Thoughts on "Old" WoW and Reasons for a Changing Culture

[Zeglo]

My theory is game development is only half of the story to why people feel WoW's entire structure has changed. I believe that the game changing from Classic to Pandaria is not the only factor going into players feeling nostalgic and sad about the older game.

I believe it's also the players that are changing. At least for me, part of the fun of Classic was simply that knew nothing about the game. I explored, full of naivety. I didn't know what stats I needed, and getting to 300 in a crafting profession was a big deal for me. Even if I wanted to know (Which I didn't, because most people didn't), Thottbot's slow seaching system and random blogs were all I had to look through.

With sites like Wowhead, WoWWiki, and others making the game's information significantly easier to find, as well as players who are much more knowledgeable, I think the player base caused the longing feeling them selves (Or at least partially). The true hardcore players may have known everything all along, but it wasn't until recently the majority of the population knew so easily, too.

If I came into WoW as a newbie into the current expansion, I would probably have that same sense of wonder. It's the human condition to explore until we know everything, which in essence is defeating our selves. I argue lack of ignorance and easier access to meta-gaming strategies changed the culture.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

Three big changes.

1. Min/Maxing used to be something you laughed about. They wore the wrong gear type, chose the most inane specs, and acted like a prick. Now m/m is normal and you are laughed at for not doing so. As such, Blizz makes it easier to m/m and anything added is automatically mandatory (scenarios... dailies... PvP.... legendary chain...).

2. LF. Yes, this system is responsible for our woes. At its inception this was a great system, but Blizz went too far when LF teleported you to the instance. No one had a reason to go in the world. Blizz says player housing would take people out of the world? That genie was out of the bottle since LFG 2.0.

3. Us. We made the above two what they are. We drilled into players heads that they have to take the shortest, easiest, and most min/maxed path. We told them "wowhead" instead of "read the quest text." We obsess over the subs going up, instead of just being the biggest sub numbers of comparable MMOs. And we chose to sit in capitals instead of going into the world.

[Dayum]

Basically, yes.

The first experience is the best experience. Throw a player who has played all eight years of WoW back into the original game, he would instantaneously stop playing due to boredom. Vanilla WoW is a clunky, simplistic and a more noob-friendly environment where everything could be achieved provided the said player would be prepared to spend a quarter of the day sleeping, and the remaining three quarters playing the game.

Its the very core of nostalgia. Someone who already knows a lot about a subject will be bored in a primary school lesson about that subject. Vanilla WoW is like a beta to the current WoW we play. To anyone being a minge about the live WoW has either bad memory or no clue about what pre-tbc patch WoW was like. 6-8 active spells, lack of item variety, boring item models and clunky mechanics. For crying out loud, you couldn't cast a spell without dismounting first. That was just.. UGHH!

[Elegiac]

2. LF. Yes, this system is responsible for our woes. At its inception this was a great system, but Blizz went too far when LF teleported you to the instance. No one had a reason to go in the world. Blizz says player housing would take people out of the world? That genie was out of the bottle since LFG 2.0

'Out in the world' is an utter myth. People used to sit in cities spamming Trade for PuGs until they got a group, then waited around for people to summon them.

[Sj]

The culture has changed simply because the players have changed. Even if there were no new players between launch and now, the playerbase would want completely different things than what they used to. Times change, people change.

'Out in the world' is an utter myth. People used to sit in cities spamming Trade for PuGs until they got a group, then waited around for people to summon them.

This is very true. As a raid-geared healer, I still spent a lot of time in LFG and Trade channel trying to find groups. Granted, I spent a lot of time in Barrens, Hillsbrad, and Arathi back in the day as well, but that was only because that's how you queued up for bgs.

[killidan]

I had that same great feeling in GW2 for couple months. Exploring a beautiful world, learning specs and stats. Only if there were more people on the server/shard and some promise of endgame.

It's not the first time is best time, that feeling can be caught again with the right changes in wow.

[Zeglo]

I had that same great feeling in GW2 for couple months. Exploring a beautiful world, learning specs and stats. Only if there were more people on the server/shard and some promise of endgame.

It's not the first time is best time, that feeling can be caught again with the right changes in wow.

I think the feeling could come back not if dungeons were made mega-hard (As some hardcores suggest). The game would need either a new feature or overhaul not operated on achievements or dailies...or even loot maybe. Or perhaps simply a system where meta-gaming doesn't really work. What could it be? I have no idea.