Vanilla Content

[Khallid]

I see constant posts about how current wow lacks content. Or it's done in 1 day etc etc.

Can someone please explain to me how the content that was so over flowing during the early wow days @ max level? Did people consider leveling from 1-60 for 2-3 months content? Did people not play vanilla/TBC? Maybe they had different experiences than me.

This is what you did @ level 60, Run dungeons (took forever) Farm mats (took forever) Raid 1 difficulty only on a week long lockout (took forever) PvP (some of it took forever) There was no story....most the quests were absurd and all over the world with no linear progression of story telling it was awful...I'm confused.

Vanilla & TBC had 0 new content throughout the expansion minus the sunwell staging area in TBC & new raids soooooo. idk. nothing that hails in comparison with argus...or isle of thunder..idk people are crazy...or am I crazy?

Thanks.

It's not that people are crazy per se. It's something called Rosy Retrospection. People misremember their own memories and think they liked it much than they actually did. Human memories are flawed, but our subjective experience of them makes us unable to realize when our memories are lying to us. It's a very common type of bias.

Also, when Vanilla came out it was shiny and impressive in comparison to games at the time. It's not anymore. So standards are higher. The game is much better right now, but it's criticized harsher because of the higher standards.

[Coffeh]

Things took a lot of time in vanilla. Not the fake, artificial time gating they do now. Actual time. You had to build yourself up little by little. You had to put real effort into the game. There was SO much to do in vanilla. Reading these posts in this thread that end-game now is better than vanilla is a joke. In vanilla like 99% of the playerbase didn't even think about raiding. The vast majority of players probably didn't even know it existed. And yet we didn't care because we had endless things to do. End-game now is pathetic. The dev team has made end-game all about raiding. So you do your raids and then....there's nothing else to do. Nothing meaningful. Just tedious little tasks that require no skill or effort.

[ReVnX]

Slower gearing process and tiers did not become irrelevant after a patch (No catch-up mechanics)

In summary getting a piece of gear or clearing a raid meant something

[Frosteye]

It's not that people are crazy per se. It's something called Rosy Retrospection. People misremember their own memories and think they liked it much than they actually did. Human memories are flawed, but our subjective experience of them makes us unable to realize when our memories are lying to us. It's a very common type of bias.

Also, when Vanilla came out it was shiny and impressive in comparison to games at the time. It's not anymore. So standards are higher. The game is much better right now, but it's criticized harsher because of the higher standards.

Yes, there is some nostalgia when people reference Vanilla. It was a much harder game at the time in terms of content difficulty (remember pulling murloc adds in Elwynn forest?), and I think some players miss that. Considering WoW is considered VERY easy now.

One thing I will note, is that Molten Core was relevant all the way until the end of Vanilla. This was due to the lack of catch-up mechanics. So in a way there was more content for more players to do, since Blizzard didn't make entire chunks of the game obsolete after every patch.

Right now Emerald Nightmare is obsolete. TOV is obsolete. Nighthold is obsolete (outside CoF trinket for certain classes, RNG titanforge). Everone is pigeon-holed into Raiding Tomb... If you didn't play during the start of Legion, tough luck you missed Emerald Nightmare. You can run it on LFR and just faceroll through, but you don't get to play it as it was meant to be played while it was current content.

In Vanilla I saw new players, new guilds, still enjoying progressing through Molten Core, while more advanced guilds were clearing Naxx.

So yeah rose-tinted glasses,etc.etc. But there were some good things about Vanilla. Granted this type of PVE Progression would cause hysteria in the current state of the game. players are used to being able to do the latest content right away, even if they just re-subscribed.

[Soon-TM]

For all its flaws, Vanilla managed to make you feel like a real adventurer, a guy who wandered across the world to earn fame, riches and/or knowledge. But that world was HUGE, and often dangerous if you took it just on your own. While I appreciate many of the QoL changes introduced since then, I think that the RP part of MMORPG keeps dwindling and dwindling.

[Frosteye]

For all its flaws, Vanilla managed to make you feel like a real adventurer, a guy who wandered across the world to earn fame, riches and/or knowledge. But that world was HUGE, and often dangerous if you took it just on your own. While I appreciate many of the QoL changes introduced since then, I think that the RP part of MMORPG keeps dwindling and dwindling.

Well, I attribute that to the recent notions that our Player Character is a "hero of the alliance/horde" and is the ultimate bad-ass who gets to consort with all the high-up faction leaders.

In earlier versions of WoW we were just a nobody helping local farmers with nuisance problems. On occasion in an epic questline we would be "noticed" by the higher-ups, but in the grand scheme we were just pawns.

Tbh we get lavished with praise so much by NPC Characters now, that it all seems so fake lmao. I know that every other player around me is getting the same treatment, so it doesn't really make me feel "important" or "special" in any way.

Not sure why Blizzard decided to make our player character(s) so highly regarded tbh...

[Netherspark]

It's also important to note that people often continued questing after max level. - it was perfectly possible to spend months and months just doing quests, exploring the world and doing the occasional dungeon, because that's what the game was about.

[Lomax1979]

Part of vanilla's appeal to me, is simply that players weren't "heroes" or "champions", we were cannon fodder. That and the non-linear quest experience made it feel more natural, like your character was an insignificant mercenary or a grunt fighting their way across the world. Now we're all superheroes, and treated as such almost as soon as we leave our starting zones.

[seventysix]

Nostalrius calls, they want to show you the almost 2mill active players they used to have before bliiz took them down.

.

Great, people turned this post into exactly what I did NOT intend, I played vanilla. it was fun. I played nostalrius. It was fun. This post is not about vanilla being bad and legion being better. It's about the amount of "content." and while some may prefer vanilla to legion or vice verse, it's a clear case that legion has exponentially MORE content than any other wow expansion.

Thanks.

[Jastall]

Vanilla had a lot of raids released, but apart from that your endgame content was 3 battlegrounds (eventually) and... that's more or less it. Oh they introduced a T0.5 set for the plebs, but you needed to speedrun existing dungeons for that so it's basically M+ lite.

The major difference is that both leveling and gearing in vanilla were much, much longer than in any expansion, so what content there was, was extremely padded in its life cycle. These days, catch-up mechanisms ensure that it's much easier to get to relevant content, but also diminishes vanilla's somewhat artificial padding. But there's a very good reason Blizzard chose that path from BC onwards, it's that leveling can only keep the casual playerbase sated for content for so long and that eventually, the model of ''lol you plebs go run MC/ZG while the big boys are in AQ40/Naxx doing the relevant shit you will never do'' was not sustainable.

[seventysix]

Vanilla had a lot of raids released, but apart from that your endgame content was 3 battlegrounds (eventually) and... that's more or less it. Oh they introduced a T0.5 set for the plebs, but you needed to speedrun existing dungeons for that so it's basically M+ lite.

The major difference is that both leveling and gearing in vanilla were much, much longer than in any expansion, so what content there was, was extremely padded in its life cycle. These days, catch-up mechanisms ensure that it's much easier to get to relevant content, but also diminishes vanilla's somewhat artificial padding. But there's a very good reason Blizzard chose that path from BC onwards, it's that leveling can only keep the casual playerbase sated for content for so long and that eventually, the model of ''lol you plebs go run MC/ZG while the big boys are in AQ40/Naxx doing the relevant shit you will never do'' was not sustainable.

Good response, couldn't agree more.

[clevin]

Sorry am not biased here, but hat the exact same issue as the other poster described.

I played 3 weeks and thats it, cleared HC and done the argus part. I don't play alts so there is nothing for me to do in the game itself.

.

Yep. While I've not cleared heroic (I don't raid but could join the guild raid and at least clear normal) There's not much to do atm if you aren't a completionist and play mostly 1 or 2 toons. But.. this isn't new. It's the 1 year doldrums. By now, people like me have had our max level toons at max level for a year. WE've done the raids and farmed the 5 mans etc over and over and over... Things like LFR and easy normal make the raid content go MUCH faster and a minority of people really give a rat's ass about doing the same stuff on a harder setting.

Vanilla had 60 levels and they took awhile. You'd farm leveling dungeons for a few runs because they dropped good gear and you'd do the same at max level to get blues so you could raid if you wanted or if you didn't so you were reasonably geared.

Since then, ever expansion hits this lull at around the 1 year, 3rd patch mark. Ideally, we'd get more world content and more 5 mans etc but they shift people to finishing the next expansion instead and, frankly, many people tend to get tired of the theme at this point too.

[Khallid]

Yes, there is some nostalgia when people reference Vanilla. It was a much harder game at the time in terms of content difficulty (remember pulling murloc adds in Elwynn forest?), and I think some players miss that. Considering WoW is considered VERY easy now.

One thing I will note, is that Molten Core was relevant all the way until the end of Vanilla. This was due to the lack of catch-up mechanics. So in a way there was more content for more players to do, since Blizzard didn't make entire chunks of the game obsolete after every patch.

Right now Emerald Nightmare is obsolete. TOV is obsolete. Nighthold is obsolete (outside CoF trinket for certain classes, RNG titanforge). Everone is pigeon-holed into Raiding Tomb... If you didn't play during the start of Legion, tough luck you missed Emerald Nightmare. You can run it on LFR and just faceroll through, but you don't get to play it as it was meant to be played while it was current content.

In Vanilla I saw new players, new guilds, still enjoying progressing through Molten Core, while more advanced guilds were clearing Naxx.

So yeah rose-tinted glasses,etc.etc. But there were some good things about Vanilla. Granted this type of PVE Progression would cause hysteria in the current state of the game. players are used to being able to do the latest content right away, even if they just re-subscribed.

First of all, retrospection bisases are not the same thing as nostalgia. People's memories are literally wrong. They remember having more fun than what they actually had.


Second, your statements are a bit contradictory.

Mythic difficulty right now is harder than it has ever been, and mythic+ difficulty scales indefinitely (although rewards don't). The game has evolved into multiple difficulties to cater to everyone. If you want easy content there's a lot of it, but there's also plenty of very hard content to do. If you don't do hard content it's your choice, and I'm not going to demean you for it. The hardest content can get pretty boring in its repetitiveness. What happened is now the world content is easier, but the hardest content is also harder. If you want hard, go for it. You can't claim it's not there. You can only claim you don't like it.

The game has a lot more addons and a more involved research community. You can just google "x-class guide" and learn how to be good at the game in less than half an hour. That has nothing to do with game development and Blizzard can't do anything about it. The auction house is full of useful stuff you can just buy instead of grind. We don't keep progressing old raids because we're better players now than Vanilla players used to be. Raids get obsolete faster, yes, but that's because the average player is more informed, has better addons and plays better. They are not forced into obsoletion, the players are demanding the new content.

The way you make sound "vanilla raids took months to progress through, so much content" is exactly the same thing that infuriated people in WoD, because "shitty raid takes months to progress through with no new content to do". It's the same thing, but with the opposite reception. If Blizzard released a Vanilla-style expansion next year, it would suck.

[clevin]

...it's a clear case that legion has exponentially MORE content than any other wow expansion.

No, it doesn't. It has about as much content as most expansions. ALL they've done is spread it out. They used to drop patches about ever 5 months with the patch having open world content and a raid. ALL they are doing now is splitting the open world content and the raid content, finishing the world content first and releasing that, then about 2.5 months later, releasing the raid. It still takes 5 months to get both the world content and raid... you just aren't forced to wait for the world content until the raid is done.

I *like* this model, but it's NOT more content. It's the same amount of content delivered more smoothly.

- - - Updated - - -

First of all, retrospection bisases are not the same thing as nostalgia. People's memories are literally wrong. They remember having more fun than what they actually had.

Prove that. Go ahead. This is one of the lamest arguments on this site - the rose colored glasses, let me tell you what you really think one.

[Schattenlied]

Did people consider leveling from 1-60 for 2-3 months content?

Yes, did you not?

There was no story...most the quests were absurd and all over the world with no linear progression of story telling it was awful...I'm confused.

Vanilla WoW was meant to be an adventure, and it did that well, there was no big linear story, you weren't "the most uberest most awesome hero of the world" you were an adventurer who roamed around finding people who needed help and helping them.

Adventure>themepark, what we have now is a themepark with a power trip fantasy, both themparks and power trip fantasies get boring pretty fast.

Run dungeons (took forever)

So, the difference being dungeons back then were actually difficult, took time and effort beyond "kill things as fast as possible or we won't make the timer!"

Farm mats (took forever)

Farming mats takes a while now too, but you know what, the things you crafted back then with those mats were actually really useful and good, not things you replaced 5 seconds into a raid. The time investment was worth it.

Raid 1 difficulty only on a week long lockout (took forever)

Most groups only raid on one difficulty anyways, once you get into heroic you don't need gear from normal and no one wants to farm that shit for "a chance at titanforge" because they have better shit to do. The time investment didn't feel any different from now unless your raid was carrying a bunch of AFKs that you didn't care enough to notice and replace, that's on you.

PvP (some of it took forever)

Only AV took forever, just don't do it then, get to exalted for your rep weapon(which goes VERY quickly in AV) and then do other BGs, AB and WSG didn't take that long and world PvP was always there... World PvP basically doesn't even exist anymore.



Whats there to do right now then?

Race a timer in mythic+, kill everything as fast as possible with no strategy, no need for CC, just mindless AoE fest. Oh boy so fun

Raid 1 difficulty 1 time a week, just like Vanilla, because whats the point in running a raid you don't need gear from (except in vanilla previous tier raids were still worth doing because they still dropped some BiS items, not to mention Thunderfury and Sulfuras)?

Spam random BGs with people that give up as soon as you start to lose.

Spam Arenas, the worst thing to ever happen to WoW's PvP... The vast majority of PvP takes place in BGs and these idiots balance all PvP around 3v3.

Spam World Quests, if you somehow actually enjoy that.

That's about it.

[Frosteye]

First of all, retrospection bisases are not the same thing as nostalgia. People's memories are literally wrong. They remember having more fun than what they actually had.


Second, your statements are a bit contradictory.

Mythic difficulty right now is harder than it has ever been, and mythic+ difficulty scales indefinitely (although rewards don't). The game has evolved into multiple difficulties to cater to everyone. If you want easy content there's a lot of it, but there's also plenty of very hard content to do. If you don't do hard content it's your choice, and I'm not going to demean you for it. The hardest content can get pretty boring in its repetitiveness. What happened is now the world content is easier, but the hardest content is also harder. If you want hard, go for it. You can't claim it's not there. You can only claim you don't like it.

The game has a lot more addons and a more involved research community. You can just google "x-class guide" and learn how to be good at the game in less than half an hour. That has nothing to do with game development and Blizzard can't do anything about it. The auction house is full of useful stuff you can just buy instead of grind. We don't keep progressing old raids because we're better players now than Vanilla players used to be. Raids get obsolete faster, yes, but that's because the average player is more informed, has better addons and plays better. They are not forced into obsoletion, the players are demanding the new content.

The way you make sound "vanilla raids took months to progress through, so much content" is exactly the same thing that infuriated people in WoD, because "shitty raid takes months to progress through with no new content to do". It's the same thing, but with the opposite reception. If Blizzard released a Vanilla-style expansion next year, it would suck.

Yes, blizzard is tuning difficulties to different levels for CURRENT CONTENT ONLY. I'm not saying that there isn't Hard Dungeon/Raid Content in Legion, but it's all tied to the current tier. M+ was a big success in Legion for making Dungeons much more relevant.

Vanilla had multiple tiers of content each at different difficulties which in turn did the same thing (in conjunction with the lack of catch-up mechanics). Players would raid MC to progress to BWL to then progress to AQ40 >= Naxx .


Also when I said that Vanilla was "harder", I was primarily talking about the Open World/Questing content. Monsters were a lot more dangerous. There were "Elite" mobs that were super beefy and hit like trucks. Everything in the world felt more dangerous.

The way you're talking about old raids in WOD/Legion makes me think you don't quite understand the difference between then and now. In WOD/Legion there are catchup mechanics (increased ilvl drops across all sources, welfare gear) that increase player power through trivial means that make the last tier of content obsolete. To put this into English it means: I don't need to run Emerald Nightmare prior to jumping into raiding Nighthold or Tomb of Sargeras.

In Vanilla I needed to get gear raiding MC/Ony before I could hope to move onto the harder raids. There was nowhere else to get the gear.


You're right about addons/information/class guides,etc. however. Not much we can do about that. But it's not why previous raid tiers are obsolete in Legion. It's the abundance of catchup mechanics/gear.

[jackofwind]

Yes, did you not?

Vanilla WoW was meant to be an adventure, and it did that well, there was no big linear story, you weren't "the most uberest most awesome hero of the world" you were an adventurer who roamed around finding people who needed help and helping them.

Adventure>themepark, what we have now is a themepark with a power trip fantasy, both themparks and power trip fantasies get boring pretty fast.



So, the difference being dungeons back then were actually difficult, took time and effort beyond "kill things as fast as possible or we won't make the timer!"


Farming mats takes a while now too, but you know what, the things you crafted back then with those mats were actually really useful and good, not things you replaced 5 seconds into a raid. The time investment was worth it.

Most groups only raid on one difficulty anyways, once you get into heroic you don't need gear from normal and no one wants to farm that shit for "a chance at titanforge" because they have better shit to do. The time investment didn't feel any different from now unless your raid was carrying a bunch of AFKs that you didn't care enough to notice and replace, that's on you.

Only AV took forever, just don't do it then, get to exalted for your rep weapon(which goes VERY quickly in AV) and then do other BGs, AB and WSG didn't take that long and world PvP is always there.



Whats there to do right now then?

Race a timer in mythic+, kill everything as fast as possible with no strategy, no need for CC, just mindless AoE fest. Oh boy so fun

Raid 1 difficulty 1 time a week, just like Vanilla, because whats the point in running a raid you don't need gear from (except in vanilla previous tier raids were still worth doing because they still dropped some BiS items, not to mention Thunderfury and Sulfuras)?

Spam random BGs with people that give up as soon as you start to lose.

Spam Arenas, the worst thing to ever happen to WoW's PvP... The vast majority of PvP takes place in BGs and these idiots balance all PvP around 3v3.

Spam World Quests, if you somehow actually enjoy that.

That's about it.

^ This.

Not to mention the Vanilla rad model made it so that MC, AQ20 and ZG were all relevant tiers for guilds to work on as they built towards progressing through BWL, AQ40, and Naxx. MC was being run as progression by some guilds for the entirety of Vanilla - EN is redundant already due to catch-up mechanics.

[Twdft]

I see constant posts about how current wow lacks content. Or it's done in 1 day etc etc.

People are just whinging. They played the game for 10+ years. Legion has brought us more content than ever but some people just whinge on forums instead of enjoying the game.

[Frosteye]

People are just whinging. They played the game for 10+ years. Legion has brought us more content than ever but some people just whinge on forums instead of enjoying the game.

Legion has a lot of content, but as quick as the content comes out, it makes the last tier of content obsolete. So in reality people blow through the content a LOT quicker than earlier versions of WoW that might have had less regular content releases.

[Flurryfang]

I see constant posts about how current wow lacks content. Or it's done in 1 day etc etc.

Can someone please explain to me how the content that was so over flowing during the early wow days @ max level? Did people consider leveling from 1-60 for 2-3 months content? Did people not play vanilla/TBC? Maybe they had different experiences than me.

This is what you did @ level 60, Run dungeons (took forever) Farm mats (took forever) Raid 1 difficulty only on a week long lockout (took forever) PvP (some of it took forever) There was no story....most the quests were absurd and all over the world with no linear progression of story telling it was awful...I'm confused.

Vanilla & TBC had 0 new content throughout the expansion minus the sunwell staging area in TBC & new raids soooooo. idk. nothing that hails in comparison with argus...or isle of thunder..idk people are crazy...or am I crazy?

Thanks.

This is gonna come very much from a personal experience, so take everything with a grain of salt.

The reason why Vanilla had alot of content, was because you not only consumed that content very slow, but also because the content was hard to get to. I was about 14-15 when i started playing WoW, but i played it alot... Like ALOT!. So did most of my friends, but none of could really muster to get more then 1 or 2 lvl 60s, because it was very hard, took a long time and was often quite boring. So leveling took most of your time and gave you very little, but you were always being rewarded. Every lvl gave you something and you were always being lured with higher lvl content. Before you hit lvl 25 as an undead, you have seen where the lvl 50 area was, the lvl 40 area was and the lvl 30 area was. You would have encountered mobs, that were just a bit too hard for you at your current lvl, so you always had something to work towards: always had something you had to get stronger to beat. That is what keept alot of people playing, atleast were i came from. I heard people talk a long time about how much they were looking forward to going into Silithus or Western Plaquelands. Sure the content inside these zones were not super great, but that did not matter when the reward was mostly just being able to kill that lvl 51 infected bear, that had been taunting you since lvl 21.

So that is the first part of the vanilla content attraction. The 2nd thing is the social event of Raiding. Now, most players in Vanilla did not raid. It was too hard, took too much time and required you to do un-fun things to get into the instances(farming fire-res gear, getting attument etc), but it was a constant element of being a lvl 60 character. Even though you did not raid, you were always aware that raiding was a thing, because gear from raiding was radiant, very flashy, often symetrical and made you stand out. You did not really care about getting more dmg or more health, but you did care about looking good and raiding allowed you to look very good. But to be in a raid, you had to 99/100 times be in a guild and a guild required you to be social. Alot of people who play PC games don't like to be social, but WoW forced you to be that, if you wanted to experience the more rewarding part of WoW end-game. This made it so that people got into social circles, meet players that cared about what they cared about, which made them stay in the game despite of maybe not having that much to do. People made their own fun even though the game gave them very little to work with.

Now these 2 things goes beyound Vanilla, but it was most vital there and in TBC. Things changed in TBC though. We actually got content in the mid patches (Ogri'la, Shatari Skyguard) and even a mid raid: ZA. People also keept playing WoW because it gated raiding to a near perfection. It had its best raid in the start, Karazhan, which keept people playing despite of not having a 25-man raid and the guilds who had 25 man had 4 big hard tiers to through for most of the expansion and at its end, most had 5 tiers.

TL;DR: It all has to do with how you design content, not how much of the content you produce. In Legion, we get ALOT of content, but that content is not supposed to keep us occupied for very long. In Vanilla, alot of content required you to be active for quite a long time for a single scenario (Having a dungeon take 30-90min+) where in Legion content outside of raiding taking more then 15-20 mins is too long and is not acceptable. I am not going to say, that either is better then the other, because i love things about both design ideas, but this should explain why Vanilla and TBC had succes.