Reasons why vanilla World of Warcraft was so popular.

[alba007]

Vanilla and BC times were very popular, because during those times WoW really felt like a world full of mystery, adventure, and comradery. Compared to that, today's world of WoW has basically shrunk into raid/dungeon/bg queues with little to no connection between the players and the world that is forgotten.

[kurais]

It was popular because it was new

[Bathory]

Reasons why vanilla World of Warcraft was so popular:
It was new.

Annnnnd thread.

[Surfd]

Vanilla was better. Every class was unique and had unique buffs/debuffs. The items were more fun with funny proccs and effects not only stats. You actually met other people and had to walk to instances. No teleporting around. It's not nostalgia. There are some who play on specific vanilla servers and guess what: They all played retail to some point and still find vanilla was way better. Nowadays every class can do the same shit buffs/debuffs with just other names, it's so innovative (irony in last sentence)

I laughed. No really, people at work are looking at me funny.

Classes were unique? Sure, if you liked being pretty much forced to play one spec for 99% of your play career after 60. Classes felt "unique" because nearly every class suffered from having only one viable raid talent tree. Raiding Feral druids? lol. Not a resto shaman / druid? Respec back to heal bitch please. Fire mages? Lol 70% of all raid bosses in the first 2 tiers of raid content being fire immune. Shadow Priest? Hell no, heal bitch for you.

It's not hard to make your classes feal "unique" when half the specs available for most of them never even get played.

As to meeting and walking around and stuff. Sure, that was great for adding the feeling of being in a big, living world (which I admit I do miss a bit), but then you realise why they changed it. Because it sucked ass to have 1 hour of your 3 hour play session sucked up by a: traveling halfway around the world to get to a dungeon, and b: waiting for the other 4 people in your party to do the same. 30 minutes of wasted time getting to your destination does not a fun game make.

[Shadylol]

I liked Vanilla the best, but this OP is simply inaccurate

"no addons"? I almost broke my mouse with Decursive

Leveling was never hard

Most WoW players never played Warcraft 3, even back then

[Cyntric]

I agree with some of this but not all...

[thewallofsleep]

6) Because most people either didn't play it, and thus don't remember it (though they like to claim that they did); and those who did are basing their opinion nostalgia (and rightly so).

[Dragonwing]

2) Leveling - people tend to hate on vanilla WoW leveling, but I have to disagree with them. Yes, leveling was tought, but we loved it. Mobs had high hp pools and were hiting for a lot, pulling more than two will most likely result into corpse run. You had to actually use your brain, develop a strategy and use all your class abilities effectivelly to level up quickly. Even AH was very important for quick leveling. Quests were very simple, but most of the time you felt like part of the world and you even felt like you are helping npcs - like in real RPG

I sure didn't. There was a minimal amount of quests per zone, mostly kill quests and absurdly low droprate quests. Any remotely interesting quest was max level, and look absolutely forever due to absurd mat requirements and the like. I remember most people just hanging out in Goldshire because we just couldn't stand leveling.

3) Social aspect - As I mentioned, leveling was pretty hard and the best way to make it easier was to group up with other players. I like how friendly people during vanilla WoW were. You could just talk to random person and 95% of time he would respond in friendly way. I've mad countless friends in vanilla.

Don't use nostalgic memories as evidence. I recall several idiots/assholes in Vanilla, they have always been there to fuck up your 5 mans, steal your loot and act completely selfishly. Perhaps there are more assholes now, but don't act like there were none in Vanilla.

4) No addons - yep, there were almost no addons and it was great. You don't know where the quest mobs are? Ask friends, guild or even general chat. Try to do this in WotLK or Cata, you would get typical "google it, use wowhead" answer. Addons are taking the fun factor out of the game. Why are people using addon to help them with rotation or addons like DBM? That's just silly.

The bullshit is strong in this one. I remember being constantly directed to thottbot for everything. There WERE addons in vanilla. Not so much at the beginning, but they came pretty quickly. Atlas was a relief to everyone I played with, as was Atlasloot. These addons make the game MORE enjoyable. If addons made the game less fun, why would people use them in the first place?
I would much rather everyone had addons to improve UI and assist rotations than being in a raid where people aren't playing properly and dragging everyone down, which frankly happens regardless anyway. I played SWTOR, which has NO addons, and at times it is really annoying. Can't customize UI that much at all, can't tell who is slacking in flashpoints, it is even difficult to tell who the mob is targetting, at times, because there is no target of target function. I'll tell you, that game could do with addons.

Why am I writing this? I just want to tell people that WoW wasn't always only about raiding, arena and daily quests. It was far more. Game had soul, it felts like RPG and leveling was important and possibly the best part of the game. The true mmorpg.

You only really feel that way because it was new at the time and you are looking at it in hindsight. Nostalgia is very powerful. If Blizzard made a vanilla server, it would be pretty damn deserted after a few months.

[Blitzc]

I don't honestly agree with 2] 4] and 5]

2] I remember on my warrior and mage I was grinding 5-6 packs at a time 50-55

4] There were quite a few addons, most of which are still in the game today: Recount,Raid Frames, postal, AV tracker, Quest helper

5] As mentioned above, I had a warrior and mage as well as rogue/shaman. And no, I wasn't a hardcore gamer, I just knew the game and fast questing routes. The only character I 'stuck' with was in PvP rankings, I used my warrior.

Questions? Thottbot

[artem123]

4) No addons - yep, there were almost no addons and it was great. You don't know where the quest mobs are? Ask friends, guild or even general chat. Try to do this in WotLK or Cata, you would get typical "google it, use wowhead" answer. Addons are taking the fun factor out of the game. Why are people using addon to help them with rotation or addons like DBM? That's just silly.

Awkward.. I'm pretty sure i used thottbot in vanilla, Something like that i forget the spelling. Told you where the quest mobs and that stuff were. Addons dont take the fun out of the game, it gives you a choice to customize, and make your UI actually better to use. Pretty sure NO ONE uses a addon to help w/ rotations.
honestly vanilla wasn't that great, BC was better, and sometimes wotlk.

[Veyne]

So please put away your crystal balls and mind reading skills so that I can read a post that isnt filled with total rubbish for once, if the phrase "rose tinted goggles" comes up once more ill just have to assume you started wow during cata because that stupid phrase is overused and rarely even used for the correct situation.

Played casually in Vanilla. Got serious in The Burning Crusade. Went casual again for Cataclysm. I've been around.

The reason it's over used is because in this situation, it -is- correct. Don't get me wrong. I don't think the OP nailed the exact reasons for World of Warcraft's initial popularity, but trust me when I tell you, it's not because it was a better game than it is now.

Vanilla was excruciating. It wasn't more difficult than World of Warcraft is right now. In fact, as far as pure game mechanics are considered, Cataclysm has seen some of the hardest gameplay this game ever has.

The ONLY people thought it was hard was because it was inconvenient. The ONLY reason people think it's easy now is because it IS convenient.

There's a thing called artificial difficulty. Vanilla was artificially difficult. It was made difficult by a buggy client. It was made difficult because of aimless class design based off of vague ideas which resulted in only having a handful of viable options. It was made difficult because of having to put together raids of 40 people - this means 40 people that did, or mostly likely, didn't know what they were doing - to fight against encounters that didn't have convenient strategy guides plastered all over youtube from groups that defeated the content in betas. It was made difficult because, on top of this, you had to find 40 people who WOULDN'T just /follow someone for the whole raid. It was made difficult because of glitches in these raid encounters. And so on and so forth.

The whole "rose-tinted goggles" thing is very real. We're ALL victims of nostalgia. I told myself for the past several years that The Burning Crusade is the vest World of Warcraft has ever been. Because of this, and feeling bored with the game that I've played for close to 7 years now, I looked to private servers. It was a pretty good server. Very true to the original 2.4.3 version of the game. No experience boosts, no droprate boosts, no bugged quests, and all that jazz. It was bad. In fact, I found myself shocked that I truly believed TBC was so much better than World of Warcraft is today.

Blizzard has done so much to make this a better game. World of Warcraft today, if it came out as a different game at the same time as the original World of Warcraft launch, you'd damn well better be sure that today's version would have been universally praised as the far superior game.

I've loved my time with this game. And to be perfectly honest, I don't know how much I've got left in me to keep playing. But rest assured, it's not because Vanilla was better, or because Vanilla was harder, or anything like that.

I've just being doing the same damn thing, over and over and over again, for 10 out of 13 raid tiers, for 3 out of 3 expansions, for 7 out 10 classes.

So just stop pretending nostalgia isn't a huge factor.

Because it is.

The only thing that has truly steadily gone downhill since the launch of the game has been its community.

[Mistgard]

Thottbot was definately king then though, everyone I knew used it.

Thottbot was my no1 source as well. Then a certain internet enterpreneur started spamming the Thottbot with his ads and the wowhead was born..

[Rakshata]

*Sigh* People, take it from someone who tried playing during Vanilla... It wasn't what it is cracked up to be. It was hard to level, confusing, and more than a little dull. I remember with jubilation when they lowered the cost of Epic mounts, as they used to cost such obscene amounts of gold that it was too daunting for more casual players.

Vanilla was hard. And not the good hard like Heroic modes. It was hard in the sense that people quit because they don't want to pay so much money to labor over leveling, not to mention gear.

The current state of World of Warcraft is measurably better than Vanilla. There wasn't LFG, or LFR, there weren't flying mounts... If you wanted to run Scarlet monastary, you had to fly to closest flight point, and hoof it to the dungeon. Then, if you are in a group, and three people are assembled, you can summon the remaining two, and then run the dungeon. There were also no badges, meaning it was possible to go into a dungeon and completely waste your time because nothing good drops for you.

Stop looking through rose tinted goggles at the past. Look to what you can do now.

[killidan]

Rose tinted goggles is what makes Vanilla popular. You're new to an amazing game where everything makes you literally go "Woaaaaaah...", you can't have that more than once.

Looking back at it, Vanilla was actually pretty bad. The community was good though, because it was required.


>> That's my personal view, btw. Not for anyone else.

Bringing 8 million players and retaining them for years to come, unlike WotLK and Cata, is not rose tinted glasses, it's math.

[PenguinChan]

I have to agree with the willfully ignorant "Because it was new" posters. But people seem to take that and type it like it's a bad thing, or comes off as a douche thing to say.

It's really not, and I still think vanilla is great. I know it was terrible compared to now, but that doesn't mean the fun factor with nostalgia mixed in the middle won't make me play it again. Hell, people still play it on illegal servers because it was their cup of tea.

[killidan]

That "Woooah..." feeling is gone for everyone who had it. If you're waiting for the next game that will give you that feeling, you'll be waiting 'till you die. It's like sex - that first "So THIS is what I've been waiting for!" feeling never comes back no matter how many partners you have. Sure, there'll be good times again - but you can only have your "first time" the first time :P

Silly analogy. Besides, first time sex is just plain awkward, it gets so much better later on.

[Deleted]

Vanilla was good because it was the first WoW. The same WoW that renewed the genre and brought a truely interesting universe with already existing customers from Blizzard's other products.

Vanilla, as others said, was actually really bad, compared to what the game is now.

---------- Post added 2012-05-07 at 07:54 AM ----------

I have to agree with the willfully ignorant "Because it was new" posters. But people seem to take that and type it like it's a bad thing, or comes off as a douche thing to say.

It's really not, and I still think vanilla is great. I know it was terrible compared to now, but that doesn't mean the fun factor with nostalgia mixed in the middle won't make me play it again. Hell, people still play it on illegal servers because it was their cup of tea.

This is true.

[Colestrolley]

Indeed just a personal opinion

[Ferocity]

I sure didn't. There was a minimal amount of quests per zone, mostly kill quests and absurdly low droprate quests. Any remotely interesting quest was max level, and look absolutely forever due to absurd mat requirements and the like. I remember most people just hanging out in Goldshire because we just couldn't stand leveling.
...
The bullshit is strong in this one. I remember being constantly directed to thottbot for everything. There WERE addons in vanilla. Not so much at the beginning, but they came pretty quickly. Atlas was a relief to everyone I played with, as was Atlasloot. These addons make the game MORE enjoyable. If addons made the game less fun, why would people use them in the first place?

Even now, when QuestHelper is basically built-into game, a lot of people still ask strange questions on where to quest, or have general problem with questing.
Questing was never hard. For only 1-2 unique exceptions, it just required you to read couple sentences in quest log, not even full quest text. But back then, at least people, who heavily relied on QuestHelper, required extreme hand-holding in questing/levelling or couldn't stand levelling at all, were basically left hanging in Goldshire, spamming /duel. Nowadays those people are plaguing WoW, and game keeps changing to accomodate to their wishes.

P.S.: And mats quests were, imho, more interesting than, e.g., Uldum quest where you need to shoot titans while driving tank, or Battlemaiden quests. They were causing more of your own character interaction with world and other players rather than hitting mobs from behind while they attack other NPCs or be out of your character control at all.

[Hippodotimus]

cause all of the raids were difficult while drunk were as todays raids you could be sober or drunk there still easy