Greetings.
First and foremost, I wish for people to discuss here. Disagree with me? Then argue why you disagree!
It is no secret that World of Warcraft has gone through a lot of changes the past 11 years. Was Vanilla the amazing unicorn everyone makes it out to be? No. It had its problems too. As a game, World of Warcraft has improved on so many things that ultimately I wouldnt be able to return to. But, Blizzard are not perfect and they took some wrong steps too. And it is fair, they could not have known the impact it would have had. Read on.
With all the changes, I see the game has taken these 3 major steps in the last many expansions:
- Accessibility of the World
- Homogeneous Classes
- Improvements to older Problems
Accessibility of the World
This step comes as a no brainer. With less then 5% of the 7 Million people during TBC having seen all raid content, Blizzard thought their raids didnt amount to much when so few people saw it. It was essentially wasted talent. This had to change, and in WotLK they introduced raid difficulties to engage more people. Fast forward to WoD and we have a whopping 4 difficulties for each raid. Man that's a lot of "lets do this guy one more time".
Furthermore, TBC had a HUGE progression line you had to work through to get anywhere near the tier 5 and 6 raiding. Attunements to everything and gear checks. TBC did one thing towards accessibility which was a great feature, heroic dungeons: a place raiders could go for a smaller (and much harder) challenge. Man, these heroics would tear people to dust. Of course, with a long run, TBC couldnt continue the gear gap between people and eventually added Karazhan badges and other nifty stuff to jump the gear ladder. Fast forward to WoD and we have so many "welfare" epics its starting to feel like Oprah Winfrey is handing out the loot.
Conclusion: To engage more players, Blizzard has removed more and more "walls" that limited certain players from content.
Homogeneous Classes
During Vanilla, this was horrible. If you were a druid or priest, your job was essentially healing no matter what. Only maybe could you be lucky and get some for your offspecc. Because of course your feral or shadow build was nothing more than an off specc. Paladins were buff batteries and support healers. Rolled a warrior because you want to deal damage with a two hander? Sorry, here is a sword and shield. Go tank... with fury specc.
TBC fixed this and in a great way. For the first time, raids were taking feral druids, elemental shamans and retribution paladins. In fact, all these classes had different "things" they brought to the raid which meant, as an officer and raid planner, I spent time theorycrafting raid setups. Man, as a Rogue I loved having my bear offtank in my group, those 5% crit helped a lot!
You had to have mages, because these f**kers had the best CC in the game at this time. Rogues had to risk it for saps etc. It was a great time to be alive as your class identity was so important. But, this was limiting towards accessibility. Guilds needed mages instead of ranged dps for recruitment, and if not enough geared mages were available, the higher tier guilds would snitch mages from further down the progression line meaning that the "mid" progression guilds often lost members to the higher guilds. Blizzard fixed this by trying to make all classes have something to offer within the same branch. To begin with it meant you took a specific class from a pool of classes which offered whatever you needed. Fast forward to WoD and you have the current build where the only thing that really matters is whether or not you are melee, ranged, tank or healer. Sad times indeed.
Conclusion: Blizzard focused so much on "bring the player, not the class", that they ultimately destroyed the sense of class choice.
Improvements to Older Problems
Things Blizzard have done is not all bad. Lots of stuff has been improved over the time, things which are arguably a much better game design than what we saw 10 years ago. But, we can try and argue from now to the 10th WoW expansion what was good or not, and we will not agree. Because it is not clear what was simply too convenient changes and what were necessary changes. Yes farming reputation was booring as f**k, but at least you had stuff to do, right?
The Rank 14 PvP system was horrible as well, and the new PvP system in Legion looks promising.
Raids back then was mechanically simple and booring. As a class, your job in raiding Vanilla was to spam 1 or 2 buttons. Nice!..
What older raids had was much more challenging, and yes WoD has the highest difficulty of raiding being on par with this (with better mechanics, no doubt).
That being said, with all the raid difficulties it adds another problem which we will need to discuss.
But keep in mind, when I compare parts of WoW to Vanilla/TBC/Wrath, Im not saying everything in it was better.
Conclusion: Blizzard has had many improvements over the years and one must not forget all the great changes we have had!
Potential: Why it was important and why we need it again
One of the main reason I kept subbing indefinitely during the first 2 expansions was due to potential. TBC came with so many raids at launch it was amazing, and I had the potential to reach it. All I needed to do was continue on the progression ladder.
I wanted this awesome looking sword from SSC and it took me 4 months to get it. Man was it rewarding having it, no doubt! And it felt unique too.
Potential is one of the main reason people continue to play WoW. Heck, some of us play for the potential of an expansion that felt like the two first.
Now, with potential, let me bring on why I absolutely hate the 4 difficulties of raiding. If I see a sword I really want from this raid or I really want to experience its glory, it absolutely destroys the potential when I can get that feeling simply by taking the lowest of the 4 difficulties. Does not matter if I play Dragon Age on Easy, Normal or Hard, once the story is complete and the world has been seen, it has been done.
Was vanilla a better setup with 40 man raiding? Probably not. I would most likely classify TBC as having the raiding done best. Potential kept people at it.
World of Warcraft used to have all these potentialities all around the world which one would strive for, but ultimately these have been removed to make the world much more accessible to everyone. This leads me to the next step:
Inconvenience: Why it was important and why we need it again
Do you remember staying 1 hour at the main city to find a group for UBRS or Scholomance? Do you remember running to deadmines, dodging all the elites while you ventured forth with your group of explorers? Do you remember having nothing but a menu now?
Convenience have ultimately killed both the MMO and the RPG part of WoW.
Vanilla is probably the time when the World of warcraft was most alive outside cities. Everything was connected so that most zones from 30 to 60 had stuff that everyone needed. Mats, instances (you had to physically run there... or get a warlock to summon you one at a time), questing, pvp and many things. But, having to do things that "suck" is a necessary evil in order to emphasize on the reward at the end. Furthermore, having things that suck also emphasize on what is awesome. If you are used to a 3 meal setup every night then you will never fee the sensation of an amazing dinner setup because it has become your standard. Running to the instance sucked hell yes, but once you got there, chances were you where gonna try and clear that instance no matter what. All the hastle needed to get to one place or another meant that the tolerance of people was much higher. I remember that wiping did break up groups yes, but the tolerance of people these days are so low that the only way that Blizzard could counter it was to reduce the difficulty so that people just didnt wipe. Wiping has become something that mythic raiders does, which is a shame, as nothing is more rewarding than 25 people screaming on ventrillo after 3 months of wiping on a boss, yes Im talking to you Kael'Thas.
Conclusion: Convenience is a double-edged sword which made the game have tedious and unfun aspects but overall were good design choices as the rewards were greater (psychologically. The actual rewards have not changed). Furthermore, with everything being so convenient, the game lacks potential towards your character which means you feel you have nothing to do. At all.
For me, its as if Blizzard continue to shoot themselves with each expansion, making more and more content accessible means that the worth of patches are so short. The notion of "mains" seem to die more and more from each expansion as well.
Dont get me wrong, the classes feel better than ever. They have done lots of great improvements and if we had backtracked (starting at WoD and going towards Vanilla), we would probably hear people whine about "why classes suck so much now".
Finally, I can shed light to the most important aspect which convenience and lack of potential destroyed
Server-wide Community:
When things required groups, when being a douchebag gave you a bad reputation. Back in the day when guilds and guildmasters were known. Vanilla and TBC was a time when anything cross-server related was not implemented and it meant work to get things done. It had its dark side too, as I mentioned earlier, guilds would snitch players from other guilds with less progression which meant that the bottom and middle group had it hard. I was in the middle group and remember the frustration with my guildmaster talking about "yet another member got recruited by the top guild". But ultimately, I would trade this frustration any day rather than have the current "silence" that we see. Trade chat has become nothing more than a few recruitment messages and trades. General chat is entirely empty. Hell, asking people for help often gives you "google it".
Where the server community went the past 10 years I dont know. I blame, convenience, lack of potential and cross-server related actions. When you can solo everything, and get everything done within weeks. When you can queue up with (N)PC classes and not say a word to them because in 15min you will never see the again.
Conclusion: Things in older expansions of WoW was so hard you needed other people to help. It had a server-wide community because it was forced to be. It emphasized so much on MMO that people would spend hours simply socializing. They had things they could do, but there were no reason to rush for it.
Would I want a vanilla or TBC server? No, I cannot rekindle the past and there are many reason why TBC was unique to its time.
But when looking past the rose-tinted glasses there are a few design choices which are apparent and that are not necessarily dependent on its time.
I refuse to believe that online server community is something of the past.
Do you agree? What is your opinion? What would bring back content that lasts for almost a year and the social aspect of WoW? or do you not miss it at all? Tell me what you think!