Vanilla Content

[jackofwind]

Nope.

/chars

So just because it was illegal we can't look at it objectively and see that it filled a niche that people actually were interested in, contrary to Blizzard's statements?

I guess we can't look at Prohibition-era speakeasies either and see that objectively they were supplying something that was in demand, because serving alcohol was illegal. I guess it also can't be said that people are interested in buying weed because selling it is illegal - except of course where it's legal, so obviously those areas are the only places where there is demand for it.

Clearly.

Let's just shut our brains down to logical thinking just because we don't like something. That's the way to move forward for sure.

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Proving a point by doing the illegal acts is not really a point to be proven.

Thousands of important points have been proven and discoveries made by doing illegal acts throughout history.

Don't be ignorant. Laws are made by men and are thus fallible, and often self-serving or arbitrary.

[Deleted]

What are you even talking about?

Vanilla & TBC had 0 new content? Do you mind checking 1.X and 2.X patches for new content? Vanilla had a massive amount of content patches with very, very diverse content additions (battlegrounds, world bosses, zones, PvP events, AQ questline and much more).

Well, the PvP changes with the ranks and battlegrounds was a huge change. A complete overhaul.

Maraudon got patched in aswell. And another dungeon got added later in too iirc although I'm not sure which one. Too lazy to check it now.

Also don't forget about the huge Silithus overhaul. There was new content, I just don't remember the time between them.

Thing is, everything took forever back in the day. The mats you needed took forever, hard to come by, and you needed absurd amounts of them. I remember making a sword that needed Breath of Wind, took me ages to collect them. Not to forget the Arcane Crystal farming back in Burning Steppes. Spent a lot of time in there.

Grinding Timbermaw took forever, the WoD factions you had to grind for rep were absolutely nothing compared to that.

[Nyel]

Too lazy to check it now.

Well, everybody can just check a WoW Wiki and see how much content was added to Vanilla or every expansion:

https://wow.gamepedia.com/Patches/1.x

(sure the initial version of WoW lacked many things but Vanilla had ~ 10 content patches!)

[Maleficents]

I don't think it was that there was tons of content. It was more that it took time to consume the content that was there, and there was genuine excitement and joy when you achieved it.

Getting your first mount? Check.
Getting to max level? Check.
Winning an Alterac Valley match? Check.

Nowadays it seems easier to "throw away" content because a lot of it has no sentimental value because it's all over so quickly. Players cared more about battlegrounds when they lasted longer than the time it took to queue into them. Winning meant something because you worked hard for it. Leveling was an experience because the world was new and dangerous. I have fond memories of going into camp settlements and needing to sheep one of the mobs, nova another and then kite the third one; slowly picking them down until I could loot the chest or get my quest credit. That same camp today would see me run in, cast Blizzard, loot and do the same thing seconds later. No risk to my character's life.

I'll say, for me at least, a lot of the 'prestige' in WoW has gone. I know people will call for mythic achievements and raid progress when I say that, but I have a family to look after and job. I don't have time for that. And that's fine, because people having better stuff than me doesn't impact me but gives me something to strive towards.

Back in Vanilla, you could slowly but surely earn your way up to something - whether that was your Molten Core gear or finally reaching a PvP rank or getting your Unstoppable Force from AV. These days, no matter how casual you are or at what point you join in the expansion, you get all the rewards. Pet battles; you'll eventually win. Legendaries for everyone. All the catch up mechanisms in the world. You can be on the same footing as the person that played on the expansion's first day with a few hours played.

That has its upsides too - I'm not saying don't have those, but I do feel that that is the difference between today and Vanilla. People used to stop and inspect people with really cool tier or a legendary item. Everyone has access to those things now.

[Deleted]

Leveling was the content. It took forever to level. When you hit 60 it meant something.

Also, end game content now is a million times better than vanilla WoW. If they burn through current content, thats their problem, and it is more a sign of the times. People have become less patient now and are more concerned with the destination and not the journey.

They burn trought content now becouse game is super easy. It have nothing to do with players.

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vanilla was a journey towards max level.
nowadays we just powerlevel roflstomb to max level, which is where the game begins. the leveling part more or less obsolete.
but theres alot more to do in legion max level, than there were in vanilla.

Kappa. Even current end game is super easy and pretty much non existend after 1 week of playing. You need special difficulty mod in order to game be atleast somehow challenging. It is pathetic.

[Coffeexbean]

Legion end game would be better but there are too many systems in place that diminish the feeling of achievement with all the convinience in place making Vanilla end game better

[Deleted]

what exactly made vanilla endgame so fantastic? grinding resistance gear? poaching players from other guilds, to meet the idiotic class stacking requirements? buggy/broken/overtuned bosses?
it certainly wasnt interesting boss mechanics.

[Soon-TM]

We can't. People were not interested. They were nostalgic. There is a reason why Blizzard said "they would make legacy servers where everything would be just like on live servers but different set of rules" going straight back into past is not good thing. If you can't understand this, you can't understand why Blizzard won't make vanilla servers.

Well, the amount of private servers over there shows that there IS a remarkable amount of people playing Vanilla, whatever the reason may be, and I am not so sure that you can tag them all as "nostalgic" or "freeloaders" or whatever niceties some folks spout here. And since Blizz isn't likely to return to Vanilla style of story or gameplay in future xpacs, they have to make do with what they have, even if at least 300k of them would rather play on an official Blizz server instead of a private one.

[Meiluy]

Blizzard had made a claim that nobody wanted to play earlier versions of WoW, and then Nostalrius came out, and swiftly shattered that statement.

They didn't say no one wanted to play Vanilla, they said it was impossible to have legacy servers because they no longer had the original code. They also pointed out that people would complain about which patch it was set at Finally, Nostralrius would only have succesfully proved that it was Vanilla that brought people running if they were also charging the same monthly rate: since it was free to play, all we were really shown was that people will play free versions of games when given a chance.

[Seefer]

Leveling was the content. It took forever to level. When you hit 60 it meant something.

Also, end game content now is a million times better than vanilla WoW. If they burn through current content, thats their problem, and it is more a sign of the times. People have become less patient now and are more concerned with the destination and not the journey.

Eh I see no point in multiple difficulties, it's the same content it only hits harder and has more health, give me TBC style any day........1 difficulty and multiple raids open at 1 time.

[Rogalicus]

They didn't say no one wanted to play Vanilla, they said it was impossible to have legacy servers because they no longer had the original code.

But Blizzard has all the original source code.

[Frosteye]

They didn't say no one wanted to play Vanilla, they said it was impossible to have legacy servers because they no longer had the original code. They also pointed out that people would complain about which patch it was set at Finally, Nostralrius would only have succesfully proved that it was Vanilla that brought people running if they were also charging the same monthly rate: since it was free to play, all we were really shown was that people will play free versions of games when given a chance.

There's the counter-argument that even if a cost prohibited a number of people from participating in blizzard run vanilla servers -- that there would still be high participation since there are a lot of people who won't play on private servers due to the likelihood of losing their character/progress. An officially run server would be more reliable and official, and overall more lucrative to play on.

[skatblast]

I'm not really sure why people still make threads like this when you can easily play on Elysium and see for yourself. Its not for everybody

[Meiluy]

But Blizzard has all the original source code.

Cite your source, because THEY said that they didn't anymore.

[InfiniteCharger]

It was more content in the sense you had 40 zones and a bunch of dungeons level through at launch.
No expansion has that many. Most players did not reach max level until well into TBC, meaning that leveling 1-60 and then 70 was the primary content of the game. Endgame raiding was non existent for most players.

Also many of the dungeons were as large as or larger than raids and contained many quests, drops and NPCs for professions and classes all of these before you even got to max level. The wailing caverns and Black Fathom Deeps at lvl 20 being a good example. In fact, some dungeons were faction specific like the Stockades for the Alliance and Ragefire Chasm for the horde. And you couldn't just zone into a dungeon by clicking on dungeon finder, you actually had to find the entrance in the zone and meet there in person to enter. So there was no real sense of "missing" anything by not raiding since doing dungeons was as epic as raiding for most folks (except for the envy of not having the BIS gear that dropped from raids).

And on top of all of that everything took longer. This is partly because there wasn't as much information online as it is now. Also, getting through the game meant making friends in game while questing or joining a guild because most of the content, even just leveling couldn't be done solo. Moving around was slow because there were no mounts until 40 and otherwise you ran everywhere on foot. And of course you couldn't use flight paths until you discovered them in new zones. But even once you did discover a flight path, flying from say moonglade to Tanaris took forever. And of course if you wanted to go from the Eastern Kingdoms to Kalimdor you had to wait for a boat.

And on top of that the environments and art directions within the zones and many of the little additional touches like weather effects and day/night cycles made the look and feel of the game world head and shoulders above what most other games were offering. Not to mention each zone had its own distinct feel and lore which made the world seem vast and mysterious.

[Soon-TM]

^

I definitely miss the Vanilla night-time. Running around The Barrens or 1k Needles felt really good, an eerie and mysterious feeling. Imagine such gorgeous zones as Val'Sharah or Aszuna with that sort of lighting. The best of both worlds

[Marakesh]

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.

Not a good start when you post something factually wrong. Then later you say you played vanilla? Hmmm, well, if you did you don't really remember enough of it to make these comparisons.

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

I wouldn't know about current WoW, but expansions are on a 2 year cycle while a new mmo like vanilla takes 5+ years to build. Some that is startup costs like a new engine and all, but playing Nost I realized how much more casual pve content gets done by default when you're creating a new world. TBC was the least linear, and closest to vanilla, but it was still on that path all these later expansions would take. Cata get s called out a lot for it, and it is most of the way to the model used in the last few xpacks, but TBC might have been a bigger jump towards that model than we thought at the time.

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.

It took me a little more than 4 months to reach max level and that was probably a little faster than the norm. Only gold farmers and hardcore reroll raiders would do it in weeks, most of us with jobs outside of WoW, that was not possible. Later, levelling guides got it down to a week, so it changed over time.

Why wasn't it immediately obvious how to reach max level in the shortest time possible. Because there was actually more complexity to it than is given credit for these days. Getting better gear helped but was it worth the time investment to get it? Travel time was a factor in where to quest and which dungeons to do. Get your professions done while levelling or at max?

The stuff you describe for max level is actually for people who had been playing at least 6 months by that point. First you had to get your epic mount which meant making money, a problem which again had a large number of solutions. Then there were attunement quests, gearing up through the various dungeons, pvp battlegrounds which are still the classics, and then more people than not would continue by starting a new alt. You could also get into a group doing 20 mains, ony, or early MC with little difficulty by the end of vanilla. (Oh, and only one of those dungeons really took forever - the BRD / LBRS line.)

But yeah, if hardcore raiding was all you do, then there isn't much difference in the overall picture. There are differences in how social management was a bigger factor, less difficulty than later wow but less mod's and experience, and yes, the classes could have been better designed for end game in mind. As both a raider and casual I preferred the chain model of earlier wow, but that's not the make or break part to me. Its how casual pve played. It aint nostalgia, vanilla and modern wow have 2 completely different designs. Compare them if you want and we could have a discussion about what works for casual pve players that make up 2/3rds at least of most mmo's, while raiding difficulty only matters to the epeen of a few.

[Kuntantee]

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...

Blizzard developers know that their player base has no sense of quality or taste in quality. It's an ability to recognize a quality work, intellectual output and pure garbage, it takes effort and requires intelligence which is non-existent in most of their player base. This is precisely why developer team thinks it is okay to put a farce like some NPC calling you "High general xxx, you are so awesome and bad-ass and savage". It gets the job done: strokes the ego of poor players, and make them think that they are subjected to some immersion miracle pulled off by WoW developers.

To me, such take on game design is nothing more than an insult to human intelligence. It's a spit on player base's face.

They do what they do, because they get away with it. The actual problem here is however lack of competence on designer's end. Blizzard writers and game designers are garbage.

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What else do you call them? People are playing a game that is far degraded in so many aspects but it was great at "that specific time" because it was new and fresh. People (as usuall) are unable to think without emotions and can't progress and hence they are stuck in time.

You can't measure the degradation rate of Vanilla and Legion, can you? You can't and that's precisely why this is just your opinion. While technically (from an engineering standpoint), Legion is a better software, can't really say the same in terms of game design. I honestly think Vanilla is superior in certain aspects of game design compared to contemporary WoW. Quest design and game direction comes to mind.

Nostalgia - is a sentimentalist for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations

Connect the dots and voila, nonsense comes on surface.

Do you honestly think that in your "real world" everything is same as 10 years ago? It's not. So lore and gameplay is not. They just develop the game how "nature" dictates.

You are assuming that this is nostalgia, it's not.

--

I draw lots of parallels between Witcher 3 and Vanilla WoW in terms of game design. I think those are two great RPGs.

[Deleted]

Right now leveling is a puzzle of content from a million different eras. Blizz should either completely remake the leveling process or stretch 1-60 to 1-110 without need to go through expac content. Its too much of a mess for new people now.

[Jastall]

Yeah, it took a long time to do things. However the reasons for things taking longer actually felt legitimate. Unlike the artificial time-gating that we have now.

Farming resist gear to be able to even enter MC and bandages to unlock a raid I would never step foot in was the definition of legitimacy to me.