Vanilla WoW?

[Hb]

vanilla was terrible. Really it was.. 40 man raids? a lot of "DCs" How many guild can have 25man these days? .. its a struggle for many guilds.. and pvp was just as retarded.. 12 hour of non stop pvp farming EVERY day if u wanted high warlord or grand marshal , for like a few months.

[vian]

No cross server shiz, it built a great community among the realms, I remember joining a BG, spoting 3 renown people on the opposite team and calling it a loss even before we started.

[Collegeguy]

Uh, are you really going with that argument? How about the vanilla pvp honor title system? You are going to tell me that wasn't grindy? What about the system in Silithus for the Cenarion rewards, that wasn't grindy? AQ opening mechanics weren't grindy? Are you sure you played Vanilla?

First off, I am talking about entry level grinding. Everything you just mentioned isnt entry level at all. You could walk into dungeons with no gear and succeed. You could walk into pvp with no gear and no enchants and succeed. The entry level itself is no less and no more of a grind than it was in vanilla, and there was no gear maintenance or constant gold grind like there is today.

Opening up AQ was a server grind event. You didn't have to participate if you didnt want to, so that is a poor example. It was very possible to walk into AQ without grinding in that. I have no idea what you talking about when it comes to silithus cenarion awards, and considering that I have been in AQ40 and AQ20, I am guessing that its not important or worthless. Or maybe I dont remember.

The only thing that was faulty was pvp grind. Like I said before, not everything was perfect in Vanilla. There were many things that worked in the time they were made and wouldnt work today. The warlord/marshal ladder being a prime example. Still, Vanilla was a game at the end of the day. Now its only a job or an e-sport.

Honestly, I didnt think the day to day grind was that bad. The entry level grind is actually much less or equal. The only thing that was bad was the pvp grind. When I think about it, probably took me 2 months to get to warlord back then from doing premades nonstop. It was a hard grind, but I did have fun. You didn't have to sell your soul to PVE or play the game. Only thing you had to sell your soul for was to get Warlord or Marshal.

[Archivist]

I found a pretty active vanilla server recently and played on it for a while. As much fun as it was reminiscing and playing among people who appreciate the old content, I couldn't bring myself to stay. It felt like revisiting an old school; you remember the places, you remember the memories, but the people are all different, and the people are what gave the memories context in the first place. Plus, I wasn't about to go back and grind the same long grind again just for the sake of reminiscing about it.

Anyway, vanilla belongs to its time. A lot about the game has improved since then, but the community got spoiled as a result, and the asshole community makes the game feel a lot worse than it actually is. Still, there's no going back once you've spoiled something; there's no taking away the Dungeon Finder, the insta-ports, the gear vendors, the flying in Azeroth, or whatever else Blizzard changed that turned everyone into entitled assholes. It would be like getting all the sex you want to being told, "Let's only have sex maybe once a month and talk about our feelings more." People would just move on and realize they don't have to stay and be jerked around when there are all manner of fantastic sluts on the horizon. (SW:ToR, GW2, etc.)

[imbavanilla]

i really miss Vanilla, i started playing in Vanilla as rouge. i remember having 22 days played time when i hit 60. and that was ok cus the road to 60 was fun,not a race to get there fast as it is today.

and i remember farming for 3 days to efford the flasks, potions and all that for the raids. i never got epic mout becus i couldet efford it and alot of ppl couldet too.

but what was the best was that you knew everyone on the server, you had 1 mabey 2 guilds that did everything first, and you saw them walking around orgrimar and alot of ppl inspecting, talking and freaking out cus it was so good looking awesome gear.
and when the whole server had to work on opening AQ, i remember when on my server we was going to open it. it was a massive fight out side the gates.

allys standing on one side, hordes on the other not doing anything at you could feel that something was in the air. and sudenly a rogue backstabed on of the allys and hell broke lose.
all just rushing into the other team and fighting like it was supposed to. and when the guy that was opening the gate arrived everything suddenly stoped and he walk to the gates and did it! it was so SICK.. you will never get that kinda feeling back into the game with out some really big nerfs to the system.

and raids was so much fun. it wasnt " link ach to get inv", it was "i know someone in the guild blablabla he told me that we need to do that, and that. and then we need to do that"
the resistance farming was a PAIN and all that, but when you got the reasistance you needed it felt so fucking good. when you had the gear you needed it was an awesome feeling.
And not rolling for items, but biding with the points you got from the guild. that was a really good system.

And for all you that dident play vanilla, do you know that very early in the game Paladine was alliance Class. and Shaman was horde! you could only be paladin on ally side, and shaman on horde! how awesome wasent that?
pallas buffed, druid heald, and the only really healing class you could trust was priest.
warriors was tanking and you needed to have skilles to tank, not the easy EASY way its done to day!

im not saying im not enjoying cata, but i really miss vanilla. and the pvp system! if you got rank 14 everybody on the server knew who you were! you could be stading in org and get like a 100 /w`s in 10 mins.

take me back plz, it was an awesome time that connected ppl and ppl helped you with things without needing anything in return.

[sosleapy]

for me what i like about vanilla was the fact that you had to work for your gear. now it is hit max level do a bunch of dungeons get the same item level gear and same gear without raiding without really doing anything and being on the same level as them. this is why i enjoyed vanilla. i loved the grind to get attuned for instances the grind to get that resistance gear it actually made me feel like i accomplished something in a game instead of this crap we do now. the game is just too damn easy!!!!

[Daetur]

I think a lot of my fondness for Classic WoW has more to do with the fact that I was new and in awe of everything in a game like this than it does with the relative quality of the game.


If I could get back that freshness where I didn't ever think about the end goal-- like reaching level cap, tracking how long til I'm finished with a zone, etc. (things that I do automatically now, because I'm so... jaded), I'd enjoy the Cata experience better than Classic.

[Bentusi]

Classic had:

Better Community... there was no dungeon finder, no cross realm bg, you knew the people on the server, in todays dungeon groups people dont care how they treat the others because they would never see them again

"Bring the class, not the player" Which of course sucked sometimes but it was cool to have different advantages in instances depending on the classes you had with you.
Now everyone can buff everything... there is just less class diversity

Harder solo content. Seriosly even a blind person could level to 85... it is just trivial, you never die, there is no challange in leveling a character, there is no challange in doing dungeons,
In vanilla there were elite quests; you had to READ the quest log, not accept quest, press m, run there loot this do that.

Cataclysm should have revived the old world but it did the opposite... the old world is dead. Everyone is sitting in Og/sw. Wanna do a dungeon? Np click this, get invited, wanna do PvP? np click this get invited? wanna do a raid? np click this get invited? wanna go to a high lvl zone? np click this get ported.
In Classic you had to use ships now you click somewhere and you are there. There is no world PvP nowadays. There is no zone high level players need to go for some reason. There is no Tyr's hand anymore. And even if there was people now have flying mounts and can easily avoid PvP combat. PvP servers are a farce.

There are many points why classic was better in my opinion. Not because the quest designs were better, they weren't. Not because it was more complex and more balanced because it wasn't.
It just wasn't this "gaming fastfood" it is nowadays and when they say they wanna make Dungeons in MoP like they were in wotlk I ask myself what the fuck is going on lol

All of this and tons more. It had balance, class roles, resource management, demanding progression of profession and levels, a tight economy forcing players to make choices instead of handing them whatever they want and it had a PVE structure that taught players how to play properly while fostering teamwork and generally good behavior because you couldn`t just escape to another server if your reputation was destroyed. I could go on and on with ways in which vanilla was a million times better than the enormous travesty it has become after being hijacked by Bobby Kotick and the rest of the Activision accountants.

I`m sorry to revive an old thread, but reading the ridiculous condescension of all the people dismissing this highly valid viewpoint as "nostalgia" inspired me to make an account on a private vanilla server and I haven`t had so much fun since the original. Everything is a challenge and you`re dropped in it without any explanation and you need to work things out yourself and along with other people around you, rather than Blizzard organized auto queues. All the crap Barry Kotick has added to WoW, such as pet battles, pet stores, free epics up your two favorite orifices all day long, top tier gear for running Utgarde Keep heroic, constant gear resets in the middle of their increasingly worthless expansions, easy modes of everything and above all the constant nerfs from hell to everything from harvesting timers to the damn weather.
You can keep your Pokemon WoW. I`never touching it again. And I`m never buying another Blizzard game after this sellout, and if you had any brains you`d all do the same in an act of consumer responsibility. If you accept being screwed over like the WoW subs have been since TBC ended then that is what gaming companies will do in the future. Only language they understand is falling profits as customers abandon ship. This is what happened to Ea, which was just as bad as Activision ten years ago.

[enchanted]

-snip-

Bad necro is bad.

[Gilbergrape]

community was much better back then and there was a sense of adventure and discovery.

[Synstir]

I always see people talking about Vanilla WoW and how great it was or how they missed the Vanilla WoW days. I started playing WoW during WotLK so I was wondering why Vanilla Wow is so often spoken of this way? Thanks

The only thing I can think of is that vanilla was for everyone the first experience of playing wow or a mmo.
Now after playing it several years, that experience is not new anymore... happens with everything!
What people are trying to say, in my opinion, is that they want wow to feel as a first experience agian.
And this is an impossibilty.

[m777]

here a videos

thing is wow was really ahead of its time its not nostalgia but this game was more then a legend for its time \

+ the community was 100% better you could really make new friend every day and your reputation in the server was important
trade chat was more like server guild chat it was great fun not because the game was better then today but because if u wanted to go play this game as solo player you would quit after 1 or 2 weeks u had to make friends and its was really rewarding when u did

[Deleted]

Gameplay wise, Wow is way better now. Not even up for debate.

But community wise.... I miss those days so much
That's what made the game fun and kept you playing even if you were bored with the content.

[Darsithis]

We don't really need to necro an old thread that has covered this topic a few hundred times. If necessary, a fresh topic, more up-to-date, can be created