I played 1.12 a while ago (this was new nosta server) I was really really impressed with spirit of community and gameplay itself.. Sure there are few grind and bots and spam bot here and there, but like always people who run the show need to grow some balls and cleanse them with easy perma ban solution.
What I took from it:
1. People actually care at vanilla servers (they profoundly helpful at everything, there is some human bond going on It's amazing to be part of it)
2. Everything matters at the game, it's amazing to see when you progress with your character all the things you do actually helps your character to grow, also it's fun to see both primary and secondary professions actually working!!!
3. There are no unimportant things at the game, you are fucking A when you get that blue or even green upgrade.
4 Quest matters, grinding currency matters, farming in general is important.
5 Various strategies involved not just to progress further, but also when you leveling.
Current game is great but it has its weaknesses, to me legion is totally different mmo when comparing.
At legion:
1 Very immature community (this instant gratification and autism mindset at everything is in the game now days)
2 Groups rush and don't care interacting with each other (mainly because of silent bots infested LFR/LFD a while ago they sure they can't speak)
3 Game is just a mindless lets get to max char asap and no pit stops, also there are no actual farming involved (you don't grind for pots, or that item from instance or gold in general)
4 Blizzard took care of everything, introduced heirlooms and took step further with character boost.
I'm not a hater, and I enjoy some aspects of the legion, but these are two separately different games for me.
The community.
And you honestly believe that the sole reason WoW lost subs is because you think the game quality dropped? Really? You honestly can't be that dishonest. You're dismissing all other possibilities, like more competition in the gaming market and players' interests changing, because... it supports your narrative, I guess.
You're not even comparing WoW to other games, which would make your attempt at argumentation slightly less nonsensical, but you're not. You're comparing it to a version of the game that is 12+ years old. WoW today is objectively better than before: better graphics, better game mechanics, less bugs, better accessibility, better balance, more classes, more races, more variety, etc.
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I was half-way writing a point-per-point reply to your post, when I realized that your post is made solely of grossly exaggerations in all of its points, with none of it being true. Communities still exist. So do casual raiding guilds. CRZ didn't 'destroy servers' (I still want to know how people can even think that), and Mythic+ dungeons did not kill pve guilds.
If "communities" died, it's because they killed themselves, not because of any of Blizzard's actions.
"Torturing someone is not an evil thing to do if it is done for good reasons" by Varodoc
"You sit in OG/SW waiting on a Mythic+ queue" by Altmer <- Oh, the pearls in this forum...
"They sort of did this Dragonriding, which ushered in the Dracthyr race." by Teriz <- the BS some people reach for their narratives...
The progression now is not linear. I can Netflix AOE down mythic 4's and have 860 item level in <3 days of hitting 110, then spam mythic 7's with friends/randoms, trade loot and get even higher no problem. Crafting doesn't even make sense in this game, and the raids are either skip-able or made trivial with overgearing. (I'm not saying you should have to do mythic EN, just at least something before moving up the IlvL chain)
I personally don't care about the difficulty argument of classic/bc so feel free to crap all over it. Yes it was easier then now, but linear progression as an idea is all I care about. I will be the first person to say 40 man size was crap and MC was netflix-capable junk.
Now we get;
Crafting? Rubbish
Early raids? Already made rubbish
Half the content? Irrelevant
Returning to expac late? A casual that never did anything? Just hit 110 late? GG 50-90% of the content has been made obsolete/trivial, enjoy grinding that final tier forever as everything else is a waste of time. Reminds me of WoD when everyone got full conquest PvP gear/Baleful then complained there was nothing to do.
ps. People only got stuck at Molten Core and places like Karazhan because you needed so many people to actually raid. If Flex existed, way, way more people would have seen AQ40/Naxx. There were so many reasons old progression sucked for most people, but linear progression was not one of them.
Last edited by Daffan; 2017-01-11 at 12:38 PM.
Content drought is a combination of catchup mechanics and no new content.
Have you considered the possibility of being shortshighted regarding this and that maybe those comunities died because there was/is little to no incentive for them to flourish? I mean, instead of whiteknighting constantly for blizzard, considering that maybe there's more to it and that maybe, just maybe they are indeed guilty because of changes to the game design, that led the game into a direction where, sure you can have guilds and communitys here and there, but there is next to no need at all for them to exist since you can almost do everything in single player mode.
The only thing that's better about Vanilla was the community. The people were better and you and your server had identity. Who you were mattered.
The game itself, however, is FAR better now, and it's not even close. Is it perfect? No, obviously. They still make mistakes in systems design (legendaries are the best example). But despite that, this game is vastly superior to the game of 10 years ago.
well they've said that they are going to be keeping the 5 man content challenging and relevant.
if your progressing on m+ that is linear progression through that one avenue of content, you can mix it up if you want, that is the power of choice instead of being funnelled into a one size fits all grind fest.
I do think that professions have kinda been given the shaft year after year after year, they either stay exactly the same or just get nerfed or become less and less important.
as far as the casual argument goes, the only thing i care about is getting to see the content, not the hypothetical epeen value of being in the 1% of ppl who gets to see something. its not like they didn't have catch up mechanics in the past, zg aq20, dungeon set 2, were all attempts at getting more ppl to raid. it didn't exactly change the fact that not many managed to reach the end.
as far as i'm concerned legion has been the best the game has been since tbc.
5 man content doesn't become obsolete when you start raiding, raiding is still challenging if you want it to be, you can actually make progress out side of raiding. you don't need to be married to the game to progress anymore.
back in the day when i had no life at all, i could sit there grinding shit all day every day, raid all night, these days, i don't have time for that.
Last edited by Heathy; 2017-01-11 at 12:39 PM.
its a lot better, tbc gave us heroic dungeons so they stayed relevant for longer, but mythic plus has improved on that system quite a lot, heroics in tbc became trivial in t4, once you had t4 the only dungeon that could give you upgrades was magisters terrace. so once you got t4, all those heroics became obsolete.
Last edited by Heathy; 2017-01-11 at 02:32 PM.
yes, i remember still doing them in t6 but they weren't challenging at all by that point so you were just breezing through them.
raiding in tbc was kinda strange tbh, some of the t5 bosses were wayyyyyy harder than the t6 stuff, the first time my guild did hyjal, we killed the first 3 bosses first time, not one wipe, it felt strange to be doing a higher tier of content that was easier than the previous tier. Vashj and Kael were actually quite hard before they were nerfed into oblivion.
it took us at least a month to kill kael. that was the first boss i actually saw some guild drama where ppl were getting noticeably pissed off with each other.
Tbh that's how its supposed to be no? Last tier end bosses are harder than new tier first bosses "normally". One thing to take into consideration was that raids were also longer in that era, how long don't you have a raid with as many bosses like BT or ICC? I consider normal in this design that the first bosses feel breezy to kill.
for me it was that you had to actually have real friends to run with.Yeah you may pick up a pug now and again but for real i ran with friends .I loved that aspect of the game.My friends were from all over the world and when youd get on vent and roll with people it was fun.Today its more a single player style game that you can raid if you want to but tbh you dont need other people at all.If you have a full line up of crafters of your own you never have to talk to anyone if you don't want to.You dont need to talk in groups with lfr or lfg.maybe mythic runs now you have to communicate .I miss the server community as well.i was and am proud of my server.We had a tight knit group of players being able to be hey lets run this and know almost everyone in the group you are in was great.Now dont get me wrong the quality of life stuff ie no longer needing ammo,or to feed your pet as a hunter,no longer having to have a ranged weapon as a warrior to pull groups,bigger bags tracking menu on the mini map are all nice things to have.For me as a long time player i miss the server community that i grew to know.
I think some people enjoy the slower pace of vanilla. I.e 'actions per minute' for most classes has skyrocketed since then.
perhaps but it didn't really feel like it was a scaling challenging, it was like, once most of your guild had t5 you basically got free t6. going from t4 to t5 was tougher i think, the bosses in ssc and tk were all quite challenging in themselves (well maybe not loot reaver ofc). where as the only bosses we struggled on really in t6 was archimonde, he took a few raids to finally down. i don't remember black temple being particularly hard, i mean you had gorefiend who would randomly 1 shot the tank off a parry but i was pretty good at that ghost mini game. oh yeah reliquary of souls was a bit shit iirc. it was basically all down to your rogues and yeah well we had good rogues but ya know there were days where they just failed at their kick rotations and it would just be a wipe.
Last edited by Heathy; 2017-01-11 at 01:16 PM.
At the end of the day, it's complicated. In some ways, it was a better game, and in other ways it was a worse game than today.
One of the most important ways that the old game was better is that class / spec made a notable difference in how dungeon and raid runs played out. It wasn't just a matter of bring pretty much any tank, any healer, and any 3 dps (preferably FOTM) because you were reliant on things like cc (and having players that paid good attention to re-ccing). In BC, I was a co-GM / raid leader and ran Kara a lot...but it didn't bother me back then because every time we ran it, I had a different set of classes, and we would have to approach many of the battles differently based on who was in the raid. That was far more enjoyable (to me at least) than today where the movement is more complicated, but the composition of the raid / dungeon run is entirely irrelevant.
I think the story-telling has largely improved with many of the expansions (although I still have a place in my heart for the voice acting for Nethekurse). But many of the other changes have done little to improve the game and are largely a mixed bag of mildly positive and mildly negative changes.