When will World of Warcraft become World of Warcraft again? the spark is long lost.

[ATZenith]

Never. There will never be a game that gives you the same feeling WoW gave you or any other "First time" game.

[Deleted]

Look on the bright side.
Now you can spend too much time doing something else.

[Whidbey]

For those who keep saying something is missing, this is my humble opinion on the matter as well as speculation as to the cause.

We are many years out from the RTS games and everything was based on them in WoW, that story is over, time and tales have moved forward.

I honestly believe both longtime players and the game as well, have been changing and evolving with the times. Folks who used to sit and spend 100+ hours a month raiding have had changes in life and perspective, they have moved on in life and to different types of games, or just look at wow as reading the same favorite book over and over. The problem with the latter is that , the book too has evolved and changed. While the engine may be old, the systems have evolved making the game less hassle free to learn, has had massive quality of life improvements, and has moved on from vanilla's plotlines. To the same old book/game after this many years is only fooling yourself.

To those who treat it like a book they love, mentally they lay claim to it, they have their own head canons, their own ways they feel things should always be. It's like all those people who fell in love with the characters and mythos of Harry Potter, some just cannot handle Dumbledore having been a closeted gay man. But guess what? He was. Why? Because his creator deemed it so. Same with WoW why the changes, why the re-vamps, why the changes to known lore.. because WoW is a living breathing universe, and it's creators wish to see things update and things to change. We are not the gods in control of this universe, Blizzard are.


What you remember as being it's "Spark", is just that a memory of your own. For millions of others, it may be a relief that the game has moved forward, and feels less like a career and more like what it is ,a video game. WoW has lost nothing, other than buggy mechanics, incomplete lore, its lack of inaccessibility to the masses, and seriously uggo character models. Maybe besides the memory you miss is the feeling of being elite in gaming circles because you played and survived the clunky monstrosity WoW used to be, and felt you were it's gatekeeper. Who knows? But welcome to WoW of 2014 still alive, still kickin ass, and with an updated player base.

It's full of spark, but maybe, your spark plugs need changing with the times.

[Frogguh]

While I am sure there are people out there who find picking flowers and rocks fun, I have personally never met one. If gathering is tedious, then you basically have to treat WoW like a job, and why in the world would anyone get off work and want to play a game that absolutely forces you to do tedious tasks before you can actually play the game? That's a pretty crappy business model, actually.

Which brings me to leveling. Blizzard has made a system to where the vast majority of the game is at endgame and thus leveling is primarily a barrier to playing the game. I would love to see a scaling system where if, say, a max level character attacks Thrallmar, his effective power is brought down to the zone's level. That way, even though he has a full load of abilities, a group of 60's could still take him down. I couldn't beat Tyson in a fistfight but I guarantee ten of me at once could, and it should be no different in game. It would make all zones relevant, reduce mindless ganking, allow max level players to group with low level friends, etc. They could even scale raids the same way, so level 90s could raid ICC at appropriate difficulties and give players the full range of PVE content to choose from.

[Deleted]

Everything in the OP was bang on, WoW lost it's spark after WOTLK when pleasing the mass market overtook sustaining an RPG game. So I say come and enjoy a bit of fun on the dark side, and see if it's you thats changed.
Come and see what would happen is you really could rewind the clock back to Burning Crusade, would you enjoy it as much as you think you would?

I know the answer for me is that the game changed. I still have an account on retail, but along side this I play on 'the dark side' and honestly WoD is going to have to be amazing for me to not pack my stuff up and leave the legit servers for good.

I know that this comment will be deleted (although not before they have a good laugh at the video which I'm sure everyone here will fucking lol to pieces over!)

But the best thing Blizzard could ever do is start opening up 1.12.1, 2.4.3 and 3.3.1 servers and put all the private servers out of business. I'd love them to do this, but I can't see it happening. As long as mods keep deleting comments like this though, demand wont have a chance to build up.

[Luko]

The community is the same now as it was back then.

The biggest difference is how many people you now see in the game and how much more popular things like forums are. Originally, you only saw people on your server and even then, there were people you would never want to play with. The same can be said for every server. Now, you see more of these people than ever before since a lot of group stuff is cross realm. Cross realm didn't make people suddenly become terrible people. The people that were like that in the first place stayed the same. There is just a higher amount of them that you have the possibility of meeting.

All these horror stories of LFD/LFR always baffle me because I might get 1 bad experience for ever 50 good ones. Most people will only ever remember that 1 and easily forget the other 49 runs.

Anyway, the community was awful then, it's awful now.

I've tried to state this many times over the years and each time it ends up being ignored, much like this one has so far. People don't have a response for logic, they wait and hand pick the opinionated posts in order to launch into these subjective battles over who had the more accurate experience.

I've been around MMOs for a smidge over 13 years now. If there's any spark that's been lost in your experience, OP, it's been lost within yourself. The game doesn't feel the same to you because of countless factors, only a handful of which have anything to directly do with the progression of the game itself and more of your perspective of those changes and your current feelings for the game.

Personally, if I felt as strongly against the current state of ANYTHING as the OP and a few others obviously do, I would have moved on ages ago, as I have with games (and anything else) in the past.

Other than a futile, monotonous semantics battle, I'm not even sure where this thread is going any more.

[Plutarch78]

If it was so bad in TBC why did u play back then?

It was fun for its time. But like I said I would never want to go back to paying thousands of gold for flying, spam endlessly for pugs to do heroics or be stuck doing Kara when guilds were doing BT and SWP.

[Sierra85]

It was fun for its time. But like I said I would never want to go back to paying thousands of gold for flying, spam endlessly for pugs to do heroics or be stuck doing Kara when guilds were doing BT and SWP.

actually talking to people, creating relationships, friendships was much better than LFD & Oqueue.

Doing kara as a way of catching up on gear, and socialising, hanging out having fun was much better than lfr

[Klingers]

Wall of text you could keep an army of Mantid out with.

Honestly the same thing's happened to me.

You've just got to realise that as much as the game's changed, so have you. No one is the same person they were ten years ago. So have all of us.

The market's changed and Blizzard's adapted. It's that simple really.

[Deleted]

actually talking to people, creating relationships, friendships was much better than LFD & Oqueue.

Doing kara as a way of catching up on gear, and socialising, hanging out having fun was much better than lfr

indeed... it was a lot better!

[jbombard]

Agreed. Things were much better when it wasn't such a rush. Everything took so long that there wasn't much point to try and blow through it in five minutes. It meant that you had time to talk to the people around you and help people out without having to worry about whether or not your queue is going to pop any second. That said it is never going back to that. That isn't the kind of game WoW is anymore. They are taking the game in the polar opposite direction and not looking back.

[Bentusi]

Wow. Lots of people on this thread with nostalgia boogers in their eyes; nevermind rose-tinted goggles. I was there during BC and I sure as hell don't want to go back to that.

Oh wow, some more dismissive arrogance without any sort of argumentation! Imagine my surprise, and may I direct you to the WoW forums where this sort of behavior belongs.

[BenBos]

Oh wow, some more dismissive arrogance without any sort of argumentation! Imagine my surprise, and may I direct you to the WoW forums where this sort of behavior belongs.

Arrogance ?

Since when was the absence of gear changer, dual specs, visiting the trainer to click copy/cat the talent trees under pressure from 25/40 other guys waiting for hours in that small raid corridor a good thing really ? Not even talking about that 14 year old Tank who decided to quit your 4 hour dungeon half way through without ANY tools to help you out ?

And what about those times you didn't get help to return to that respec/bank because your fucking HS was on cool down for an hour any way?

People forget so much annoying things, it is not even funny.

[Bentusi]

"changing and evolving"

Man I`m tired of this "argument". The game has been "evolved" into a stinking pile of manure, and it doesn`t even have opposable thumbs. There`s a slogan from Orwell`s 1984: "CHANGE IS GOOD", which all the brainwash victims keep repeating as a mantra, and WoW apologists remind me of that. I have explained why the game is shit and you respond with pseudo-evolutionary waffle. You might try and explain why it`s good to make everything trivial, make the five mans soloable and to convert the entire PVE aspect of the game into impersonal queues instead perhaps. If I wanted a lecture by David Attenborough I`d buy one of his DVDs. But since you dragged the conversation into bioreligious territory, let me respond in kind with my perspective of what`s been done to WoW:


Classic, TBC, Wrath, Cataclysm, MoP and WoD.

[Deleted]

sorry to say NEVER

[alany]

Threads full of crack addicts good god.

[Primernova]

No matter how many 'Fox News' style buzzwords and talking points come into these discussions, Vanilla-3.2 was the better game.

The worst part, is how the changes after 3.2 effected the development of the MMOs after it IE: Ruined them...

[Bentusi]

Arrogance ?

Since when was the absence of gear changer, dual specs, visiting the trainer to click copy/cat the talent trees under pressure from 25/40 other guys waiting for hours in that small raid corridor a good thing really ? Not even talking about that 14 year old Tank who decided to quit your 4 hour dungeon half way through without ANY tools to help you out ?

And what about those times you didn't get help to return to that respec/bank because your fucking HS was on cool down for an hour any way?

People forget so much annoying things, it is not even funny.

You`re talking about frustrating things. Frustrating things are good in games, because they make the games harder and therefore you happier when you get things done in them. And none of the things you mention are any worse than being in LFR raids, doing daily quests until you`re blue in the face or not knowing half the people in your guild, because nobody ever needs to cooperate anymore. And I wasn`t talking to you anyway. I was talking to some goober who thinks he can just hurl out dismissives such as "rose tinted glasses" and "nostalgia" in a brainless oneliner and win the "debate".
I liked all the inconvenience and want it back. Inconvenience made it necessary to plan things in advance, and not just waltz in without any preparation. That was why things were inconvenient. It rewarded organized people and punished disorganized people. Convenience and nerfs has wrecked WoW by appealing to lazy and bad players is my general opinion.
I don`t mind if you disagree with this, but please read the posts I`m responding to before you comment.

- - - Updated - - -

Think people confuse, "I want to go back to how I felt about the game when it was young." to "I want the game to be the way it was when it was young."

Hell, most people who talk about how they miss Vanilla/TBC talk as if they didn't even play back then. All the people calling it, "So Hardcore" are probably the funniest, WoWs entire selling point back then was being the most casual MMO.

And yet it was harder by a mile than WoW has been at any point since TBC. If I have rose tinted glasses you have skidmarks on yours.

[notorious98]

It's a completely different game now. It honestly did used to be a game with a huge journey - even after you got to the "end" and started raiding, there was tons of stuff to do that had little to nothing to do with raiding (or PvP). Now, Blizzard shoves you into the narrow endgame, and then wonders why people burn through it so fast. Lately, they've added on facebook-style mini-games, and made a few half-hearted stabs at something beyond raiding, which is at least _something_ but not exactly what WoW used to be.

As far as twitchy, "kill this thing in front of you", now here's some 'points', games go, I suppose WoW may be pretty good. Idk, because that's not what I play games for. So I don't really mind people who think current WoW is 'good', its just the people who claim that its the same game, and the old WoW was 'bad'. Classic WoW didn't get 12 million subbed players by being bad - it was a different game.

I agree that Blizzard has pigeonholed players into running LFR for their endgame, but seriously? There as tons of stuff to do during Classic aside from raiding or PvP? Like what? Farming mats so you could raid and PvP? Aside from that, there was very little to do at endgame.

[notorious98]

Arrogance ?

Since when was the absence of gear changer, dual specs, visiting the trainer to click copy/cat the talent trees under pressure from 25/40 other guys waiting for hours in that small raid corridor a good thing really ? Not even talking about that 14 year old Tank who decided to quit your 4 hour dungeon half way through without ANY tools to help you out ?

And what about those times you didn't get help to return to that respec/bank because your fucking HS was on cool down for an hour any way?

People forget so much annoying things, it is not even funny.

I think this guy sums up your sentiments about Classic pretty nicely.