So my wife dug up some Vaniila gameplay video she had made way back at launch

[Solidsteel]

They should have released the last expansion as vanilla2 and not changed anything. I would have much preferred playing through an old, good version of wow a second time than kungfupandaland.

[SodiumChloride]

2) Too much fast travel and not enough incentive to keep you in the world.

WoW travelling is slow as morass. Have you played GW2?

"not enough incentive" is the main reason people aren't out in the world - "artificial incentive" like putting the VP gear vendor in the middle of nowhere (shitty travel times not helping) for no reason isn't "incentive" BTW.

3) The truly challenging content is locked behind a wall that is guarded by spoiled elitist people. There is no room for casual-hardcore like me. I love nuking content and binging, but I can't devote 15 hours a day like I used to.

People like me can't be bothered due to the "responsibility" involved.

[nekobaka]

3) The truly challenging content is locked behind a wall that is guarded by spoiled elitist people. There is no room for casual-hardcore like me. I love nuking content and binging, but I can't devote 15 hours a day like I used to.

Except players cant lock out others from content in this game except maybe an opposing faction guarding/camping an instance portal which just slows down people entering and leaving. Elitist dont hold the key. Everyone as long as they meet the requirements set by the developers and have purchased the box can access the content. While I didnt raid in Classic, I didnt even spend 15 hours a week raiding in BC.

I can agree though there really isnt anything in MoP for the time limited player that wants engaging group based content especially compared to Cata. There is Flex now, but the raids have gotten fairly large for the previously typical PuG times.

[Deleted]

Vanilla WoW leveling was hard as hell.

You walk into a zone and get 3-4 quests (tops) that are actually your level. Great, finish the quests and now you have none left that you can do so now you have to run to the otherside of the world to get 3 more quests. Finding dungeon groups was tedious at times and a lot of them were really hard. (lol, Gnomeregan) There was no quest helper, you had to thottbot every quest. Getting gold for your mounts was hard. Finally getting your epic mount was a crowning achievement.

Despite all the negatives, it was fun and really nostalgic for me. It took me at least a month to get from 0 to 60 and back then you could do 10-15 man regular dungeons (lol).

World PvP was a lot of fun. You never knew when suddenly a raid of 20 horde came to attack Duskwood or Redridge.

[Armourboy]

Vanilla/TBC had their good points but it also had some bad ones. Frankly most of the issues from then were either unneeded grinds or just wonky classes due to development decisions.

Things that I'm glad that have changed are things like needing bags full of arrows or soulstones, needing to farm for crazy amounts of time for potions/flasks and all of those weird one off items ( like the thing from Felwood that would take life away and give you mana back). The other great thing is the fact that there are very few specs today that are completely useless. Alot of the tediousness did need to go as it didn't really bring any enjoyment to the game at all and they tend to be the things people forget they did for hours on end.

That said it did have some redeeming qualities as well. The dungeons were far better due to them being a bit more challenging and the gear actually having some use, not to mention there were other things that took you back into those places from time to time ( like the old Tier.5 quests or the Paladin/Warlock mount quests). Classes and even individual specs all had much more of a unique feel to them, and I liked that not everything could be covered by 4-5 classes. I also like that there were still support classes, but I will be the first to admit that it caused lots of problems, some of which were caused by the developers themselves ( aka Tigole and Furor hating hybrids). I liked that the game didn't just tell you where to go when it came to questing, made you explore more places imo. I will also say while you didn't have a whole lot of choice I still liked the feel that the old talent system gave you versus the new one, its really messed up leveling and the overall reward of it.

Certain things though have both been good and bad for the game at the same time, and while I think it would be bad to see them go I think they way they are handled could be better. LFR/LFD fall into this category. I think they were a great addition for us late nighters, but man did they do a number on server communities and guilds as a whole.

Edit: I also think they did a much better job of tying the entire world together inside and out. Today zones and instances are like individual worlds instead of just a piece of a larger world.

[Malkazam]

Oh god.. old time ! I remember when i was playing on ''EU-french server'' and the game wasn't all translate yet.

I also remember all that golds a in-game friend gave me to buy my first mount.

Awww...

Now, i'm rich, alone and sad !

[Deleted]

I know a lot of people who play and raid on Emerald Dream and it's just as good as I remember it to be. I wish I had the time to level one character to 60 and raid there myself!

Judging by your banner it looks like you do have the time to do it lol.

[Ronduwil]

Showed me some snippets of us early leveling, many things I had forgotten about and looking back I really missed. Mobs sure hit harder ( and since I was a warrior no self heals). Some things that really stand out while looking at it.

Forgot that there was no quest markers, they gave you a general area to head to ( like go south-east) so you do way more exploring.

I miss that too, but when they were introduced in 4.0 the community had reached a point where everyone was running an addon like QuestHelper or Carbonite to track their quests and optimize their levelling. They couldn't realistically continue to provide those players with a challenge while leaving newer players in the dark. Deliberately breaking those addons wasn't realistic because then players would just go to a third party site like wowwiki, wowhead, and/or wowpedia in order to get quest help.

[Saxtorph]

Oh god I remember how /1 was spammed by thoses "WHERE IS THIS MOB PLS ?".

I'm pretty easygoing about many changes in the game that make it easier, but there are a couple, related to your comment, that really have me doing a /facepalm. The one that stands out the most is the quest that has you killing Fozruk the giant. Changing him from a very difficult encounter that roamed almost the entirety of Arathi Highlands to a joke of an enemy, that stands in a corner waiting to be killed by even the most clueless of players is a travesty.

[Deleted]

Man I miss back in the day when wow was a challenge in all aspects. Wish wow would go back to it's old ways instead of the mindless creation is has become.

[Ellessandra]

The only way I'd play vanilla style again is if I could have my mind wiped of all things WoW so I could start fresh.

[Ronduwil]

It is 100% rose tinted glasses, I also played and raided end game in vanilla, it was fucking awful. Hours of farming for materials, and the gold to repair, having to get resist sets which required rep farming, but wait you didn't have alts to farm the stuff for you because leveling was god awful. You had to organized 40 people of which 20 were complete idiots. Vanilla WAS AWFUL.

With respect to raiding, yes. Raiding used to be designed to keep those few players who levelled to 60 way faster than expected busy. That's why you had resist gear that didn't really make you more powerful, but enabled you to raid. That's why you had attunements. That's why you had steep repair bills. At some point that changed and raiding went from being a time sink to being the main attraction. Now levelling takes 72 hours for really fast players and raiding is what keeps them subscribed for the rest of the year. A vanilla raider was marginally more powerful than a player in greens. In today's WoW a heroic SOO raider is twice as powerful as a LFR SOO raider. The allure of raiding was primarily a cosmetic distinction in vanilla. Now you get huge buffs to gameplay by raiding. The flip side of that, however, is that the game now sucks for non-raiders. They hit level 90 in a couple of months and then they do heroic dungeons for a week, and then what?

[sizzlinsauce]

It is 100% rose tinted glasses, I also played and raided end game in vanilla, it was fucking awful. Hours of farming for materials, and the gold to repair, having to get resist sets which required rep farming, but wait you didn't have alts to farm the stuff for you because leveling was god awful. You had to organized 40 people of which 20 were complete idiots. Vanilla WAS AWFUL.

so the only difference you pointed out today is that gold is botted to no end so repairs are moot, rep farming today is put a tabard on or kill a warbringer a few times, and not having to wait for 39 others?...

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

Mobs didn't get nerfed so much as we started getting better gear. Back in Vanilla, greens were rare to find outside of dungeons. Now we get them from every quest starting at level 8.

[Ronduwil]

Mobs didn't get nerfed so much as we started getting better gear. Back in Vanilla, greens were rare to find outside of dungeons. Now we get them from every quest starting at level 8.

Not to mention a blue for completing a zone. It's drilled into players from pretty early on now that blues are crap low level gear and purples are the high end stuff that you really want. Even in WotLK I felt relatively powerful decked out in 180+ blues. Now a 90 in blues is a pathetic joke who just hasn't met the requirements for LFR yet. Even weirder, the stats are such that your DPS actually goes down from 87-90 unless you upgrade your gear. That never happened in WotLK. Every level felt like an increase. Over the weekend this level 54 tank in BRD was bragging about how he was out-DPSing everyone on trash. I told him to enjoy it while he could because this would be coming to an end at level 85. He was skeptical but I wish I had friended him just to get his reaction when he got to the actual game and reality started setting in.

[oland138]

AOE tank threat killed 5-man dungeons. The difficulty of 5-man dungeons lied a lot in the ability of the group to control mobs.

[Souflikar]

Folks who speak of Vanilla remind me of Grandfathers talking about the good old days. "In the good old days, we had to walk everywhere, up hill, in the snow. We had to work so much harder and got less for it." "These days, you young whipper-snappers have everything handed to you". I'll admit, I'm guilty of that mind-set as well concerning a lot of things currently in WOW. I miss the old days. However, if Blizzard suddenly flipped a switch and we were all instantly back there, I'm sure I would QQ about a lot of things that I now take for granted. Even in games, you can't get in the way of progress. Also, you'll never get everyone to agree what is progress and what is a setback.

[RoKPaNda]

Also I'm sure that anyone that leveled a paladin in Vanilla hated it.

[RickJamesLich]

Personally I loved old school wow, plenty of good, plenty of bad, it's almost like the opposite of current wow. Back then classes were a pain in the ass to level, but the social experience was awesome and you'd make friends all the time thru leveling, now leveling is incredibly easy and you never really have a need or reason to talk to anyone or make friends, even at max level lol. Back then professions would give you cool tools if you took the time to actually go thru and max it out. Now, professions give you some generic .5% boost to your crit, hit, or mastery rating. Back then you'd have to work hard just to get a single epic, it could take a month or more of work. Now you can get a full set of epics with a few hours of max level lol. Back then raiding was a serious thing, you had to play your class well and the game was open ended, as the toughest stuff was beaten by only a little bit of the playerbase. Now you can /afk thru raiding and you can see all of the content with a few days after hitting 90. Back then PvP was taken more seriously, if you afk'ed you could get banned, and reporting someone to a gm worked. Nowadays you can afk and get a full set of good gear out of it lol.

[Ronduwil]

Back then classes were a pain in the ass to level, but the social experience was awesome and you'd make friends all the time thru leveling, now leveling is incredibly easy and you never really have a need or reason to talk to anyone or make friends, even at max level lol.

I can agree with this.

Back then professions would give you cool tools if you took the time to actually go thru and max it out. Now, professions give you some generic .5% boost to your crit, hit, or mastery rating.

Agreed. I remember levelling my JC profession just to be able to make a nice necklace in WotLK.

Back then you'd have to work hard just to get a single epic, it could take a month or more of work.

You didn't have to work; you had to play a lot, but I get your meaning. I agree that I had to grind out lots of heroic dungeons before getting a full set of starter epics.

Now you can get a full set of epics with a few hours of max level lol.

I agree that the gearing rate is ridiculous. Blizzard bends over backwards to make sure there are always plenty of players capable of raiding the latest tier. I know why but don't understand.

Back then raiding was a serious thing, you had to play your class well and the game was open ended, as the toughest stuff was beaten by only a little bit of the playerbase.

This is where I don't agree. You had to show up consistently and gear appropriately, but playing your class well was much easier back in the day than it is now. Classes that relied on procs were the exception, not the rule. Most classes could (and often did) macro their rotations into one or two buttons. Blizzard deliberately changed up rotations to explicitly prohibit this. There were also some weird mechanics that were completely counter-intuitive but made all the difference in the world. The key to good shadow priest DPS, for example, was waiting to max mind flay stacks before applying DoTs because each tick went off whatever your stacks were at the time the DoT was initially applied. Even DoTs that automatically refreshed didn't update to the current stack count. How the heck was anyone supposed to figure that one out without carefully analyzing logs and/or reading a guide written by someone who had done so?

Now you can /afk thru raiding and you can see all of the content with a few days after hitting 90.

You could always AFK through raiding content if you found a group who was skilled and/or nice enough to carry you through it. I know this is supposed to be a dig at LFR, but have you actually tried to AFK through it recently? It's not as easy as you might think.

Back then PvP was taken more seriously, if you afk'ed you could get banned, and reporting someone to a gm worked. Nowadays you can afk and get a full set of good gear out of it lol.

Nowadays if you AFK the game automatically boots you out of the battleground. Also, lots of the PvP gear is locked behind ratings, so unless someone is carrying you through rated battlegrounds and/or arenas you're not going to AFK your way to a full set of good gear. I don't know where you got that impression.