How long until people notice that Classic was 90% leveling and stop playing?

[Powerogue]

I played vanilla for quite a while but on reflection, yeah, I was almost entirely either leveling or leveling my professions (lockpicking took quite a long time in particular, long durations of no xp gains opening junkboxes around the world, or going all the way back to the swamp for more blindweed for blinding powder...) I didn't even afford an epic mount until around level 67 of BC.

It didn't help that finding groups for dungeons and raids was so flipping difficult compared to today. You could realistically expect to spend all day waiting on the raid to fill, be a few people short, and give up. That was your day of WoWing.

[Vaelorian]

People didn't really think this way until the South Park esisode. I never knew anyone to express anti-leveling sentiments until then anyways. People just enjoyed the game and all the friends they made along the way.

Then the need for end game became an absolute must-have!

"Sure I suck at this game, but I needs endgame!"

"I wants to raids!"

etc.

Then WoW took a big tumble and was never the same again. Thanks Casuals. Thanks Cataclysm. Also thanks WotLK for introducing auto-LFD. Great.

OMFG so true.

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It took me under 7 days played to get to level 60 in retail, the game is absolutely not 90% levelling.

Honestly? This is coming from actual RETAIL Vanilla experience? Not private servers where experience can be greatly enhanced? This is not coming from someone who leveled to 60 when WOTLK was available? This is not coming from someone who already leveled a main and now wanted to play an alt... and found a way (or bought a guide) to speedrun to 60?

I am saying this because I lived in WoW when it came out. I took about 24 days /played to become 60. The second time around it took 13 days. The first time I helped so many of my friends or just random strangers that did not reward me any experience - so I sort of handicapped my leveling... (in terms of speed) but I did have the best time leveling my first character (still my main). The second time I also took a lot of time leveling up my professions. So yeah... But I guess that if you did in fact speedrun in the most efficient manner and had groups for dungeons on the fly... it could be possible. Perhaps even a little less then 7.

But to come here and say this is NORMAL....

[Niaraa]

I think people will be more surprised about how imbalanced the game was, wanna raid as Elemental Shaman or Prot/Ret Paladin for example? be prepared to be laughed at.

sure and tank was warrior only stuff and main heal priest shammy for totems. if you are alliance your priest MUST be a dwarf for the fear immun spell.

[Slashnox]

True, I barely hit 60 and TBC had started. But your title is dumb because you assume people don't like that. Get that stick out of your ass because it's a good thing.

[kyoloco]

im pretty sure i spent most my time in AV

that and farming d1 sets/being carried by raiders because i was a tank

[Deleted]

23 days played until level 60 for me on my main warlock in vanilla, ended up with about 120 days played before calling it quits. Look a long a leasurely path to max level and was one of the few players who cleared Naxx40 for reference. I also spent lots of time in BG's including many an epic AV. I surely have tons of memories from leveling but most are from max level. Vanilla had an amazing end-game with lots to do.

If you didn't enjoy PvP or didn't manage to raid you were out of stuff to do very fast though, I must admit. I was going to quit before I found my raiding guild when I had achieved BIS gear in every slot pre-MC, there was just nothing left to log in for.

[Coombs]

Probably after they reach level 60.

[Teri]

I had multiple 60s and all of them spent way more time at 60 then at 1-59.

Multiple of them got into some form of Raiding/PvP, ZG and AQ20 were great places for alts.

In beta I leveled to like 45.

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It didn't help that finding groups for dungeons and raids was so flipping difficult compared to today. You could realistically expect to spend all day waiting on the raid to fill, be a few people short, and give up. That was your day of WoWing.

That's why organized guilds existed.

And my guild also knew a lot of other people to do dungeons with, community grew due to the system of Keys, to like UBRS and Stratholme/Dire Maul & PVP.

People were much more likely to help eachother out, even if the blue gear from dungeons was 100% useless to them.

[Deleted]

People have to stop saying that. Apart from the very beginning of the leveling, past level 15-20, except warriors, rogues without CDs (and still, as soon as warriors get sweeping strike, they can handle it), every other class can pull more than 1 mob and still don't die. For mages, feral druids, hunters or warlocks it's even trivial. Priests do well too. Pals and shams with their healing capacities are fine too.

OT : If for you, 90% of Vanilla was leveling, you were either doing it wrong or you started Vanilla at the end.

i stil remember using my wand on my mage and priest alts so i wouldn't have to drink after every 2 mobs

[Kyphael]

It's kind of what I'm hoping for, I don't have time for true raiding anymore and haven't done it since Cataclysm. Casual leveling and exploring is what I have time for.

[solinari6]

I never got to raid in vanilla, because my highest char was only 57ish when TBC launched. I remember hearing people chat about MC and stuff, but I never really understood what they were talking about. For me, vanilla was all about leveling, and dungeons. And I remember dungeons taking HOURS. Especially dungeons like Razerfen Krual ... it took so long walking to get there, and people running it (including me) had no idea what they were doing, would drop group randomly, which would cause a probable 15-30min delay until we found a replacement and actually got him there ... only to have a group dissolve before the ending. I think I probably started that dungeon over twice as many times as I actually completed it. Hopefully that won't happen so much in the new Classic, since people know what's going on, but replacing people in dungeons is still going to SUCK.

[jackofwind]

OMFG so true.

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Honestly? This is coming from actual RETAIL Vanilla experience? Not private servers where experience can be greatly enhanced? This is not coming from someone who leveled to 60 when WOTLK was available? This is not coming from someone who already leveled a main and now wanted to play an alt... and found a way (or bought a guide) to speedrun to 60?

I am saying this because I lived in WoW when it came out. I took about 24 days /played to become 60. The second time around it took 13 days. The first time I helped so many of my friends or just random strangers that did not reward me any experience - so I sort of handicapped my leveling... (in terms of speed) but I did have the best time leveling my first character (still my main). The second time I also took a lot of time leveling up my professions. So yeah... But I guess that if you did in fact speedrun in the most efficient manner and had groups for dungeons on the fly... it could be possible. Perhaps even a little less then 7.

But to come here and say this is NORMAL....

Yes. It took me 7 days played to reach level 60 in actual retail Vanilla. It wasn't as uncommon as you think.

[Hiromant]

I got to level 46 in four months and quit due to burnout. Good times.

[Aoyi]

I liked the leveling of original WoW. Yes, there were definitely some points that dragged on more than others, but I was the type to read the quest text and take in the zones back then. I don’t know if I’d want to do it again since I’ve already seen so much of it, but I’m sure there are some out there who will also enjoy taking it slow and enjoying the process.

[Deleted]

If you think people are gonna stay subscribed to sit in a constant content drought, you're mad. When they reach level 60 and start looking for LFR, only to find out you need to be attuned, need to go here and do this, here to do that just to get into the earliest end game content, they're gonna go back to live servers quicker than I can kill a Elwynn Forest deer.

[Jujudrood]

I would venture a guess that, for most people leveling their first toon, it was close to about 300 to 350 hours, somewhere in the realm of 12-14 days played.
This was because people were learning how to play and didn't really understand every concept of the game yet.
Hell, I remember my first toon running out of arrows and I was hitting things with raptor strike/mongoose bite and being sad that I couldn't loot arrows from mobs I shot, then lo and behold, a majestic vendor in town sold them!
Others figured out max leveling speed paths and such with additional toons and probably cut that time in half, or close to it.

The point is, 14 days played to level will be much less than 90% of /played if you want to do endgame things, like get a dungeon set, get attuned to MC, get fire resist gear, get attuned to BWL, work your way through group quests for things like Benediction and Rokh'delar (sp?), I mean, it goes on and on.
This is foregoing instanced and world PVP, farming mats for professions, grinding scarlet elites for cloth/silver to buy your epic speed mount.

Vanilla was a never ending grind of a treadmill that didn't really have any catch up mechanics or speed passes (unless you had baller friends who didn't mind carrying you all over Azeroth).
Leveling was much slower than today, but it was still a drop in the bucket to the endgame hamster wheel.

[Ornerybear]

I mean, at the time leveling in wow was pretty fast mode compared to the rest of the mmo world. If anything compared to modern games, it might be nice to have a little grind again. take time to smell the roses as it were.

[TG Coward]

I remember a lot of cool things about vanilla, yes it took ages to level but it was worth it more in the end and loved the ammunition fails while in a dungeon and having to melee kill for the rest of it.

[TJ]

Because leveling in Vanilla WoW isn't a chore when it is difficult. It isn't exactly as tedious as leveling retail where you can go pretty much anywhere and pull many mobs and still walk away without any issue. If you pull more than one mob in Vanilla, you might die. Pull three and your death is certain. Plus you have to worry about gankers which makes it even more difficult. Retail you can just turn on "care bear mode" and avoid PvP.

I like how you talk like gankers are a legitimate difficulty and mandatory part of the game, when really, they're not and it depends on how many assholes you run into. I know I won't be rolling on a PvP server 100%, playing on a private Vanilla PvP server has cemented that decision for me. I love PvP but ganking is not PvP, it's just pathetic by somebody that's too crap to play the game at max level so instead ruins everybody else's playtime at a lower level.

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Classic isn't for everyone. Even if only 10% stick around and those 10% really want to play Classic what is the problem with that? What if more then that stay? Who cares? I will play both? What does that make me in the eyes of all these "my version of the game is best and yours is shit" debates? I don't understand why people are so up in arms about Blizzard having another video game to play. Very very odd.

Exactly, you have all the people that want Vanilla saying retail is shit and whining constantly and then you have the retail player saying Vanilla is shite and no one will play it. Who gives a flying fuck what people want to play or think? Let them do what they want.

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I guess it's just a matter of what you find enjoyable.

Many people describe the quests as "poorly laid out", but to me, that was what made them so good. Rather than having a quest giver send you to deliver an item to the guy at the other end of the street, you instead had a guy send you from Darkshire to talk to someone in Menethil Harbor. Or to get one item from a hippogryph in Feralas, one item from an ogre in Dustwallow, and one item from a naga in STV. Stuff like that made it feel more like an adventure. Sure, it's absolutely not efficient, but I never cared for efficiency.

I never faced a "dead zone" during the leveling experience, probably because I was always quite inefficient. If I needed to kill 20 troggs for the quest objective, I'd inevitably end up killing two or three times that number, just because I was wandering around and trying to get at some tin deposits while in the area. So where other players reached a point where they found themselves having to grind XP, my "grinding" was sort of naturally absorbed into the experience instead of being a specific, soulless, activity.

So yeah. I'm not refuting your points, I'm just saying that I see it differently. And I've never viewed Endgame as the be-all and end-all. I still don't, not with SWTOR, and not even in the current retail WoW environment.

I agree, the questing in all honesty was sort of poorly laid out, but it was awesome how it made you go to different parts of the map. I honestly didn't think I'd enjoy that style of leveling again and would get annoyed at some of these little things, but I love it, absolutely love it way more than retail's version.

[zoddzero]

It wasn't 90% leveling, but it was hella time consuming and very alt-unfriendly. That will make people quit if anything. But plenty of people will stay playing Classic as well.