Reaction to current state of WoW since Wrath

[Dangg]

And in 6 years these forums will be bombarded with 'Legion was amazing!!! what the f*** happened to this game!?!?!'

Recently they are cropping up about MoP. Meanwhile, those of us with a good memory can remember just what these forums were like during the actual expansion.

We won't see it with a truly shit expansion like WoD.

[Fabinas]

Legion is the best expansion ever so....no. Stop trolling please.

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This is gold lol

*pukes /10c

[Darkguyver2020]

Only when it's shit.

Compared to what, exactly? I have played a lot of shit games in my life and Legion wouldn't even break the top 50 in the list.
And if you say compared to previous expansions, you're just being a nostalgia blinded moron.

[Aeula]

Compared to what, exactly? I have played a lot of shit games in my life and Legion wouldn't even break the top 50 in the list.
And if you say compared to previous expansions, you're just being a nostalgia blinded moron.

Compared to MoP (The best expansion) and mediocre expansions like Cata.

And it’s not nostalgia. I can still go back and do the 5.1 questline and enjoy that far more than anything WoD and Legion have had.

[taliey]

"Welfare epics" is TBC-era nonsense, not WotLK. Surely you recall the endless, endless idiotic flamewars on the official forums about "welfare epics"? They were before Wrath and actually died down during Wrath, at least on the official forums.

The actual, underlying concern was, that, at the time Arenas came in, it was quite difficult to get good weapons from raids, but if you ground pretty hard at Arenas, and did okay, you could get them. Initially self-proclaimed raiders* who claimed to represent all raiders, just whinged and cried and moaned about how hard it was to get weapons from Kara etc. Then they stepped the crying up a notch, and started talking about how deeply unfair it was that anyone could get epic weapons from any source but raids, because they obviously didn't need or deserve them (because like, getting handed a weapon in Kara due to loot council or DKP or winning a roll is so... er... deserving), and the game was being ruined by these plebs (no-one used that term back then except posh English people of course). Then they went even further and got really upset about the gladiator armour and so on, and particularly that it shared a model with the raid armour and OH GOD we never heard the end of this utter drivel.

Yet all they really wanted, ironically, was for weapons to drop more from raids. So a kind of welfare, really. Jesus wept.

WotLK has been considered the "high water mark" of WoW since WotLK, I would suggest. There have always been some who preferred Vanilla (like me - I felt Naxx kind of shat on Vanilla's design though), or TBC (there's always some), but Wrath is generally popular as best "overall" expansion, and there's no denying it provided a strong all-round experience and some of the most Warcraft-y Warcraft lore.

* = As someone who was raiding at the time, fuck these guys, we weren't having a problem, we weren't crying, and the only people I knew from my server who did cry about this a lot? Were total failboat raiders. They just objected to the idea that they might be told by their GM that they had to go grind Arenas or something, so made a giant, pathetic, song and dance about it.

I was more referencing the reality of drops at the time - at the end of each heroic boss in WOTLK, there was always a guaranteed epic loot drop. There was also all epic dungeons in the form of Trial of the Crusader (basically T7 10/25 man) and the 3 Icecrown Citadel dungeons (T8 10/25). In addition to that, there was the general ease of how you got those items near the end of WOTLK (LFG already implemented and spamming AOEs without regarding to CC).

I was under the impression that 'welfare epics' came into prominence in WOTLK though, but thank you for the short history lesson. I appreciate that.

[Osmeric]

The actual, underlying concern was, that, at the time Arenas came in, it was quite difficult to get good weapons from raids, but if you ground pretty hard at Arenas, and did okay, you could get them.

It wasn't even necessary to do okay. Back then, ratings were attached to a team, not to individual players. So if you wanted to you could reset your ratings by dissolving and reforming the team. Lose ten games a week, get points, then reset the team next week to grind out some more points.

It was until S3 that they started adding ratings requirements to some items. They went way overboard with that at the start of Wrath, adding personal ratings and ratings requirements even for most honor gear (I think libram slot items could be purchased without a rating). That was retracted pretty quickly when PvP participation imploded during S5.

[Jazzhands]

Remember guys, if you like anything in the past, that's just your rose tinted goggles, you never actually enjoyed anything more than you are now. Things only ever get better, not worse.

[Apology]

It really isn't, and people who use the rose-tinted glasses saying goes both ways with them saying legion is better. Ever since Cata, blizzard has been consistently adding more convenience into the game for casual players, removing more stats and dumbing down your options in gameplay and them doing this has resulted in less players, even going down so far as to be below what Vanilla WoW peaked at before TBC.

And yet, when they didn't really do this (at least no where near as much) they had MORE casual players than ever, and this is the very audience modern WoW tries to draw in but cannot do or sustain them like old WoW used to. I wonder why that is....................................?

Because WoW was part of the cultural zeitgeist at the time. 2008/2009ish was the heyday of WoW, its 15 minutes of fame. You can't expect a decade old game to retain the playerbase it had at its peak, no matter how good it is.

[Soon-TM]

Definitely better than Legion imo. (Much) Less RNG, less grind, almost all specs were raid-viable. Ofc PvP was a real mess with OP DKs, OP Rets (until the nerf) and Frost Mages LOL'ing at any melee that wasn't a kitty... but PvP has always been a mess in WoW, so no surprises there. A couple more issues with WotLK are:

• Naxx was undertuned af. Those complaining about being "rehashed" surely don't know that the original version was seen by less than 1% of the playerbase back then. No worse than EN being also undertuned af.
• OS and EoE were filler raids. Again, nothing worse than HoV now, at all rates.
• ToC, the worst raid in history (well, aside DS, but I disgress), followed the magnificent Ulduar too close and rendered it obsolete. Thank the Light that Legion has no ToC equivalent... Actually, it doesn't have anything in its place LOL

Still, beats Legion by far, especially gameplay and storytelling-wise. Zones like Grizzly Hills and Storm Peaks are among the most popular in the game's history, and for a good reason.

EDIT:
Post 1 "WoW isn't the best MMO in the market"
Blizzdrone: "Ofc it is, it has the most subs/players lul"

Post 2: "WoW is declining badly, judging by the subs/realm activity"
Blizzdrone: "Old game is old lul"

I had to say it

[Razorice]

This just in folks, raids don't count as content if they don't come in a major patch. You heard it here first folks. Guess ToV isn't content either.

Are you saying 3.2 wasn't released as a major patch?

[SL1200]

It's a completely different game than it was during Wrath. There are probably other mmos closer to what wow was during that time period than wow is now. One day i stopped and looked up and I realized. This isn't even the same game I fell in love with.

[Deleted]

Not really. A lot of stuff was done much better in WotLK then ever after, but the game still seems to have a quarter of WotLK subs.
Let's face it, there's only so much you can do after Arthas died and before Legion returned in force.

[tikcol]

A friend of mine that didn't play since mid Wotlk returned to play legion. It didn't take long for him to leave. I didn't even try to make him play because I also left.

WoW has become a 1 month game for me. Play after release and leave. There's nothing interesting to do anymore. Nothing to work towards that feels meaningful.

People that don't take a break from the game don't understand how biased they are. The game is a cluster fuck. It's starting to feel like those free mmorpgs that do everything wrong.

[Jyggalag]

Since MoP ended the game’s been mostly terrible.

yes /10char

[cparle87]

Are you saying 3.2 wasn't released as a major patch?

No. I was responding to your odd statement that Ruby Sanctum didn't count as a content update.

[caervek]

Anyone else who came back to Legion since WotLK feel this way?

I never left but I can easily see how returnees would feel this way, however over time there have been a lot of improvements made to the game. Sadly with WoD the rate at which things were getting worse started outstripping the rate of improvement. Things have gotten better with Legion in a couple of areas, but in many it's still worse than pre-WoD.

[Razorice]

No. I was responding to your odd statement that Ruby Sanctum didn't count as a content update.

How was that odd? How was Ruby Sanctum content?
Addind one boss is hardly a raid, they could have added at least some dungeons or something else to do for non-raiders.

[Eurhetemec]

I was more referencing the reality of drops at the time - at the end of each heroic boss in WOTLK, there was always a guaranteed epic loot drop. There was also all epic dungeons in the form of Trial of the Crusader (basically T7 10/25 man) and the 3 Icecrown Citadel dungeons (T8 10/25). In addition to that, there was the general ease of how you got those items near the end of WOTLK (LFG already implemented and spamming AOEs without regarding to CC).

I was under the impression that 'welfare epics' came into prominence in WOTLK though, but thank you for the short history lesson. I appreciate that.

I remember these epics, but I don't recall there being even 1/10th as much raging and ranting and so on about them as the Arena-derived epics. Note that in TBC you also got epics from Heroic dungeons (albeit TBC-era Heroic dungeons were initially a lot more demanding in terms of planning/execution for most class setups - late in the expansion a moderately geared Holy Paladin + people with decent AoE could faceroll them though) as well, but they are almost sort of random bits and bobs so again there was less outrage than re: the Arena weapons (and to a lesser extent armour).

As for the all-epic dungeons, as someone again, who was actually a raider back then (albeit less cutting-edge), I felt like the "outrage" a few loudmouths continually pushed was largely manufactured/fake/trolling (that a lot of the biggest loudmouths hadn't played Vanilla was telling, I felt). The fact was, the vast majority of people who actually did the TotC and ICC-era dungeons already had full epics on their main by even the time Ulduar had been out a few months, let alone by when TotC came out. There were Naxx PuGs running from the dawn of Ulduar, and they were not hard to get into (if anything, less prone to outrageous requirements than PuG raids today!), so really anyone could get covered in epics if they wanted to.

The drops were not that awesome either, despite being purple - I mean there was the odd good bit or bob, but it was inconsistent - but they did have Valor points (I think they were called that, right?) or something similar which were the main draw, that and gearing up alts, and the odd cool drop to fill some hole that RNG had prevented being filled in Ulduar. I mean, you talk about the TotC dungeon as if it were too easy, but if anything, the TotC raid was even easier than the dungeon. It was a faceroll. Pretty much every non-incompetent guild on the server finished it the first week you could finish it (same with Heroic). I know mine did. I recall some guilds had incredible and laughable problems with the third encounter, the faux-PvP, but that's because they were bad. Really bad. Checkboxers as we called them - people unable to make any kind of strategy on the fly or respond to different compositions. The sort of people even the mildest PvP scares shitless because they can't just mindlessly follow a guide or pre-prepared plan. The sort of people who are almost never the last few standing in a near-wipe, or if they are, it turns into a full wipe, because they won't even try to find a way through. Our guild was full of the opposite kind of people, which got us a number of kills whilst undergeared and unprepared. Anyway I digress.

As for "spamming AOEs without regard for CC", um, what? There was very little CC in WotLK dungeons period. Someone might frog or sheep or whatever an annoying caster who wouldn't come join the party, or panic-CC a mob who was causing a problem or about to add to a pull, but this was not an expansion where we regularly used CC, not at any stage in the expansion, except maybe the very start and even then it was usually just "someone CC that troublemaker mob". That said, neither the ToTC dungeon or the ICC dungeons were AoE facerolls unless you were so overgeared that you were only there for the points. The ICC ones in particular had some annoying trash, and many of the bosses were quite well-tuned in that you had to actually play your character, just like you did with the earlier Wrath Heroics. But CCing much? Not AoEing? That does not sound like Wrath in the least. That sounds like TBC or early Cata.

It wasn't even necessary to do okay. Back then, ratings were attached to a team, not to individual players. So if you wanted to you could reset your ratings by dissolving and reforming the team. Lose ten games a week, get points, then reset the team next week to grind out some more points.

It was until S3 that they started adding ratings requirements to some items. They went way overboard with that at the start of Wrath, adding personal ratings and ratings requirements even for most honor gear (I think libram slot items could be purchased without a rating). That was retracted pretty quickly when PvP participation imploded during S5.

Yeah that's true, so even these whining "raiders" (I was really steamed with them at the time, because I felt like they were giving raiders a bad name with their massive crying) could have just put the damn time in and got the weapons. Of course some did, and then they'd cry about "forced PvP", like they were fucking slaves that the Romans had unfairly and cruelly dragged to a Colosseum for their amusement, not just some dudes grinding points for a weapon they barely needed. There isn't an eyeroll emote big enough in the world for these people.

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A friend of mine that didn't play since mid Wotlk returned to play legion. It didn't take long for him to leave. I didn't even try to make him play because I also left.

WoW has become a 1 month game for me. Play after release and leave. There's nothing interesting to do anymore. Nothing to work towards that feels meaningful.

People that don't take a break from the game don't understand how biased they are. The game is a cluster fuck. It's starting to feel like those free mmorpgs that do everything wrong.

You're dead wrong. I've taken breaks from WoW several times, most notably from early Cata through to late MoP. The game's nadir was Cata, and WoD wasn't much better (I don't have a fixed opinion on MoP because I didn't play it enough when it was current content, but it seemed less awful than either of those). I've played since beta. I've played virtually every alternative MMO from LotRO to FFXIV. I often stop playing WoW for several months - so I take breaks. And Legion is the best WoW has been since Wrath, and it's better, for MY money, than TBC, and indeed a lot of Wrath, and only really pre-Naxx Vanilla was solidly better.

You attribute your friend leaving to JUST the game changing?

You actually believe that? That, the game changed in 8 years, but your friend didn't, you didn't? That the game changed, but what your friend likes is EXACTLY THE SAME as 8 years ago? Fuck that nonsense. That's gibberish.

The reality is, the game has changed, but so have we. That you friend only played for a month is not just about the game, unless he's been kept in cryo for the last eight years (has he?), it's about him, his lifestyle and so on. I bet in mid-Wrath (2009) he had a guild, people to play with, a lifestyle that allowed for playing WoW 3-4 hours a day, and so on. He didn't Netflix, social media, Discord and a zillion other brilliant games distracting him (the number of good PC games back in 2009 was shockingly low), and so on.

So to everyone claim "OH GOD THE GAME CHANGED!!!!", you changed too, stop pretending you didn't. The culture changed. Entertainment changed. Games changed (for the better, mostly, though the new wave of "LOOTBOXES 24/7 IN ALL GAMES!" may force us back into a gaming dark age). Unless something is seriously wrong with you, you are not the person who you were eight years ago. If you were in your teens or early twenties back then, that's particularly true. Nor are your friends the same - virtually everyone I knew who was a huge WoW player back in 2009 has long since quit - and not because "the game sucks" or whatever, but because they don't feel like they have time to play any more, or they've just changed and now find other games more appealing (or more friendly to their schedules), or because our old guilds, old networks, don't really exist any more.

So maybe you do have a kind of accidental point you don't seem to understand - it's not that "people who keep playing are biased", it's that some WoW players are primarily "self-propelled", and will keep playing for quite a long time without their guild, or with changing friends or the like, and some WoW players are really primarily part of a specific group of players, where it's a guild or a network of friends or whatever, and let's be real - most people are somewhere in the spectrum between the two. If you're more self-propelled, you'll find pretty much every version of WoW to have at least some interest, and you'll probably be able to see the value of Legion. If you are returning, having lost your network, lost the people that you enjoyed playing with, though? You probably won't last long. That is totally understandable. I've kind of been there. But blaming the game for what time hast wrought is some silly fucking shenanigans.

[tikcol]

You're dead wrong. I've taken breaks from WoW several times, most notably from early Cata through to late MoP. The game's nadir was Cata, and WoD wasn't much better (I don't have a fixed opinion on MoP because I didn't play it enough when it was current content, but it seemed less awful than either of those). I've played since beta. I've played virtually every alternative MMO from LotRO to FFXIV. I often stop playing WoW for several months - so I take breaks. And Legion is the best WoW has been since Wrath, and it's better, for MY money, than TBC, and indeed a lot of Wrath, and only really pre-Naxx Vanilla was solidly better.

You attribute your friend leaving to JUST the game changing?

You actually believe that? That, the game changed in 8 years, but your friend didn't, you didn't? That the game changed, but what your friend likes is EXACTLY THE SAME as 8 years ago? Fuck that nonsense. That's gibberish.

Well, he continues to play in private servers. He if changed, the love for the game as it used to be sure didn't. Else he wouldn't play there.

As for me, I spend more time playing in private servers every single year for around 5 years than I spend playing the new iteration of the game.

I might have changed but my love for the game hasn't.

[Eurhetemec]

Well, he continues to play in private servers. He if changed, the love for the game as it used to be sure didn't. Else he wouldn't play there.

That's interesting, but there are still a lot of other factors that might favour private servers, and I wonder if he'll stick with even those? I've seen people before quit WoW or certain other MMOs which have private servers running, go to them, roll in nostalgia for a few months, then quit those and at that point they're often truly done with the game forever because they've "said goodbye" to that period of their life.

The other thing private servers DO have going for them which I wish WoW had more of, is community. Private servers don't have the same level of churn as actual WoW, because only strongly-motivated people are playing them - a small, self-selecting group of people. People who search them out, download and configure the software (less of an issue than it was admittedly), and go play them. That's very different to casually subbing to a mainstream game.

So if you are the "people person" kind of WoW player - i.e. you want regular people to talk to, a guild which actually has humans who actually talk, and so on, private servers tend to be good for that. Admittedly I haven't played WoW ones for a while, but I have played other ones (DAoC for example - pre-ToA private servers still exist for that).

WoW is definitely better when there's some sense of community, when people do talk in chat and so on. I'd actually forgotten how much until I got into M+ stuff, and suddenly people were actually talking and friendly-ly taking the piss and so on.