Classic World of Warcraft Discussion [Megathread]

[Kudos]

haha. sorry, not going to read 700+ pages about nostralius. ty for the info though.

And herein lies a repeated issue on these forums. You see a topic on the front page and blindly comment with a disregard for any prior discussion. Just show some restraint and don't press the 'post' button. You see it all the time, where a thread has gone on from 10 pages (as opposed to 1130 here), but 10 pages in people are still quoting the OP or rehashing or disregarding comments from the previous page.

[kary]

Except thats not even close to what your whole previous rant was about, nor what the people your argued against said or implied and you are now just backpeddling to some hyperbolic 'Blizzard is incompotent' strawman that another whiteknight started out of nowhere, just like that that Overwatch thing you tried to throw at me that popped out of nowhere.

But its all okay now I repeat myself:



You can now have the last word to make yourself feel better in continued denial and delusion.

lol what? I'm not even in your argument and your self reply makes no sense.
It's pure speculation on both sides. The legacy crowd is just as, if not more closeminded, because they see only what they want and anyone against what they want is an enemy. Just remember, it's the whine crowd that pushed this thread to 22k replies, lol.

[Vash The Stampede]

The casual experiment failed. Bring back some mechanics like WoW Vanilla had. This should be clear by now.

[RippedLife]

The casual experiment failed. Bring back some mechanics like WoW Vanilla had. This should be clear by now.

they would alienate half of mmoc if they made the game harder

[Saurox]

I see people crying over the nostalrius thing and I mean I understand it, it was their beloved community so it hurts to have it removed from existence. What I find odd is this uproar over having official vanilla servers, and how much wow now sucks. I keep seeing arguments about shit being super easy, about being able to level up really quickly etc etc.

I've been playing wow since 2004, I did all the raids back then including Naxx (up to KT), world first AQ gates opening (go Medivh) etc. My days consisted of raiding about 4-6 hours a day and then farming consumables for the guild and pvping when progression was over. I was also 19 back then and had a lot more time. What I'm trying to say is that I've experienced everything there is to experience in vanilla wow, I also didn't have a life back then.

Leveling... I don't remember anyone liking the leveling back then, it was way too long and painful and not very rewarding. Everyone just wanted to get to max level so that they can raid. The game also had a terrible job showing off what there is to do, I had no idea about half the dungeons until it was too late. The game might have been more exciting because it was a completely new experience but that's about it. I honestly don't remember serious players eagerly wanting to level a character for 2 months. The only people who I remember liking to level are the ones who were terrible at raiding. Nowadays it seems like it still takes a few weeks to level up which isn't too bad imo, unless you play 18 hours a day.

Raiding... Generally I liked raiding, it was a lot more strict than it is now, and as a 19 year old uni student I had the time to do it properly. I don't think a lot of the encounters were as polished as they are now. Fights were a lot simpler, the main challenge of raiding was organising 40 people not necessarily executing the fight mechanics perfectly (THERE ARE EXCEPTIONS OF COURSE). Also you could carry a lot of the people in the group, so even though you had 40 people in the raid, only about 25-30 were actually playing at their maximum ability. I hated resistance fights, what a bad bottle neck for guilds. I mean it's kind of cool in a way but id rather have a bottleneck in terms of a gear/skill check rather than a resistance fight, apart from sapphiron, but that was only cool cos it was the second last boss of the game. Another part of raiding I hated is loot... As a hunter there were 4 viable weapon options, hunter quest bow (MC), ashjre'thul (BWL) , ouro (AQ) gun and the slavemaker (NAXX). It took my guild 52 chromaggus kills, yes 50 fucking 2 kills to get the first ashjre'thul, and there were 7 hunters in the raid. That is simply bad, I dont care how much this makes the gun special, it is just horrible design, it should never happen ever again.

Community.... Sense of community was there because you had to depend on other people more than you do now, so you had to be nice and helpful because you didn't know when you'll need help back. You were more inclined to stay with your guild because there was about 10 guilds on average on every server who were raiding properly so once you build up rep with your guild you'd need a serious reason to leave it. Nowadays as soon as you don't get something you want, you can leave your guild and find another because theres another 150 guilds with half baked raid teams struggling to find players. Also imo the sense of community feels like it's gone because people you played with in vanilla and tbc arent there any more, so finding new meaningful friends is hard.


The recent vanilla wow outcry feels like it's coming from a very vocal minority of people who are able to dedicate a lot of time. I know for sure that if I was to play vanilla wow I wouldn't be able to play half the content in the game because now as an adult with a full time job I just wouldn't have the time to do it.

What blizzard can do to fix things.... Garissons fucked up the game and they only came out to please people who wanted player housing, horrible idea. Remove flying but when you remove flying don't design zones the way they are designed in draenor with massive hills separating each little sub zone effectively turning a big zone into 10 small ones. Sense of community could be brought back by introducing some penalties for leaving groups and /or guild hopping, making dungeons harder, introducing some attunements (proving ground thing was good), adding more group quests with tough bosses, adding more group wipe mechanics in 5 mans while leveling to get people used to paying attention to certain things. Just some very rough views...

Just my 2 cents...

[Vash The Stampede]

Yep. You didn't need to know how to play until at least ragnaros. All you had to do for MC was farm BRD for enough FR to live long enough to see bosses die.
While nostalrius was trending, there was a video of a 32 min BWL clear. That's what would happen if a group of 40 competent people did the instances. On every private server, people basically clear all the content in a reset because they weren't complete shit.

That's how raids used to go. Once you had a raid of people who knew wtf they were doing, you can clear it pretty easily. It's called git gud. Where modern WoW works on the idea that you just spend more time and the game will hand everything to you.

[Camthur]

Why should anybody at Blizzard give Kern special treatment? If any of us wrote one of the main guys at Blizzard, odds are, we wouldn't get an answer. He's just some nobody now, so why should he be treated preferentially?

Besides, the last I checked, Blizzard already answered the vanilla crowd the other day.

[Orby]

That's how raids used to go. Once you had a raid of people who knew wtf they were doing, you can clear it pretty easily. It's called git gud. Where modern WoW works on the idea that you just spend more time and the game will hand everything to you.

TBC had a better raid system than vanilla. It had some aspects of vanilla but it was perfected in TBC. A part of me really did miss farming resistant gear though, Tanking Krosh in Gruuls lair was my thing. Only good raids I played in vanilla were Zul'Gurub and BWL hated the rest (although never got into AQ40 and Naxx though, so I cant speak for them)

F** Vanilla servers give me TBC servers lol, thats where it was at

[Vash The Stampede]

they would alienate half of mmoc if they made the game harder

That argument doesn't hold water anymore. People said this at 10 million subs, then at 8, then 6, and now we're down to probably 4. TBC, which was a much harder expansion, and had much more subscribers, was also extremely hard. Remember Sunwell?

You lost most of the subscribers from making WoW more casual. See this chart? It doesn't support the casual argument.

[Deleted]

lol what? I'm not even in your argument and your self reply makes no sense.
It's pure speculation on both sides. The legacy crowd is just as, if not more closeminded, because they see only what they want and anyone against what they want is an enemy. Just remember, it's the whine crowd that pushed this thread to 22k replies, lol.

Something as obvious as one party saying or implying 'this > your speculations = stop asking and shut up' and someone pointing out that 'this' is in fact just pure speculation and its delusional to assume that Blizzard can do no wrong which is the only possible way to assume 'this' is not just speculation, because it all happens behind closed doors, makes no sense to you? Calling something out as speculation when its just speculation to pull people from their imaginary high horse, doesn't mean you insist you can't speculate at all. Why is everyone pretending to be so dense and acts like that is a contradiction or hypocrisy? I doubt I can help you further if you are unable to get that.

And fact is, not everything is speculation. Things like the official number for the people playing on a vanilla server by choice instead of a newer version are facts. Just everything on top of that is speculation. Closeminded whiteknights who want to twist and deny that don't turn that into speculation.

[kary]

That's how raids used to go. Once you had a raid of people who knew wtf they were doing, you can clear it pretty easily. It's called git gud. Where modern WoW works on the idea that you just spend more time and the game will hand everything to you.

No well....
people were bad in vanilla. That's why raids took long for the general person to clear. Good people saw all the content.
People were less bad in tbc but still bad. Raids took not as long to clear, but most people still didn't get to see the end. Good players saw all the content
People were less bad in wotlk, but still relatively bad. Organized raids did well, pugs usually got shit on by bosses like mimiron vezax and yogg
People were less bad in cata, but still kinda bad. Organized raids did well, most people went about without helms or shoulders for a long rime
Then LFR happened. Blizzard acknowledged that people should be able to experience the content, not just see it via youtube. People were able to complete their tier sets from causal runs, yay. Hardcore guilds did all sorts of exploitation of the system to gear up faster
People were less bad in MoP, but it didn't matter because they were content getting tier gear from LFR
People were less bad in WoD, and blizzard removed tier from LFR. wave of mad happened. People actually have to get good to get any of the actual rewards, but the content is still there for people to "experience" however people complain because they have been used to getting rewarded for nothing.

That's pretty much raiding as a history

- - - Updated - - -

That argument doesn't hold water anymore. People said this at 10 million subs, then at 8, then 6, and now we're down to probably 4. TBC, which was a much harder expansion, and had much more subscribers, was also extremely hard. Remember Sunwell?

You lost most of the subscribers from making WoW more casual. See this chart? It doesn't support the casual argument.

Making the game harder would alienate people, though. Nothing is stopping people from doing "hard" content. People don't do hard things because they don't want to. People are just leaving because it's a 12 year old game, and looking for reasons to do so. The whole "garrisons r bad im quitting" is such bull. Garrison cache just replaced ezmode world bosses like VoA/BH/August Celestials. All of the easy/free loot already existed.

[Ielenia]

Except thats not even close to what your whole previous rant was about,

Wasn't it?

Ahh yes we are back to the point of the grand delusion of the infallible big company that just knows everything better and can do no wrong

nor what the people your argued against said or implied and you are now just backpeddling to some hyperbolic 'Blizzard is incompotent' strawman that another whiteknight started out of nowhere, just like that that Overwatch thing you tried to throw at me that popped out of nowhere.

Now you're just stumbling over your own arguments. I don't recall ever arguing about Overwatch with you. And saying that the 'blizzard is incompetent' line started from an anti-legacy poster (ad-hominem, btw, and interesting to see you're not above name-calling for the sake of name-calling) when players have been claiming that for god knows how long every time Blizzard refuses to cave in to their demands or they enact a change some players don't like.

You can now have the last word to make yourself feel better in continued denial and delusion.

I don't recall ever admitting what I say is 'pure speculation. You need to stop projecting your faults onto others.

[Orby]

That argument doesn't hold water anymore. People said this at 10 million subs, then at 8, then 6, and now we're down to probably 4. TBC, which was a much harder expansion, and had much more subscribers, was also extremely hard. Remember Sunwell?

You lost most of the subscribers from making WoW more casual. See this chart? It doesn't support the casual argument.

I am pretty sure thats only a fraction of the reasons why the numbers dropped, let's not forget that...

MMO's just are not cool anymore
The fatc that there are more MMO's on the market now, free ones too,
MOBA's and team based games are leading the charge over MMO's as well
WoW being over a 10 year old game doesn't help either

name me a game thats had a high amount of subs, over 10 years old and hasn't declined in that amount of time. Also WoW is s till the most successful MMO on the market even with the amount of subs they have.

While I agree with you that I hate the pandering to casuals thing let's not blind ourselves by that logic

[Deleted]

That argument doesn't hold water anymore. People said this at 10 million subs, then at 8, then 6, and now we're down to probably 4. TBC, which was a much harder expansion, and had much more subscribers, was also extremely hard. Remember Sunwell?

You lost most of the subscribers from making WoW more casual. See this chart? It doesn't support the casual argument.

... Those were different times ... People who played MMOs were different. I was playing the game 24/7 back then, but would I again? Hell no. Why do you think more people didn't play on Nostalrius? According to you and to this exact post there should be, what, 7-8 million people playing it, but there were only 250K ... why is that? Because people don't want Classic WoW ... times change, gamer generation changes, games change ...

[Deleted]

Ok this thread has gone places again and again but I will try to summarize my opinion on the matter:

First of all, we have two communities, one from the retail game and one from the nost server. The second one in Blizzard's facebbok and social media pages really spit s***t on every person that dares to say something on them either be for pristine servers (the recent update on the matter) or just shouting that Vanilla was THE thing. Comments like "Hey (username) go play Farmville would ya?" are all over the place. The real question is this:

Does the retail community wants a portion of this community back? With this attitude? I think the vast majority says no, even folks that played on that server.

About Vanilla WoW. Lots of this people say that Vanilla was hard. It was not hard it was grindy (thing that has been posted in this thread numerous times). A grindy game is not hard, Dark Souls NG++ is hard not vanilla wow. The hard part with Vanilla WoW is to find time to dedicate in that grind, and guess what people do not have that as they used to have when they were students.

So TL : DR Grindy != Hard.

Nost people must understand that the majority of the players will not care about them, first due to their attitude and second due to the fact that the majority of the playerbase does not have the time for a grindy game such as vanilla wow. Blizzard knows that, and it is really stupid to try to believe otherwise. They released an answer to get that tiny market of the legacy servers as well. As for the grindy I know that current WoW is kinda grindy as well but the QoL changes really help. And about the community thing, my personal opinion is that if you have waited your whole life to make friends only through an online video game of Vanilla WoW quality then you might want to rethink your social standards. Also Blizzard make games not Tinder nor other places to hang around with people. Hanging around with friends in WoW is a game perk not a game goal.

[brob]

Steal? How is it stealing?

They're not taking money for anything, how is this any different than Fair use?

copyright trademark fairuse. and all that stuff is very messy. im not sure about american laws.

but i assume it still has the idea were you have to protect your claim in fear of compromising it.

so its probably blizz Activisions legal team doing what they have to do.

[Canderous1]

And herein lies a repeated issue on these forums. You see a topic on the front page and blindly comment with a disregard for any prior discussion. Just show some restraint and don't press the 'post' button. You see it all the time, where a thread has gone on from 10 pages (as opposed to 1130 here), but 10 pages in people are still quoting the OP or rehashing or disregarding comments from the previous page.

sorry, im not going to weed through 1000 pages to find an answer i can simply ask. if you dont want to answer it, you can simply scroll right past.

[Derpling]

That argument doesn't hold water anymore. People said this at 10 million subs, then at 8, then 6, and now we're down to probably 4. TBC, which was a much harder expansion, and had much more subscribers, was also extremely hard. Remember Sunwell?

You lost most of the subscribers from making WoW more casual. See this chart? It doesn't support the casual argument.

Anyone have the picture comparing Nicholas Cage movies to the GDP or something like that?

Correlation != causation.

[Vash The Stampede]

I am pretty sure thats only a fraction of the reasons why the numbers dropped, let's not forget that...

MMO's just are not cool anymore
The fatc that there are more MMO's on the market now, free ones too,
MOBA's and team based games are leading the charge over MMO's as well
WoW being over a 10 year old game doesn't help either

name me a game thats had a high amount of subs, over 10 years old and hasn't declined in that amount of time. Also WoW is s till the most successful MMO on the market even with the amount of subs they have.

While I agree with you that I hate the pandering to casuals thing let's not blind ourselves by that logic

Even still, the fact that people are making servers like Nastalrius shows that people want some of that hardcore back. And from what I've been told is that Vanilla WoW made it feel like everything was an accomplishment, where WoD feels like a waste of time. Because leveling was harder, and dungeons were harder, and raids only had 1 difficulty. When you did something, it felt like it really mattered.

If MMO's aren't cool, than why did people make Nostalrius?
If so many MMO's are out, why did people make Nostalrius?
If WoW being over 10 years old was a factor, then why did people play on Nostalrius?

See the problem here? People want that back. And because WoW made the standard on how MMO's are made, of course other MMO's would copy them, even the stupid ideas.

Argue against a more hardcore WoW all you want, but that's what most players want. A unofficial realm that ran in the dark had a sizeable population of players. And what were people playing? Vanilla WoW, the hardest if not one of the most difficult gameplay WoW has ever had. It's not exactly new content either. Unlike WoD where the content is relatively new.

[kary]

If you're comparing numbers, 150k active players on a free mmo vs a speculated 2.5m subscribers is nothing.

But nostalgia folk won't accept that they are just an extremely vocal minority.

Would I invest sizeable amounts of money into keeping less than 10% of my total population happy? Or I could just invest my money in things that fit with my current direction. Maybe when there are enough people interested to make sizeable returns, you'd have a point.