism and demand for immediate tactile feedback and precise control
>that K/D ratio
disgusting
death knights scare me
>blizzard will never let something like release DKs happen ever again
>people have absolutely no hope for hero specs to be interesting in TWW because everything has to be balanced around race to world first
And this is emblematic of the modern game as a whole.
It's like someone at Blizzard really just wants to design the entire game around the 60 or so people who participate in Race to World First and MDI.
>It's like someone at Blizzard really just wants to design the entire game around the 60 or so people who participate in Race to World First and MDI.
That's their "esports" for WoW now because PvP is fricking dead. Blizzard catered to the tournament players with Overwatch and it ruined that game too.
nobody but DK players enjoyed DKs being disgustingly broken you dumb Black folk, balancing classes is something the majority of the players want
But nobody can agree on what balancing IS. That's where the problem is, and there's a tremendous lack of honesty and transparency between dev teams, class leads, and the people who play the class. Obviously numbers in the millions or billions isn't good, but the flip side is that players will always want the biggest numbers no matter how thematically inappropriate it is. Case in point: DW Unholy.
If the WoW team was honest about what they want each class and spec to do rather than continually trying to fit the bare bones of the holy trinity, this wouldn't be a problem. When DK was launched, it was heralded by Actiblizzard as the first anti-magic tanking class, and that each spec had the capacity to tank. Look what happened in 3.1 to see how long that blatant lying lasted.
>But nobody can agree on what balancing IS
no moron, its pretty fricking obvious
similar performance in raid and similar ladder representation in dungeons and PvP. Thats balance and thats what people want, for their class to not be dogshit and benched
>Obviously numbers in the millions or billions isn't good
total number has literally 0 relevance to balance. If everyone did a billion damage it would be way more balanced than some people doing 2000 and some people doing 4000
>If the WoW team was honest about what they want each class and spec to do
They are
>rather than continually trying to fit the bare bones of the holy trinity
Every class DOES need to fit the holy trinity you moron, when you break out of that you become overpowered
>When DK was launched, it was heralded by Actiblizzard as the first anti-magic tanking class, and that each spec had the capacity to tank. Look what happened in 3.1
because 3.0 DK was moronicly and disgustingly overpowered. Again, only shitters who crutch on their class being broken want 3.0 DK back.
I disagree.
Because youre a moronic shitter
>475,236,677 damage
?????
is this the power of indian playtesters?!
Old fart here, it wasn't.
Back in the day, I was hooked on Lineage 2, that game offered more freedom and was challenging: you could create your own clan and declare war on everyone or just kill any one you don't like. When you died you lost hours of XP that you needed to grind back, so dying was really really bad. You could also lose equipped items when you die, it was rare, but in earlier chronicles (updates) it was possible. WoW on the other hand had better lore, better exploration, better PVE, better raids, but I didn't like it because I had bloodlust and was a pvp guy. To defeat others in honorable battle felt great. People killed each other in real life because of that game, WoW didn't have that, but I've heard some roleplayers were having a great time playing as a noble paladin patrolling Elwynn Forest or something like that.
Anyway, WoW was definitely better than it's now, it was a magical experience but it wasn't as good as in the other games.
yes but because it was a different time
competitive gaming and minmaxxing everything destroyed gaming
What made it magical was interreacting with others online was a novelty paired with USA being about free speech. It was a great time, seeing someone acting zesty and calling him a homosexual, and instead of whining to the GMS he would call you a homosexual back and it would be a jolly time.
There will never be anything that matches the unrivaled, unintentional success of Barrens chat ever again. Forcing over 75% of one faction into one zone for 15 levels AND making it a transport hub through Ratchet AND having two mid-game dungeons in it was recipe for total success.
Too much freedom for deceivers to handle
Coming back to play Classic like a good broken goy. Saw people trying to recreate barrens chat but with modern correctness. Literally wasn't the same, you could tell who the OGs were. Meanwhile if anyone said something not approved all the gays would come out and go "uhm problematic sweaty!!!!!"
Same tactics as /here/, too.
>The Barrens was always PC because of our heccin wholesome Chuck Norris jokes, sweaty. You started playing in the 2016 expansion
I spammed [The Nicker] as a pronoun in chat.
>"dude shut the frick up"
>"Uh-oh! [The Nicker] is telling me to shut up!"
As a TBC baby, yes.
I know i'm not who you asked for but even during TBC it was still something so great to experience as your first MMO, before social media, smart phones, modern journos, etc.
Most immersive, magical gaming experience i've ever had. Nothing will ever be like that again. Luckily i've quit playing over 10 years ago and am not stuck still chasing that high like a lot of others.
I had never played it cause of the sub price primarily, although I had played most blizzard products, mostly playing starcraft. I certainly wish I had because classic has been mostly good, and I enjoy the game itself it's just the community is aids on occasion
Classic community sucks compared to 2004-05. The first month of Classic was pretty close but then the illusion shattered and the retail mentality stormed in and drove out anyone who wasn't a metagay or gold seller.
if this is for SOD that is so sad considering the raids are clearable by literal blind people
I think it was before SoD. Still sad.
>tfw some big-brain lad figured out that DH fast 1-handers as Unholy was significantly higher DPS than the normal 2h Scourgestrike build
>it immediately breaks guilds because sweaty parse-chasing frickwads begin to demand weapons normally attributed to tanks
Parses were a mistake.
Not to mention it's not thematically sexy. It's like making paladins wear dresses back in Vanilla when there was so much viable healer plate that they could use.
For me it was always
>two-hander
Blood, Unholy
>dual-wield
Frost
But realistically DKs were so overpowered in Wrath that they could play any spec with any weapon combo as any role (well, tank or DPS) and excel.
last laugh was unironically a worse weapon for tanks than the 213 from 4H. unless you brought a warrior but then you're a casual guild anyways so who cares about loot
>unless you brought a warrior but then you're a casual guild anyways so who cares about loot
wasn't Kungen a warrior and in the best guild in the world at the time?
ultra sweaty speedrun guilds brought warriors for trash purposes, they would give LL to dk's for the dps buff over a tank anyways. tanks are just prone to being cry babies
No one on earth cries more than parsers about their BiS
literally not crying about anything, i played ret paladin during naxx. all i did was point out that LL would go to anyone in a casual guild, or dk's prio in a sweat guild. the only ones crying "its a tank weapon!!!!1!!" are the absolute worst part of the community and should be perma locked to their SOD servers so they can be toxic as much as they want
m8 he's not calling you out, he's simply pointing out the fact that no one cries about gear more than parsers do about their BiS.
A parsegay would crawl through a mile of broken glass if it meant getting their BiS weapon before everyone else and they'd kvetch and complain the entire time about how they never get any loot.
/roll MS > OS will never be topped
Not so fast anon. I've run the simulations and I've calculated that [Big Dragon Sword] is actually a 8.323% DPS upgrade for the hunter if he stutter-steps his shots while standing at a 48 degree angle and spamming iron grenades using an auto clicker that clicks 9 million times per nanosecond while using his ultra rare spawn gorilla pet with the special attack power roar (2% more ap than a regular gorilla if you manually cast it every 5.9224 seconds using an addon). And for that reason the sword goes to him and not you, thanks for coming to the raid butthole now go frick yourself.
agreed.
loot averages out over time, and if your players aren't self centered dipshits they will pass to each other anyways if someone is getting screwed on rolls.
planning loot is for the autists and their speedtroony validation.
Only subhuman drunkard smokers play in MS>OS raids.
Nah, you could just state you're rolling "X MS" despite filling heal or whatever. Literally nothing is better, after all my experieces with autistic DKP, EGPG, Council, whatever the frick
>the first time you entered your race's capital city
>the first time you took a flight path
>the first time you delved into a dungeon with your bros
>the first time you scraped enough gold together for your mount, probably after level 40 unless you were smart
>joining your first guild
>joining your first SS/Crossroads raid
>joining your first raid
Last two are a little erotic so gonna spoil those:
>your first pair of shoulderpads
>your first full-length cloak
Zoomers will never understand.
one of the most memorable early experiences for me was being guided from Dark Shore to Stormwind by a Dwarf
i had no idea at all how big this game was and it seemed like a never ending journey, trusting a stranger on a dangerous path until you finally reach a huge civilization
bless that guy for showing me the way
but even all the memories leading up to that point are all so memorable
now i play a game and i forget most of what happened in it a week later
Think how nice that guy would feel if he knew that, almost 20 years later, you still remembered when he showed some random a moment of kindness in a video game.
If people nowadays acted like that things might be a bit better.
I still remember grouping with some random guy for BFD. The group fell apart quickly, but for some reason he and I decided to continue plugging away at the dungeon as best as 2 people could. We were a rogue and a hunter, so it wasn't even like we could heal one another, only swap aggro and heal with food/bandages. We got to the lady naga boss before it got too much to bear, and we bid each other farewell and went our separate ways.
Nowadays people would've immediately hearthed out without saying a word.
I kinda miss making do with what you had.
>tank warrior leaves
>shaman equips a shield and tanks with rockbiter and taunt totem
>druid off-heals and hunter kites and off-tanks with pet
>can't make the last boss but a friend of a friend logs on and despite him being 4 levels too low and on the other continent we invite him and wait 25 minutes for him to run all the way to the dungeon
>finish and get a cool blue item that blows my old one out of the water
>go to bed feeling like a million bucks and added everyone to my friends list
All those extra buttons and weird abilities added so much soul to the game. Nowadays everything is dumbed down and all the abilities you get belong to your designed damage rotation.
Blizz's modern aversion to utility spells confuses the frick out of me.
>hmmm. That spell doesn't have a place in the optimal rotation for your spec's determined purpose
>better fricking delete it in case you get any bright ideas
Is a little flexibility too much to trust modern players with? Gawd damn.
Eyes of the Beast was deleted after hunters realized they could flag low-level players by naming their pets after named NPCs, which low-levels would mindlessly target and attack following one of Jame's guides and get permanently assfricked in starting zones. So, no, we can't trust players to not abuse utility spells ;^)
The late cata (or was it early MoP?) ability trimming was the nail in the coffin for me.
Take me back
This experience was so common for everyone, now it's weird to even talk with anyone
running ragefire chasm and wailing caverns with some guys you just found in general chat over 20 minutes and it's most of the groups first time was so fun
after a couple runs I had the whole dungeon figured out and felt like a boss leading the group through WC for an hour+
it was better than raiding
Hell yeah, BRD was the goat. Even zoning in was hectic
>"we could take a different route"
>"did anybody bring the key?"
being the keyholder felt great, like someone who just saved them from starving
>be rogue
>cruel barb drops twice in a row
>immediately feel 10x stronger than before
I felt like I'd completed the game there and then.
There's even an ``influencer'' named Not My Problem
I've had similar experiences with Classic back in 2019 and then again when they released HC servers. They won't be frequent but they happen from time to time.
Same, I had some legitimately good experiences in the early days of Classic, before the GDKP and boost-sellers took over. I joined a guild late, and because I was one of like 2 hunters in the guild I just got funneled loot non-stop.
Except my fricking leaf, it took me (and this is not a word of hyperbole) 15 straight weeks before I saw ONE leaf drop. Thank CHRIST the two pug hunters we had in the raid at the time passed it to me but I think it was just because my character was a female NE. because that was our very last MC as a guild.
I feel bad for those who rolled on megaservers and missed the good parts of classic. A major factor for MMOs is the community, and there's nothing worse for the community than too large a size. If there are so many people that you rarely run into the same people, it's hard for a proper community to foster. At most you get small, isolated communities in the form of guilds.
My server had no GDKPs, they just never took off. I knew a ton of people, I knew the guilds on the server. There were infamous people, moronic people, etc, and a lot of memories attached to them. There was massive server drama. The actual gameplay is significantly less memorable than the events that happened with the community and other people. And that's how it was with vanilla as well. We still remember various people, various guilds, various events from almost 20 years ago and chat about them.
Some people like to claim that whatever happened in 2004-2006 can't happen again because people are different and everything is different. But aside from a higher degree of minmaxing mentality, my classic experience wasn't all that different. It showed me that as long as the game properly supports and guides, even forces, players into actual social interaction, similar things can happen.
I guess it depends heavily on what your server was like. We didn't have GDKPs until AQ was out. I was also lucky to be on a relatively balanced (at least at the start) server with a fun discord community.
>Prestige World Wide
Uh, my server had a PWW guild too but they were horde
>zoomerbait fad died a few months from its release
besides the obvious, week-1 clears,etc. This was proof that Classic wasnt going to give people their nostalgay Vanilla experience
>without saying a word.
this is one of the biggest things that killed MMOs for me
when dungeon finders became the norm and eventually cross server queuing, people just stopped caring about each other and treat each other like NPCs
i have lots and lots of good memories playing WoW as a teen and most of them are tied to social interactions i've had with people i met in the game
the first time i ever did Dead Mines i was overleveled for it already because i didn't even know dungeons exist until the group i went with told me to come with them, it was still awesome
It's not the dungeon finder that killed these interactions. It's the internet as a whole.
No, that didn't start to happen till SJW invasions, much later, whereas people playing the game saw overnight how people in LFD started treating everyone as disposable. I'm sure most people's first truly miserable LFD experience was Halls of Relfection.
nah, /misc/tier drama in the internet took a while. But the internet was becoming a cesspool for social media drama by 2010 already. Zoomergays like to believe it was all politics but it wasnt
Regardless, anyone playing saw it first-hand. People from your home server couldn't just wantontly abuse parties and phase out. The worst you could get was some nutcase playing the long game and ninja looting at the last second. But it's not like everyone wouldn't know about it/him, even if he did
>Nowadays people would've immediately hearthed out without saying a word
I don't know about that. I had similar dungeon experiences during Classic, as well as horrible "hardcore" powerlevelling sperg ones during actual vanilla. The problem is averages.
>your first pair of shoulderpads
>your first full-length cloak
There's unironically no better feeling. Also the level 23/24 cloth hood you could get as your first head piece, and watching as some low level age sold some for silvers and everyone was just happy to have it. Also remember getting Helm of Narv as a drop on my Shaman and proudly wearing it, despite the fact it sucked ass for that character.
>your first full-length cloak
silver-thread cloak, it was grey with gold borders i still remember it perfectly and the look on my friend's face when he saw it
On horde I'd always check that one peak near Crossroads for the rare in the cave because he'd drop a long cloak.
For me it was the snuff quest in STV, full-length cloak of a good color that had great stats for any physical DPS class.
I know I'm preaching to the choir but it's insane how much they game has changed. In retail you get every piece and cool looking gear after just some hours of playing
This is what happens when you listen to the WoW general forums. The average person (read: dimwit) doesn't understand risk vs reward, they don't value prestige, they just know getting [item] gives dopamine and they want [item] now. They're paying a subscription fee so they're entitled to the same dopamine as everyone else in spite of their capabilities.
Can you imagine time traveling back to vanilla/BC days and explaining to any WoW fan that it takes 4 hours to get to max level and you can start doing world events for epic gear better than normal raid drops as soon as you ding 70? Retail WoW is a collect-a-thon full of sad individuals running ICC25 with 40 alts to get a horse so they can brag to r/WoW about how they've wasted 20 hours a week for a last 12 years.
I remember spending a lot of time in duskwood because I didnt know where to level up, so I got many green upgrades, got my first mail shoulderpads over there too. My friends just couldn't believe it, I even got a blue weapon drop. Went to duel some noobs from a noob guild around the same level with my Paladin, won every single one of them I ended up feeling like the hot shit with others cheering for the good upgrades I got. If only I had known later on that Paladins were mostly seen as buffbots, great times nonetheless. But you are right, zoomers will never know this
Epic one-hander sword for me, I remember getting it at stranglethorn vale, cant remember if by killing pirates nearby booty bay or while doing the gorilla quests but it felt so good
No.
2004 was still the before-times when streaming/youtube meant that the meta wasn't propigated to every corner of the internet and was instead a couple dozen people discussing shit on an obscure form.
all the stuff people say "ruined" classic was always there, the only difference is that normalgays didn't know about it so they couldn't parrot what the hyper hardcores were doing the same way a child imitates their parents while driving
People did know about it thoughie. Most people just didn't care to be top guild competitive, and it wasn't expected of them either
>umm aksuhally a playerbase of keyboard turners totally knew about dungeon-cleave to level to the cap quickly, they just didn't want to.
most people genuinely didn't care to level fast or reach endgame, it's why you have those inflated /played times people had for reaching 60 or 70.
That wasn't even known by top guilds back then
Everything was a lot slower, making each miss felt and mobs was lethal in groups. This made the world feel a lot more dangerous as you had to figure out where most things were by yourself or chatting.
It's a far cry from today where you are never lost, everything is explicitly laid out for you and you are never in danger.
Was it better before? It was for me as I want the journey and the danger. Even back then there were players complaining that just because they worked two jobs, had five wives, ten kids, two dogs and managed a farm and got to play maybe one evening every month, they too were entitled to get the best loot and see everything the game had to offer. Activison saw this and saw dollars, so now it's tailor made to "respect your time" and hand your participation trophies. Im sure Im overreacting as I know raids and mythic are still a thing, but for me? It was never about optimizing for one fight, it was exploring the world for the first time, seeing a mob with a skull instead of level or catching a glimpse of the opposing faction. That time has been and Im glad I played it.
"Mythic" leveling would be good for it. Hardcore sort of had the idea, but never dying is a completely moronic mechanic.
ogdevs:
>wow xp loss on dying is not fun, we should remove that
nudevs:
>xp loss on dying? no, you have to completely start over
>This made the world feel a lot more dangerous
In comparison to MMORPGs that came out before WoW it wasn't dangerous at all. The whole thing about WoW being soloable to level cap made it piss easy. That's one of the reasons it had its reputation as a casual game in the eyes of people who had played MMORPGs before it.
One of my favorite things about classic (and hardcore) was healing/rezzing people out in the wild because saving them that time was a much bigger deal. The dopamine hit from saving people in hardcore is unmatched, so much so that I have almost died myself because of it (some dipshit mage doing murloc stuff and I could not resist helping).
It's same as with your first 3D GTA experience. It was cool because it was you first time experiencing something like that, it was new, novel.
>Was it as good and magical as classicucks say?
Yup. It was. What you also have to keep in mind is that this was a time when people had shitty internet, shitty computers, and hadn't optimized the fun out of video games yet. That's a key component of what made original WoW kino. If you simply keybinded your abilities, you were already in the top 10%
That's why playing with latinos and slavs in private servers is pure SOVL: they suck
Back before it was woke
No it sucked ass then and it sucks ass now
The less you knew about the game, the better. Thottbot didn't fully explain quests and people were trying to figure out how the game worked, many would claim certain mobs dropping purples more than others, quests like the Shaman quests were big and open adventures, and no one outside of 1% of guilds tried to minmax. End game was just a reward for finishing leveling, and leveling was the main focus of the game. There weren't a lot of easy accessible "big chatrooms" that people were aware of (most of that was smaller groups that kept to themselves and some instant messengers), which was a major draw for people at the time. Even the forum had a fun, if just being Ganker lite at the time, community that would just post whatever. Probably also helped it was a lot of people's first MMOs and people could run it on truly shitty hardware, meaning you could even run it on a crappy computer so long as one of the four disks didn't decide to mess up the 24 hour time it took to download it all. Ultimately though, the love for it is nostalgia for better times, and Classic could never live up to those expectations.
It was inferior to eq.
I still remember my friend and I thinking that Duskwood was the most dangerous area in the game. We would just run around in the world to explore, find mobs to kill, and find people to chat with. Sometimes we'd learn things, sometimes the evening would be a waste of time, but there was no care in the world about getting to max level or playing in the most efficient way possible. We just played and enjoyed the experience. Good times.
Yes.
It came out and was better than every other MMO on the market by a frick ton.
MMO markets were not massively over-saturated like they are today
MMOs and online gaming didn't have the fun optimized out of them yet.
The community wasn't fricked by everyone trying to race to the finish and parse for internet fame to profit off streaming.
It was a different time and can never exist again
It will only happen if people create entirely new mechanics and systems that players don't understand AND has mechanisms to mitigate minmaxer behavior
I wonder what the mechanics of such a MMO game would be like. How do you avoid people learning the game, while keeping the game fun, engaging and not totally random? Changing the rules at random is not enough I guess.
By making the game actually hard but that's not how MMOs work. Their whole point if having stupid as frick hamsters wasting time for rewards.
Most people don't want really hard. Barely anyone participated in challenge modes until they made it M+ for relevant gear.
so basically what you are saying is that you are feeling nostalgic and want to be a teenager again because you are sad about your current state of affairs in life?
the game is still there, its just you who are autistic enough to cry over this
>sad about current state
Nope, really enjoying my life
>Current state of affairs in life
I'm moreso sad that gaming has becoming an LGBT groomer paradise filled with homosexuals.
>game comes out
>everyone loves it and has positive discussion
>a few big streamers tweet about things they dislike
>discussion suddenly turns overly negative
I dislike this as well. The power of the internet and letting morons band together so easily has caused irreversible damage. Worst part is when you see the person do a 180 on a stance because mr. streamer said something good about the X game again.
It works both ways. The people in charge can scapegoat "blackhat influencer" as if there was never a problem to begin with.
Imagine if the "reveal your real name on the forum" plan was revealed today. Besides the fact that no one uses the forum anymore, obviously those people would make a video calling it out. Were the pages and pages of protests somehow invalidated now that he had?
>Battlenet real ID
I remember this what a moronic idea.
Actually if it was revealed today it would garner support organic and inorganic. People would go "time to own these bigots!" Since people have devolved into creatures that love to hold any ounce of power over another.
Sure, but the "against" support was huge and organic then, even without influencers. Easily to trivialize if you pin it on someone
that was inredibly moronic and also really funny
>Blizz guy defending and then gets fricking full doxxed a day later
humans are generally a species that follows a designated leader and those marked as a leader by a collective has to rely on themselves and pave the way for their followers.
this is why when one celeb states something they like usually gives that product a boost in sales as their followers are following the leaders directive.
so what are you, anon?
a leader or a follower?
I'm literally Garrosh.
Tenk you Mr. Teito, vely cool.
I'm sigma
Sure you are, doll
>no no no wow isn't full of gay shit and gay characters now, all the female characters also didn't get censored, it's just you being nostalgic about being a teenager!
lmao kys
i was not talking about WoW in my greentext, it's common knowledge Blizz has been irredeemable dogshit for many years
that post and your post before it were both stupid, the game isn't there anymore, a butchered mockery of the game is there with lgbt shit smeared allover it, it's not just that someone became a bitter adult and is nostalgic for the times when he was more innocent, the game also changed (for the worse) and the world in general also changed
>the game is still there
Except it isn't, the community is not the same anymore.
You like Chess, right? Would you play Chess in its current state (old WoW) or only with 20 grandmasters in the player pool (modern WoW)?
remember google video?
warcraftmovies.com_intro.wmv
For me it was I think xFire? or some other video hosting site that didn't cap the video length so you didn't need to watch Part 1 of X like on Youtube.
Breh, xfire streams were >fire.
>xfire
I still have a bunch of old screenshots I took with it. Shame I didn't back up even older screenshots. These only go back to 2009 or so.
>lost all my vanilla screenshots in a hard drive crash
>R-R-RREADY STEADY GO
I APPRECIATE YOUR INPUT
This has lived rent-free in my head for almost 20 years.
It's a thousand times worse than I remember.
This is better than I recall, could have just been random shit thrown together but they definitely tried to compose something here.
Vanilla and MoP were probably the only times WoW was actually better then the competition. XI had already pulled ahead during CoP and ToAU for a real MMO experience. TBC/Wrath were highly overrated at the time and classic Black folk will never really recover from that. I cannot imagine being more cucked then the troony freaks who no lifed TBC and Wrath when private servers did it better for 10+ years in a row.
>furfaf opinion
Say that without crying next time.
?si=TNPzd-8XwMpwk1zE
HEE HEE SHAMONE
>the part where he sniffs a stallions ass
lmao
Vanilla PVP was a joke where nolifer backpedalers just kept zooming on their numbers thinking they're hot shit.
I didn't backpedal.
I used Trinket + Trinket + Presence of Mind + Pyroblast while flasked.
>you will never have proper 40m raids anymore
>you will never fight over open world bosses anymore with your 40m raid while even calling your pvp group to support you while they gain extra honor for their r14 grind
>you wont have level 19 alts anymore to grind pvp in the middle of the night
it's wild to think that the game became so awful it managed to break over 10 million WoW addictions
Yes. Not because they game was good, but because the whole internet climate back then was completely different. Just going online and interacting with people from all over the world was fun and novel.
Just started playing Classic a few weeks ago. Haven't played WoW in nearly 15 years before that.
Things weren't being datamined in ptr so yes it was magical, you legitimately could be finding new shit weeks of playtime in.
>internet's golden era
>gaming golden era
they were different times, Classic wasnt the same and could have never been the same
I played a bit if Classic before Blizz started bending the knee to China so overtly and honestly the magic was still there. The game just played way better back then.
nah, it wasnt because it was the times where it happened that made it different
>it was because muh chinks
spoken like a true eceleb obsessed zoombot, shit was gone by then already, dramas like those had no place back then because people mostly cared about the game
>>it was because muh chinks
I didn't say that, moron. I quit the game because of Blizz bending the knee.
Vanilla leveling straight up plays way better than the modern game. It's no contest. The quest design and world layout is simply superior even if it's way simpler on a technical level.
Yes and private servers were unironically more like vanilla wow than classhit ever was
i miss irreverent and silly internet, everything is gay and moronic now
Little Tom putting uncle toms in their place.
?si=ZORx5ufkG2HvJEFx
>leveling in hillsbrad
>some guy in general chat talks about warcraft radio is going live
>warcraft radio??
>go to the website and tune in
>hear totalbiscuit for the first time
?si=NrVIbHUmUBDNrf1H
I spent a lot of time just exploring the world. It was crazy to me that a bunch of areas were in the game completely unused, added a lot of mystery and scale to the world
my best memories of the game was just exploring alone. i played an undead rogue so i was always stealthed. my first time experiencing any kind of stealth mechanics in a video game. i used to hang out in contested/enemy zones just spying on random alliance players
ywngb
ywnb15yo
ywnbaa
WoW in 2004 was more like social media than it was a video game. People logged on literally just to talk to their guild. That barely happens anymore.
I liked TBC but TBC was when the whole Vanilla feeling was lost. Classic/Hardcore/SoD are just grifterbait, its not the same and never will be
>TBC was when the whole Vanilla feeling was lost
Unironically what did he mean by this? I'm legitimately curious as to what you thought was lost moving to BC, as I felt that the design of the game was still in accordance to the tenants they set in Vanilla (perhaps with the exception of a lot of the instance design which were primarily linear hallways).
Their post-classic consensus seems to be that it wasn't TotGC/LFD but TBC, due to its unpopularity.
Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who absolutely loves BC.
I love the updated class design that made it viable to bring a lot of the underrepresented talents/classes, I love the weird alien science-fantasy feel of everything, I love basically all the zones in one way or another (although I agree Hellfire was a terrible choice of an introduction), I love the grueling, trash-filled raids, I love the design of the loot on both an aesthetic and mechanical level...
It's all great.
Parts of BC were great. I remember starting a Blood Elf well into MoP (or Legion? It was after the stat crunch) and playing through Eversong for the first time in years. The atmosphere in the Blood Elf and Draenei zones absolutely blew the rest of Cata Azeroth out of the water, and walking through the Dark Portal onto Hellfire Peninsula was an impossible setpiece to top. Zangarmarsh, Nagrand, and Terrokar Forest are also top comfy zones that Blizz has yet to top.
I never did any raiding until Wrath (and even then, only barely) but it was a good time for me.
The music and vibe in belf zones is incredible
The general consensus was that Arenas ruined PvP specifically because it undermined BGs and WPvP, charity gear to get players to Sunwell without needing the standard attunement process was confirmation that Blizzard only cared about end-game raids, and flying undoing the entirety of player interaction by setting a precedent that everything between you and an instance should be skipped at all costs are the biggest factors that have caused people to turn on TBC.
Other mentions include the lorebreaking, the class homogenization, the new profession that only encouraged raiders, the change in how stats were operated (13 hit rating instead of 1% hit), and more.
YouTube becoming a thing ruined PvP. Rather than people learning to PvP over time through experience, they'd just watch AzzH0l3_77's ten minute guide on how to win arena by running around a pole until your opponents left. Eventually there was only one comp that won 3s and if you weren't that comp you weren't welcome. Frick Arenas and frick low IQ idiots that watch guides made by even bigger idiots.
Were you even on AJ
I'll straight up tell you I don't know what that is.
I was High Warlord in vanilla and Gladiator in season 1. I won pvp because I was good at it. I had a circle of friends that were also good at it.
Once Arena season 2 and 3 came along I was fighting the exact same comps doing the exact same tricks over and over.
It was frustrating, stupid, and everyone who used to respect PvP gradually just stopped, eventually myself as well.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070801000000*/http://arenajunkies.com/
Adding two starter zones, a capital city, and post-60 leveling zones spreads the population too thin.
That's fair, so you would've preferred the expansion bring more zones/content within the 1-60 range? What about the new raids that BC added that are within Vanilla content (such as Kara)?
The requirements for additional zones are:
1) be part of the main continent; you can walk/swim/boat/blimp to it
2)cannot have any safe haven, town, or hub for you to fast travel to
The reason for this is to keep the main world's travel and traffic as it is and to keep zones from being devalued in the form of becoming obselete or redundant to the new zones.
Just adding the races would be fine too. Not that Blood Elf Paladin or Dreini Shaman should have ever happened.
But because I canot imagine a Dreini being anything other than a shaman I'd make them a Horde race instead.
>faction balance changed
>minmax autism started to settle in(not at the level its today but still bad)
>flying
I loved TBC but loving it isnt the same as being blind and disingenuous about it
Flying mounts killed world pvp
>aeon did flying pvp years before and it was great
blizz devs are just pure incompetent and can't think beyond flat grassland with rock walls
Aion wings were fun like a SMB3 cape. I don't really remember anything else about that game.
>Flying mounts killed the world
FTFY. I loved it at the time but playing it again as an adult blew me away with how disconnected and random the TBC zones (and everything that came after) were compared to the original. There's no way to blend the facades into one another or give the illusion of scale. It's like a fricking Mario overworld.
>completely moved away from Azeroth into "space"
>flying killed open world pvp and general the experience open world
>shared capital city with homeless atmosphere
>arena pvp killed open world pvp even more
>blood elves
The dungeon design was a major issue but it also started forcing you to logon every day to do daily quests and heroic dungeons adding more required stuff behind timegated content so you were really fricking yourself if you only played on like weekends. The raids themselves were more interesting than vanilla but the shift in raid sizes really killed the vibe a huge group had and made you bring the same A-team every time with minimal spaces to bring along undergeared players and quickly gear them up and bad players couldn't be carried as easily. Flying mounts. Not to mention dividing the players up between pre xpac and post made the cities a lot worse.
Threadly reminder that they allowed you to cache your daily rewards for the week in Cata, so you could log on in the weekend and collect 7 daily dungeons. Of course they removed it because it was too good, and bad for their metrics.
>minmax autism was much more common in raiding
>metahomosexualry fully settled by its 2nd season arena
TBC was great but it had its shortcomings
>minmax autism was much more common in raiding
We had to run Gruul every fricking week so melee could hope the fricking dragonspine trophy dropped. That's one thing I don't actually miss. BiS coming from specific mid-level random shit that mix/maxers will farm for weeks.
I straight up refused to farm Angerforge in vanilla for that stupid extra hit trinket so melee could have 1% more damage. Frick you, nobody cares. Be a cool guildmate and a competent raider and I'll gladly overlook that you aren't in the top 100 global parses, you insecure weirdo.
Sounds bad, I had to minmax autismo my way up since I missed a few months from TBC release, I only managed to pull off very easily because I was a seasoned player, and overall liked by the guild, I had a few friends that helped me farm some entry level equipment.
Since I off-tanked a few encounters I pretty much had the favor of an entire guild, they even let me roll on DPS equipment because they knew it was my main spec.
The funny thing, Gruul was extremely easy, so I was shocked how people were making a huge deal out of it. From then, I hated minmax autism even more, it had that shit settled in, even in entry level raids. Same with Kharazan, besides a few encounters, the entire raid was pretty easy. I remember having more issues raiding in Naxxramas and even then the minmax autism wasnt as bad, we did however ask players to bring consumables. When BT dropped, it was insanely common and even mandatory to have certain addons.
I still have fond memories from TBC, it was the moment where I tried more classes and specs too, focused more on PvP, but it was clear that the game was never going to be same
>The funny thing, Gruul was extremely easy, so I was shocked how people were making a huge deal out of it. From then, I hated minmax autism even more
That made me dislike raiding altogether. I was never a huge fan of it, but seeing morons act like that over trivialities was completely off-putting
These sort of drops were supposed to be things that make rumors around them.
Thotbot and all the equivelants ruined MMOs. There is much less sense of adventure when you know exactly where things drop and what can drop when, or what can spawn at where.
And then as you said there is no fun in now having that knowledge and farming locations for something that is supposed to be rare and random.
He's not wrong. TBC is the beginning of the end, and future expansions only continued to expand all of its issues without considering long term issues that would become a problem later. While certain class changes and general additional gameplay elements were welcome, TBC is the start of
>reconning several different elements of the universe
>fight these WC3 heroes for purples because... just do it!
>arena becoming the main focus of PvP
>badge gear
>heroics being the first example of "just keep running the same dungeons" thanks to said badges
>dailies to farm gold and rep
>neutral cities instead of wanting to design something for both factions
>world PVP slowly dying, most of the zone PvP objectives suck ass
>flying mounts
>changing the game from being about leveling to getting to end game content
Note that some of these things were fine initially because it was all new, but instead of Blizzard trying to think about it in the long term, they only kept abusing many of these things to what they look like today.
The short answer is yes. It really was.
>spent thousands of hours just fricking around in the barrens
>horde and alliance players meet up at the crossroads and have random epic battles
>sometimes a jerk camps your corpes until you ask general chat to help you out and like 20 dudes show up to put the jerk in his place
It was, and you'll never be able to experience it
WoW used to be a playground, in the purest sense of it. You logged on to have fun. You walked around the city just seeing other people, yelling out and having someone yell back. Your guildmates were on doing their own thing but keeping you company in chat. Sometimes someone random was doing something interesting so you joined them like a raid on enemy towns or world pvp. A bully is around? Call on your friends to help fight back. It was a web of social experiences and the video game was just a foundation.
Now WoW is more like a guided experience. You will have a handful of specifically crafted encounters. Some will be fun, but none will ever organically grow out of nothing.
its literally a you problem
the same game is there in classic wow era
or download the old client and play on a vanilla pserver i guess
You will find the same game but you will look at things differently because you aren't a moronic child anymore
no it isn't lmao. Everyone playing WoW right now, classic or retail, is a gamer. Everyone playing WoW back in 2004 was not. There is a major difference. I used to play with like fifty year old women who have never touched another video game in their life and all they wanted to do was talk in guild chat. There is no experience like that now.
>Everyone playing WoW right now, classic or retail, is a gamer. Everyone playing WoW back in 2004 was not
This. There is a reason that fricking celebs "came out of the closet" by telling late night tv show hosts that they played *gasp* World of Warcraft. It wasn't just a game for gamers, it was a true massive multiplayer experience. You met all kinds of different people playing WoW and it felt like a real live world because it was a real live world with strangers and people completely unlike you. Now everyone you meet in WoW has the exact same goal as you, get the best equipment, clear the hardest raids, whatever.
>its literally a you problem
He's talking about modern WoW, which doesn't even trust new players enough to let them walk to the mount vendor on their own, even with the magic GPS system they've plugged all the quests into.
>You will find the same game but you will look at things differently because you aren't a moronic child anymore
thank you for succinctly describing what the problem is and why it's a problem.
>bro so what if everyone knows what they're doing now, isn't that good?
no, because now everyone is in it to get to the end instead of enjoying the journey like they were 20 years ago.
when people grow up they tend to find efficiency and goal orientated achivements more suitable.
maybe its time to grow up?
i know you're baiting, but i'll indulge just a bit longer because you're entertaining. those Black folk should play dwarf fortress instead of WoW
no i play oldschool runescape and classic wow and check my warcraftlogs and BIS-lists every so often, then raidlog and wait for the next raid where i can pump DPS so i can hit the 99 parse already
whatever you say, "old school gamer"
welcome to the age where the kids who grew up blissful behind WoW clicking spells still continued to play the game 20 years later
i reject your modern view and instead choose to view WoW as it once was. simple as.
It was glorious.
>a vast world to explore with great gameplay and interesting quests and unique classes, and none of it had been datamined and dissected and parsed and calculated to hell and back
>no "optimal" way of doing things
>sometimes you stumbled upon amazing secrets no one else knew about
>every time you met someone, they were likely to be just as lost as you were and you got to figure things out together, forming immediate friendships
>it was just adventure after adventure and over time you built up a friend's list of people you could call on for help, and they could call on you
>you might get an invite to a dungeon you'd never even heard of on the other side of the world out of the blue one day from someone you helped several days prior
>if you meet a newbie, there's no chance they're an alt of someone with 10,000 hours of experience, so it feels way better to help them and mentor them
Everything was amazing. Not even Classic WoW could recapture half of the magic because most of what made it special was the fact that everyone was learning it all at the same time. Nobody had figured out the "right" answers yet. There were melee hunters and warlocks back then. They weren't "viable" but no one knew that. At some levels and in some situations, a hunter using Raptor Strike with a polearm could do decent damage, and a Warlock using a Firestone to add fire damage to their attacks could, too. They were trash by level 60, but nobody cared.
>most of what made it special was the fact that everyone was learning it all at the same time
and the lack of external social media except teamspeak, AIM, and ventrilo
and the still somewhat healthy attention spans of your(at the time) average person
and the lack of overt corporate meddling in what players did online(hey kids, remember the ESRB? the board that specifically tells you that online games are not and cannot be rated? so that if something happened to you it was nobody's fault but your own and the homosexual who involved you?)
It was based because no one knew everything
Now it's just morons min maxing and bots
Dont be sad because its gone, be happy because it happened. It was a once in history experience
It was better because everyone was playing at 1280x1024 20fps and nobody knew what the frick was happening and nobody was using mods and they hadn't discounted 90% of game content as "useless" or "a waste of time" so you could find people in every random corner doing every strange quest or their own self-made goal and doing a dungeon took like three hours between getting a party, traveling there, and fumbling through the instance
>playing at 1280x1024
Look at the rich fricker here
it's still magical and timeless
you can boot it up and quest through mulgore
very few games give you that vibe
wow is eternal
It's like going back to your kindergarten while it's empty.
The memories are there, but the friends aren't. It's like being a ghost looking back on your previous life.
I did that on Everquest's 20th anniversary when it went free to play. I just ran around in an empty world going, "Oh yeah, that's where we got killed by a cyclops. There's the dungeon we got lost in for three hours." A melancholy feeling.
wow's isn't empty, you will always run into players
its crazy how hard music hits you, I've hated wow since.. well around Cata pretty much. This music bringin back memories of 2005-2007 where I was a young buckaroo without a care in the world
>Was it as good and magical as classicucks say?
Why would you care? You weren't there and you'll never be there so you'll never experience it anyway.
i did arenas in tbc when i was like 14 and some guy lit me the frick up for being bad and kicked me off the arena team
I lost a friend because my mom got a late night phone call because my uncle was in an accident and I got booted from a ranked arena match, which hurt that ex-friend's rating.
FACT: If you don't laugh at this video, then you are an NPC.
It was pretty great but I took long breaks from it so clearly it had its own issues. Probably the most revolutionary thing were smooth controls. No more invisible walls and moving on rail tracks. To this day there are modern MMOs with worse controls than 2004 era WoW.
this is what the vanilla wow rogue opener sounds like
blood elves playable for horde introduced the cancer players and destroyed the horde homie
For the mid-2000s, it was great. Classic would've probably been great now as well if the community wasn't complete garbage.
Going on any vanilla private server and seeing people farming tidal charms really makes me upset
Move Legion down to B and I'd agree.
>tier list
zoom zoom
>Legion
>S tier
Move that shit down to B right now.
>legio
>legion
>wotlk
>s tier
holy reddit
>SL above anything
If you think SL is better than WoD you played neither and you read le reddit threads.
Spires of Arak. Just Spires of Arak alone had better and more interesting (and more Warcraft related) storytelling than the totality of SL and its robot nonsense.
fixed version
>Wrath anywhere but the bottom of the list
It's over, Classic has shown everyone what a cancerous piece of shit Wrath was
This fight made boomers piss and shit themselves with how cinematic and emotional it was.
Well yeah, it was the Final Fight
WoW should've ended there.
Because Wrath had fricked the game up beyond repair and it needed to be put out of its misery, I agree.
>cata on the same level as shadowlands
Come the frick on. Yes, it was definitely different from the Classic era but it wasn't that fricking bad.
The leveling experience of Cata started strong, but it became so fricking mind-numbingly boring once Deepholm happened.
A year and a half of Dragon Soul didn't help its case, either.
You only ate good if you made a Worgen or a Goblin and leveled from scratch to enjoy the new world, which was baller as frick. Once you hit the endgame part of the expansion though, shit became real boring, real fricking fast.
I wonder what happened to the guys who made these old wow videos. Their channels are long dead and they probably lost access at some point, they probably quit the game a long ago, maybe even gaming altogether
Some people surely played classic, but others simply don't look back and move on completely
They see it as a past addiction, and they know the new game isn't the same anyway
most player from that era were pretty normie IRL
In 2004 and comparing to its rivals it was the best MMO, right now in $CURRENT_YEAR, no, it's dated and a lot of mechanics have aged really poorly.
For me, the fact that I have to rest to recoup the mana every single match against an enemy completely puts me off from playing it.
it was always MMO lite for casual wagecucks who are bad at video games and need an easy mode.
It wasn't the game that was good.
It was the experience.
The world is well-designed, movement and abilities feel good, different races and classes are all fun and have their own identity. It's a good game
He's posting classic screenies, wye
>images you can feel
It was both.
It was a fantastic framework for a game with a lovingly hand-crafted world with a lot to see and do, fast and responsive gameplay, and enough incentive to get people to interact that they naturally did, creating organic experiences between players.
>lot to see and do
Lmfao like raidlog?
I helped a warlock explore a part of the blasted lands that was full of elite level 60 demons for an hour and a half so he could learn how to summon a doomguard. Once we made our way back to Orgrimmar, we asked some people to help us perform the ritual. Our rogue was sacrificed, and a mighty doomguard came screaming in to Azeroth. He was enslaved, and then released in the auction house, killing a couple noobs.
There's a lot more to vanilla than raidlogging, if you go out and look for it.
when looked at it from a purely numerical sense and what systems blizzard put into the game it was easy, in a modern lens, to think vanilla was just raidlogging
but even 2019 classic people were doing a lot more than that, the game just lended itself to people doing dumb shit and interacting
There was so much stupid shit in WoW.
Even if you did want to raidlog, getting world buffs could be a social activity in and of itself, assuming your guild organized them that way. On one of the vanilla private servers I played on, I was a human warlock in a fairly hard-core guild. Before every raid, myself and 4 guildmates would do a dire maul tribute run for our own buffs and then I'd summon all of our raiders so that they'd get their buffs too. It was fun, the DMT runners would shoot the shit while doing the dungeon, and the raiders were happy and thankful because of the easy world buffs. Vanilla is a great game because it has mechanics that lend themselves to socialization, so long as they aren't over-optimized.
>Was it as good and magical as classicucks say?
Yes.
Yes it was.
Nothing has ever gotten close.
Boralus was a cool city. Suramar should have been more significant
you haven't seen some of the best cities
go find suramar on retail come back when you have found suramar
I'd put TB at S simply because it was much less of a pain in the ass to go around compared to other Horde cities
>b-but you could fall off
rookie mistake, we all made those
Boralus is pretty cool, it really feels like a city. Most of it is basically a questing zone though. Same with Zuldazar, though it is much harder to navigate than Boralus.
Valdrakken just sucks. Oribos just sucks. Stormshield and Warspear are very whatever.
Fun Zuldazar fact: Alliance could set their hearthstone at the neutral Hozen inn down on the harbor! I was never able to find a Horde equivalent in Boralus.
Undercity is S tier, Thunder Bluff is A tier at least
I remember when dungeons were actual locations and not just angular hallways.
Do you?
The best ones were recognizable, like SFK and Kara
>I remember when dungeons were actual locations
Then why did you post a World of Warcraft screenshot?
Yes. This game was so good it created an entire generation of losers, because playing it all day is better than anything real life is going to throw at most people. Zoomers will never understand.
KEK
anon, you're on Ganker
Chastity is a virtue
It pre-dates facebook. It was a way to meet and chat with strangers when few others existed before.
classic Legion when?
Will probably be a while since all the gdevs love MoP so much
Still in love with the design and art direction of classic WoW. Any games coming from Blizzard? It's like they are sitting on a goldmine in termes of lore, content and story but won't do anything.
What's the state of things with future Warcraft (non-WoW) games ?
You need to find another clone like WC was a WH clone
Is retail wow worth playing if I have never played retail wow before or should I just play classic
classic is easier to get into. try season of discovery.
if you buy a sub, you can try both (- latest expansion) anyway
Dragonflight has its moments (particularly the dragon riding itself and aesthetically it's quite nice) but for a total newcomer the old game is leagues better, no contest. If you absolutely must play a game that's "current", there are better options than World of Warcraft.
I think Dragonflight is OK. Definitely a B- tier expansion, I had my fun with it, and as a druidgay seeing the Emerald Dream was pretty great (even if it was really lacking in the surreal elements always hinted at in artwork and the alpha version of it hidden in Vanilla).
But the game is impossible to get into as a new player and I'd never recommend it to anyone. It's this old, bloated, creaking mess of a game with way too much going on, where absolutely no thought has been put into the new player onboarding process and absolutely no attempt has been made to keep old content relevant or worth doing even if you brand new to the game.
So you start a new character, get rushed through to endgame having absolutely no idea what you're doing, get overwhelmed with all the shit the game is forcing on you, and then when you do try to join endgame groups nobody wants you because you're a newbie and have no idea what you're doing.
>then when you do try to join endgame groups nobody wants you because you're a newbie and have no idea what you're doing
Don't fret, newbie! Just install the addon that plays 1000db airhorn noises and text-to-speech whenever the boss breathes and you'll be fine!
No, the internet was just newer and more genuine. I had just as much fun in RS and MS as in wow.
When I started playing back in the day I spent 30-40 minutes trying to buy a horse in elwynn logging camp, even going so far as to ask a level 43 how to do it. He just shrugged at me and gave me some silver.
Stuff like that is what defined the 2004 experience, the world was new and exciting and most importantly; Alive.
ff11 was way better since it had just a tad more QoL while still having a similar feel and a waaaaay more pleasant skin. wow just felt baby mode in comparison
*ff11 was a way better everquest
It was like any other MMO really, except far more casual friendly
>tfw we'll never EVER get a zone as cool and mysterious again all because of drooling keyboard turners who couldn't keep track of up and down
I hate WoW players.
Still kind of blows my mind it's on the same map as Stormwind/EK and you can swim out to it if you really want to.
As cool as it was though I don't really ever want to do it again, it freaks me out.
It's not just WoW players, it's players in general. I played GW2 for a hot minute and all of its underwater content got axed because Anet's playtesters couldn't figure out the z-axis. It turns out the average person is just a fricking moron and only likes 3D graphics with 2D planes.
>Monster Hunter Tri
How is this such a hang-up for the average gamer?
There's some of it in End of Dragons. Like there's an underwater boss right next to the little village you start in in the first zone.
I also think GW2 is kind of underappreciated if I'm being honest. Yeah it started out really shit, but by the second expansion it became a great alternative to modern WoW that kind of feels like Wrath or Cata in terms of design and difficulty.
Cool, but you're willfully ignoring how that expansion introduced boats as another means of avoiding contacting the water, water PvP arenas and fractals have been replaced or removed, and there's never been any balancing for water combat since launch.
The average person cannot process the z-axis because the average person does not navigate on the z-axis in real life. It's why the Vietnamese beat the shit out of Americans, because Charlie kept hiding in the trees, and no one EVER looks up.
Oh yeah didn't you have special attacks for underwater specifically? Haven't played that game in so many years.
Honestly? I think they should've left the swimming as a gimmick that you do just a little bit, and then they handwave some reason why you can just normally run on the ocean floor. You still can swim if you want, and the zone still looks nice and unique, but you get to play the game as usual for the most part
What? That's how it is. You can absolutely just run on the ocean floor in Vashjir and play most of it normally.
The zone is hardly different from how you play the game now just flying around everywhere.
Nah
There's a lot of swimming, WoW doesn't even handle the Z axis all that great, pathing is fricked up, swimming is slow and boring and running on the ocean floor is really weird and it just feels bad, not to mention to start swimming whenever you hit the space bar
Unironically one of the biggest reasons 2004 WOW was so good because it coincided with most lower middle class people getting easy internet access. Everyone was wrapped up in the wonder of being able to talk to someone across the country and realm forums were full of drama and light talk.
It's actually because it came out in the wake of a huge recession and everyone was unemployed and bored.
MMOs were great in the 2000s because "social games" mostly meant hanging out with friends and playing mario kart, and there weren't many games that let you hang out with people from around the world. EQ/RS/WoW had that special niche because you were surrounded by random people, which was a huge novelty back then. That novelty has mostly become a ubiquity, when regular games/discord/forums/reddit/social media have taken up the mantle, and now MMOs are just a banality. Modern MMOs have went in a totally different direction from the old "massive" feeling they used to give, and now games like WoW/FF14 are more lobby type games, where you can play without really having to interact with much of anyone else. It's over, it was a period piece and the genre is fading into obscurity where it will remain.
Wait... don't tell me... that none of you have your own private server for you and your buddies...??
I play on Firestorm and all I do is just fly around the world as some sort of cartographer, taking screenshots and using them as inspiration for my setting.
I hate wow and I hate blizzard and I wouldn't give them a cent, but the zones are great. Except Shadowlands, I hate that place, looks like it was made by women
Reminder:
It was incredible. You had to be there to know.
Anyone telling you otherwise was never there and is salty that they weren't.
WoW 2004-2010 was the golden age. There was no point to play past that.
The point to play past that is for good gameplay, something classictards can't understand
seething zoomer assmad he missed out on the platinum era of vidya, I don't hate you I just pity you
Apparently they're doing something pretty interesting with Cata Classic.
A popular perception is that Cata is when the game started getting really easy, so they buffed the overworld to be more in line with the experience of other versions of Classic.
I hope people give Cata a chance. It was one of my favorite expansions. I think leveling through Cata Azeroth as a Goblin or Worgen is one of the best experiences you can have with the game and that the Cata zones were really good (except Deepholm).
>except Deepholm
heathen
>A popular perception is that Cata is when the game started getting really easy
Literally no one thinks that. Cata is infamous for cranking the difficulty back up after Wrath dropped it way down.
... in dungeons, which was loudly complained about during launch month, resulted in Ghostcrawler making a long post about how players should feel compelled to rise to the occasion rather than want to faceroll heroics.
They capitulated and nerfed heroics into the ground shortly after.
I'm talking about the overworld, where most people felt you could start pulling several mobs at once and survive.
>I'm talking about the overworld, where most people felt you could start pulling several mobs at once and survive.
No, Cata increased the difficulty across the board, in the overworld, dungeons and raids. Mobs were not dangerous in Wrath, you could easily pull multiple and kill them without stress. Pulling two mobs in the 80-85 zones at the start Cata was risking death.
What parallel universe did you drop out from? In ours, Cata added more graveyards and flight paths, made it easier than ever to earn XP to level up, and it was impossible for even warriors to dip below half health thanks to how much self-sustain each class had so the game could be solo'd by actual quadrapalegics now that it had become a full-on phased theme park.
Yeah that's what I was thinking. You had to prepare to take two mobs in cata expansion zones, shit was wild at release.
It's just Wrathbabbies trying to rewrite history as usual, pretending that their le epic Arthas expansion didn't frick up the game.
2004-2007 before BC was magical. Legit crack. After that it got so nerfed for normies and felt more like a job so I quit in summer 2007 MT for a top 50 guild.
all the adventures and possibilities still make my balls rockhard
even now getting into stormwind gives me chills
>the music
>the number of players
>the number of HIGH LEVEL players
>the scale of the city
All of it helped make moronic 13 year-old me feel like an absolute nobody... but goddamn it, one day, I could BE somebody!
I remember my 256mb ram struggled with orgrimmar where my game would crawl down to a literal 1fps slideshow for 5 minutes to load everything and everyone in 2005. When I got myself 512mb ram I was so fricking happy I could fly into orgrimmar with no lag at all. I pity the zoomers who weren't bullied for being nerds and did not get to live and see the progress and advancement of PC technology. I still remember how awestruck I was when far cry 1 and doom 3 were released. Back then I really thought graphics couldn't get better.
Only because it was one of the easiest MMOs to get into compared to all of the Korean ones at the time and Western MMOs were much more scarce in comparison (and those that existed were way more complex than WoW such as Everquest and NWN Persistent Worlds).
>One of the easiest MMO's
>Literally promil of players saw the last raid
You're just repeating what someone else said and know nothing of the sort. Go play Echo Isles with hunter or warrior and tell me how easy it is to reach level 10 (in vanilla).
You seem to have misread my statement anon.
>one of the easiest MMOs to get into
>to get into
WoW was much easier to start up than any other MMO during its existence and is a large reason why it took off (outside of also being because it's related to Warcraft which was huge after WC3).
Ah, my mistake, you're correct. Most of the MMO's during that time were Korean stuff or the few rare western ones with clunky gameplay like Ultima. I actually remember i had to steal Korean SSN to play Lineage 2 LOL.
I also remember looking up random Korean websites that generated KSSNs to play some KMMOs like Talesweaver and Survival Project.
I have a fresh experience of leveling 1-90 in mop, having never experienced mop. I wanted to give cata's revamp a fair shake.
It's dogshit. It's so much worse than the original game. Every quest is perfectly grouped together, none of the objectives are zones away. There is no sense of adventure, it's a treadmill from one quest to the next, full of pop-culture references. Nothing is challenging, there is no player input, there is no soul or enjoyment to be had. They should just remove the leveling process, because holy frick is it a chore. And I love leveling in classic, it's my favorite part of the game.
Once you get to MOP it's even worse. Every zone is phased to all hell, and you need to do every little quirky quest to actually unlock the fricking world. vendors and cities have story progression prerequisites..
I dunno. It just fricking SUCKS. I cannot get into it. Maybe the end game is fun, but I can't stomach cata leveling. They also completely fricking murdered the soul of old world zones..
My thoughts exactly. The funny part is that modern retail audience loves this. I found some forum posts with them seething about TBC zones being unplayable suffering because the quests are not "streamlined"
That's because leveling is barrier to the real meat of the game, raiding.
;^)
If you eat shit for breakfast
wtf is her problem!?
Always loved Shamans and wanted to play one, but man being Horde was so fricking gay.