What made classic wow better than current?

[Kyanion]

Ofc it's not vanilla, being vanilla like is already a good step in the right direction. Please don't use the mechanics argument Kyanion, there where and still are countless examples of under/over tunning or just simply broken fights in Retail Vanilla, Legion or any other.

Would you agree that any version of Blizzard Vanilla was better than the most polished PS? If you say no then I really have to wonder what you are talking about because even the most 'popular' one before its death knell had multiple issues that people talked about in these forums in the megathread. I agree that Blizzard tuning is not perfect and likely will never be perfect but they do a damn good job with this game over the past 12 years and you know it.

It may be a 'good step' in the right direction but I think any goodwill they earned has long since evaporated.

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Broken fights like what? I can count 1 broken fight and 2 overtuned fights in the history of the game. C'thun, Kael and Vashj, respectively.

And the quality of tuning has been better over the years due to the PTR but on the flip side that comes with many fights being downed far quicker because of all the testing.

[voidillusion]

Would you agree that any version of Blizzard Vanilla was better than the most polished PS? If you say no then I really have to wonder what you are talking about because even the most 'popular' one before its death knell had multiple issues that people talked about in these forums in the megathread. I agree that Blizzard tuning is not perfect and likely will never be perfect but they do a damn good job with this game over the past 12 years and you know it.

It may be a 'good step' in the right direction but I think any goodwill they earned has long since evaporated.

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And the quality of tuning has been better over the years due to the PTR but on the flip side that comes with many fights being downed far quicker because of all the testing.

Not only do i agree with that, despite several issues and persisting bugs that the game had, but i and others also want exactly that. One of the main points, it not the principal point, of the pseudo pro legacy movement is to have official blizzard servers replicating the original experience, provided by blizzard.

And i also agree that they got better with time, but that's is the expected, after 12 years if they had the same lvl of expertise it would be worrying.

[Demithio]

same oppinion here.

ofc the mmorpg genre was freh in 2005 for the mass audience (star wars galaxies and ultima existed long before for the mmorpg crowd). after the hype of wow mmorpg elements influenced every fukin game out there (even sports games). so mmorpg stops relative early to feel fresh. and as above said every expac is the same in its core.

but i dont think thats the reason the playerbase lost half of their ppl. i have a few reasons for that:

1)
every day a new 12 year old kid is born, never played a mmorpg. the wow universe could be a great thing to a 12 year old kid. will say: there are always new ppl which are not "through" all the wow stuff and have the repetitive feeling after expac nr 35272635.

2)
you have a crowd. called ppl playing EXACTLY that game or genre they like most. and they playin it because of it is IT. they not even dont care when every xpac is the same with different color/world/quests/bosses, because thats what they like, no, they even WANT that behaviour. so why they should leave ?

3)
statistic wise the "half playerbase lost, bc of gettin old" argument can not survive.

so, my oppinion is, like the quited one, they changed things too much, lost a great part of their crowd, to target the mass audience. but they do not get as much out of the mass audience, as they would get out of a directly targeted crowd. this is mostly because the mass audience standard casual gamer play that game 2-3 months and leaves the game forever. imo they underestimated the value of long term customers playing the game cause of they are the crowd of the game.

you can see this when you look at the subscriber numbers. exactly at the moment they start targeting the mass audience better, it goes down down down. before (mid-last Wotlk) it was up up up.

imo blizzard made a huge mistake when they changed their targeted audience to a mass audience. the jerks of all trades never left the casino with full bags of money, at the end of the day.

This. Blizzard cut their own wrists by changing the formula and catering almost fully to casuals. Instead of alienating their original, long term player base, they should have made minor changes for casuals and worked on keeping the real fans happy. They never realized that most casuals usually have a short attention span when it comes to keeping with any particular game. The original formula (vanilla/TBC - or even wotlk) would have produced much better retention over a longer period. The casuals stilled played back in the vanilla / TBC days, they adjusted to the game. they adapted, and learned to play the game as it was designed. Yes, some washed out, but that can be expected with any game. WoW also kept mostly full retention of the original player base back in that period. Now, the 'hardcores' are mostly all gone due to being alienated by the content, and the casuals fade in and out of the game when they get bored.

I for one would be still be paying and playing if Blizzard had stuck to the original formula. Perhaps not as much as I used to, but I would still be subscribed and doing what I could with the time I have. As it sits now, and for the foreseeable future, I have zero intentions of ever subscribing again.

[Effenz]

This. Blizzard cut their own wrists by changing the formula and catering almost fully to casuals. Instead of alienating their original, long term player base, they should have made minor changes for casuals and worked on keeping the real fans happy. They never realized that most casuals usually have a short attention span when it comes to keeping with any particular game. The original formula (vanilla/TBC - or even wotlk) would have produced much better retention over a longer period. The casuals stilled played back in the vanilla / TBC days, they adjusted to the game. they adapted, and learned to play the game as it was designed. Yes, some washed out, but that can be expected with any game. WoW also kept mostly full retention of the original player base back in that period. Now, the 'hardcores' are mostly all gone due to being alienated by the content, and the casuals fade in and out of the game when they get bored.

I for one would be still be paying and playing if Blizzard had stuck to the original formula. Perhaps not as much as I used to, but I would still be subscribed and doing what I could with the time I have. As it sits now, and for the foreseeable future, I have zero intentions of ever subscribing again.

I disagree. Blizzard makes more content for people willing to push their characters now than they ever did.
If you want to be hardcore, you 100% can be. You can and will be tested to the absolute limits of your personal performance.
Hardcore people are still there; they are the people pushing mythics past 15, these are the people pushing world firsts.

The dishonesty never ends.

[Desparil]

I disagree. Blizzard makes more content for people willing to push their characters now than they ever did.
If you want to be hardcore, you 100% can be. You can and will be tested to the absolute limits of your personal performance.
Hardcore people are still there; they are the people pushing mythics past 15, these are the people pushing world firsts.

The dishonesty never ends.

Butbutbut they killed boss in lfr so there is not point of killing it on mythic

[Effenz]

Butbutbut they killed boss in lfr so there is not point of killing it on mythic

Totally. Game was better with 1 difficulty anyway.

[Demithio]

I disagree. Blizzard makes more content for people willing to push their characters now than they ever did.
If you want to be hardcore, you 100% can be. You can and will be tested to the absolute limits of your personal performance.
Hardcore people are still there; they are the people pushing mythics past 15, these are the people pushing world firsts.

The dishonesty never ends.

I think you, like many who repeat the same thing over and over, are mistaking overall game design philosophy with absolute difficulty. Raid / dungeon difficulty is not the glaring issue, if you ever bothered reading the numerous posts here about the issues with game design and why it lacks a compelling elements you would understand that.

[Effenz]

I think you, like many who repeat the same thing over and over, are mistaking overall game design philosophy with absolute difficulty. Raid / dungeon difficulty is not the glaring issue, if you ever bothered reading the numerous posts here about the issues with game design and why it lacks a compelling elements you would understand that.

Tedium isn't a compelling element.
Design philosophy? You mean actually requiring people to play to their best ability rather than play a certain class is worse? You mean being unable to play 2/3 of the specs for a LOT of classes in a group/raid environment was a good thing? Lol. Sure.

Raid/dungeon philosophy back then was bad.

[Effenz]

It's about a continuous journey vs a repetitive. Running on a treadmill can be just as challenging as running outside but you're not seeing something new, you can't look behind you how far you've come or ahead to see how long you still have to go, you only have numbers on a screen telling you.
Non linear progression lacks immersion and satisfaction. It's like D3, you're gearing for gearing's sake, not in order to see something new, and you keep doing the same thing over and over again, just making your enemies stronger.

You make it sound like you did a dungeon once in vanilla and never again, which was never the case.
You still farmed the absolute fuck out of content to get gear. Miss me with the bullshit.

[Demithio]

Tedium isn't a compelling element.
Design philosophy? You mean actually requiring people to play to their best ability rather than play a certain class is worse? You mean being unable to play 2/3 of the specs for a LOT of classes in a group/raid environment was a good thing? Lol. Sure.

Raid/dungeon philosophy back then was bad.

Tedium to you is adventure and involved game play to others. Some here like having to go to A through Z to obtain objective X. Some, like yourself I'm guessing, only want to do step A and out pops objective X.

In regards to 'pigeon holing' classes during vanilla in regards to raiding, yes, it was a bit that way. However, TBC (and we can safely say that TBC was still very much in the original formula vein) brought classes out of that issue. I GMed and raid lead a well performing guild throughout TBC. My druids were no longer just healing, they were tanking or damage dealing, my priests were to no longer just healing, they were damage dealing, same applies to paladins, warriors and most other classes. So, where is your argument for that time period? And, people like you will still resist TBC-like game play regardless of what actually went on. Because it was still too limited? There was no "easy mode"? Or was it just the 'pain in the ass' factor of the overall game design that a number of you can't handle dealing with?

[Effenz]

Yes but it's a huge difference in doing one dungeon 10 times for a reward versus doing a dungeon 10 times in one difficulty, and then 10 more times in another difficulty, and then 10 more times in another difficulty, and then 10 more times in another difficulty, all for the same reward with bigger numbers attached to it.

Literally noone but the world first crowd does that.
You do the dungeon at the difficulty appropriate to you. You *can* in theory do that, but noone apart from the people looking to maximize their chances at a certain item do that. It's circumventing the lockout in a way, i guess.

BUT.

There is no difference between running MC 20 times and N NH 10 times and H NH 10 times.

[helic]

It was more mysterious, I played to learn and have fun at a time when everyone was playing to learn and have fun. Now it's just min/max with the minimum amount of effort possible.

[Effenz]

Tedium to you is adventure and involved game play to others. Some here like having to go to A through Z to obtain objective X. Some, like yourself I'm guessing, only want to do step A and out pops objective X.

In regards to 'pigeon holing' classes during vanilla in regards to raiding, yes, it was a bit that way. However, TBC (and we can safely say that TBC was still very much in the original formula vein) brought classes out of that issue. I GMed and raid lead a well performing guild throughout TBC. My druids were no longer just healing, they were tanking or damage dealing, my priests were to no longer just healing, they were damage dealing, same applies to paladins, warriors and most other classes. So, where is your argument for that time period? And, people like you will still resist TBC-like game play regardless of what actually went on. Because it was still too limited? There was no "easy mode"? Or was it just the 'pain in the ass' factor of the overall game design that a number of you can't handle dealing with?

Pigeonholing was still a thing way into TBC. WoTLK was the expansion that killed pigeonholing. I cleared all content pre nerf in TBC and yes, pigeonholing was still a thing. Shaman? LOL. Spec deep enough in enhance for imp windfury and go resto. Hunter? BM or gtfo my raid. Mage? Make water and leave. Warlock? Destro or no thanks. Rogues? Combat swords or nothing. Sure, you could get by with bad specs, just as you could in vanilla. But you had to really, really want them, enough to hamper your performance to have them.

[Warmage]

The fact that it was new, an entire world to explore.
Now we are already used to it and new zone is not as "new" as it was the first time.

[Akka]

And yet Blizzard, who has all the data of what players actually did, obviously agrees with me, not with you. After BC they never toyed with removing catchup mechanics. The data were obviously quite compelling.

And they lost half to two third of their customers. Guess they, you know, might have been wrong when analyzing their data.

[Effenz]

There's a huge difference. Working for weeks or even months in order to get to the last boss and then finally downing him vs downing him on day one and then spending maybe a week or two progressing in order to kill him yet again, and then going into farm mode for months.

So essentially you want to afk farm repetitive braindead content ad nauseum? Just join a guild with no aspirations to go further than normal. Or do LFR. Most people, since vanilla, usually want to do harder content when the current raid becomes too easy. But again, I do know of people that did nothing of MC throughout the lifespan of vanilla.

If you want to progress slowly over months, just go do LFR. It's timegated to simulate the progression.

Btw the reason why progression took long in vanilla was due to logistical/strategical issues, i.e people being bad/not knowing strats/not being available.
All of the pirate server raids clear content on the first go. Again, miss me with the bullshit. The vanilla progression model is dead, and for good reason too.

[Akka]

Pigeonholing was still a thing way into TBC. WoTLK was the expansion that killed pigeonholing. I cleared all content pre nerf in TBC and yes, pigeonholing was still a thing. Shaman? LOL. Spec deep enough in enhance for imp windfury and go resto. Hunter? BM or gtfo my raid. Mage? Make water and leave. Warlock? Destro or no thanks. Rogues? Combat swords or nothing. Sure, you could get by with bad specs, just as you could in vanilla. But you had to really, really want them, enough to hamper your performance to have them.

Seems exactly as today : one spec produces better result, and bleeding edge raiders only use such spec to get the absolute best output.
And everyone else plays the spec they like. As someone said, "no one but the world first crowd does that".

[Effenz]

Seems exactly as today : one spec produces better result, and bleeding edge raiders only use such spec to get the absolute best output.
And everyone else plays the spec they like. As someone said, "no one but the world first crowd does that".

False.
It's not a case of "one spec does marginally better" like today
It's "one spec does half the damage of the other" like before wotlk.

Anyway you're gonna deny everything anyway so whatever.

[Demithio]

There's a huge difference. Working for weeks or even months in order to get to the last boss and then finally downing him vs downing him on day one and then spending maybe a week or two progressing in order to kill him yet again, and then going into farm mode for months.

If you play only for gear I can see if there's no difference. But if you play in order to move yourself on step further on the journey it's a huge difference.

Exactly. There is no buildup or excitement in killing that next tough boss anymore. No real gratification. Now its just "ok... next". Its really two different player mindsets and expectations, one just wants all the 'shinies' he or she can accumulate, the other wants gratification through accomplishment and progression.

[Desparil]

And they lost half to two third of their customers. Guess they, you know, might have been wrong when analyzing their data.

They definitely lost all because of archaeology! I mean decline started with damn archaeology correlation=/=causation and that stuff.

You are just cherry picking data to glorify vanilla and link "wow dying" to stuff you don't like , because anyone can literally take anything they don't like from game and somehow link it to decline and you can't prove jack shit of it.