What made classic wow better than current?

[Echocho]

You're not exactly refuting what I said. You know that, right? Why are you playing on those illegal servers? Nostalgia.

I'm not saying that it's not Nostalgia for a lot of people but I don't think that's how Nostalgia works. It can't be something you're currently doing, although I'm not sure, maybe you can do something you did last week again this week out of Nostalgia.

I'm sure a lot of people, myself included are playing Legion because of Nostalgia

[Akka]

You're not exactly refuting what I said. You know that, right? Why are you playing on those illegal servers? Nostalgia.

This argument is stupid beyond belief.
It can't be nostalgia if it's current and ongoing and kept strong.
FFS people, I know you like buzzwords, but it really shows you aren't even understanding what they mean.

[Ielenia]

No, I mean stuff that made classes truely unique and desirable. In WoD so many specs felt the same. I know they had a big focus to bring class identity back in Legion but it is still weak IMO.
Give Paladins strong impactful Auras. Give Shamans important totems for the raid. Let Druids be the only ones that can combat res. Only let Priests give shields to players. Only let Hunters have the kit to kite a mob for a long period of time. Stuff like that.

The issue that comes with that, is that it the "bring the player, not the class" no longer becomes true. We would go back to the inane "we need a druid for combat rez/hunter for misdirect/shaman for heroism/etc" that is a detriment to player freedom of choice, which means players less skilled/geared would be picked instead of better skilled/equipped players, simply because said skilled/equipped players are of the wrong class.

Are you saying that just because I only want 1 difficulty on bosses, they HAVE TO BE 40 man? No. I think some raids should be small, 10 man, and some should be big, 25 man. I don't know if we need 40 man. You know, the TBC model.

That wasn't my point. I was just pointing out the 'difficulty' of vanilla raid fights. If we brought them down to 10/25 man, by today's standards, they'd be around 'Normal' difficulty, I imagine.

Let me flip the reasoning and say that there is no reason a piece of gear should not look like the gear it actually is. How does Transmogification make any sense, from an RPG standpoint?

Seriously? For someone who harps on the 'RPG' element so much, I'm disappointed you asked that question, but here's your answer: one of the cornerstones of RPG, character customization.

So what progression do we have now if you only do random battlegrounds? Paragon level gain satisfaction? Tell me, does anyone actually feel satisfaction from getting a paragon PvP lvl?

Some do gain satisfaction from getting prestige levels alone. Some like the rewards you get with new prestige levels. Some enjoy PvP for what it is: PvP, and doesn't care about titles or prestige levels.

[Charge me Doctor]

No, I mean stuff that made classes truely unique and desirable. In WoD so many specs felt the same. I know they had a big focus to bring class identity back in Legion but it is still weak IMO.
Give Paladins strong impactful Auras. Give Shamans important totems for the raid. Let Druids be the only ones that can combat res. Only let Priests give shields to players. Only let Hunters have the kit to kite a mob for a long period of time. Stuff like that.

Like Retribution Aura, Aura of Mercy, Aura of Sacrifice, Devotion Aura with Aura Mastery?

Like Healing Tide totem, Cloudburst totem, Lightning Surge totem, Windfury totem or Wind Rush totem? In fact, legion totems are best totems for whole wow history. They definitely nailed them this time.

No, that only brings us back to "we need 3 druids per 14 players to be able to do this raid" and to "we balanced this encounter around raids having 5 druids for BRes".

What? Why? That's just ridiculous.

See above. Also, shamans and mages were better at kiting in vanilla.

Are you saying that just because I only want 1 difficulty on bosses, they HAVE TO BE 40 man? No. I think some raids should be small, 10 man, and some should be big, 25 man. I don't know if we need 40 man. You know, the TBC model.

So, when a guild progresses through a patch in 25 tier, next tier is 10 man and this guild needs to pull out 2 more geared tanks for progression or throw 15 players out of water and just let them do their thing? Or should blizzard release "easy" 10 man raid and "hard" 25 man raid? So top guilds will just skip 10 man and go to 25? Or 10 man raid should fill the niche of catch up gear vendor?

Let me flip the reasoning and say that there is no reason a piece of gear should not look like the gear it actually is. How does Transmogification make any sense, from an RPG standpoint?

It makes great standpoint, because by RPing you don't shoot yourself in the leg. If i want to play and RP half-naked orc warrior with troll bloodfury mask on me and giant bloody axe - i should be able to. In old versions of the game i couldn't do that - now i can, and it's great. See? It only adds something to the game without taking something away from it, that's good design. Taking something away "just because" - is bad design.

So what progression do we have now if you only do random battlegrounds? Paragon level gain satisfaction? Tell me, does anyone actually feel satisfaction from getting a paragon PvP lvl?

You get reputation, achievements, AP, and gear.
In Vanilla you could get to rank 10 i thnk without farming group, account sharing and using some dodgy addons that let you make premades for BGs. Also PvP gear was shit for (gasp) PvP, PvE was way better. So, someone who only does RandomBGs now is in way better position that he would be if he did that in Vanilla.


And oh my god people can't grasp a definition of a word. Shit.

[Ielenia]

This argument is stupid beyond belief.
It can't be nostalgia if it's current and ongoing and kept strong.
FFS people, I know you like buzzwords, but it really shows you aren't even understanding what they mean.

It is "ongoing and kept strong" exactly because of nostalgia. If it wasn't for the nostalgia, it wouldn't be "ongoing and kept strong". It was made over ten years ago, and then illegally re-launched several years by a third party later after its run was done. Why? Nostalgia.

[Charge me Doctor]

It wasn't hard when the content was linear, because said content wasn't "old". It's hard now because Blizzard make its own content obsolete through catch-up mechanism and automated progression.

It was hard, because content was old and people were doing it only to get specific items. So if you happen to get into a naxx raiding guild - you can get into "alt runs" for AQ, but you won't get any tanking gear (just as an example) and will have to pass on a lot of shit in favor of regular raiders for couple of weeks. Only THEN you can START gearing up for a raid. It was extremely hard to get into raids and get some loot of it. Sure, you can afk for the most part, but even if you do something - nope, not getting anything unless no one else wants it.

[Sansnom]

So even those that never played it until now and keep playing it on a daily basis are doing it out of nostalgia?

Yes. It can. People re-enact historical events regularly. I doubt those people were alive and lived during those period at the time it happened.

[Deleted]

First of all Vanilla WoW is not inherently "better" than current, that's an objective falsehood at least when comes simply down to game mechanics:

- Itemization was terrible, and stats were designed to try to be "every stats somewhat useful to every class" but was really poorly thought out
- Classes substantially broken resulting in some to be pigeonholed into certain specs
- RPG systems were being "gamed" in ways that were probably unintended (like the downgrade of a skill to a lower rank, because the base value was lower but it scaled pretty much the same)
- Designs on boss encounter were flat and uninteresting until AQ40/20 where they got spiced a bit.
- Quest flow was extremely fragmented with tens of levels of gaps with no quests every now and then, which resulted in those "long" leveling times that some people still think were due to how "difficult" they remember the game was (hint, it wasn't there were maybe a COUPLE of elite quests here and there that required parties, but mobs were pretty much either tank and spank or were surrounded by several normal mobs "OH, THE HUMANITY")
- Grinding resist gear.

However the reason why was "better" were pretty much threefold:
1 - when WoW came out it was the "right product at the right time". The only competition were dying MMOs like DAoC, Everquest, and Ultima online, some other were in development (like Wish) but bombed harder than throwing an elephant from outer space.
2 - Despite the bugs that were inevitable, even despite the game breaking bugs and server situation and shit WoW was an *incredibly well polished games* both for the time and relative to the state competitors came out at release.
3 - the game was new and the terrain to cover was reasonably vast and varied. (though most of the space was pretty much empty)

If you played DAoC at the very beginning and played WoW at the very beginning, the difference was an Abyss of the kind that looked back at you multiple times while try to dirty talk you into tentacle sex. As a consequence due to how usually super buggy and unstable MMOs tended to be at release, expectations were *insanely low* as people pretty much expected a game that was near unplayable until several patches later (your personal experience of those expectations may vary), imagine the surprise when they logged (when they managed) and while the game had bugs was perfectly playable and actually enjoyable.

Also MMOs were not a product for the masses, they were pretty much a very tight niche due to subscription and the requirement for internet connection at a good speed, there were few "experienced" people. When WoW came out it saw a mass influx not only of those experienced MMO players but also of people that never touched an MMO in their life and were unfamiliar with mechanics and group content and raids. The skill ceiling was insanely low, so low that bosses in MC were a challenge despite having like 2 abilities each and most classes having a one button rotation. This obviously, alongside the fact that logistically 40 man raids are a nightmare, extended the time in which that content remained relevant.

Fast forward to today:
- Market is saturated with MMOs, that are pretty much reasonably well polished at release and this in return increases baseline expectations
- Due to the fact that WoW has been around for long every expectation in regard of the game is so high that if it could be concretized in the length of a physical rope it would probably reach alpha centauri by now
- Same for classes, before people were pretty happy they could be effective in their role or the niche their role entailed (though there 40 man raids helped as there was plenty of space for everyone), now they want their role to be effective at everything
- People are much more experienced now than they were then, after 10 years, so even if the content is harder than before it didn't scale as much in relation to how much more skilled people are in average so it seems "easier". Bosses tend to fall faster than before. (also next point actually help increasing this perception)
- The omnipresence of online resources, everything is spoiled beforehand there are guides for raid encounter and classes, addons providing tons of additional info and timers and radars and arrows and maps for nodes and rares and shit and stuff and this and that.
- As the time moved forward player became more and more obsessed with the mechanics of their classes and how these worked and optimizations and DPS and stats and other crap, the game moved more and more from RPG to more of an action oriented game with a story on the side, mechanics become tighter at expenses of lore/RPG elements.

WoW was "better" because at the time was new and exciting, it was all to explore you didn't really have addons or resources revealing to you every shit that was around and telling you how to do everything and players were actually PLAYING the game instead of passing their time reading guides or reading wowhead or getting guided by addons.

My overabundant 2 cents

[Littleraven]

It wasn't. People just look back at it fondly because it was new and most people had never played an MMO before. The only argument I could even make for it is that things felt more rewarding but that may also go back to it being new. The current game is better in just about every way.

[Ielenia]

My overabundant 2 cents

I agree 100%. It's something that's been said over and over, about the "right place, right time" and all the competition stuff, back then and today, but it bears repeating.

[Darsithis]

And I have to correct you for the 4th time :
Your definition of nostalgia is false. Get a hint already, you're just being annoying oblivious about it, without the excuse of not being corrected. Learn to read the fucking definition.

A sentimental longing for the past.

What is classic? The past. What do people want to do? Experience it again. Nostalgia.

Like I said more than once, that doesn't mean they can't end up preferring it over the latest version of the game, but unless you've been playing classic for 12 years straight, a desire to go back to classic is fueled initially by nostalgia.

We all experience it. Every time I end up in Howling Fjord it takes me back so many years. I even signed up for a private server once just to experience Auberdine again. There is nothing wrong with it, but it does help people to completely forget all of the terrible, annoying aspects of WoW from 5, 7, 10, 12 years ago.

[Vash The Stampede]

WoW was easiest available MMO on the market, where do you pull "high difficulty" bullshit from?

Considering how few MMO's there were back then, I don't see how relevant this is? It's not like today where everyone is trying to make a MMO.

It was known for being way less grindy and way more noob-friendly game than EQ, or lineage for example. You could be absolute noob who only does auto-attacks and backpedals (why did you even need to backpedal? there was almost no boss mechanics that required you to move away) and do just fine, if not great.

The difference in difficulty from Vanilla and Legion is probably greater than EQ and Vanilla. Yes it's a noob friendly game, but it also challenged you. Without challenge it becomes a grind. Not so much a game but a job that you pay monthly to experience.

And with challenge players expect rewards. Part of the problem with todays WoW is all that hard work is completely thrown in the trash when a new patch or expansion is out. Where on a private server that's never going to happen, so long as it stays running. Admittedly, players back then never thought about the idea of an expansion. When TBC was released players weren't happy they were vending their epics for quest greens. Which was because the amount of stamina on the gear was huge compared to what you got in Vanilla.

The last sentence is true - MMO is very repetitive, if you don't like repetitive content - you won't like MMO. Every expansion is the same shit, level, gear up, do raids. Now blizzard realized that they don't have a second arthas to bring people back - they have to be creative, that's why we have way more content now than before - so people won't leave after playing for a month. It's like people complaining about diablo (pure hack&slash) "you just kill monsters all the time and loot useless shit". Yeah, exactly, that's the fun part of it. If you don't like it - move on to the next game.

There was ways to make a game more engaging without having to reinvent the wheel. I actually liked the idea that Monks were going to play like Street Fighter type gameplay, unlike the current system most classes have. Alas, they scraped the idea and Monks got abilities similar to how other classes work, and now they're the least played class in the game. Blizzard could have updated their game engine and put new features in like physics or destructible environments. God knows their game engine really needs a major overhaul. How long did it take Blizzard to implement voice talk into the game? A feature that's been around long before WoW's release. Blizzard just isn't very interested in putting resources into WoW. They haven't been for a whle.

[Usagi Senshi]

Definitely nostalgia as I rather play Legion than that old, ugly, and mechanically inferior PoS and I put 150+ days played in vanilla. The game got better better in TBC and it really got good once Wrath launched.

I won't lie and say I didn't have fun but somethings really aren't worth repeating.

Vanilla WoW most certainly isn't in the same nostalgia league when it comes to old games like Super Mario Bros 2/3/World, Super Ghouls and Ghosts. Sonic 3&Knuckles, etc, still being fun, challenging, and more entertaining to watch.

[Dormie]

Nostalgia.
By Oxford Dictionaries: "A sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past."
By Collins Dictionaries: "a yearning for the return of past circumstances, events, etc."

So basically, you're experiencing nostalgia every time you feel like playing WoW, even if it's legion. So it's meaningless.
I guess everything in my memory I've ever enjoyed is just nostalgia. Darn!

[Darsithis]

I play vanilla for 30 hours per week all year round. I can't really feel nostalgic about something I do on a daily basis can I? I mean I spend 3 hours per week playing Legion, if anything that's the game nostalgia should kick in for given that I haven't played it in almost a week but I played vanilla yesterday.

So basically, you're experiencing nostalgia every time you feel like playing WoW, even if it's legion. So it's meaningless.
I guess everything in my memory I've ever enjoyed is just nostalgia. Darn!

No one is saying that it's nostalgia to continue to do something. All we're saying is the original desire to return to something was fueled by it. It doesn't stay that way, of course, but that is how it started out.

[Ielenia]

So basically, you're experiencing nostalgia every time you feel like playing WoW, even if it's legion. So it's meaningless.
I guess everything in my memory I've ever enjoyed is just nostalgia. Darn!

There is a difference between continuing to do something, and want to return to something you're no longer doing.

[Heathy]

I'm firmly of the opinion that a true reliving of classic can't happen twice, the uncertainty of those days is just gone, a large part of the draw to that time was the not knowing.

all in all its really a much better game today, for everyone, not just those with insane amounts of time to play, although mythic raiding is a thing and if you have lots of time to wipe practising the content, you can still go for prestige.

I think i'm having more fun levelling alts today than i did back in vanilla, most alts never saw a raid today you can get an alt to a certain ilvl plateau and have a decent chance of pugging previous tiers.

in the end playing the game is the fun part, not standing around waiting for something to happen or waiting for raid day. getting to make decent progress on alts extends the longevity of the game for many ppl, i'm doing a pala alt atm i'm saved to nearly everything this week so now i got time to do an alt, playing alts in vanilla was the ONLY thing to do and they didn't get to raid, very few ppl bothered with pugs because they would usually be fail unless the guild running the pug were willing to carry everyone the pugging scene for raids was practically dead in classic. there were occasional MC pugs but only toward the end of vanilla the latter part of 2006 i remember weekly MC pugs started happening, but for the majority of vanilla i saw no pugs.

today the skill of the average player and the premade group finder/creator lets ppl pug mythic, twice now i've pugged nyth and ursoc easy bosses to pug, put a bunch of keyboard turners and clickers into a mythic raid today and it'll be a wipe in the first 10 seconds.

a lot of the nostalgia pieces i've read are from ppl reminiscing about getting killed by quest mobs at level 10 or 20, as if the game revolved around dying to quest mobs at low levels, well you can still get one shotted in mythic plus, pretty much everything you can avoid in a mythic 14-15 will one shot you if you don't move or interrupt. the difficulty of the game has scaled to beyond masochism levels.

[Deleted]

Eh we kind of saw how it went with the Molten Core thing. I just don't think it would be well received and would piss off even more people.

Personally my stance has always been this. Do the servers or don't. Either way I'm happy. However I am Pro Legacy so it's a weird way of looking at it I admit.

The problem with the molten core event was that no bosses had anything on them except ragnaros. It was doing a 1½ hour run for the "chance" of something dropping and those were merely cosmetics and not even transmog of maybe a different color.

[Akka]

It was hard, because content was old and people were doing it only to get specific items. So if you happen to get into a naxx raiding guild - you can get into "alt runs" for AQ, but you won't get any tanking gear (just as an example) and will have to pass on a lot of shit in favor of regular raiders for couple of weeks. Only THEN you can START gearing up for a raid. It was extremely hard to get into raids and get some loot of it. Sure, you can afk for the most part, but even if you do something - nope, not getting anything unless no one else wants it.

You're describing someone who is being carried here. I'm talking about the fact that there always was several guilds progressing at every single step.
Even at the tail end of TBC, there was still new guilds discovering Kara, for whose the T4 content was not only relevant but actually "progression".

Yes. It can. People re-enact historical events regularly. I doubt those people were alive and lived during those period at the time it happened.

That's just not what "nostalgia" means. This is completely nonsensical.

First of all Vanilla WoW is not inherently "better" than current, that's an objective falsehood at least when comes simply down to game mechanics:

And that's objectively wrong, because your list of game mechanics isn't "objective" ("itemization was terrible" for example is a terrible argument, I won't find a game more fun just because items have the most efficiently distributed stat, that's just dumb) and is even downright false (there was never, ever, any moment in Vanilla where there were no quests available for your level ; this is a complete forum hoax with no basis on reality).

- - - Updated - - -

No one is saying that it's nostalgia to continue to do something. All we're saying is the original desire to return to something was fueled by it. It doesn't stay that way, of course, but that is how it started out.

You have a serious problem at getting meaning from description, and an even more serious problem at realizing how wrong your definitions are if you actually apply them...

Phumbles perfectly describe the total absurdity of your definition : if you play Legion now, it's nostalgia, because you wish to return to play the game after not playing it for eight hours. This fits your definition. It's downright stupid. Yet you still consider your definition is correct. Hello ?

[Deleted]

The community may have been better, nothing else was. Anyone who genuinely thinks differently will be remembering the good things, and not the very annoying details; such as having to keep a supply of arrows as a Hunter, or maintaining 2 minute Paladin blessings - on up to 40 people.