Why Vanilla WoW?

[McNeil]

I wish this board could stop shoving their own opinions on people that the games they like to play are supposedly bad, pretty sure people can make up their own mind once they get to play it. I always hated this attitude that someone else tells you what your supposed to like... that attitude lost Blizzard quite a lot of subs during WoD atleast.

[Zafire]

I liked it better.

A couple enemies the same level could mow you down pretty quick. You can train 20+ now.

You had to travel a lot. You had to see all of Azeroth. You had to know how to walk everywhere you went. You had to, to progress. You can just queue for dungeons all day now, never moving out of the Auction House in Stormwind.

There were class quests, and you had to go to exotic places to learn the last 75 levels of your profession.

The economy was more realistic, and money was harder to come by. Crafting a blue/Rare piece of gear required commitment and was very powerful.

Threat was a mechanic we don't have anymore. Feel about it how you want, I liked it. It's a dying mechanic and it's really too bad.

Specs were more about pushing your class in a certain direction, not completely defining it. Example: Ret could still heal short-term almost as well as a Holy Paladin in the same gear.

Dungeon quests rewarded some pretty awesome gear for leveling, and it took long quest chains to get access to them. You had to put groups together and meet people.

Leveling was actually a journey, now it's just an inconvenience.

[Interim]

Of all the expansions to compare to <insert current expansion to complain about here>, why is vanilla WoW the one many people argue are the best? I can kind of relate to WotLK/BC even though there is still vastly much more to do now than back then, but vanilla onestly was a sad attempt of a game compared to Legion. Maybe it was cool back in its time, but when I look back, I see a game that:

-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.
-There was 3 less classes (DH, DK, monk) with the first 2 being widely popular.
-Horde didn't have paladins, alliance didn't have shamans.
-Only 8 races, and let's face it, without blood elves, we'd lose half the current horde population.
-Terrible graphics and character models compared to now, with horrible facial animations.
-Ridiculously long and grindy dungeons/raids with next to no mechanics and way too much trash.
-The only reputations were very time-consuming and boring mob grinds, or item turn-ins with items from mob-grinding.
-No flying, which apparently is a ridiculously massive problem for many players.
-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...
-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.
-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.
-No max level content besides raiding/dungeons, and PvP. (Wait isn't the problem now that there isn't enough to do? Weird...)
-Having to walk all the way to altarac/hillsbrad to queue for AV, or arathi for AB, etc.
-PvP incredibly unbalanced, enh shamans one shotting people with windfury procs, warlocks being ridiculous, etc.
-Waiting around in the main cities for an hour trying to get a group for the specific dungeon you want.
-Without a good guild, you could just forget about doing raids and thus not having any reason to do dungeons.

I mean I could go on all day and the only benefits I see are from nostalgia goggles and can never be fixed outside of a completely new game:

-The game is new, so everything is interesting and unknown.
-People first playnig the game were much younger, so things are of course going to be more "magical" to younger kids. I myself was like 12-13 at first.

Honestly that's all I can even think of, after staring at my screen for 5minutes. Outside of nostalgia, vanilla is just objectively the worse "expansion" (yea, it's not an expansion, w/e). I'm legitimately curious to hear what anyone has to say that was nice about vanilla as opposed to now. Oh, and try not to say things that blizzard has tried reintroducing recently and it tanked horribly because nobody liked it.

because it was before wow became a faux-mmo/closer to a real mmorpg.

[bioshell]

-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.
-There was 3 less classes (DH, DK, monk) with the first 2 being widely popular.
-Horde didn't have paladins, alliance didn't have shamans.
-Only 8 races, and let's face it, without blood elves, we'd lose half the current horde population.
-Terrible graphics and character models compared to now, with horrible facial animations.
-Ridiculously long and grindy dungeons/raids with next to no mechanics and way too much trash.
-The only reputations were very time-consuming and boring mob grinds, or item turn-ins with items from mob-grinding.
-No flying, which apparently is a ridiculously massive problem for many players.
-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...
-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.
-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.
-No max level content besides raiding/dungeons, and PvP. (Wait isn't the problem now that there isn't enough to do? Weird...)
-Having to walk all the way to altarac/hillsbrad to queue for AV, or arathi for AB, etc.
-PvP incredibly unbalanced, enh shamans one shotting people with windfury procs, warlocks being ridiculous, etc.
-Waiting around in the main cities for an hour trying to get a group for the specific dungeon you want.
-Without a good guild, you could just forget about doing raids and thus not having any reason to do dungeons.

-Yes, and wrong, warriors could dps indeed, you just had to know how to play, and no, dps classes had more than 1 viable spec, again, you just needed to know how to play (eg. be skilled)
-So? DH suck, DK suck, Monk's are ok, but personally wouldnt be missed.
-Exactly how they should have left it. Makes horde and alliance more unique.
-So? wasnt a big deal, and i bet it wouldnt be a big deal for people who would want to play on a vanilla server.
-Graphics was fine, but seriously, do you play the game for flashy graphics? You are playing the wrong game.
-Yes, But however you look at it, raids and dungeons were more challenging, for example you dont see people sapping/sheeping TRASH nowdays, cuz guess what? its not neccesary cuz its EZ-PEEZY.
-That alone made it feel more accomplishing to finish a grind and plus, not everyone and yo grand-mamma was doing it like today.
-No
-No mount til 40 was fine, stop whining, you have just become too spoiled.
-If im not mistaking, people still use a site like thottbot (wowhead) for stuff and what/how to do it. But yes maybe quests were not immersive and such but who cares, the goal was to level to 60 and start raiding and pvping.
-SO? again, you over-spoiled brat.
-People love to whine about everything, there is lots to do. But in the vanilla days, raiding/dungeons and pvp was enough for 90% of the people cuz, A) raiding took a hellofa lot time to organize and start/finish (plus the flask grinding, or any grinding therefor), B) dungeons took their time also (finding grp, getting there w/o warlock, starting/finishing it) and PVP took its time also, going to SW or ORG as respective faction and or XR/TM/Wherever, or BG que.
-Wrong, there was a thing called Battlemasters you could que at. You could also walk there but you only really needed to if you wanted to purchase the Rep items or for the quests.
-PVP was quite unbalanced but balanced at the same time. The time i spend grinding to rank 12 in vanilla i saw a lot of different people playing different classes, all owning whoever they faced, because you know what? PLAYER SKILL MATTERED EXTREMELY. Warlocks? did you even watch drakedog back in the day? ok. - Every class was good if a good player was playing it.
-Well so what? that created a good community, while today you barely know anyone anymore and give 2 shits about everyone.
-Without a good guild yes, you had a much lower change of raiding, but you could still get in if you were lucky (paying gold or stuff like that), but you could almost always find and join a new-ish guild and start from scratch in MC with them. And if not, you could almost always do dungeons, even unguilded, because quess what? the community was better, you most certainly had friends or a reputation (or not if u were a baddie or a dick) or you could just ask in general chat or LFG chat.


Now stop talking shit about vanilla, everyone knows deep down that vanilla was the most fun version of WoW ever. People are just to lazy to start from scratch and expect to get epics (legendaries now) handed to them. Come on...

[rlane7948]

This point of view comes from a player who has played this game from the day it launched and has not taken a day off. (I went days without playing. I have been a paying customer every day the game has been live.)

While Vanilla had it's flaws I think people want the game to be more like Vanilla because to do the high end content for PVE you had to put in ALOT of work. A casual could not expect to raid ever. You had to do attunements, you were out in the open world more cause there was no flying and to do a dungeon you had to run to the instance. It all sounds like a pain but after you got a reward you felt like you accomplished something. As far as community, there is one now and there was one then. If you are not in one you like that's your problem. Look for one you want to be in. PVP was better too. There is nothing like a 3 day Alterac Valley or a 16 hour Warsong Gulch. People would have lived with out DK's, Monks, DH's, Blood Elfs, Draenei, Goblins, Worgen, ect. The game wasn't that bad. It had alot of bugs and imbalances but it was good.

Now at the same time there is not one expansion that has come across that I thought was a bad expansion. They all served a purpose. I enjoyed Burning Crusade. The expansion I liked the least is everyones favorite WOTLK. I still liked it. I just hate snow. That's all there is to that. I hate Silithus cause I hate bugs. Doesnt mean I don't go there though. My favorite until Dragon Soul happened was Catacalysm. I enjoyed the raids, the dungeons, the quests, everything. I liked Pandaria. I hate Garrosh Hellscream but I liked Pandaria. Also didn't mind Draenor.

Now that being said. The evolution of this game is a good thing in my opinion. No one wants to play a game where it takes months of days where you spend hours online just to do the end game content. If legacy servers happened, I would play. I would also play this live version alot more and I think alot of people who want legacy content would too once they realized how much a hassle the game was back then.

[deniter]

You kidding right? There are thousands of games on Steam, Origin, everywhere.
You did not have close to the amount of choice in games back in 04 compared to what you have today. A few of my friends that I started playing WoW with play Tera. I've played alot of SWToR and still do now and again.
Theres games like LoL, Overwatch, CSGO

Also, if you don't pay for your games, no wonder they are crashing "left and right", eh?

In any case, playing on private servers is stealing and no matter how much you want vanilla back, you're doing to wrong.

Right, i thought for a second we were talking mmorpgs here. I've played Tera and SWotR and neither of them offer a similar gaming experience as vanilla wow does. LoL, OW and CSGO are completely different genre, they are MOs but not MMOs or RPGs.

Also, i do pay for my games if i consider them worth my money. I played and paid for WoW from 2005 to 2010 15€/month until it was developed to the point it was no longer worth my time or money. Legion i wouldn't play even for free, but i would happily pay for any version of WoW pre-Cataclysm. If there was a legit way to do it, my credit card is at their disposal.

[Matthias]

I can understand the people who wanted to go back to Vanilla in WoD. But I feel like Legion has addressed a multitude of issues that has been plaguing the game for years, really starting with WoTLK.

I mean we still don't have flying, so WPvP is everywhere, and it's super unbalanced like it was in Vanilla.

There is a lot to do when not raiding, WQ, Mythic Dungeons, Professions, etc.

Vanilla classes had a lot of "authenticity" to them, Rogues needed poisons, and blinding powder, Hunters need a Quiver and Arrows. Legion brings us some class identity, some falter a bit while others I think are great. I love the fact that Monk and Paladin healers are considered Melee and expected to melee. Never made sense to me how they lose their martial prowess after a life time of training.

Dungeons are challenging once again. Vanilla dungeons were very immersive and long. TBC dungeons were long also, but aestically they were just colored hallways with trash. WoTLK started the AoE fest nonsense. Mythic plus makes 5 mans relevent and harder again, yes they are timed, and it's really all about your DPS wad, but it's been addressed. When you reach high affixes and aren't concerned with the timer, then you can take your time.

I could go on, the few things that the game needs to address is the leveling process is perhaps too easy, but back in Vanilla there were a ton of people leveling up with you that would help out. Most people are max level and that's not the case anymore. Naturally it needs to be a bit more solo friendly. Communities sadly are a thing of the past, Xrealm was an awful mistake, so it's harder to make new friends. I don't think I've established new relationships since WoTLK.

Finally ilvl inflation is still out of control. If you don't have friends or guild mates and you play a DPS class your going to have a rough time finding groups. M+ creates a bit of a "rich get richer" scenario for people who have friends.

Otherwise Legion is great and I refuse to look backwards. I think they have a model that they can build off of just like they did with Vanilla > TBC. Just don't screw up what's not currently broken like they did with WoTLK and shook things up and caused Wrath Baby Syndrome.

[Hctaz]

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.

Yeah it just wouldn't be possible to feel that same way again, though I would honestly love the chance to bring some friends into that experience personally. I'd love to see if the old style of the game can work or if the MMO market has lost the luster of leveling and gaining power.

[wombinator04]

It is pretty funny that so many people in the private server community are accusing Blizzard of DDOSing. They are convinced.

[Kokolums]

The in-game community was at its most sophisticated in vanilla WoW. They've destroyed the in-game community now. The game has taken a massive step back in quality because of it. Consider that in Legion they were threatening to destroy the RP community with massive city phasing and only relented when there was a huge outcry from the RP community because they knew it would kill them off. They had ZERO understanding of the importance of community even as late as Legion launch!

[Everwake]

PvP and server community.

[Felaris Stormrage]

PvP and server community.

I like your signature. Beautiful.

Anyways, I could care less about Vanilla. However, I do wish there was a sense of community left in MMORPGs and player identity. Oh well, it's never coming back and that's just apart of life. The new generation of gamer(s) are infatuated with instant gratification and unfortunately, it sells. If I could re-live the 1990's and early 2000's again, I would in a heartbeat.

[Aensland]

It was something totaly new never seen before. Thats only reason. If blizz would do expansion now in vanila style, everyone would loose his mind about how baaaaad it is.

This.

Also, I think many mistake the expansion they enjoyed the most for being the best.

Personally, I had the most fun playing during Wrath because of friends and the guild I was in. And I'm currently enjoying Legion the least by far, due to no friends or guild, and way too far behind in character progression to raid. But that doesn't necessarily mean I think Wrath is the best and Legion is the worst.

[belleflop]

My question to anyone who actively dislikes vanilla wow or people who strive for the experiences it provides. Does others enjoying a game with different goals/aspirations bother you?

The OP question is very subjective, as is this entire thread. I think there is room for both people who enjoy the new content and people who wish to play at a certain time of the games history. If you are having fun and you aren't harming other peoples ability to have fun then what really is the problem?

From my experience back in vanilla there was a sense of community. Things were harder in the context of needing other people to complete most tasks and gold wasn't easy to come by some you had to work for things. Getting gear and upgrades were really special moments. Farming for my Qual'Serrer for my first epic loot is an experience I've never forgotten. In retail wow purple gear just gets throw at me, it doesn't feel good to kick some squirrels and nuts and get a purple ilvl 860 piece of gear, or worse a legendary that offers nothing but utlity... and then run a mythic+ dungeon which is considerably harder and requires a group and get an ilvl 840 purple with horrible secondary stats from the last boss.

Sorry but this is backwards and for me diminishes the whole experience. In vanilla when you saw someone decked out in epics you knew they put in great effort for such rewards.

[actiwe]

Beacuse it was a whole other game than todays WoW.

My opinions:
In vanilla you never really "finished" the game compared to today, there were more things that were better back then in comparison of what is better today.
First of all I am in the group of people that don't think everything should be available to everyone (be it gear, raids, quests or whatever)

Gold mattered ALOT back then, which was great, it actually had a meaning.

Everything was "harder" - things took longer time, rewards could be huge etc. = more satisfaction when you accomplished something

[Linri]

felt rewarding while leveling
felt like a challenge while leveling
required groups sometimes
game was harder

[Trollfat]

The vanilla Durotar experience :

Made a new shaman and died twice in the valley of trials. Combat lasts 5+ GCDs and every mob drains me of vital mana. I often ran out of food and drink. Looted everything to be able to afford new spells. Had to group up to complete several quests, such as Zalazane and Darkfizzle. Took me 6 hours to reach level 10 after completing almost every quest in the zone. Made my way up a narrow, winding mountain path to kill a fire elemental (that I died 3 times to) for a class quest.

Legion Durotar experience:

Got to level 10 in one hour. Never died or ran out of resources. Never had to group up. Killed every mob within 3 GCDs. Just when things were starting to get a little tougher at 8 and 9, I get a sudden 50% increase in power at level 10 and begin steamrolling again.

[shise]

Vanilla gave a chance to have an adventure whilst later on it became mindless faceroll.

[Deleted]

It's hilarious when people say "it was totally new never seen before". Laughable, but i guess LoL was first MMORPG amirite

[God Save The King]

80% Nostalgia
20% New game feeling