The question seems to come up everywhere.
Lets get a few things straight.
- Graphics are better now
- Gameplay is smoother now
- Connection uptime and overall server stability are better now.
Anyone who argues that or even brings it up are stupid.
However:
- Reasons for participating in world content are lower. World quests are usually a single player element, and world bosses pretty much are taken down in a auto-invite group or simply tagging a boss that a pre-made group has tagged.
- Having to communicate with a group is pretty much non-existant. This is the piece that is majorly different. Doing any dungeon in Vanilla required communication, as the bosses were not 100% documented by websites and other tools.
- Engaging world content for an upgrade is pretty much a non starter. The 3 to 4 quests that really come to mind as super engaging and fun were The Hearthglen questline with Tirion's son, the Onyxia questline for the key to Ony, the key to UBRS, the quests on the AQ line, the World Dragons, the Twilight Hammer in Silithus, and summoning the major bosses. You may not have liked those things, but I did.
Why I liked them. They were difficult. They took some planning. You needed a group to understand what was going on. They forwarded story without feeling like it was on rails.
Why they cant happen again? They were difficult. No one wants that in casual content anymore. We arent talking Mythic here. The real reason for that is that casuals have spoken (Im not saying this is wrong), and they have told Blizz (as their biggest montary contributer) that they dont want difficult content in the world that blocks progression to small group play.
Combine that with the cross realm technology and you feel like everyone you see with a different server name is forgettable, as you wont EVER run into them again, and you have a disengaged system for creating a friend outside of your guild.
What everyone is talking about with Nostalga, and not everyone felt this is in Vanilla, was the common goal scenario, where you felt like a small part of a bigger group that was doing something larger than life. Playing now, you rarely get that feeling. I had it for a second at the beginning of Legion, when we were in blues/epics going into Emerald Nightmare, but it dissipated when we found out how easy normal was. Once we went through it on normal, Heroic was not exciting at all, it felt like a drag. The easy answer is to simply go right to heroic, slam your dick in a door and skip normal. That may be a thing, but lets face it, if there is an easier option, pretty much everyone will take it. It ruins the illusion of the boss and the raid. You can argue its value to the game till your blue in the face, but a raid with a single difficulty is far more satisfying. It feels like you've finished it, rather than ran it. The first kill on a boss is the best feeling, but when its easy its diminished. Why dont more people only do one difficulty? I bet you that half the people cant be bothered, or dont even know that it feels different, as they have filtered in from days past that. Others have to deal with people who dont care about that anymore. Others are really burnt out from the vanilla grind due to crappy guilds and otherwise non-progression. I had the benefit of being in progression throughout vanilla and BC, and it was a blast. Were there times it sucked? Fuck yes. Beating my head off a wall for 3 months on Muru, that was fun.....sigh. However, the grand majority of the time, you felt like you were a part of something bigger.
Community was knowing the alliance and horde heroes of your server. You didnt need to be told you were great, people told you. I remember looking at this T2 warrior in Ironforge and thinking he was the cats meow before I started raiding. It was obvious who was putting in raid time. I know thats all elitist to a generation of participation award winners, but that doesnt make it wrong, just because you dont like that idea. It appealed to me, I wanted to raid to get that. I wanted it to be gated. I didnt care if I never got it, it made me seek out other people who had the same idea that I had, to go do a challenge, to overcome it and not feel like you are taken out of the narrative. Thats the game I paid to play. I know other people dont like that idea, but I did. It was immersive in a way that difficulty levels never could be. Right now, even mentioning the idea that you like having something that someone else doesnt is a fucking war cry to people who want access to everything with no effort. Because of the choices now, guild ARE smaller because they simply dont have to be bigger. Your community of people you deal with on a daily basis is smaller. Does it mean you deal with less a-holes in a day, yes, but they were the people who added color to the group, added drama to the game. Every person who left in a rage was a conversation for a week. It meant sometimes you were that person, but tempers died down, you moved on to another guild, and your social group got bigger. The community aspect is lost for accessibility, and thats ok too, if thats what you want. Im not saying any of that stuff was fun persay, but it was engaging. Many people quit over those things, but a lot also did not. The avrage age of those people were much lower Im assuming then too, which Im sure had plenty to do with it. Some of the people I know have literally grouwn up and had kids over the life of the game, but those people are the ones I talk to, because they are in quild and we all know each other over a long period of time.
Now everything seems smaller. Reminds me of days before the internet and cellphones where things in a way were managed by your group of friends, and not by 1000 anonymous friends. THis really is a microcosm of the world today and when the game started. May seem like a silly statement but it seems to fit, at least to me.