Why Vanilla WoW?

[Selastan]

Why not have a modified Vanilla? You know, with the updated graphics and quality of life stuff (sweet, sweet auto loot. We take that for granted)

[Socialhealer]

snip

yeh a very very tiny % of people, also could be those who refuse to pay for a game, still i don't see what those players are doing that hasn't already been done on vanilla.

[saeros]

half of the things in your list are wrong (pvp queue, they changed it in vanilla), stupid (graphics, voiceover) or useless (PvP balance, number or races, no blood elf) or even more stupid (flying, you really can't concieve that maybe people that cry about flying are not the same that liked vanilla more?).

for the few things in your list that actually make sense, yes, it had some flaws.

some thing were better, some were worse.

some people care more about the things that were better before, other don't.

the ONLY objective things that now is better is the server stability, any other thing is subjective (long dungeons, class fantasy...) or have some drawbacks (like lfg, flying).

[Azarak]

This "discussion" you're asking for is redundant since it's already been extensively and repeatedly expounded upon in the classic server megathread.

Then don't post here? That was hard. I for one would rather not read hundreds of pages of mostly useless answers to get what I wanted out of this thread. Also, again with the negativity, you're good at it.

[Deleted]

- PvP was more fun, yes imbalanced classes were fun and beating them just as much[/QUOTE]

PvP in vanilla was awful, real pvp started in tbc and was perfected in wotlk

[Coolascancer]

fury warriors did amazing dps guy, check your shit. Pugs happened on bigger servers, for sure. Youre right about the mechanics in raids/dungeons.. almost nothing to them up until you get into aq40. (some guy said boss mods didnt exist for a while.. uh yes they did. i had boss mods the moment i stepped foot in MC and I did it the week before they changed Might from dps to tank)
Not knowing everything right from the game screen was.. well.. immersive? good? i donno.. now you just grand theft auto your way to anything and everything, which works because the game (wow in all it expansions) leans towards time efficiency.

I simply dont agree with you on the pvp imbalance.. it was just more rock paper scissors and do you have a healer and does your healer get one shot by the ambush backstab rogue? it just depended. The queues eventually were moved to the big cities so.. youre simply wrong there- however i haven't pvp'd since they introduced death knights and broke the game pvpwise.

Your character was actually.. weak or required help or assistance. You still do now but it.. i dont know man i cant explain it.

The game just felt more like warcraft than it does now (or has since cataclysm) thus making it better to some people. I'm not on the vanilla was immaculate bandwagon but i think the game is boring and repetitive horseshit. I enjoy the horseshit from time to time but eventually i get tired of it and will never again attack wow the way i did from vanilla-wotlk.

[Revi]

I think trying to pick it apart makes it seem a lot worse than it was. It's not about the individual features it had, but the experience it delivered.

Grinding mobs to level felt okey, because hitting max level was a big deal and felt like a big accomplishment.
Standing in a city for ages to get a group was okey, because dungeons were an entirely different experience. You had to travel there, discuss strategy, you had to plan pulls, the dungeons took much longer to finish and felt like challenging content rather than a 20-min time-sink for loot, and if you did get a good upgrade it felt like it was all worth it because good gear was rare.
There was a whole social structure that's gone now. Servers were isolated communities. You recognized the people you walked past, you remembered who was good when looking for people for dungeons, you remembered the name of the people you faced in BGs, people mostly treated each other well because you weren't anonymous - how you acted would be remembered and you'd probably meet the same people or others from their guild again later.

Could go on about things that are different, but the point is that it's the sum of how it all came together and what the philosophy for the game design was back then that delivered a very good experience. Personally I think TBC improved the game, but certainly not all aspects. Now the game is so different that you can't really go back and compare individual features of the game to make a judgement.

[beanman12345]

Nostalgia. I get the nostalgia thing, I sometimes go back and re-play my old games, however wow with the time investment, nah, not worth it for me. So while I get the nostalgia, I sure don't get the motivation.

[Hctaz]

I can get people looking back at how it was fun then, but what of the thousands arguing for vanilla servers now? That just sounds awful.

I want it solely for the world exploration factor. The game is too focused on the end result that the journey to get there suffers... and frankly it should. The end game content is where the majority of the fun is now because that's how the game has evolved. Vanilla WoW was essentially a completely different game where the focus was the exploration of the world at hand. When the game shipped there weren't even enough quests to hit max level and you had to grind mobs out. It sounds horrible but it goes to show how little emphasis they placed on actually achieving max level aside from raid content.

By the way, Molten Core was almost not even shipped with the game. It was originally going to be an extra addition to BRD (which would have made that dungeon absolutely crazy) and was nearly scrapped minus two Blizzard employees finishing the raid zone in a week. The only raid would have been Onyxia at launch.

Anyway, the way the game is now makes leveling feel, quite frankly, boring and superfluous. It's a chore now to hit max level in order for the real fun to start whereas back in Vanilla WoW you could take your time and just play the game to have fun leveling and exploring new things. I'm fairly certain that the experience will not be nearly as great as it was for the people who always ask for it. They'd need to have their mind wiped of all of WoW for Vanilla to be as exciting as it once was but I can personally say that I would love the option to play Vanilla again so I could get some friends of mine who never got to experience it and go re-explore the old world before the Cata revamp.

[Zequill]

I cannot be the only one that would like a legacy server mostly because I didn't clear BWL/AQ. Each tier have is different challenge and Vanilla Raiding is so much different from Retail and I would like to experience those raid as they were in the past. Just MC, where I was stuck with the guild I was in at that moment, was really different then what we had and what we have.

[Geldor]

I want it solely for the world exploration factor. The game is too focused on the end result that the journey to get there suffers... and frankly it should. The end game content is where the majority of the fun is now because that's how the game has evolved. Vanilla WoW was essentially a completely different game where the focus was the exploration of the world at hand. When the game shipped there weren't even enough quests to hit max level and you had to grind mobs out. It sounds horrible but it goes to show how little emphasis they placed on actually achieving max level aside from raid content.

By the way, Molten Core was almost not even shipped with the game. It was originally going to be an extra addition to BRD (which would have made that dungeon absolutely crazy) and was nearly scrapped minus two Blizzard employees finishing the raid zone in a week. The only raid would have been Onyxia at launch.

Anyway, the way the game is now makes leveling feel, quite frankly, boring and superfluous. It's a chore now to hit max level in order for the real fun to start whereas back in Vanilla WoW you could take your time and just play the game to have fun leveling and exploring new things. I'm fairly certain that the experience will not be nearly as great as it was for the people who always ask for it. They'd need to have their mind wiped of all of WoW for Vanilla to be as exciting as it once was but I can personally say that I would love the option to play Vanilla again so I could get some friends of mine who never got to experience it and go re-explore the old world before the Cata revamp.

I think you are right in many ways. Just want to add, that for many of us, we had never experienced anything like WoW before that. Things like Baldur's Gate were great in their own way, but a totally different beast. Of course there were some people coming from other MMOs, but for people like me, I think the first few weeks right at the start of WoW were the most enjoyable and outright awesome thing I ever felt during a game. Just the whole world was so different, and even things like running through the Wetlands getting ganked by mobs felt exiting at first. But you can't bring that back. If you do it now, it won't feel exciting at all. You also can't drag a lot of people through a leveling experience like that anymore. Games and people have changed since then.

I don't doubt that some people do enjoy such games, but for the majority it's just too tedious. And we already know too much about the game to be charmed like that anymore.

Maybe when they make a really great open world 3D game or something like that, you'll get a feeling like that again. But I doubt you can get that back from Legion or from playing on a Vanilla server. I think the game is pretty good for what it is now.

[Relapses]

Then don't post here? That was hard. I for one would rather not read hundreds of pages of mostly useless answers to get what I wanted out of this thread. Also, again with the negativity, you're good at it.

There wasn't an ounce of negativity in my post. I simply pointed out how completely and utterly pointless your topic is.

[Aphrel]

-Has ridiculously imbalanced classes/specs, and by far worse than now to the point that hybrids couldn't DPS, plate wearers were only useful as tanks, and DPS classes only had one viable spec.
Yeah i for one think it was a great change to make all specs viable.
-There was 3 less classes (DH, DK, monk) with the first 2 being widely popular.
The amount of classes hardly determines wether it was a good game or not.
-Horde didn't have paladins, alliance didn't have shamans.
This is a bad thing?
-Only 8 races, and let's face it, without blood elves, we'd lose half the current horde population.
what do you mean that you whould lose half the population? Are you planning on forcing all current players of legion to play vanilla wow?
-Terrible graphics and character models compared to now, with horrible facial animations.
The amount of polygons used rarely matters to me at least. And wow havent developed much when it comes to completly new graphic features. No waves in the ocean, no treees swaying in the wind. No blood or any other wounding effects. No storms or other cooler weather effects, only static rain. No clouds moving in the sky. Not much new wildlife to enhance the experience such as singing birds or treeclimbing monkeys. Not much added when it comes to bodylanguage or muscle movement. very little destructable objects. Your clothes doesnt get dirty/wet/bloody ever.. nor do any plate ingame reflect sunlight and the shadows cast by the sun for that matter doesnt seem to move nor is our nights particularly dark.
-Ridiculously long and grindy dungeons/raids with next to no mechanics and way too much trash.
You do realize a good portion of players prefer "long and grindy" over fast and smooth. Think of it this way, if wow legion is a highway to get to your destination, vanilla wow is a hike in the wood. But wich one of them is really most entertaining? I for one whould pick the hike. Its about the journey, not the destination.
-The only reputations were very time-consuming and boring mob grinds, or item turn-ins with items from mob-grinding.
Again, the more effort you put into something, the more rewarding it will feel. Did you feel happy and awesome when you got your artifact in Legion? I sure as hell didnt.
-No flying, which apparently is a ridiculously massive problem for many players.
Again No-flyign is something many players prefer since once you get flying, the world becomes very small all of a sudden.
-On that note, no mounts until level 40, like ffs, fuck leveling with that, I don't know how i did it as a warlock...
Another thing contributing to the world feeling more massive and overwhelming.
-Clunky, long, and unintuitive quests that sent you across the globe (again without mounts, hello shaman class quests) and forced you to often use Thotbot to figure out what to do.
Oh an adventure taking me across the entire world to destinations unkown, fuck that wheres my ferarri?
-No quest voice over besides the very most important characters, no cutscenes (which are amazing), and no interesting quests, literally only killing, gathering, and escourts.
I agree that some elements of questing has become better, but i feel like in the recent 4 expansion it has been ruined by the overwelmingly high pace leaving you with barely any recolection of any induvidual Q. As for voiceover, i love it and wish we had more of it in vanilla wow. But what made vanilla wow Questing so great was that everything had time to leave an impression on you since you didnt just zerg everything down in a second.
-No max level content besides raiding/dungeons, and PvP. (Wait isn't the problem now that there isn't enough to do? Weird...)
I find that the endgame havent changed much trhou the expansions, raiding is and remains the dominant endgame content
-Having to walk all the way to altarac/hillsbrad to queue for AV, or arathi for AB, etc.
Locations are important, it lends authicenty to the whole battleground. Its no longer some random place to fight.
-PvP incredibly unbalanced, enh shamans one shotting people with windfury procs, warlocks being ridiculous, etc.
No offence but this is in most cases a noob argument since depending on who you listen to every class was op... warlocks was op, mages was op, shamans was op, warriors was op, rogues was op...
-Waiting around in the main cities for an hour trying to get a group for the specific dungeon you want.
Are you saying that lfr/lfd is something that makes legion better than vanilla?
-Without a good guild, you could just forget about doing raids and thus not having any reason to do dungeons.
So you prefer lfr over organized raiding in a guild? I can probobly speak for everyone who enjoys vanilla wow that we are of the exact opposite opinion :P

[donjn]

1. Still feels like an actual world .... 0
2. Server communities were just as bad back then, just in a different way. Elitists ran the show ... 0
3. Feeling rewarded by things, I got an awesome reward last night in Legion ... 0
4. Class identity was definitely better in Vanilla, also the ability to have way more combinations of spec ... 1
5. PvP was indeed more fun, so much fun that even I did it ... 1
6. The list doesn't go on, cause if it did - it would have gone on ... 0

Your score : 2/6

Why I want vanilla servers - so i can spend half an hour going and revisiting my favourite town (Auberdine) in an undamaged state. That's it - won't be back

Destroying Aubergine was something ive never recovered from. that music...

[Deleted]

I have too much spare time tonight, so let's do this.

-Has ridiculously imbalanced classes/specs, and by far worse than now to the point that hybrids couldn't DPS, plate wearers were only useful as tanks, and DPS classes only had one viable spec.

I do agree with you, there were some flat out broken specs in vanilla, however it wasn't just 'this spec worked and this one didn't', there was a lot to experiement with. Hybrids worked well in vanilla, the end game isn't like retail where everyone just pumps as much dps as possible to get to the top of meters. The latter statement is just false. DPS warriors are a thing (and very good too), Paladins are plate wearers and they heal. Mages have multiple specs that work (some hybrid). If your guild isn't trying to be so hardcore and only invite "viable" specs then you should look for a new guild. It wasn't even that uncommon to bring dps druids to raids. There were a few specs that although didn't do as much damage as say a rogue or fury warrior, they provided buffs to make those classes stronger to make up for it.

-There was 3 less classes (DH, DK, monk) with the first 2 being widely popular.

This isn't even a point? Yes, the game didn't have those classes... That doesn't negatively impact it in any way.

-Horde didn't have paladins, alliance didn't have shamans.

I suppose this is more opinion based. Some people love this, some people hate it. I'm indifferent, it doesn't affect me.

-Only 8 races, and let's face it, without blood elves, we'd lose half the current horde population.

Again, it's an older version than when more races existed. The horde population was perfectly fine back then and still is fine on private servers now.

-Terrible graphics and character models compared to now, with horrible facial animations.

Graphics don't bother most people, including me. I'd much rather have the game as it was than have shiny new graphics.

-Ridiculously long and grindy dungeons/raids with next to no mechanics and way too much trash.

No mechanics? I'm guessing you never saw passed MC. Long and grindy dungeons were what brought the community together. They don't feel long and grindy when you actually work as a community rather than in retail when you press a button, port in and 15 minutes later leave without uttering a single word to anyone.

-The only reputations were very time-consuming and boring mob grinds, or item turn-ins with items from mob-grinding.

I agree. Some reputations were incredibly time consuming, but others were also very rewarding because of that.

-No flying, which apparently is a ridiculously massive problem for many players.

From what I gather from the forums, flying is a big deal in the broken isles because of how poorly designed it is. It was never an issue in vanilla as the whole game was designed for ground movement only and also made it feel that much bigger. There are always arguments for and against flying mounts.

-On that note, no mounts until level 40, like ffs, fuck leveling with that, I don't know how i did it as a warlock...

Yes and in my opinion that's how it should be. Getting your level 40 mount was a big achievement. It allowed you to appreciate how huge the world is and how long it takes you to travel without one. I've levelled a few 60's in the past couple of years and not once did I feel it was too long to wait.

-Clunky, long, and unintuitive quests that sent you across the globe (again without mounts, hello shaman class quests) and forced you to often use Thotbot to figure out what to do.

Addons help with those types of quests, always have. It's not for everyone but I honestly feel like I'm travelling and experiencing the world when I'm sent across the globe for certain quests (even now when I play on vanilla servers). I don't like how the system is now where you complete camp A and move to camp B until the zone is complete.

-No quest voice over besides the very most important characters, no cutscenes (which are amazing), and no interesting quests, literally only killing, gathering, and escourts.

Remember that vanilla was the start of WoW, so of course it's not like it is now when it comes to VO work.

-No max level content besides raiding/dungeons, and PvP. (Wait isn't the problem now that there isn't enough to do? Weird...)

Except there was no train of gear in vanilla like there is now, so it took weeks, months to get the gear you wanted. The rate of progression is much slower and you always had a goal because of it. Now you can ding 110, do a few heroics, LFR and some basic mythics all in the same day. Gear upon gear is thrown at you and THAT is what makes the game boring. It's an illusion of content, gear is meaningless and nothing is memorable because you plow through everything in a couple of days. I vendored so many pieces of gear per day from my bags. I don't even remember the name of a single piece of gear on my priest, because I just randomly got upgrades when doing m+ content or raiding. Yet I can still remember the names of the gear that drop in UBRS (for leather wearers, as I was a rogue back then) simply because those pieces were my end goal and I ran specifically for them, making it much more meaningful and memorable.

-Having to walk all the way to altarac/hillsbrad to queue for AV, or arathi for AB, etc.

Battlemasters were added in later during vanilla.

-PvP incredibly unbalanced, enh shamans one shotting people with windfury procs, warlocks being ridiculous, etc.

3 minute mages. Warrior crits 1 shotting people. Discipline priests smiting for 3k damage. Rogues stunlocking people to death naked. You can say the same thing about every class. They all had their pros and cons.

-Waiting around in the main cities for an hour trying to get a group for the specific dungeon you want.

Never had an issue, even when levelling. Tons of live/ud strat ones going, UBRS groups filled relatively quickly etc.

-Without a good guild, you could just forget about doing raids and thus not having any reason to do dungeons.

Just not true. Even if your guild wasn't very good it was still raiding at least MC. Watch the 2005 presentation of raids where Jeff Kaplan states that the 1% who raid is a myth and in fact most people raided back then. Even if you didn't raid it was still enjoyable doing dungeons.

Vanilla wasn't perfect and it definitely had its downsides, but a huge part of why people want to play it even now is because of the community. Having to actively group for non-elite quests simply because your character was so weak and/or it took a very long time to solo, or building a group and discussing the instance as it took much longer than retail. Instances mean nothing these days except how fast you can clear it to get a piece of loot or some exp. From mid-late Wrath all the way to Legion I barely met anyone, there is just no reason to communicate with others anymore except if you're in a guild. On Nost/Kronos I had 20-30 people on my friends list, people I met through questing, dungeons, pvp, saving them from death, and a few of them I spoke to daily and still do now even though I stopped playing.

And what Revi said, there was social status in the game. You would always run into people again because you played with people on the same server. People who ninja'd gear or were complete assholes were quickly recognised and avoided by most, and positive impressions lasted. Now people call each other whatever they want, they treat you like nothing, kick you from groups, because they're never going to see you again so why not?

[Alexeht]

when I look at my old screenshots from 2006, there's no difference. And this is important.

Do you play Legion on lowest graphics settings?

[Pivotal]

I've got 82 days playtime on a certain server

yeah, definately just nostalgia there.

[Pull My Finger]

Nostalgia.

Then there's nostalgia.
And of course, nostalgia.
Nostalgia.
Have I mentioned nostalgia yet?

And finally, nostalgia.

[Darkguyver2020]

Nostalgia.

Then there's nostalgia.
And of course, nostalgia.
Nostalgia.
Have I mentioned nostalgia yet?

And finally, nostalgia.

Nostalgia is one Hell of a drug. About time these people went to rehab.

[mhdoe]

I have been playing WoW and been continuously subbed since 06 and personally have zero want or need to go back to Vanilla. But if people enjoyed it and want to play it again go for it I have never understood the whole retail/private server war either way it does not affect me. It is a game and if you enjoy playing a certain time, expac style or whatever its you choice have fun. But if someone feel's the need to bash someone because they choose retail or vanilla get the fuck out maybe they just need to find another game that's not so stressful for them.