WoW from a Vanilla player's perspective.

[Drdraenei]

Still the same old

Raiding isn't as much fun and the world is dead. I feel sorry for WoW players who didn't experience Azeroth when it was just 1-60 and there were loads of players running around, when you could get 200 people fighting in Tarren Mill for no particular reason.

But the questing is much better, the default UI is much better, there is more random stuff to do (for a new player at least), the servers aren't down half the time etc. Evens out really.

edit: The difference between killing Illidan and waiting for new content is only a few thousand guilds killed Illidan when it was the top raid, compared to everybody being able to kill Madness on LFR now. So instead of 100k players waiting for new raids you have 10 million waiting for new raids.

I kinda agree, my guild where just stepping into black temple round about the time the nerf came, quite frankly I was dissapointed WOTLK came out, I could have quite happily continued with TBC for a few more months, maybe even a year.

Now we're waiting months on end for content.

[koutalianos]

Well i am a rogue too, from the day 1 i played this game (Little bit before TBC). What i miss the most is how unique were the classes at that time. Rogue for example. We had to learn how to use weapons, how to pick locks, choose three kind of weapons skills (fist/dagger=5% crit, axe/sword=5% extra attack, Mace=5% stun), each talent tree had its meaning, gear was soooo difficult to take. I remember geting in Karazan with my pvp swords, the only epic weapon i could have for a long time! I mean each class had something unique. Now all have stuns, three classes can use somekind of stealth etc.

The bigest mistake they did, is that every class had each own business to do except from everything else. Now all are the same.

[Geekissexy]

I agree with almost everything you said, but you have got to be kidding me when you said that "The game has not been dumbed down".

That makes me feel like you didn't actually play at all in Vanilla.

- You actually had to use CC back then in normal groups, heroics, and raids! If you didn't most times it meant a wipe. You couldn't just AoE down all the trash pulls like you can now. Not only that, but you had to be careful which abilities you used around them because everything broke CC too.

- When you saw someone with epics back in the day, you know they had worked their butts off to get them. You had to grind out fire resist, frost resist, and nature resist for the older raids. Now you can walk in and kill all the bosses without having to worry about any of these things.

- Gold was much harder to acquire for most people. Getting your first epic mount felt like a true achievement.

- Making groups was a lot more difficult. You had to use summoning stones unless you had a warlock, and you had to sit in chat and hope you could find a full 5-man, or hope people in your guild wanted to run. Don't even get me started on 40 man raids. I can't even believe we pulled that off anymore.

[Aquamonkey]

- Making groups was a lot more difficult. You had to use summoning stones unless you had a warlock, and you had to sit in chat and hope you could find a full 5-man, or hope people in your guild wanted to run. Don't even get me started on 40 man raids. I can't even believe we pulled that off anymore.

Back in my day, those stones were used to queue for dungeons and not for summoning.

[Tziva]

I agree with almost everything you said, but you have got to be kidding me when you said that "The game has not been dumbed down".

That makes me feel like you didn't actually play at all in Vanilla.

- You actually had to use CC back then in normal groups, heroics, and raids! If you didn't most times it meant a wipe. You couldn't just AoE down all the trash pulls like you can now. Not only that, but you had to be careful which abilities you used around them because everything broke CC too.

- When you saw someone with epics back in the day, you know they had worked their butts off the get them. You had to grind out fire resist, frost resist, and nature resist for the older raids. Now you can walk in and kill all the bosses without having to worry about any of these things.

- Gold was much harder to acquire for most people. Getting your first epic mount felt like a true achievement.

- Making groups was a lot more difficult. You had to use summoning stones unless you had a warlock, and you had to sit in chat and hope you could find a full 5-man, or hope people in your guild wanted to run. Don't even get me started on 40 man raids. I can't even believe we pulled that off anymore.

It's true that some things were harder back then, but not universally everything.

Some things were legitimately harder. The game had a much steeper learning curve, for one.

Then there were a lot of things that weren't really challenging, just more tedious or time-consuming.

And some things, like boss complexity and individual player "rotations" are a lot more challenging today.

[Izenhart]

- You actually had to use CC back then in normal groups, heroics, and raids! If you didn't most times it meant a wipe. You couldn't just AoE down all the trash pulls like you can now. Not only that, but you had to be careful which abilities you used around them because everything broke CC too.

So you do in Challenge modes, which is what Blizzard have been repeating time and time again to be the new hardmode 5men dungeons.

And from TBC to WotLK to Cataclysm there have always bean easymode heroics and hard heroics people used to insta-leave if they got queued into. Arcatraz, Black Morass, Oculus, 3.3.0 ICC dungeons, Grim Batol.

- When you saw someone with epics back in the day, you know they had worked their butts off to get them. You had to grind out fire resist, frost resist, and nature resist for the older raids. Now you can walk in and kill all the bosses without having to worry about any of these things.

Now you don't "walk in and kill all the bosses".

How many HC bosses did you kill this content?

No one gives a shit about how your gear looks. It's the reward that comes from your raiding progression that matters. Titles, mounts and higher LEVEL of gear. Not gear appearance. And with transmogrify that doesn't even matter anymore.

Do you seriously think having to farm for WEEKS frost resist and nature resist for the tanks to be even able to ATTEMPT Hydross was something fun, challenging or rewarding just because it was hard? Having an entire raid get the Onyxia cloak for Flamegor/Ebonroc/Firemaw? Fire resist farm on the warlock that had to tank Leotherass?

NO.

It was tedious, and boring, and a completely unnecessary raidblock+timesink that required neither skill nor coordination, just lots and lots of time.

- Gold was much harder to acquire for most people. Getting your first epic mount felt like a true achievement.

Yet again, more timesinks that were boring and unnecessary. Most ways to gain gold in Vanilla were just to farm for hours and hours elementals hoping to loot some Essences, mindlessly and endlessly farm Dire Maul, or go and do all the quests you could get for the huge gain of 1.5/2.5g per quest.

Boring, tedious, unimaginative way to gain gold. Way more boring than actually being smart and knowing how to play the AH with the resources you have given your professions.

- Making groups was a lot more difficult. You had to use summoning stones unless you had a warlock, and you had to sit in chat and hope you could find a full 5-man, or hope people in your guild wanted to run. Don't even get me started on 40 man raids. I can't even believe we pulled that off anymore.

Again, and this is the definitive proof that either you have a pretty twisted memory of what Vanilla was, or you were just a casual so you probably didn't mind or realize so much how time consuming it was, or simply we have much different meanings to the equation "hard=better".

What makes you think that "making groups was a lot more difficult" back then equals to the game being toned down nowadays?

You seriously think spamming a chat for 45 minutes, then spend 20 minutes to fly/reach the instance, often with 60% mounts because not everyone had the 100% one, then maybe having to have someone go back to a City to spam the chat AGAIN because during the 1+ hours that you took to assemble the group one of the members had to go away/afk/leave. And you think this made the game better?


The game at lvl60, at the time, was a fucking masterpiece.

But if you compare it to all the improvements, technical, graphical, gameplay-wise and of overall quality of life, then lvl60 WoW is the little retarded brother of lvl70, lvl80, lvl85 and lvl90 WoW

[Silver-Fox]

I started playing at the end of the Ahn'Qiraj events so I think that gives the appropriate credentials of speaking as a "vanilla player". Maybe. I really started playing because I felt that the burning crusade expansion looked "cool" so I rolled a mage and got to sixty maybe a year before release?

I feel personally that World of Warcraft, for me personally, is better now than it was. However this is not without understanding the fundamental evolution the game has gone through and we the players have experienced. I feel the game in it's current state is the culmination of Blizzard's game design and development process. You know, like we are given certain features in one expansion and Blizzard would get feedback then they would remove and redesign some of the less attractive features and build on the features we loved. So I think it's better now because the game's evolution has been a result of Blizzard's experimentation. There were ups and downs, yeah, but I feel it's better now than it was years ago because Blizzard's been improving the game since.

Yeah Vanilla was cool and I do miss the level of social activity it had before dungeon finder and random battlegrounds. But the grinds then, if you ask me solely, were worse than all the grinds in any expansion. I think it was vanilla that projected the stereotype of playing World of Warcraft and having no life so-to-speak. It was fun, still don't get me wrong, just in hindsight I couldn't say I would have had the patience and stamina to make it level sixty. While I concede that the game was harder back then in virtually every respect, virtually every aseptic was harder then, I think it is for the nostalgia we yearn for more than the actual game-play of yesteryear that brings up these sorts of topics or why people want vanilla servers offered to veteran players. For me vanilla was a trial by fire that if you reached sixty and got an epic, you were somebody and now it seems more like a commodity to have an epic equipped after say only a couple days after hitting the level cap.

[Aquamonkey]

So you do in Challenge modes, which is what Blizzard have been repeating time and time again to be the new hardmode 5men dungeons.

If you're going for gold in those challenge modes you don't CC at all. You pull all the things and rotate aoe stuns and cds.

[schwarzkopf]

These are just my thoughts on why it appears there is so much QQ (that has always been there anyways lol) still going on about how good the game use to be, and how much it isn't now. Thoughts?

The first drink of water is always the best drink of water, not because the water changes - but because you do.

I've been running my mage since 28th May 2005, still loving the game - so I think that the minority whingers just are more vocal than the silent happy majority.

[jfuze]

I played vanilla and absolutely LOVED it. It's the cool thing for people to say they miss vanilla,.... but honestly its the truth. The game was raw and required you to actually use your brain. Now everything is just forcefed and put up on a silver platter.

It also had more of a community feel. That is a huge part of it. Felt more like an RPG rather than just a farming game.

[Vladar]

Reading some of the posts its obvious most veteran players just left WOW a long time ago. I left WOW at the end of Cata. To me WOW was really better both in Vanilla and TBC because you had to be on top of your game to actually accomplish in the rading part of the game. I remember wiping for weeks on raid encounters and having the best tries being better and better.

You couldnt do anything with half the raid afk unless you were 2 tier above, sure a Naxx guild could go AFK in molten core but noobs still wiped and wiped in MC. The game was so much better back then. The first Trivial raid came in WOTLK with the redone Naxx that's when Blizzard started to get lazy and opened up raiding to everyone.

[Scunosi]

It always astounds me when I look back at my subscription history and realize I was technically a Vanilla player, though I never hit a level cap until BC. So let me weigh in!
I feel like WoW as a "game" is always improving. Mechanics constantly getting clarified/improved/made relevant, more complex mob mechanics, so many quality of life changes, and tons of casual fare added throughout the years. I know there's people out there that don't support changes like LFR and LFG, but you can't really stop the march of progress. Plus, that seemingly tends to boil down to a different issue, that of community.
Like the game, the community's also been constantly changing, but since it's made up of almost nothing but intangibles it's pretty hard to say if it's ever been better or worse. Apparently the official forums have been bad from the beginning, and are actually arguably better now. Blizzard seems to communicate with the playerbase more, but on the flipside when players don't get recognition it just gives them one more reason to whine. Tools like LFR and LFG are great additions from a gameplay aspect, but they can actually harm a server community. Of course, if the majority of a server is flocking to tools instead of their own peers, doesn't that say something about the "supportive, friendly community" in which they allegedly reside? And it's not like you can't still make your own groups. So that's sort of a non-issue in my eyes, and I've made plenty of use of LFG, if not LFR (never had the iLevel in Cata ^.^).

So, has the game gotten better since Vanilla? I'd say yes, almost unarguably so. Has the community also improved? Eh, it's hard to tell. I wouldn't say it's gotten worse, anyway, it's just that the current fads and wants of the community are always changing. Remember when Gearscore was the be-all-end-all of the game? Yeah, the things the community fixates on tend to come and go, whereas the core gameplay (the part Blizzard can actually control) has remained solid and received nothing but improvements and streamlining since release.

[potis]

There are 2 sides to the story.

1)MMO's werent so famous back then, WoW was a completely new experience and came from the awesome background of Warcraft 2/3/TFT, got famous really fast.

2)The game was a RPG back then, it is not anymore every since the beginning of Wrath.

WoW evolved from a MMO-RPG game, to something else..It started with the whining of "I am being left out of dungeons/PvP/Raids as class XX because class XX has <Spell here>", after that generalization started, everyone has everything to make the game more accessible in terms of classes-->RPG feeling gone.

The game became better in terms of annoyance, with the whole LFR and other things, they ARENT bad, if you play any of the new games that come out, that last a few months and have a population and then start to go down and everyone calls for a LFR, you understand what i mean but it drifted away from its RPG core into something else, i really have no idea what it is nowdays, every second class is the same so there wont be PvE cries etc.

The community will never change, there were 13 year olds then, there were 30 year olds acting like 13 years old then, and they exist now..Nothing has changed, only thing has changed is the accessibility of things, back then maybe a couple 13 year olds had something to brag about and be asses, nowdays everyone has something to brag about = What you have.

[Daara]

US-Mannoroth - First server to open AQ gates so I know what I'm talking about, I'm not from some crap backwater server full of carebears.

I downed Rag in Vanilla.

It still doesn't take long for someone to get blacklisted on a server so your point is moot.

The stats prove Hrag in Firelands was one of the hardest fights ever put into the game. So again you talk out of your butt lol.

You can't get Teir loot from vendors doing 5 mans, they require tokens to this very day.

You are trying to tell me I'm a liar, but you make argumentative points that make zero sense.

Medivh was the first server to open the AQ gates, moron.

Mod Edit: Please don't insult people.

[vindicatorx]

People have always been assholes true enough it just seems the number of assholes has increased dramatically. The game itself has evolved and I still remember starting an hour + late on MC runs because we were waiting for the right number of healers and tanks to log in. I personally think the current game is much better for people like me who like to maximize their time in game doing raids or pvp. The community is a lot worse than it was I generally stay out of towns when logged in.

[schwarzkopf]

US-Mannoroth - First server to open AQ gates so I know what I'm talking about, I'm not from some crap backwater server full of carebears.

US-Medivh - http://www.karashur.net/aq_wow_pics.php

The stats prove Hrag in Firelands was one of the hardest fights ever put into the game. So again you talk out of your butt lol.

H: Ragnaros: 7945 (11.53%)
H: Sinestra: 2147 (2.84%)
-- source wowprogress.

You can't get Teir loot from vendors doing 5 mans, they require tokens to this very day.

Toren Landow says otherwise, you could get 2xTier in Cataclysm from VP (now JP).

http://www.wowhead.com/npc=58154#sells:50+14-2

I downed Rag in Vanilla.

It still doesn't take long for someone to get blacklisted on a server so your point is moot.

You are trying to tell me I'm a liar, but you make argumentative points that make zero sense.

Not a liar, but if your at 0/3 on the ones I quoted then 0/3 seems reasonable for the last three.

[Destruktion]

So you do in Challenge modes, which is what Blizzard have been repeating time and time again to be the new hardmode 5men dungeons.

And from TBC to WotLK to Cataclysm there have always bean easymode heroics and hard heroics people used to insta-leave if they got queued into. Arcatraz, Black Morass, Oculus, 3.3.0 ICC dungeons, Grim Batol.

Uhh, there was no queue for Arcatraz or Black Morass, or even Occulus for that matter. If you found yourself in one of those instances, you can be 99% sure that you went out of your way to be there.

It was tedious, and boring, and a completely unnecessary raidblock+timesink that required neither skill nor coordination, just lots and lots of time.

If you don't like timesinks then go play something else. Clearly this genre isn't for you.

Yet again, more timesinks that were boring and unnecessary. Most ways to gain gold in Vanilla were just to farm for hours and hours elementals hoping to loot some Essences, mindlessly and endlessly farm Dire Maul, or go and do all the quests you could get for the huge gain of 1.5/2.5g per quest.

Boring, tedious, unimaginative way to gain gold. Way more boring than actually being smart and knowing how to play the AH with the resources you have given your professions.

Sitting in a capital city in a single room watching numbers tick by is more fun than actually playing an MMORPG? To each his own I guess.

You seriously think spamming a chat for 45 minutes, then spend 20 minutes to fly/reach the instance, often with 60% mounts because not everyone had the 100% one, then maybe having to have someone go back to a City to spam the chat AGAIN because during the 1+ hours that you took to assemble the group one of the members had to go away/afk/leave. And you think this made the game better?

This game from its inception was designed to be played with friends. If you played solo, you had a tougher time playing the game, and justifiably so.

The game at lvl60, at the time, was a fucking masterpiece.

But if you compare it to all the improvements, technical, graphical, gameplay-wise and of overall quality of life, then lvl60 WoW is the little retarded brother of lvl70, lvl80, lvl85 and lvl90 WoW

Much of WoW has changed for the better, much has changed for the worse. Gear is more homogenized and uninteresting than ever before. Classes are more homogenized than ever before. Encounter difficulty consists of nothing but UI toggles and complex mechanics that create brick walls for average guilds. Timesinks were phased out for a time, leaving behind a shallow and unfulfilling endgame. The World of Warcraft and the land of instanced content are less connected than ever before (instanced content was a major criticism when classic WoW was released, but now there's such a massive rift between them the negatives are outweighing the positives).
Blizzard is starting to come 'round.

[Deleted]

Why do so many people always write "then" when it should be "than" ?!?!?! I see this all the time.

[Scunosi]

People have always been assholes true enough it just seems the number of assholes has increased dramatically. The game itself has evolved and I still remember starting an hour + late on MC runs because we were waiting for the right number of healers and tanks to log in. I personally think the current game is much better for people like me who like to maximize their time in game doing raids or pvp. The community is a lot worse than it was I generally stay out of towns when logged in.

I would suggest this is due to game mechanics, none of which really have anything to do with the actual community. Tools like LFG and LFR mean you can see more people more quickly, running through multiple dungeons in the time it used to take just to form a group for one back in the day. This means you're just opening yourself up to more slivers of humanity, some of which might be great, some of which might be bad, but all in all it'll be the same ratio as always. But since you tend to remember bad things more readily than the good, it sticks out in your mind and makes you think you've been encountering more bad/rude/annoying people, when in reality you've just be encountering the same amount as always just at a faster pace.
Plus with the influx of new players to MMOs in general in recent, it stands to reason you'd be seeing more people of every stripe in-game, whereas back in the day there weren't nearly as many on the vast majority of servers. Apply above reasoning, and you get the same result; same ratios, just higher overall quantity, affecting perceived results.

[CrazyCraftLady]

I've already responded to a similar post on this, but I think after BC every expansion made me lose more interest and I just keep hoping for something else to come along that I can replace WoW with for good.