It's not Nostalgia.

[Deleted]

Private server is not how Vanilla really was. Furthermore it's a small community which is also totally different from how Vanilla was.

Vanilla had server communities. I guess you never experienced that?

---------- Post added 2013-04-29 at 07:09 PM ----------

What on earth are you talking about?

I meant it's more like an interactive movie than an actual game these days.

[xixixviixiiii]

One of the striking notions that I've read in this generally interesting thread has been that after spending eight years in the game it has somehow failed because it's not as immersive, fresh, exciting and new as it was eight years ago.

That's rubbish of course and is the pure distilled essence of nostalgia. So it goes. If anyone thinks this is not rubbish please provide examples of video games that are just as immersive, fresh, etc. as they were eight years ago. I'd like to play them.

Doom, for Playstation or Doom 64.

Why do you call it rubbish? The game was more immersive because questing wasn't faceroll easy. You were not handed 4-5 quests at a time and piece-mealed a zone and finished it linearly. The dungeons had build-up to them, as did most of the raids. Items (and drops in general) did not follow a necessarily strict formula. Every player was not the "chosen one" meant to save the whole of Azeroth. The zones themselves were often oppressive and exploration was rewarding - flying from Ironforge to Duskwood, for example, brought you over Searing Gorge and as a lower level character, it was an oppressive place (especially seeing so many skull mobs). Entering Outland for the first time was epic and it was fun having a bunch of level 60's fruitlessly banding together to see if they could down the Pit Lord.

World of Warcraft actually had a world at one point and it had, *gasp*, RPG elements. The only reason you even see as many people in the world is because of CRZ (even then, it's not much) and because Blizzard filled MoP to the absolute brim with mindless, time-sink dailies and then attached coins to them for bonus loot in raids. But yeah, queuing up everything without ever moving from Orgrimmar is so much better! Everything else is nostalgia and rubbish!

Please... lol.

[Osmeric]

The game was more immersive because questing wasn't faceroll easy.

Repeating nonsense doesn't make it any less nonsensical.

[Lilija]

Vanilla had server communities. I guess you never experienced that?

I trust that some servers did but some didn't. I was on a big server full of rerollers and it was crap community wise. Noone cared for anyone but themselves.

Server community is an ephemera. Requires very specific circumstance to occur properly. I can imagine what people mean describing their good sense of community in Vanilla - I have experienced something similar on a private D2 server. We all knew each other and had great time but it ended when people stopped playing it. Something like this can't occur on any big server because it's not in human nature to make friends with so huge amounts of people. You can't even possibly remember most of them.

That's why the real source of any meaningfull social interaction were, are and always will be guilds. Server communities can flourish for a moment but they are very short living without people carrying to keep the spirit up.

[Huehuecoyotl]

Repeating nonsense doesn't make it any less nonsensical.

nonsensical? you mean like suggesting that someones opinion is nonsense? actually i agree with him. how can you become immersed in a game where there is no challenge? if raids were built like that, we would get a BUNCH of people coming on here asking what was the point of it. and yet everyone should just put up with questing that works that way?

[Osmeric]

nonsensical? you mean like suggesting that someones opinion is nonsense?

If he had written "it felt more immersive to me because...", I would not have disputed it. But to claim that the general sense of immersion comes from difficult content? This makes no sense whatsoever.

[xixixviixiiii]

Repeating nonsense doesn't make it any less nonsensical.

lol - What is nonsensical about it? Truly, explain to me how questing and the world itself are better now than before? Now, beyond leveling (*), I can guarantee the zones in MoP would be empty if Blizzard didn't coerce people via gimmicks (lesser coins and valor) and make stuff like cooking this arbitrarily long and convoluted process. Blizzard has literally designed themselves into a corner and the only way they can fight back is by making the world itself tie into end-game content.

* Even leveling would largely be done via LFG and Blizzard knew this also, which is why they made people "discover" the instances, which in MoP's case, meant doing a big quest chain to unlock them.

MoP, despite being this golden age as some people claim, it actually rather awful. If anything is nonsense, it's the ridiculous amount of dailies and how retarded the valor setup is this expansion (aka 90% of the valor gear is useless and gated behind factions that require more dailies to earn rep). Now people just sit around in towns waiting for their queue to pop - allowing other people to provide feasts and taking minimal responsibility for their own performance. Hell, half of the time people can't even do that right. I couldn't tell you how many times someone missed out on the queue because they apparently couldn't handle the 10 min LFG queue or 20-30 min LFR queue.

EDIT: Answering your question, when you're able to put forth next to no effort and win, win, win... and basically know exactly what to expect all of the time because the questing content is so formulaic, it really starts to feel boring and if I'm bored, I'm not being sucked in. Sorry if it was implied. Thought that was common knowledge.

[MoanaLisa]

nonsensical? you mean like suggesting that someones opinion is nonsense? actually i agree with him. how can you become immersed in a game where there is no challenge? if raids were built like that, we would get a BUNCH of people coming on here asking what was the point of it. and yet everyone should just put up with questing that works that way?

My actual point was aimed a bit differently than that. It was simply that if you play a game pretty much continuously for several years, getting that new game feel along with the immersiveness and freshness that comes along with it is unlikely. Thinking that you could get that back by returning to the past is pretty much a fantasy.

I didn't find questing back in the day all that difficult to be honest although I wasn't around for vanilla, mid-BC was when I came in. Questing was at times tedious with all the going back and forth, but outside of group quests, not really anything that was overly stressful. I think I died half a dozen times getting my first character to end game [70 and not counting dungeon wipes] and most of those were just plain not-paying-attention on my part. So I would question that a bit.

The question of community is a difficult one because everyone's experience with that is highly personal and depended a lot on what server you were on, when you played and a variety of other things. My server at the time was dominated by a few guilds that were constantly sniping at each other in trade. It got to the point where I turned the channel off for most of BC and half of Wrath. So much for opportunities to find friends or a sense of community. That's an anecdote to be sure but to blithely assume that the 'community' back in the day was 100% hearts and roses for everyone everywhere is simple, wrong and not a little bit insulting to people who can clearly remember differently.

I've mentioned before that I have an alt on Cenarion Circle [US-RP] and that is and has been a spectacular community for years. You don't see me taking that and assuming that everyone else's realm community is the same. That would just be stupid.

[Osmeric]

lol - What is nonsensical about it? Truly, explain to me how questing and the world itself are better now than before?

Changing goalposts, are we? The claim was that difficult questing made the game feel more immersive. This is ludicrous. What does difficulty have to do with immersion?

Vanilla was new and immersive. The questing was also more difficult. This doesn't mean the latter caused the former.

[MoanaLisa]

Changing goalposts, are we? The claim was that difficult questing made the game feel more immersive. This is ludicrous. What does difficulty have to do with immersion?

Vanilla was new and immersive. The questing was also more difficult. This doesn't mean the latter caused the former.

Quoting Osmeric to support a common-sense point: Immersion is only mildly related to difficulty. Overly difficult games aren't immersive at all. There's nothing immersive about multiple corpse runs while attempting to complete a quest. Dying repeatedly takes you out of the story more than immersing you into it.

A well-done new game should be immersive. But after time passes, it will become less and less so as the new wears off and familiarity sets in. That's more about human nature than game design, much less game design on a platform and environment that's been around for nearly a decade.

[xixixviixiiii]

Changing goalposts, are we? The claim was that difficult questing made the game feel more immersive. This is ludicrous. What does difficulty have to do with immersion?

Vanilla was new and immersive. The questing was also more difficult. This doesn't mean the latter caused the former.

Um, no. I provided a list of reasons why the game was more immersive before. You chose to only focus on one.

I'm not strictly speaking about vanilla either. I found much of TBC and even Wrath to be immersive. Cataclysm was were the disconnect first began for me because much of it took on a rather silly tone and every single person began being referred to as the "chosen one." MoP continued this trend mostly. I liked the Mogu story stuff when I first encountered it in the Jade Forest but it never really went anywhere. It kind of just fell flat, some Trolls showed up and suddenly it was more of the, "Oh, save us Chosen One!" stuff.

EDIT: I do not agree with that MoanaLisa. Immersion can be achieved with a well played out story, backdrop and adequate challenge. As far as difficulty is concerned, I have a hard time being convinced of the Pandaren versus Mogu story, where the Mogu are made out to be these all-purpose, vile, bad guys that pose a serious threat to Pandaria and I'm able to faceroll over every single Mogu I encounter in quest greens. Sorry.

[Seefer]

I wish half the people in this thread could see themselves back.....9 years ago when WoW came out and they were playing Vanilla, They would know they are just talking out of their asses when they say "The community is dead" or the million things wrong apparently.

IT

IS

NOSTALGIA

MoP is fantastic and last I checked WoW still had over 10 million subscribers which...is STILL the size of a small country, So yeah....It's fine.

"BUT THE COMMUNITY IS DEAD AND NO ONE TALKS TO EACH OTHER" Maybe on your server, Not on mine. I have a friends list full of people that log on every day and night. Up to 15 people online at once, Not even counting my small raiding guild of...120 people, My guild usually has about 10-15 people online during the day/night.

I have friends, I have community, I raid with a guild, I PvP with the guild and friends...I have shared so many personal and intimate moments with my guildies and friends and I would not change it for the world.

If WoW stopped tomorrow I would not know what to do without them, So this claim of "WoW has no community" is bullshit and you know it

9.4 million not over 10 million, and the community IS gone unless you are a trade troll, there is no talking in LFD/LFR unless it's to insult someone.

[yjmark]

9.4 million not over 10 million, and the community IS gone unless you are a trade troll, there is no talking in LFD/LFR unless it's to insult someone.

Funny - I talk to people all the time in LFR and LFD, and they respond nicely a majority of the time. I even respond to some folks in trade chat, and they are also nice. /shrug....

[MoanaLisa]

EDIT: I do not agree with that MoanaLisa. Immersion can be achieved with a well played out story, backdrop and adequate challenge.

I won't argue that and I should have been clearer that expansion content or content that you've never seen before when leveling an alt can be very immersive if it's good. For that matter, my personal favorite zone with the most immersive questline in the game is the redo of Silverpine from Cataclysm. To be fair, I'll argue the other side of the coin as well: Heirlooms are about as anti-immersive as it gets. So is reducing the XP needed to finish a zone. QOL changes generally come at the cost of being able to easily disappear into the game. One of the huge problems with the 5.0 dailies is that the way they were set up, they were about as anti-immersive as is imaginable. And this is from someone who didn't then and doesn't now mind dailies. The 5.1 dailies did this much better but you can only see the story once and that applies to everything.

The main point is that it's a balance: too easy or too difficult can take you out of the game pretty easily. So the solution is not in every case to make things more difficult and call that 'immersive'. It's not.

[Deleted]

I trust that some servers did but some didn't. I was on a big server full of rerollers and it was crap community wise. Noone cared for anyone but themselves.

Server community is an ephemera. Requires very specific circumstance to occur properly. I can imagine what people mean describing their good sense of community in Vanilla - I have experienced something similar on a private D2 server. We all knew each other and had great time but it ended when people stopped playing it. Something like this can't occur on any big server because it's not in human nature to make friends with so huge amounts of people. You can't even possibly remember most of them.

That's why the real source of any meaningfull social interaction were, are and always will be guilds. Server communities can flourish for a moment but they are very short living without people carrying to keep the spirit up.

People who move to big servers usually want to be carried. Now they have LFR so they don't even need to move anymore.

It's tragic. Transfers were the final nail in the coffin for realm communities but I guess that's peoples' own fault for being lazy and wanting to be carried.

I almost wish I could go back in time to before the "casuals" took over WoW.

[Shahad]

People who move to big servers usually want to be carried. Now they have LFR so they don't even need to move anymore.

It's tragic. Transfers were the final nail in the coffin for realm communities but I guess that's peoples' own fault for being lazy and wanting to be carried.

I almost wish I could go back in time to before the "casuals" took over WoW.

Hum, most transfers to higher population realms are to escape the dead ends of shit realms, not to get "carried"(what does that even mean? Carried by what?)

And what do you mean casuals took over wow? Casual players always were the majority of players, even in vanilla(just look at the % of raiders for total population).

[MrHappy]

Stopped here. Questing in this game has never been particularly obscure or difficult as far as what to do, and how to do it. Even as a beginner in this game, there were only a 1 or 2 that left me wondering what to do, simply because I didn't know about various crafting, and where to get things.

Even now, it's unbelievably spelled out for you, which really is another check mark in the "convenience removing immersion" column. As far as hub design goes, the 'questing on rails' trend we're seeing also means that alt runs have absolutely zero diversity in them, which in turn makes those efforts even more monotonous, which in turn makes people demand that xp be boosted for alts, etc etc etc.

i like questing how i like a book. It has beginning, middle, end. I don't want questing to be like those idiotic novels for kids "if x go to page 4 if y go to page 122" and you spend your whole time flipping through with no coherent story. Questing if you bother to read them actually is meant to tell the story of the zone. Prime example is the sylvanas quest chain in SilverPine. actually questing in vanila was nothing BUT obscure for the most part. It is how addons like Questhelper came to pass and thousands of pages on forums were created because even more people literally said "wtf am i supposed to do now?" How is running around lost wondering wtf to do have to do with immersion in any way?

There should not be diversity UNTIL you are max level. Why? Because if you are new to wow you learn where you come from, and you are guided on a path of a great (insert class here) where at max level you can choose what to do, which faction to support, which role to play. But even so there are crossroads (literal and figurative) that you can choose where to go to advance your personal story/immersion there are at least 2 zones for every level group you can choose. Every continent has a different story from start to finish.

The monotony you speak of is because by now most people have played every race (if not every class) at least once (not saying maxed level but at least out of the starting zone). You have seen all possible stories. So when you have to play ANOTHER class through the same zone all over again yea you want to skip all of it. When Cata came out people were complaining that some zones took TOO LITTLE time due to all the xp boost and people took off the gear till outland so they can see all the new stories and what not.

[xixixviixiiii]

The main point is that it's a balance: too easy or too difficult can take you out of the game pretty easily. So the solution is not in every case to make things more difficult and call that 'immersive'. It's not.

Agreed. I never intended to proclaim vanilla or older expansions were more immersive only (and entirely) due to challenge. I did list several examples of why I felt the current system wasn't up-to-par but only my first point was contended with. More than anything, people need to look at the complete package rather than focusing on bits and pieces.

As a package, while vanilla was certainly awesome in many regards, I certainly did not like many things either. I feel Blizzard hit about the best balance in Wrath (with a few notable exceptions; ToC, an anti-climatic story-line, several loose-ends story-wise, et cetera). Now, in MoP, it seems to be heading down the opposite side of the bell-curve as vanilla and I'm not a fan. When it comes down to it, WoW is an MMORPG and I simply don't feel the MMORPG in it anymore. The world feels like it exists for novelty and all anyone does anymore is stand around, waiting for things to happen - or otherwise, plays the game as they would any other single-player game. Challenge is important not only because it lends itself to the immersion but also because it gives the community a reason to work together. As-is, not only do I not feel the Mogu threat due to lack of challenge their related quests provide but the community only barely needs to coexist to perhaps down a world boss every now and then.

[papajohn4]

the ones who speak about nostalgia are the jealous people who never had a chance to play during vanilla or tbc. So is like a diffensive mechanism of humans, telling themselves "I did not miss anything valuable, it was shit, buggy, blah blah blah"

It is how addons like Questhelper came to pass and thousands of pages on forums were created because even more people literally said "wtf am i supposed to do now?" How is running around lost wondering wtf to do have to do with immersion in any way?

what I said above...yea, quests in vanilla had no story..right..I loled. also in vanilla I don't remember there was the quest helper addon. Me and my friends we knew all quests without the need of addon...and this is how quests needs to be, make you travel and wonder what to do, not hold your hand..

[Shahad]

the ones who speak about nostalgia are the jealous people who never had a chance to play during vanilla or tbc. So is like a diffensive mechanism of humans, telling themselves "I did not miss anything valuable, it was shit, buggy, blah blah blah"

That does not necessarily mean that they are wrong though.
Inversely to your point, one could say that those who say it's not nostalgia are looking through rose-tinted glasses.