Will WoW ever be what it once was?

[dokilar]

WoW has in fact gotten better the problem is people looking at older expansions with nostalgia and saying that they were so much better when content wise they weren't. It was a brand new game and people got very immersed in it but after 10 years people are getting burned out and want something new and WoW can't provide because it's too outdated.

you are entitled to you opinion but i simply dont agree with it.

i havent played MoP and at this point i dont see myself picking it up anytime soon so i cant comment on how i would feel about the game but i can say without any bias that my favorite time period of the game was TBC. i started playing just a few short months after vanilla was released. i enjoyed vanilla wow very much, i played almost non stop from the time i start playing in vanilla until i stopped playing my way thru Cata. a few breaks for a month of two here an there.

despite me being more excited about Cata (shocking i know right) and thinking that WOTLK had better story and epic feeling, i still didnt have as much fun or enjoyment as i did during the entire run of TBC. note that im not saying that WoW would or wouldnt be better off today if it had stuck with TBC business model. im stating that i never had a better time in game as i did during that time period.

to answer the op, quite simply no. the game you seemed to enjoy (the vanilla/TBC) model will never return unless they add some sort of legacy server thing, which is highly unlikely. i also dont believe WoW will ever see 12 million subs again, possibly but again i doubt it

[Littleraven]

no because it will never be new again. that feeling of majesty just cant be there when a game is pushing 9 years old. when WoW first came out azeroth was relatively new to the majority of the people playing. hell even blizzard handnt fleshed out everything as much as it is now.

sure the game has lost things along the way for the sake of quality of life and changing times but even if it were still as it was in vanilla it would still be a 9 year old game

[Deleted]

This song jump to mine. http://youtu.be/sbMlHGEICuY?t=38s ( the times they are changeing)
No i played since vanila, Wow is is better in anyway. There is more to do, times a milion, before in wow when you had time to do, there was 3 things you could do. 1:Farm elements for mats for raideing exlir, 2:Farm tyr's hand, this was the only " real" way to make money beside AH. 3: Pvp, with only 3 bg's.
There are just plain out, MORE of everything

[HeedmySpeed]

I started in Cata and enjoyed my end game experience until the shitstorm that was LFR and Dragon Soul.

Times have gotten worse but I don't think we will go back to even Cata launch status.
QQ casuals are running our game into the ground! So is the world, all good things come to an end.

[tangers58]

Is the golden age of WoW truly gone? Days that are never coming back?

What do you guys think?

Of course not. The game is old man, and every year it just gets more dumbed down

[Mormolyce]

Well it's almost 9 years old so of course the "new game" gloss is gone. But in pure gameplay terms it's better than ever.

[ComputerNerd]

People who bring this argument up can never tell us what it was they want back.
Many features such as 40-man raiding were simply out of necessity, due to a complete lack of alternatives.
World PvP was active due to lack of battlegrounds, but quickly died when players had a more rewarding and more convenient alternative.

WoW would have been dead as per the predictions had it stayed as it was.

Of course not. The game is old man, and every year it just gets more dumbed down

Or the arrogant and long-term players get more experienced and so will find things more trivial.
The game cannot have this ever increasing learning curve, since it needs new players.
Those coming in a few years later should not have to go through the same progression, otherwise they would always be behind and the population at the top would be dwindling.

Showing yourself to be idiots by endlessly repeating the casual arguments.
Those people are the reason there is still a game in the first place.

[Paladin885]

Define "Golden Age". To a new WOW player this IS the golden age. To a vanilla player it's not and never will be again.

Z.

or you're like me, a vanilla player who can honestly and truthfully acknowledge how primitive and shitty vanilla was compared to how it is now.


If WoW did go back to vanilla just for the entire month of April 20XX, I could see a lot of backlash from the community because [insert "my class is broken" here].

[Deleted]

Is the golden age of WoW truly gone? Days that are never coming back?

What do you guys think?

Hey there mister nostalgia. Long time no see. Actually it's not.

[Razorice]

It won't be for me at least. After doing all the quest areas and most of the raids there's not much excitement left in the game. I have other MMOs to explore new lands and areas which does the trick for me.

[Incandio]

I've played this game for a while, since 2007 I think. When I started with my human paladin, now a humble alt, and I was questing in Elwynn, I was genuinely nervous about the Darkened Bank across the river, where those wolves prowled, with their dark red nameplates.

Now, of course, I experience nothing like that feeling of dread

What I don't do, is make the mistake of talking about the golden days of WoW, and how if only the game would be rolled back, it would be the game it once was. It will never be the game it once was if you have been playing it for, I reckon, more than about 6 months. After a certain point, even the new is kind of familiar. It's just another mob, you know what's going to happen if you go near it, etc etc.

Roll the game back and you will be horrified to discover that water forced a dismount ....

[Deleted]

Golden age right now, and imagine next expansion (if Its sargeras stuff)
The only problem are toxic players and elitists

Who at current stage are sheltered by game mechanics like LFx.
Let's just say that no matter how awesome meal you have right now, if you are sharing it with asshats, it will never taste good.
You can say whatever you want about old vanilla group orginizing and how it was slow, uncasual etc... but what you cant say about it is how it put your public opinion to the test and how players had to face the consequences of their actions. That alone, this netiquete of behaviour is worth more than thousand innovative game mechanics.

[mistahwilshire]

Who at current stage are sheltered by game mechanics like LFx.
Let's just say that no matter how awesome meal you have right now, if you are sharing it with asshats, it will never taste good.
You can say whatever you want about old vanilla group orginizing and how it was slow, uncasual etc... but what you cant say about it is how it put your public opinion to the test and how players had to face the consequences of their actions. That alone, this netiquete of behaviour is worth more than thousand innovative game mechanics.

I call bullshit on this point. I've played WoW since the beginning and people that acted like asshats in Vanilla still got raid spots and cleared content. This point is SO ridiculously blown out of proportion and it's frankly just not even true.

[creamo42]

This is the golden age of WoW for many.

[papaz]

Yes.

Titan is coming.

in 10 years WoW will make a comeback. Until then, it's Titan time.

[haxs101]

Sadly, no. Numbers don't lie. The game is dying. People that don't think so are blind. The golden days are gone. Yes 8 million is a lot, but its not 13 million. Its sad. The game was indeed better. But everything has to come to an end sometime.

[Stevegasm]

People who bring this argument up can never tell us what it was they want back.
Many features such as 40-man raiding were simply out of necessity, due to a complete lack of alternatives.
World PvP was active due to lack of battlegrounds, but quickly died when players had a more rewarding and more convenient alternative.

WoW would have been dead as per the predictions had it stayed as it was.

Casual guilds did 20 man raiding. ZG and AQ20 were actually pretty easy, and you never needed great gear to finish them.

World PvP happened because the world was populated back then. It was also smaller, which is a point nobody seems to bring up. The world was also built to encourage it back then. Nothing is a better example of that than BRM. STV was also hotbed of world PvP, as was Tanaris, Felwood was also great too. Many zones weren't as open as the zones have been since TBC, so you were almost always going to run into members of the opposite faction at some point. The only thing we lost when BGs were introduced in the spring of '05 was the TM/SS back and forth and XR raids.

I call bullshit on this point. I've played WoW since the beginning and people that acted like asshats in Vanilla still got raid spots and cleared content. This point is SO ridiculously blown out of proportion and it's frankly just not even true.

I'd say you're blowing your point out of proportion. Sure, the occasional jerk would get a spot. He must've had a friend in a guild, or at the very least, had crazy skills. There's an exception to every rule, right? Maybe your server was just awful. I can't think of many people on my server that didn't end up rerolling thanks to staining their reputation badly. Ninja looters especially got tarred and feathered, but gear was also hard to come by back then too. Reputation mattered so much back then, because the only way you were going to get anywhere was with the help of people. Welfare epics and the ability to reliably get gear solo didn't come into play until Season 2 of Arenas when you could grind out Season 1 gear through random BGs.

[Palmz]

Seems OK to me. Best expansion yet...

[therealbowser]

Is the golden age of WoW truly gone? Days that are never coming back?

What do you guys think?

The only things I miss about 'old WoW' are:

1. The themes. (only because I disliked Cataclysm's theme, and preferred WotLK and TBC over MoP theme -- slightly. Also, nostalgia.)
2. The community. (the biggest one. Sadly, this is not something that can come back unless Blizzard decides to actually do more moderation. This will never return.)
3. Old Alterac Valley in vanilla. (Yes, I went there.)

There was nothing else 'golden' about WoW's older days. Things were new and exciting, but now we've just about reached the point where we've improved everything to the extent that there's no more basic features to add, and some people simply can't be pleased unless it remains new and exciting. I suggest trying a new MMORPG, then returning to WoW once you get bored -- it'll work wonders.

Compared to today, vanilla WoW was excessively boring, there was nothing to do. TBC was only slightly better. The attitude of the community was different though, and I'd like to think that's the main thing people miss about WoW's older days. That community can't directly be brought back, but a better community could be created with the combined efforts of the current one, and Blizzard itself punishing trolls and griefers. Sadly, again, this will never happen, on either side. We don't care enough to do anything about it, and Activision Blizzard (incorrectly) thinks that punishing and banning players will make them lose more subscriptions than it would gain.

---------- Post added 2013-05-21 at 01:29 AM ----------

Sadly, no. Numbers don't lie. The game is dying. People that don't think so are blind. The golden days are gone. Yes 8 million is a lot, but its not 13 million. Its sad. The game was indeed better. But everything has to come to an end sometime.

The second largest MMORPG is barely a fraction of that number. Just because WoW is losing more subscribers than most MMORPGs have ever even had does not mean it's 'dying'. WoW is 'dying' in the sense that a 20 year old man is 'dying' of old age. WoW is fine at the moment.

I am not an avid fanboy of Blizzard anymore, I'm only posting this because I hate seeing this pop up again and again. Doom and gloom got old years ago when people started the "_____ will kill WoW." garbage. WoW is in no danger whatsoever, sorry. And to further express this, the reason they lost subscriptions is due to problems/challenges in the east, not problems in Europe/America, where you are (presumably) posting from.

[Deleted]

WoW is how YOU make it. It's never going to improve for you if you sit around bitching about it. Do you really want to play the same game that you did in 2005? I surely don't. If anything, if Blizzard didn't change the game in the way it has, maybe WoW would be down and out by now or barely pulling in any subscribers at all.

Sure, there is some parts about WoW that I personally dislike such as Cataclysm & doing dailies for lesser charms just to add more RNG into the gearing up process but overall I think we are even lucky to have dedicated & enthusiastic people working on a game deep down we all love and continue to put their hard work into doing.

Sure, they mess the game up every once in a while but patches like Throne of Thunder have been amazing and one of their best in terms of raid content at least and it's always nice to see them trying new things with our game.