For me the game was brand new and I had never played an MMO before. Literally everything was new and exciting. You also didn't know every little thing about the game or what was coming. I am sure there was a community that did but it was no where near like how it is now.
It also helped that it took way longer to level. That isn't really a good or bad thing but you could literally spend an entire weekend working through a zone. Maybe we were just worse at the game and didn't know how to be efficient. Maybe it really did just take longer. Either way....it always felt like there was something to work toward and it wasn't artificially created.
I would never say the game was better back then. it was just different. That is what kept me logging in every day. I still do log in basically every day today but it is more often than not to just knock out my daily laundry list then bounce out.
Checking the PvP rankings each week, and the fame of the high ranks. Priceless.
I'm not going to comment on all the things I loved about Vanilla, but one of the ones which stands out most to me (and which is not often mentioned in these threads for some reason) was its sense of history.
I'd played plenty of fantasy/sci-fi games beforehand, but WoW was the first one where the world didn't feel like it was being made up on the fly. Vanilla had three previous video games and a plethora of out-of-game material to draw from, and it showed. You could walk around a zone, find a ruin, and end up reading about its backhistory on WowWiki. Little touches like the memorial where Garrosh (the original) died went a long way. The non-optimized layout of zones made them feel more real and less game-ified. The whole of Vanilla had a sense of history which made other games, especially other MMOs out at the time, feel absolutely shallow with their stories.
Not going to comment much on the expansions since then. Suffice it to say that the best ones have come close to approximating that feeling, and the worst ones have had some of the most shallow lore histories I've seen in any fantasy game.
Along other great things, the community and social side got me in always
During Vanilla I only played at the weekends, likewise during TBC, because of school.
My friends started playing Wow before me so during Vanilla I just wanted to catch up and play with them basically.
During TBC though I started to play more without my friends and to be fair, massively out did their progress, at that point I sort of had an obsession with running heroics as fast as possible and in the case of places like Shall and Slabs with as little CD as possible.
Those reasons you had for logging in every day back then, are the reasons why I login every day now. Back when I was new, it was for the same reasons people whom were new in Classic felt drawn to the game for...
Fancy that.
And no, Classic/TBC did not have the biggest variety of content available. Classic had the biggest amount of leveling content, for obvious reasons. Cataclysm had even more including that 1-60 rework, so there's that...
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Meanwhile, actually good players whom put thought into their character builds, know the names of BiS just fine. I got pretty damned excited the other night getting a tier titanforged to 925.
Last edited by Queen of Hamsters; 2017-05-12 at 11:07 PM.
The server reputation was one of my favorite things back in BC and Wotlk somewhat. My guild wasn't that great but we were pretty big. Gear made a difference back then but skill and knowledge made the biggest difference back then. It was easy to spot people that knew what they were doing with their characters. I became so good at maximizing my characters that everytime i ran anything or pugged into anything, i was always welcomed back. I wasn't the most popular where everyone knew me, but i always impressed everyone i ran with. To an extent i still do that today but because alot of this stuff is cross server, it's not as personal. Like, if Guild A needed someone good to heal, tank, or dps, they'd send me a message. Nowadays, they just go on the group finder and that's it. Those people nowadays don't feel pressured into keeping the same group when they can pug anyone whenever.
OT: just mostly what keeps me playing today, my friends in-game/guild
It's not that it was too hard, it's that most of the population was busy leveling to max level. Raids today are more accessible, but far more difficult at the difficulties that count.
Grind and time required being out of whack =/= actual difficulty. People were struggling with 2-button rotations, 2-ability bosses and still downing them as long as they met the logistics requirements, even carrying several players in order to fill out the raid.
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People have this odd ability to not count shit they don't like as part of "Warcraft". :P
Last edited by Queen of Hamsters; 2017-05-12 at 10:56 PM.
Don't know how this is really a question. Game was new. I certainly wasn't analyzing why I was logging in every day when I jumped into my first MMO at 18.
Now that I'm older and seen the genre I can break it down and analyze it more, and I know exactly why I've been logging into the game recently. But to ask why people would log in when the game was new should really only be met with, well, the game was new. You didn't have a sense of community or any of those other factors because they were just there, so it wouldn't make sense for you to log on because of things that were always present.. you just assumed that's the way things are.
If I had to pick something in retrospect, based solely on what I know now about the game, the only thing I kind of miss is server reputations and to a degree the sense of community. Anything else in this game has been improved upon greatly. I suppose one could make the argument about a sense of mystery, but that sense is never something you can get back or replicate, and only pops up when a game is just released. Furthermore with how information travels, it's increasingly impossible to keep anything secret or a mystery for any length of time thanks to the internet.
Last edited by Tojara; 2017-05-12 at 11:01 PM.
It was the sense of newness, of exploration. The sense of being in a HUGE world full of (at the time) hundreds of thousands of other people, and that sense of WOW THIS HUGE ZONE?!?!?!?!? ALL THESE QUESTS?? RAIDS??? Stuff like that. It was just a very wonderful gleeful experience that I shall never forget.
One of the BIGGEST, however, was going to Ironforge in downtime and seeing all the raiders in purple epic gear, they looked so cool. I wanted so bad to be like them, and so I did. It was fun.
Vanilla veteran playing since 2005.
Last edited by Master Guns; 2017-05-12 at 11:03 PM.
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The fact that it was way better than any other MMO available at the time.
Now, if it hadn't changed since then, I wouldn't still be playing. I believe Wildstar has firmly demonstrated what happens when you try to compare Vanilla WoW against current WoW.
WOW was my first mmo and being a fan of the warcraft world, i was instantly hooked. That fresh experience you had leveling from 1-60 (whether you liked it or not) will be something I don't think wow could ever recreate again. The time where my first horde character was questing in the northern barrens area and happened to stumble upon the entrance to Ashenvale. I couldn't walk 10 steps in, without running back like a noob, thinking that a bunch of Nighteleves would see me and shoot me dead with their bow and arrows.
Just about everything. There's a reason it's the greatest incarnation of WoW.
Initially it was leveling. It was a true adventure that I got to experience with my best friends. The journey to Scarlet Monastery as an Alliance was a better adventure than the entirety of the leveling experience of any expansion that came after it. Truly unrivaled.
Endgame was just as incredible, and there was niche activities too.
- Server Community
- Exploration
- World PvP against actual rivals that I had battled against for weeks/months/years
- US Raiding scene was at its peak
- Booming lvl 19, 29, and 39 Twink PvP brackets
- Honor System Grinding
- Consumable farming for world-first raiding
- Profession progression
- ALL the RPG elements that have since been gutted, leading to a shallow, hollow game comparatively
- Real talent trees with unique paths and choice. I experimented with PvP builds, kiting builds, leveling builds, and of course raiding builds
- My guild
- on and on and on
Players opted for convenience.
There are more tools now than ever to actually interact positively with players previously behind barriers.
But it is the players who choose how they are used, and they opt for convenience and efficiency before anything else, and it is always someone else's fault when they make their own decisions.
On the original points - community is the desire to interact positively.
Forced interaction it was not.
The longest interactions I have had with players, some of them for years were never born of forced interaction, but that someone chose to do.
Helping someone out if I could, answering questions, assisting with content which offered little to no benefit to me, but more to them.
CC only worked when you had the right classes or specs.
If you didn't that could result in groups ragequitting.
When not all classes can bring the same tools, over-reliance on CC will mean there are simply good and bad classes to bring.
A good example allbeit later dungeon is IMO one of the best examples of why it sucks.
Magister's Terrace - the expectation was 2 specific classes be present, mage and warlock.
Having played a warlock near exclusively I saw first hand the number of times a group would refuse to even try if there was no mage.
The long relevance of dungeon loot was only due to lack of accessibility to the raids.
Not because it was actually relevant on its own merits compared to the raid gear.
Forced progression did not equal relevance.
Relevance is when you WANT to go to content other than the highest tier, not because HAVE TO.
I am both the Lady of Dusk, Vheliana Nightwing & Dark Priestess of Lust, Loreleî Legace!
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