What made classic wow better than current?

[Deleted]

Wasn't better, its better now by far.
If WoW was now like was in vanilla will have half of the players, players want get things fast. Vanilla was slow, leveling was slow like hell, all was slow to get.
When u have a fast car, u dont want a slow car anymore.

[Deleted]

for me personally this cant be talked about in terms of one being better than the other based on facts. (based on facts itll become a hazardous discussion).

Its more a feeling for me personally. Im currently having a ton of fun in legion even tho im not raiding anymore. But in general classic wow and my first experiences there feel like the junkie chasing that first high. I still get that overwhelming nostalgic feeling of running on the (now northern) barrens in the evening and hearing the music the zone has. Also certain "depth" that some classes had appealed to me more than the way it is now. Class quests on my rogue along with leveling poisons and lockpicing for instance. I loved it. it felt it fit the theme for me. Same for my druid having to do quests to get certain forms was awesome.

Nowadays it feels much more one dimensional. Having said that a lot of other things are much better these days. Its evolution...it has things i like and things i like less. later xpacs will surely make me say the same about legion (or whatever other xpac)

[Dergiab]

Of course WoW vanilla is not better in terms of mechanics, confort and technology. But as Raenor here just said, it was different and some people preferred that. No need for the usual fanboys on both sides to say "wah wah vanilla sucked Legion is perfect game" or "Legion is just bad, vanilla was perfect". Both are lies and try to pass subjective opinions as facts.

However I won't retract my statement on WoW poor RPG experience. To me WoW vanilla was already bad in terms of RPG, I'm not arguing on that.

I sadly think being so reasonable on these forums is against the rules IME.

[enragedgorilla]

It was "new" for 1 .
It was not 10 + years old for 2.
It did not have a contingent of players that had spent 1/2 their lives playing the game and developing Rose colored vision for 3.

Soo...a lot of superficial and subjective opinion stuff that has no actual FACT based influence on the actual Game as it stands today.

[Echo of Soul]

It was "new" for 1 .
It was not 10 + years old for 2.
It did not have a contingent of players that had spent 1/2 their lives playing the game and developing Rose colored vision for 3.

Soo...a lot of superficial and subjective opinion stuff that has no actual FACT based influence on the actual Game as it stands today.

Preference is by definition subjective. There are no facts to had in a situation like that. Vanilla isn't new anymore and it's over 12 years old, I still like it more than Legion, but that's my subjective opinion, just as your Legion preference is yours.

[Akka]

Wasn't better, its better now by far.
If WoW was now like was in vanilla will have half of the players

Well, from player activity it seems to actually be the case, Legion having half the player count that Vanilla had

[Phlegethon]

It was. By far.

I'm sorry, you don't seem to have played before WOTLK. Vanilla was new and exciting, but it was never better than what we have now.
I do not long for that days that you had to sit in orgr/sw for hours on end to find a group for Scholo/strat or UBRS, only to be heartstoning back just when you were at the dungeon to find a new xxx because yours had to go for dinner. Fuck that shit.
Nor do I long for the days that leveling was a process of several months of running around on the whole of Azeroth or grinding stuff was actually grinding stuff for hours on end.
What I did like was running into MC with my guild and wiping on the first two behemoths, or server first Ossirian with 2 groups. I had a nice guild.

But the game sucked in comparison.

- - - Updated - - -

Well, from player activity it seems to actually be the case, Legion having half the player count that Vanilla had

Well that's "alternative facts" (better known as a false statement or just "fake news" these days)

[Deleted]

It was just a different game.

I wanted to say it was better because that is what I feel when I think about it. But, if I want to be honest and treat the new game with respect I'm just going to say that it was a tottaly different game.

It was a timesink, it was grindy, it was slow. But at the same time it created a connection with your char and truly imitated an open online world.

The WoW we have now is great in many ways, but its not an MMO right now - it's has more of a MOBA feeling with rpg elements.

And the gear look now is just ridiculously epic. I persnally can't stand the fact that you cannot distinguish a powerful hero from a noobie - everybody looks like super-mega-hyper hero. In vanilla you had to really work on your char to be somone. And it's not a joke - before TBC and other expansions the gear had a lot of variety. TBC introduced a lot of the same looking armors with different colours and it has been like this since then. I mean how many different pieces of questing armor does legion have? like 1 for each type? with 5 different colors? that is just a joke.

I gave Legion one last chance but I'm quiting and now for real. This game has lots of things to do but is not fun for me anymore. I liked the times when seeing raid content made you someone. Now its only about mythic which doesnt even give you better looking gear sometimes than LFR. It's just not a game for me anymore.

So, you are playing games to be a special snowflake? Is a real life fail so strong within you that you need games for some sort of psycho therapy? I'm not trolling you but this is a pattern I'm seeing in alot of players. Games are entertainment and should be treated as such and when you're not having fun anymore you quit, plain and simple.

[Akka]

Well that's "alternative facts" (better known as a false statement or just "fake news" these days)

Yeah yeah I know, when it goes your way it's "evidence", when it goes against it's "falsehood".
FACT (like, you know, reality) is, player activity was pretty strongly correlated with sub in WoD, so in the absence of verifiable direct stat, I'll keep it as a relatively fiable indicator. When you have something better than denial to propose as counter, wake me up.

[Relapses]

Yeah yeah I know, when it goes your way it's "evidence", when it goes against it's "falsehood".
FACT (like, you know, reality) is, player activity was pretty strongly correlated with sub in WoD, so in the absence of verifiable direct stat, I'll keep it as a relatively fiable indicator. When you have something better than denial to propose as counter, wake me up.

I really hope you understand how insane you sound. If you're going to make an outrageous claim like Legion having half the player count of Vanilla, at least back it up with evidence further than a couple fucking bar graphs from unreliable sources. (I'll give you a hint: You can't since Blizzard doesn't release this information.)

[tankbug]

Well, classic wow is a lot worse, so I can't answer that question. But I think that my enjoyment of the game peaked during the first year, where I had this immense world in a franchise I loved to explore. So much mystery and excitement! Too bad superior gameplay and graphics can't compete with that.

[Akka]

I really hope you understand how insane you sound. If you're going to make an outrageous claim like Legion having half the player count of Vanilla, at least back it up with evidence further than a couple fucking bar graphs from unreliable sources. (I'll give you a hint: You can't since Blizzard doesn't release this information.)

=>
FACT (like, you know, reality) is, player activity was pretty strongly correlated with sub in WoD, so in the absence of verifiable direct stat, I'll keep it as a relatively fiable indicator.

If that sounds "insane" to you, despite providing a) a source, b) an argument why the source is considered adequate, c) recognition the source is only an approximation, then the problem is more probably you. For someone who claims to be on the side of logic, you seem to have a pretty impressive ability to filter out any part of said logic which doesn't conform with your opinions.

[Celadir]

Nostalgia.

Really, that's most of it. We remember what we love fondly and forget its faults. Vanilla WoW was a good game for the year it released. If it was released today as a $15 a month MMO, it would not be received well. It was also the first MMO for many people. That holds a lot of weight.

This is what will always, for me, place classic WoW at such a high tier. I remember seeing the portal on the login screen with the music for the first time...man, good times. They've improved significantly with a lot of features, but for most I'd say Aoyi pretty much hit the target.

[Deleted]

Overwatch is going to fade away overtime. It's innovative in that unlike TF2 they have female characters and characters with ethnicity from around the globe. But that's when the good stops, and when the bad starts. You can't make custom maps like in TF2. No custom servers, no custom game modes, no custom sprays, and no movie maker. Basically they're like Apple in that you can have whatever you want, so long as chosen from their selection. If TF2 were to release female models, I could see OverWatch being completely forgotten.

But it's easy to see that a lot of game design philosophy from WoW and D3 have made it's way to OverWatch. People are creative and like to express their creativity and that includes games. I can't tell you how many times I rolled my eyes when I open a loot box to find more sprays. Just about every other online FPS allows you to use custom sprays.

Yeah...just no

[Eleccybubb]

This is what will always, for me, place classic WoW at such a high tier. I remember seeing the portal on the login screen with the music for the first time...man, good times. They've improved significantly with a lot of features, but for most I'd say Aoyi pretty much hit the target.

The funny part is people think nostalgia is an insult. It really isn't. I collect and play retro games partly because of nostalgia. People who enjoy vanilla can enjoy it because of nostalgia it's not a bad thing at all. I sit on my Sega Saturn for example because I remember playing it as a kid and all the fond memories it brought back. Nostalgia always plays a part for me when playing something retro.

Never understood why some people perceive nostalgia as a bad thing.

[Paarthurnax]

The only main thing that was better was the community of players. people were generally better at the game or had to be given how hard even group content was so it was either you got to a certain in-game skill level to do anything or you got left out. This lead to an overall game community that was above average in general competency and also the fact that it was much larger at that time then it is now made things feel much different.

There is nothing in the current game that challenges you to become a better player besides high level M+ or Mythic Raiding. Back then pretty much everything did that, and the game benefited greatly.

P.S. I will agree that on a game design level the game as it stands now is miles ahead of where it was in classic, its not even close.

[Akka]

The funny part is people think nostalgia is an insult. It really isn't.

1) It's not an insult, but it's used as such.
2) It's used to dismiss opinions by switching the argument to "nostalgia".
3) It's used wrongly, because many arguments are completely unrelated to it.
4) Even after everything above have been repeated 10 000 times, it's completely ignored.

These are the reasons why there is some measurable irritation.

[lavaalamp]

When you're told it's Just nostalgia but you never even played in vanilla during it's time and enjoy it more than Current wow : /. the two are so far apart in gameplay/content that they're not even the same game anymore, there's a reason vanilla was revived.

I Enjoy vanilla wow more so than Legion (not as much as MoP or Wrath though)

[Deleted]

1) It's not an insult, but it's used as such.
2) It's used to dismiss opinions by switching the argument to "nostalgia".
3) It's used wrongly, because many arguments are completely unrelated to it.
4) Even after everything above have been repeated 10 000 times, it's completely ignored.

These are the reasons why there is some measurable irritation.

Its also the fact that people think a game quality can be measured only by so called "objective elements" such as interface, confort, technology,etc...

Of course in this case WoW has evolved and added things. But things such as confort can mean different stuff. Someone who only cares about completing a dungeon for the sake of it will see LFG/LFR as a good thing and won't be arsed to actually form a group and travel to the area manually. Because why would they? The average gamer is completely opposed to any form of immersion or roleplay. You have this huge environment called Azeroth and yet its nothing but barren lands because players only care about the loot and the shiny purple gear and bragging rights. This is the type of player Blizzard is catering to nowadays for everyone of their games.

The same goes for buying ammunition, poison,unlocking totems,etc... people now don't want any of that, its a race to the absolutely overrated piece of crap called "endgame" which is nothing but brainless grinding and muscle memory (at least personally I see it that way and don't get the whole hype about arena or mythic raiding).

The game has evolved to cater to a certain demographic of players who play MMOs as "just another game" and have no time to care about immersion, roleplay or quality story writing. Get rid of the gear grind and 99% of the playerbase will quit in two days the game.

[thunterman]

Back then you had incentive to talk to people because everything was hard. Friends made things easy, if not possible. With Legion why waste my time talking to people if I get the job done faster and better? The only exception to this is Mythic raiding, which I don't do due to lack of good incentives.

High end raiding back in Vanilla had no real incentive other than the feeling of accomplishment you and your friends got at the end of it. The exact same as today, funnily enough. So because what you personally do is not hard enough, you've become unsocial? Yea... The problem is still you I'm afraid. Not the game itself. Keep trying?

And when they built that game, and all that content, they didn't have a game at all, just the hope that one day they could build something that would have half a million paying players. Now they have millions of players giving them more money than they could ever have dreamed of back when they started, and an expansion that costs the same as the original game gives you a handful of zones.

So no, it's not "impossible" as you say. They just don't want to put the time, money and effort into it when they have customers who seem to be satisfied with scraps instead of a feast. And a roller-coaster instead of a off-road adventure. Sad really.

Yea, maybe they could use all that money to buy a time machine and develop unlimited content. Game development is a tricky thing, throwing money at it doesn't improve the end result, it requires passion, which Blizzard have, and time, which they don't. You could throw 10,000 developers at WoW and it probably wouldn't speed anything up, infact, it would probably make it worse, because work would conflict often, things would break more. It's one of those things, We need content faster than we have received it in the past, the compromise is that what we get wont be mind-boglingly huge. And to be fair, Legion has a hell of allot to do, I'm impressed at what they've achieved, even with the bits I hate more than anything in the history of the game..