What made classic wow better than current?

[Holofernes]

That's not "skill". That's "time commitment"


Please. A sizable portion of the raid groups were made of inexperienced players that were there just to fill 40 people in the raid group. And, again, raid fights were MUCH simpler back then. Ragnaros is a much, much simpler fight than Xavius, for example. "Skill"? You almost didn't need skill, in comparison.


Raids today are the same thing. They are tuned around gear. And "not very forgiving"? Please. You could have 5-10 people dead and still beat the fights. Want 'not very forgiving'? Do some mythic raiding, in Legion.


Why don't you compare it to the hardest mode possible, instead of taking the cheap route and comparing it to the easiest modes?


So instead of having to worry about threat, tanks now worry about surviving and properly rotating their defensive skills. If you think mana management isn't a thing... I wonder if you wandered into progression fights in mythic or later heroic raiding in Legion.

how many people where alive when helya died on mythic the first time?... or Guarm? ...

And raid tuned around gear: in classic wow, a new raid opened. u had to farm the first part of the raid for weeks to get enough gear and the right stats to be able to go further. Nowadays, everybody gets to that gear within 1-2 weeks maximum, because so many drops per boss per player. There are no resistance gear walls, the last time there was a boss blocking for a little was butcher dps requirment. Huhuran block for example lastet for month.

so yes beating the game in nowadays version is WAY easier done with why less effort as it was in classic WoW.

Classic wow, u enter the instance. Nobody has any clue about what is happening, and suddenly u have a room full of adds u try to fight, they spawn endlessly. someone figurs out there is a orb, and u can control a dragon with it, to undo some eggs. Ok 3 hours training opening adds, while trying to fight the spawns. Ok kill mages, hunter kite dragons. Getting better. 3 raiddays later (we had 3 4 hour raids and 1 8 hour raid on sunday): we got the boss to spawn! yeay! but he kills our healers, dazes the tank and we wipe. Yep u cannot taunt a boss in wow. they are immune. and yep some mobs cc the tank. so they insta los aggro. so all your heals are dead.


3 hours later: Yeah we killed the first boss of the new instance, after 70+ trys and 25 hours of 40 man raiding. omg priest tier2 bracers and a useless class trinket dropped.


Modern wow: go in new instance.

scorpion boss, i probably should have read a guide, but nvm just check dungeon journal. spec for more ae / cleave stuff? nah lets try wihtout, dont want to waste the glyph stuff for respeccing... boss dies first try, the only interesting thing is gratulating the ele shaman for doing a rank 1 log. check loot, bis gloves for arms warrior, even warforged. ok i take it. 5 other people from 23 man raid got loot too, thats fine.


Pls dont say anything about skill. Modern wow is a stupid breandead game in comparison to what it was in vanilla.

[Kyanion]

Nostalgia gets u to go back to a certain game or place, but not to stay there. U dont play a game for hunderds of hours just because of nostalgia.
I guess ppl liking different games us just an impossible thing, and having a good conversation about our different tastes is even more impossible.
And the idea that u can like both games but prefer the other is just unheard off.
But this is mostly #Mmo-champion things. If this wasnt good entertainment i would just stick to the other forums

Re-read what I said please. I said I personally don't think it is solely nostalgia for the reasons that people would want to play Vanilla. I honestly rate nostalgia pretty low on the list if I was to put out a bunch of reasons of why people would want Legacy. But that hasn't stopped many different people from coming into this thread that has the title of "what made classic wow better than current wow" and answering with nostalgia. There might be something to that.

[Deleted]

Re-read what I said please. I said I personally don't think it is solely nostalgia for the reasons that people would want to play Vanilla. I honestly rate nostalgia pretty low on the list if I was to put out a bunch of reasons of why people would want Legacy. But that hasn't stopped many different people from coming into this thread that has the title of "what made classic wow better than current wow" and answering with nostalgia. There might be something to that.

Didnt mean it that way either. Was mostly pointing my angle on the nostalgia thing.
Im sure nostalgia plays some part in it. Old times are always better.

[Relapses]

That's the whole reason I say it's a lame cop-out. By definition there is no discussion place which involves everyone, so by definition it's always a minority. So you're, as we say here, just ramming an open door.

Using forum feedback to support any argument is fucking stupid. I'm glad we can at least agree on this.

And you need not look further than this very thread to notice there is about ten times more circle-jerking from anti-Vanilla people, and one hundred times more mindless drones who will repeat "nostalgiaaaaaa" even when facing arguments which are objectively completely unrelated to nostalgia - if you wish to wage a crusade against the most stupid arguments, you've really chosen the wrong side.

By definition, a lot of these responses are fueled by nostalgia. But you're so caught up in the moral superiority of the Legacy movement that you can't even admit that it's predicated on this concept. You guys see the word as an insult when most people see it as using the proper word to describe a phenomena. Jesus Christ, the most popular PS of all time had six of the word's nine letters as the basis of its name. But nah, let's pretend that our brains aren't wired to remember positives more than negatives when recollecting days gone by. After all, it's the morally superior and eternally martyred pro-Legacy movement who knows what's best for the community.

And it's not our problem, again. That's my whole point and you seem to have missed it. We've not some ethical duty to like whatever Blizzard throws at us or to chide ourselves for wanting something else. Our only loyalties should be toward our own preference, and our only duty should be to be intellectually honest and somewhat reasonable.
Blizzard wants feedback, my feedback is "your design sucks since WotLK, I liked pre-WotLK design better". There is enough people thinking like me to make a lot of noise. Why shouldn't we ?

Have fun making all the noise you want but don't expect Blizzard to look at your petty squabbling over which version of the game was superior when ultimately the decision about whether they're implemented is entirely above such arguments.

Either you've added a bit too much negatives in this sentence, or it's too convoluted for my english, because it makes absolutely no sense to me.

The "poor man's alternative" to Legacy already exists and it's free. I see a lot of pro-Legacy supporters making arguments for official Legacy while completely ignoring the mention of something everybody knows exists but we can't talk about on this website (or the official WoW forums).

[Kyanion]

Pls dont say anything about skill. Modern wow is a stupid breandead game in comparison to what it was in vanilla.

Damn I can't wait until for the 7.3 patch we go back to 40 man raids with bosses with 1-2 mechanics. Such fun, much yawn.

And btw unless your guild was one of the first ever to go to BWL there was information on how to do the bosses out fairly quickly because websites that gave out information existed back then if you knew where to look. Most of the 'learning' new bosses comes from people figuring shit out in PTR in modern WoW. I personally don't like all of it being done on PTR but it is what it is.

- - - Updated - - -

By definition, a lot of these responses are fueled by nostalgia. But you're so caught up in the moral superiority of the Legacy movement that you can't even admit that it's predicated on this concept. You guys see the word as an insult when most people see it as using the proper word to describe a phenomena. Jesus Christ, the most popular PS of all time had six of the word's nine letters as the basis of its name. But nah, let's pretend that our brains aren't wired to remember positives more than negatives when recollecting days gone by. After all, it's the morally superior and eternally martyred pro-Legacy movement who knows what's best for the community.

Stop trampling on his feels.

- - - Updated - - -

Didnt mean it that way either. Was mostly pointing my angle on the nostalgia thing.
Im sure nostalgia plays some part in it. Old times are always better.

Fair enough

[Desparil]

Pls dont say anything about skill. Modern wow is a stupid breandead game in comparison to what it was in vanilla.

Much complicated, much wow, much heal, people now days would fry their brains from complexity.

[Ielenia]

how many people where alive when helya died on mythic the first time?... or Guarm? ...

There's a big difference between dying when the boss has 10% life left, and when the boss has just barely lost 10% of his life.

And raid tuned around gear: in classic wow, a new raid opened. u had to farm the first part of the raid for weeks to get enough gear and the right stats to be able to go further. Nowadays, everybody gets to that gear within 1-2 weeks maximum, because so many drops per boss per player.

That's not an example of skill. That's purely 'time commitment'.

so yes beating the game in nowadays version is WAY easier done with why less effort as it was in classic WoW.

Please. If you're going to boast how 'hard' your vanilla is, at the very least do the honest thing and compare it to the hardest mode available to day.

Classic wow, u enter the instance. Nobody has any clue about what is happening, and suddenly u have a room full of adds u try to fight, they spawn endlessly. someone figurs out there is a orb, and u can control a dragon with it, to undo some eggs. Ok 3 hours training opening adds, while trying to fight the spawns. Ok kill mages, hunter kite dragons. Getting better. 3 raiddays later (we had 3 4 hour raids and 1 8 hour raid on sunday): we got the boss to spawn! yeay! but he kills our healers, dazes the tank and we wipe. Yep u cannot taunt a boss in wow. they are immune. and yep some mobs cc the tank. so they insta los aggro. so all your heals are dead.

You do know that you wrote there does not really denote 'skill' (if anything, it shows lack of skill, but w/e), but just illustrate the fact that, back then, we didn't have 'Tankspots', 'FatbossTVs' and 'L2Raids' to create guides for the fights during PTR and post video strategies to help players know the strategies so they don't have to bang their heads against the wall to figure out the whole strategy themselves.

[Biggles Worth]

I'm doing some research and I'd like to hear your opinions guys and gals

What made classic wow better than current wow is current wow is dead and classic wow was alive.

[Kyanion]

What made classic wow better than current wow is current wow is dead and classic wow was alive.

I think it is the other way around, sir. I'm on current wow right now and 'classic wow' isn't a thing that Blizz provides. Huh.

[Pratt]

It was the sense of wonder at exploring this huge unknown world. The game was unlike anything else I had ever experienced. It was hard and there was so much less handholding. There was so much less information available. I thought the whole thing was amazing. 40 man molten core raids blew my mind. I admit that if the game was still that way I probably wouldn't be playing it now, but at the time I couldn't get enough.

[Darsithis]

Sometimes I wonder, based on how people here pine for classic, if our client's users pine for earlier versions of our apps, too.

When we first rolled out our software to the first store (out of 50 for our client) in November 2013, it was a nightmare. Another developer (I was just a developer then, not the lead/product manager) and I took turns with 18 hour days supporting the software on-site by constantly publishing new builds all day long that fixed bug after bug, much like the original WoW team probably did, too. Even so, for the first two years, the software was hideously unstable (like classic WoW). Due to a bad design decision years before when it came to saving sales, deadlocks and timeouts were common, so completing sales not only took forever (15 - 30 seconds per) but had a high chance of being broken, duplicated, or only partially saved. Closing drawers, ending the business day, exporting bank transfers to cover sales to third-party vendors, it all frequently messed up, including a memorable $7,000,000 transfer one morning that had me up at 5am frantically getting it reversed.

Year after year, though, I put in an incredible amount of time to bring the software into the future. I streamlined sales saving, first by putting into a series of transaction-safe stored procedures, then by caching sales to disk and uploading in the background. Soon, sale saving was down to less than a second. Further changes removed the weekly crashes of the database, reduced deadlocks, increased responsiveness when printing daily sales sheets for long time periods, pruned unused indexes to reduce maintenance costs, did away with closing empty drawers (saving time at night)...the list goes on.

All of those things are objectively good things, and I'm sure we can show parallels to World of Warcraft. Warcraft now is incredibly stable compared to what it was 10 years ago. Under-the-hood changes have increased security, reduced chances of rollbacks of data (losing quests/items when the server would crash), reduced the chances of those very crashes, increased total number of people who can play, moved up to 64-bit data types, reduced time needed to achieve the smallest things that shouldn't take forever (like end of business day in our software), improved responsiveness when playing, reduced frivolous abilities that had little application in most cases...

I get that not every change was a good one, of course, I preferred the old talent system vs the new and there are aspects of the game now that frustrate me, like the extreme level of RNG present in Legion, but objectively the game is far superior now. Going back to classic is like the tellers going back to our first rollout back in 2013, to a system that was clunky, broken, and difficult to use.

Though sometimes I wonder if the tellers from these first stores all those years ago sit around campfires, telling scary stories of the days when sales would fail and the dreaded Red Screen of Death would appear...

[Deleted]

So i got it down to a few things, the only Real major true one is, The community, and the "world feel" You where part of a server, and You where as good as your name, if you where a cunt, or a Ninja looter ( god forbid, back in vanila that was actually shamefull), You would get blacklisted from those people, maybe even added to some guilds that had a blacklist as Warnings atleast to it's members about Douchbags. there is none of that anymore, I can go in raid, Cry, yell, be and ass and ninja loot, the next way, people have forgotten it. You felt more part of a server..

Beside this, only really the RPG elements, wow is no more a MMORPG, just MMO, you actually had to put work into your crafting, You wanted a resist fire potion? well then you better go farm some damn fire elementals and water elementals, and Flowers from this 1 zone. it was work, more fun? No, but it felt More "real" as in more roleplaying.

[Daffan]

That's okay. My post wasn't supposed to cover it all. The general point was that for a lot of people, details become fuzzy with games that they used to play years ago, which makes it hard to compare to the games they play today.

Unless we are talking about Doom 1 and 2

The best! FOREVER! (.wads/Sourceports included of course... heh)

I know, right, no warrior used to break their keyboard mid-dungeon when they charge through the ground and have to take resurrection sickness.

One time In Un'Goro, near the gorilla cave at the top, I charged from the top of the entrance cliff (Where you jump down) all the way to the bottom level and it took like 30 seconds as my character ran around the cave at insane speeds. It was pretty funny tho

People playing private servers right now are not playing vanilla. It's not vanilla anymore. It was (and could be) back then - but now vanilla is pretty much dead, because of how much information there is about it. You wonder where to quest? Back in the days you either spammed chat and got bunch of dicks in return and grinded scorpions, now you just go to any database and search through, or look for a one of million half-assed guides on "how to do X on Y private server!"

This is very true.

BUT

It's not all about the first-time experience or even leveling really. People have different releases. People who play Vanilla/TBC LIKE the feeling of item rewards and such. They like spending lots of time and effort for 2-3 items, then have an experience dictated by the welfare/catchup train. It's a whole different experience.

It's like people who gamble have different tastes, even if certain casino games are more profitable (more loot). They prefer the feel of a different one.

This is just one example of why people like the old style. As a casual these days even I still prefer starting at the bottom of the Ilvl rung and working my way to the top no matter how long it takes, instead of receiving welfare/catchup every 10 seconds or each time a new patch comes out.

Yeah no flex/crz/premade finder sucks big time and the rotations are garbage, but some core aspects are still good. Blizzard has merely tried to replace the big satisfaction of receiving an item in Vanilla/TBC, with receiving a whole truck load to trigger the same "happiness" response, simple psychology really except it's overblown these days.

[Akka]

Using forum feedback to support any argument is fucking stupid. I'm glad we can at least agree on this.

No it's not, a forum is a good venue to get people explain their opinion - of course the catch is that it requires someone who actually listens, which is the actual problem.
We're not making a headcount based on forums, obviously. The arguments, though, tend to be somewhat the same as the ones you'd see shared by the relevant population at large.

By definition, a lot of these responses are fueled by nostalgia. But you're so caught up in the moral superiority of the Legacy movement that you can't even admit that it's predicated on this concept. You guys see the word as an insult when most people see it as using the proper word to describe a phenomena. Jesus Christ, the most popular PS of all time had six of the word's nine letters as the basis of its name. But nah, let's pretend that our brains aren't wired to remember positives more than negatives when recollecting days gone by. After all, it's the morally superior and eternally martyred pro-Legacy movement who knows what's best for the community.

"nostalgia" by itself is not an insult.
Trying to shoehorn "nostalgia" as the reason why people prefer a particular thing, even when they spell out what they actually like and it's objectively unrelated to good memories, is being both stupid and who just actively refuse to accept anything which isn't what he already decided to be, even when faced with facts.
You're just being a complete hypocrite here, denouncing the exact thing you're doing. Especially ironic when you act all superior and mighty to mock the supposed claims of moral superiority by others. Man, have a look at a mirror, seriously.

Have fun making all the noise you want but don't expect Blizzard to look at your petty squabbling over which version of the game was superior when ultimately the decision about whether they're implemented is entirely above such arguments.

Blizzard will do what they feel is in their interest. They did do some PR stuff to mitigate the bad press they got by shutting down some private server, so it's not like it's actually completely useless to make said noise. They did seem actually surprised at the extent of the popularity of legacy servers, which wouldn't have happened if people had just kept quiet. And if one day they decide that they would gain enough money through legacy servers to compensate the hurdle to set them in place, they will do it, regardless of all your objections.

The "poor man's alternative" to Legacy already exists and it's free. I see a lot of pro-Legacy supporters making arguments for official Legacy while completely ignoring the mention of something everybody knows exists but we can't talk about on this website (or the official WoW forums).

I don't see how the existence of non-official private server prevent the wish for people to have official legacy server. Your argument is completely nonsensical.

[Holofernes]

There's a big difference between dying when the boss has 10% life left, and when the boss has just barely lost 10% of his life.


That's not an example of skill. That's purely 'time commitment'.


Please. If you're going to boast how 'hard' your vanilla is, at the very least do the honest thing and compare it to the hardest mode available to day.


You do know that you wrote there does not really denote 'skill' (if anything, it shows lack of skill, but w/e), but just illustrate the fact that, back then, we didn't have 'Tankspots', 'FatbossTVs' and 'L2Raids' to create guides for the fights during PTR and post video strategies to help players know the strategies so they don't have to bang their heads against the wall to figure out the whole strategy themselves.

figuring out a stategy yourselves IS THE FUCKING MOST IMPORTANT SKILL in an rpg. Its what this whole game genre is about, it was the most fun aspect of raiding: working as a team to overcome a boss that was fresh and new.

But for people like u, mimicing a video from ptr is "skill"? lol.

[Akka]

Sometimes I wonder, based on how people here pine for classic, if our client's users pine for earlier versions of our apps, too.

If you added bloatware, you can bet a 100 % chance that a certain number of them would answer "yes".
Some people (and I'm part of them) like to have minimalist functions, and are increasingly annoyed as the applications becomes bigger and bigger and bigger and adds tons of things that are useless for the user. Of course, other people have the exact opposite desire, and like to have applications doing everything (so they don't have to hunt down some more).
Some people like "pretty" applications, other like barebone and purely functionals.

So yeah, when you change something, you'll have people complain. Sometimes it's because they don't like change, sometimes it's because they actually prefer the way it worked before. What is called "nostalgia" on WoW.

but objectively the game is far superior now

No it's not. The utter unability to distinguish between facts and preferences is probably why so many people are stuck on labeling anything they can't comprehend as "nostalgia".
The parallel with your experience is also completely missing the point : you're talking about technical improvement (nobody claim that Vanilla had better graphics or was more stable or had a more complex codebase), which is completely and entirely beside the pro-Vanilla point.

[Kyanion]

No it's not. The utter unability to distinguish between facts and preferences is probably why so many people are stuck on labeling anything they can't comprehend as "nostalgia".

The hell are you even going on about? You think Vanilla was the highest point of WoW? You think the game didn't need to evolve and improve over 12 years?

[Jagd]

Sometimes I wonder, based on how people here pine for classic, if our client's users pine for earlier versions of our apps, too.

As someone who provides business support for hundreds of clients, absolutely. The usual complaints are, the new interface is too different, the options are too complicated now, the new features are useless, the new reports don't show what the old ones did, it's slower than the old one etc etc. The issues the old client would have they knew how to prepare for or circumvent to the point where they didnt consider them issues, as if it was such a huge issue they would have left your product in droves and you went bankrupt.

[Relapses]

No it's not, a forum is a good venue to get people explain their opinion - of course the catch is that it requires someone who actually listens, which is the actual problem.
We're not making a headcount based on forums, obviously. The arguments, though, tend to be somewhat the same as the ones you'd see shared by the relevant population at large.

Remember two posts ago when I mentioned pro-Legacy supporters trying to transcribe their opinions on the disinterested masses? Yeah, guess what you're doing.

"nostalgia" by itself is not an insult.
Trying to shoehorn "nostalgia" as the reason why people prefer a particular thing, even when they spell out what they actually like and it's objectively unrelated to good memories, is being both stupid and who just actively refuse to accept anything which isn't what he already decided to be, even when faced with facts.
You're just being a complete hypocrite here, denouncing the exact thing you're doing. Especially ironic when you act all superior and mighty to mock the supposed claims of moral superiority by others. Man, have a look at a mirror, seriously.

Look dude, I don't know why you try attributing this Holier-than-thou label to my posts but I'm not doing anything other than expressing my opinion. I don't believe my opinion to be any more right than yours and I can definitely accept other people enjoying a different version of the game than me. But there have been a lot of posts answering the OP's question with responses that cannot be described as anything other than nostalgia. There are people who long for the openness and exploration of the world... the lack of information about things... the fact that sites like wowhead and MMO-C didn't exist to spoil things before they were announced. All of these things would not be able to be replicated even if Blizzard announced Legacy realms. Some people's fond memories of Vanilla will never be fully realized but that doesn't stop them from allowing their memories to fuel their desire to have the game return to these roots. And that's perfectly fine, I just don't think it's particularly healthy to full-stop ignore the impact nostalgia has on this discussion.

Blizzard will do what they feel is in their interest. They did do some PR stuff to mitigate the bad press they got by shutting down some private server, so it's not like it's actually completely useless to make said noise. They did seem actually surprised at the extent of the popularity of legacy servers, which wouldn't have happened if people had just kept quiet. And if one day they decide that they would gain enough money through legacy servers to compensate the hurdle to set them in place, they will do it, regardless of all your objections.

K.

I don't see how the existence of non-official private server prevent the wish for people to have official legacy server. Your argument is completely nonsensical.

You're the one who mentioned a "poor man's alternative." It's hard to get any cheaper than free. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Tya]

Nothing lol

There's a reason why the vanilla private servers, despite being completely free which no doubt attracts a lot of pirates, don't even have 1% of the playerbase of live.