Pristine Realms – The Crux of Nostalgic WoW

[orioxez]

Disclaimer – This is not a thread about creating or asking Blizzard to create legacy realms. This is about further developing what is interesting about the pristine realm idea brought up by J. Allen Brack.

Over the years we have talked about a “pristine realm”. In essence that would turn off all leveling acceleration including character transfers, heirloom gear, character boosts, Recruit-A-Friend bonuses, WoW Token, and access to cross realm zones, as well as group finder.

http://eu.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/17611300963

Obviously by now everyone has heard enough about classic realms with the shutdown of Nostalrius several months ago. Although the game has improved in incredible ways since that time, from graphics to game systems – the game has lost many of the things that once made it great. Obviously the community is divided on this issue. Many hated the slow pacing, travel distances, and grinding of its older versions. Many millions have quit and left behind Warcraft because of how the game has changed the MMO genre and become something different entirely. J. Allen Brack's suggestion was that a new realm type, rather than recreating an older version of the game, was a possible solution to this problem. I would propose that this idea would be beneficial to the game, capture what made vanilla great, and not hinder the current community that enjoys the game as is.

What would this server be exactly? It would be the same as every other server just without all the modern 'quality of life' changes that Blizzard has added over the years. It will be upgraded to 7.0.3 and have Legion content. There are many features of the older versions of the game that make it more engaging to play on. For example, traveling to dungeons, queuing for bgs from the bg instance portal, being grounded, world pvp. All of these elements combined create a need for more social interaction among players and stronger server community as a result. This is not to say that the current version of the game has not added content that I find engaging. For example, bonus objectives, world objects (treasures), dynamic daily quests, and rare mobs all are great additions to the game that began in Mists and developed further in WoD. Leveling a character through the WoD zones is now my favorite part of leveling a new character. This is being developed even further in Legion with World Quests, which I look forward to.

However, despite progress that Blizzard has made in the past three expansions to create more engagement among players and with the world – there is still something lacking on retail that can be solved with a pristine realm. I propose if this realm were to exist, it would exist on the current patch content and it should have the following features.

• No heirloom gear or experience boosting consumables or buffs.
• Exp requirements increased overall.
• No dungeon finder, raid finder, or bg finder.
• Bg finder would return to an NPC or area of the major city where players would have to physically go to in order to queue. This includes arena.
• Flying removed or reworked. Flying would be a cooldown that every player can train at level 60 – would be a 10 second cast out of combat and only give flying for a short duration (15-30 seconds) and have a substantial cooldown. This would give players the ability to still reach flying only areas without indefinite flying.

These changes revert much of the game systems that Blizzard has introduced over the years to improve quality of life for players, but has eroded the essence of what makes an MMO. By relegating these changes to a new server type and by keeping the current patch (with minor changes) – this would create excitement for a different style of playing the game without too much effort by the developers and it would not infringe upon the people already enjoying the game as is. I believe this would reignite an interest in players currently disinterested in playing Legion, and perhaps players who never played on a server with a real community would experience it for the first time. It's my belief that when players are forced to interact to create groups manually social bonds are forged to a greater degree. When players are forced to interact and cooperate to complete tasks this is what makes the community strong.

[Eleccybubb]

Still wouldn't bring leveling back to on par with the old times. Gear from quests make it easy enough to level. It would just make it more irritating to complete a zone. If they are gonna do Legacy fucking do it. If not don't try and compromise with the shitty Pristine idea. Pro legacy people want Legacy servers not a compromise.

[Kazgrel]

Still wouldn't bring leveling back to on par with the old times. Gear from quests make it easy enough to level. It would just make it more irritating to complete a zone. If they are gonna do Legacy fucking do it. If not don't try and compromise with the shitty Pristine idea.

This, and this subject was beat to death but the horse's corpse is still available for flogging in the legacy/pristine server megathread that still floats up here every so often.

[deniter]

Still wouldn't bring leveling back to on par with the old times. Gear from quests make it easy enough to level. It would just make it more irritating to complete a zone. If they are gonna do Legacy fucking do it. If not don't try and compromise with the shitty Pristine idea. Pro legacy people want Legacy servers not a compromise.

+1.

If the old code and technology is too hard to bring back, remake vanilla/tbc by using new graphics and code to make it as close the original as possible. The game has changed too much to just take away a few convenience features and call it 'vanilla experience'.

[Eleccybubb]

+1.

If the old code and technology is too hard to bring back, remake vanilla/tbc by using new graphics and code to make it as close the original as possible. The game has changed too much to just take away a few convenience features and call it 'vanilla experience'.

Which is total bullshit since they finally admitted after the meeting with Nost they have the code for vanilla just not minor patches and hotfixes which personally I don't believe either.

[FlemmMinis]

Isn't there a megathread for this?

[WskyDK]

No heirlooms or boosts kill it for me.
I've done my time in the old content, at the point in my life the game doesn't being until max level. Anything that delays my getting there is a nuisance

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

Ya the pristine thing is pointless. I don't want leveling, I want to do the raids with classes as they were. Problem with classic and tbc is there was even less content than WoD though so it's not really something they want to do.

[Eleccybubb]

Ya the pristine thing is pointless. I don't want leveling, I want to do the raids with classes as they were. Problem with classic and tbc is there was even less content than WoD though so it's not really something they want to do.

Because Vanilla released content faster. There was less overall features than WoD but because the content came out so fast nobody noticed and just got on with it. Go check the wowpedia or wiki or w/e for the dates of all the 1.x patches to see the time lapse it's insane. It's actually quicker than some other MMOs today.

[Nurvus]

Pristine Realms are a good idea as a concept.
However, they cannot be implemented on the current WoW without first making serious changes to the content itself - in particular the worth of different types of activities (questing vs dungeons vs professions).

As long as rushing to max level continues to be so crushingly beneficial, Pristine Realms are nothing but a pipe dream.

[Pakmanisgod]

I think a vanilla server should be released but it should be Vanilla at launch. No organized pvp, several dungeons missing, no actual raids as far as I can remember, no meeting stones along with a plethora of other features that even most vanilla players take for granted these days. Even the original release evolved and matured quite quickly.

[Eleccybubb]

I think a vanilla server should be released but it should be Vanilla at launch. No organized pvp, several dungeons missing, no actual raids as far as I can remember, no meeting stones along with a plethora of other features that even most vanilla players take for granted these days. Even the original release evolved and matured quite quickly.

Original release had MC and Onyxia. You are thinking of the beta stuff which would be stupid to release. Only dungeons I think weren't in at launch were Dire Maul and Maraudon but I haven't read the old patch notes in ages.

[Deleted]

Will never understand this nonsense about traveling to the dungeon making the game more immersive. It just doesn't.

I've done full Mythic lockouts on 2 characters for weeks and weeks, usually I would make the group and I would travel there for summons myself. There was zero difference between being teleported to the dungeon and taking the closest taxi and then flying for another 30 seconds after. All it did was take a little more time, whatever, it doesn't bother me, but it doesn't add anything either.

I don't PvP, but queuing for BGs from the portal is the same shit. Oh I walked to the portal. Big woop.

I suspect a lot of people that ask for things like this actually spend comparatively little time playing the game or doing the same things over and over. By the time you ride to that BG Portal or dungeon portal for the 50th time, the "journey" won't get you "pumped" for whatever you'll do, it will be as meaningless as your daily work commute, just something you zone out through, the difference being that in real life you have to do it while in a video game it's just pointless.

There are games where this sort of downtime between action is critical to the atmosphere: horror games, any good shooter, even DayZ wouldn't be what it is if you wouldn't walk for 30 minutes through Czech countryside in complete silence before shitting yourself cos someone suddenly shot at you out of a bush.

WoW is not one of those games and it never really was. That run (on foot no less) from Southshore to Scarlet Monastery as Alliance ? It's memorable yes, but mostly because it was bullshit.

If I didn't have the ridiculous and frankly irresponsible amount of free time I had back then, I would've never been able to achieve shit, not because I wasn't skilled enough, not cos I wasn't good at the game, but because there were SO many times when something like 25% of a "dungeon run" was actually getting there. During that time, you were not challenged or tested in any way, except maybe for patience.

I dearly hope that Blizzard experiments with this one day so that 90% of the people asking for it realize that artificial time sinks do not make an amazing game and that most of their positive experiences came from playing with friends, not because it took 20 minutes to walk from town to dungeon and then another 40 minutes to replace the DCed tank cos someone had to HS back to town, find a tank and then walk back again.

The remaining 10% can be content with their world where you take longer to do anything but they won't be great customers since I seriously doubt they were ever hardcore players. No one who did SM dozens of times in Vanilla and before summoning stones to boot will tell you "Golly gee I sure liked having to cut through Hillsbrad and swim through that lake outside Undercity then walk all the way through Tirisfal to the Monastery and it was amazing all the 50 times I did it ! "

If they do, they're either lying to you or only remember the bits where they bantered with their friends while holding W down and forgetting all the snore inducing moments.

PS: I didn't even get into all the catastrophic population problems that limiting someone to just their server for finding dungeons would cause. This wouldn't cause people to PLAY. It would cause them to QUIT.

/rant

[orioxez]

Many of these replies fixate on the leveling process. I think the main functional difference would be the lack of group finding and lack of flying. The intent of pristine is not to be leveling forever, it's for the leveling to be meaningful and a dedicated process. Also, travel distance does matter because the world as an element of gameplay matters - or should matter in an MMO. The fact that players see the world as an obstacle to content rather than content is indicative of players rejecting the very concept of an MMO. When there are no flying mounts then world pvp dictates 'content' of the world. Certainly Blizzard has managed to add more world content recently and I support this.

[Pull My Finger]

eroded the essence of what makes an MMO

Yawn. When I hear this kind of talk, I instantly tune out. I can't take people seriously that stand there and lecture everyone on "how things are supposed to be". It reminds me of religious fundamentalism.

[Demithio]

I would have to possibly agree with pristine servers over a legacy vanilla rehash. Its most likely the only way this will be possible. As much as I would like to have a vanilla -like experience again, it probably wouldn't last long. Having said that, they should remove most of what would be considered conveniences to make it close (but not quite at) Vanilla levels of game play. They would also have to do some tuning of mob strength, gear drops, and quest rewards, among a number of other things. This of course is not taking into account of the far less extensive dungeon and raid design as compared to vanilla.

[Traveler Voltin]

Because Vanilla released content faster. There was less overall features than WoD but because the content came out so fast nobody noticed and just got on with it. Go check the wowpedia or wiki or w/e for the dates of all the 1.x patches to see the time lapse it's insane. It's actually quicker than some other MMOs today.

most patches in classic were aimed at fixing things.

[Deleted]

- no raid catch up mechanics, like tbc and vanilla
- only mythic dungeon difficulty
- only mythic raid difficulty

and no transmog

[Relapses]

Why is this a thread? Ion pretty effectively squashed the idea of pristine realms in one of the Dev Q&As.