Was "classic wow" really that much better?

[gumzrogue]

What do you think? Idk, I'm getting pretty bored of WoW lately but I only started playing during WotLK.
Has anyone here played the original game before, what's big fuss about?

Mod Edit: Infracted.

[sonshinegreene]

The COMMUNITY was different in classic, just seemed to be less asshats around.

[WolfyDude]

game wise? no. it was new and so were the players. players wise it was great

[Callipygian]

The game wasn't "better" but the community was.

It was impossible to break into raiding without making connections. Now all you need to do is go to a guild recruitment forum and fill out apps til someone says yet. Or just PuG. Or LFR. It makes everything much more convenient, but so does facebook. You can't argue that either leads to a "better" community.

[ComputerNerd]

TLDR version - A high skill cap is fine when the goals or entry does not change with content or expansion patches. A high barrier is good only when its fixed.

Vanilla was not as inclusive as it is now, with a much higher skill requirement for the content.
That did result in a much more focused pve community, with the remainder of the community aiming for something that was nearly or effectively out of their reach.

That would have worked fine had the goal posts not moved quite so substantially, and suddenly the content they had been aiming for was then out of date and new goals were released.
Repeatedly changing the "end" goal through content patches and ultimately expansions meant that most of the community would be forever behind and therefore in order to keep or expand the "casual" or average skilled playerbase then it needed to be more inclusive.

That is what future expansions did in lowering the skillcap to get into raiding content, eventually culminating in even the inexperienced and first-time raiders seeing the end-game content of an expansion.

The game would have been dead had that not happened, had it catered only to a small portion of its player base who could meet ever changing requirements.

That is what people miss about vanilla, the difficulty and the belief that seeing the content, let alone killing it was truly earned.
Somthing which unfortunatly had to change for the sake of the game to continue.

The game wasn't "better" but the community was.

It was impossible to break into raiding without making connections. Now all you need to do is go to a guild recruitment forum and fill out apps til someone says yet. Or just PuG. Or LFR. It makes everything much more convenient, but so does facebook. You can't argue that either leads to a "better" community.

The vast majority of problems nowadays are community driven.
Content not aimed at those better than the majority is flamed by them as poor or inferior, but they are perfectly willing to abuse it or get every advantage they can out of it, fair means or foul.
Basically the raiding community which used to be so is now very hypocritical and being the very opposite of what they were in vanilla, someone to look up to because a good player was more than just skill, but a good person. Something no longer the case much anymore.

[TaurenNinja]

No.

Game was just new and more interesting/challenging/exciting, because no one had a clue or any reference on what to do and how. So it was pretty much "find 40 newbies with very mixed gear and skill, try each boss a lot of times, fail most of the time because people suck, then maybe find out how to best do it and kill it finally"

Nowadays, even before release of a new content patch there's still calculation etc about what the best gear/builds are.
Guilds such as Paragon already know each boss from PTR when it hits live. And there's detailed video guides around before the content is even released.

Most players today are far better than they were in the early days. Much more hardcore and concentrated on having the best build/equip possible. We also have a lot more reference material (WoWHead, gear/DPS calculators, combatlog analyzers and so on, which didn't exist at all in the early days. I think not even something like Recount was around then, so you weren't able to tell if someone did enough DPS or was just standing there being autoshot-AFK).

Also there was just one difficulty setting, meaning the later bosses were pretty much hardmode by default. This leads to some players believing that it was harder then simply because there was no option to play it on an easy difficulty setting.
Nowadays you even have 3 difficulty levels - medium/hard (Heroic) is still around, but there's also easy/medium (Normal) and laughable/easy (LFR), and most players only play Normal.

[xGLxAnubis]

I like the people that say that it was harder and the boss mechanics were way better.

"Alright kiddies! Gather around! I'm going to tell you about vanilla WoW. Back in my day you didn't have flying mounts. You had to walk to MC to get your epics UP HILL BOTH WAYS THROUGH THE SNOW!"

Play on a vanilla server (TONS of free ones nowadays), level to 60, and clear MC. THEN come back here and tell us it wasn't harder in almost every way.

Stop talking out your ass, you clearly have no idea.

[Kouki]

I could break down twelve reasons why classic was better for me (and still is as I found classic server to play in), but I'd be assaulted by the jaded members of the community who obviously are paid by Blizzard to say that new shit > old shit.

Wow a world of no change, a world where you can be the same character forever, a world with the same dungeons, the same profession, no balance patches or content updates.

If wow never adapted it would have died along time ago.

"To stop growing is to die"

[xGLxAnubis]

TLDR version - A high skill cap is fine when the goals or entry does not change with content or expansion patches. A high barrier is good only when its fixed.

Vanilla was not as inclusive as it is now, with a much higher skill requirement for the content.
That did result in a much more focused pve community, with the remainder of the community aiming for something that was nearly or effectively out of their reach.

That would have worked fine had the goal posts not moved quite so substantially, and suddenly the content they had been aiming for was then out of date and new goals were released.
Repeatedly changing the "end" goal through content patches and ultimately expansions meant that most of the community would be forever behind and therefore in order to keep or expand the "casual" or average skilled playerbase then it needed to be more inclusive.

That is what future expansions did in lowering the skillcap to get into raiding content, eventually culminating in even the inexperienced and first-time raiders seeing the end-game content of an expansion.

The game would have been dead had that not happened, had it catered only to a small portion of its player base who could meet ever changing requirements.

That is what people miss about vanilla, the difficulty and the belief that seeing the content, let alone killing it was truly earned.
Somthing which unfortunatly had to change for the sake of the game to continue.



The vast majority of problems nowadays are community driven.
Content not aimed at those better than the majority is flamed by them as poor or inferior, but they are perfectly willing to abuse it or get every advantage they can out of it, fair means or foul.
Basically the raiding community which used to be so is now very hypocritical and being the very opposite of what they were in vanilla, someone to look up to because a good player was more than just skill, but a good person. Something no longer the case much anymore.

I disagree on a lot of points here. The main one:

Yes, one of the worst parts of Vanilla was that it was very difficult to jump into a new tier of raiding. Unless you were in one of the good guilds on the server, you didn't do MC, which means you couldn't do BWL. So you got stuck in MC for a long time. There are two potential fixes to this:

1. Make the content easier.
2. Allow gear to more easily obtainable when a new tier is released.

What does blizzard do? They implement both. This was a terrible idea, and lead to Casualcraft as we see it today. If they had instead kept raiding difficult, but added new easily obtainable gear (Like they do now!), it would have been perfect. Think of BC, because this is the exact model they used. BC was widely considered the bext WoW Xpack, and I believe it's alrgely for this reason: Raiding was still challenging, being fully epic'd was still something that was 'cool'. But, with the addition of Badges of Justice, it allowed people to enter the new raiding tier without a TON of extra work, but still didn't allow it to be steam rolled.

[Deleted]

Yes it was, it was a different game though and wasn't so much about playing at level cap but more about doing what you wanted. It was much like MMO Skyrim TBH - sandbox.

So it was better because

-Slower leveling (but it wasn't an issue because level cap wasn't where the actual game begins)
-No flying mounts so exploring was an important part
-All gear useable everywhere with minimal disadvantages
-Epics were actually epics, not many freebies
-Much more immersion
-Almost sandbox, at least didn't give that disgusting theme park feeling
-Encouraged teamwork so better community
-Fun, different gear.. they weren't worried so much about balance so you could get very creative with that
-Most speccs had different roles instead of that stupid 3-role system. Sure, some were not very useful for raids but the game wasn't 100% about raids anyway.
-Good rewards that added spells, special abilities and attunements instead of that cosmetic crap they're trying to "sell" now.

[coldbear]

The COMMUNITY was different in classic, just seemed to be less asshats around.

I was on Laughing Skull - one of the original US launch pvp realms. Plenty of asshats on both sides.

Just that what you did and who you said what to had consequences back then. You had a reputation and took care to maintain it, whether good or bad. Getting ostracized basically meant rerolling at level 1, or just playing solo/small groups since you then had zero chance at getting anything done.

All that said, mechanics and balance and just the game overall sucked compared to now. It's a better *game* now. But movement between servers and instances and raids and cross-server everything means there's not much world left, and zero server community feeling.

Hence why I no longer play. Better game, less social - **** that.

[Engaged]

Yes, it was a better game because of the rich community... after all what makes a game, a game... the community. A lot of people were very ignorant and there weren't to many hardcore people. I loved Pre-bc a lot because of how rich the community was and how your actions on your server decided weather you went somewhere raid wise or not. I think that the best game from WoW is defiantly BC though. It had the best of both worlds... rich community, and hardcore raiders, and difficult raids that not everyone on the server can experience. WotLK introduced the dungeon finder which absolute destroyed the community on nearly every server. Wrath also introduced Heroic raids, which are more challenging than anything pre-bc had to offer. This isn't my opinion this is fact... i raided all the way through naxx 40. If i had to chose between gearing a toon up to near max ilvl within 3-5days which it takes about now, or a rich community on nearly every server and where some luxurys that blizzard has given us, are taken away, i would choose the community.

[Pancaspe]

Today's version of WOW is much, much better. But as others have said, the community is not.

I actually don't think changes in WOW had anything to do with the destruction of the community, I think the internet in general did.

In 2004 there was no YouTube, no Facebook, no social media of any kind. I think it is the introduction of these things that destroyed the internet community, not just WOW.

A good example is the SWTOR community. It has already been branded the most caustic yet seen in a game. Why would that be? Did Bioware create that? I think not, I think it is just he way things are now.

[ComputerNerd]

I disagree on a lot of points here. The main one:

Yes, one of the worst parts of Vanilla was that it was very difficult to jump into a new tier of raiding. Unless you were in one of the good guilds on the server, you didn't do MC, which means you couldn't do BWL. So you got stuck in MC for a long time. There are two potential fixes to this:

1. Make the content easier.
2. Allow gear to more easily obtainable when a new tier is released.

What does blizzard do? They implement both. This was a terrible idea, and lead to Casualcraft as we see it today. If they had instead kept raiding difficult, but added new easily obtainable gear (Like they do now!), it would have been perfect. Think of BC, because this is the exact model they used. BC was widely considered the bext WoW Xpack, and I believe it's alrgely for this reason: Raiding was still challenging, being fully epic'd was still something that was 'cool'. But, with the addition of Badges of Justice, it allowed people to enter the new raiding tier without a TON of extra work, but still didn't allow it to be steam rolled.

Yet the obtaining of raid level gear without raiding is criticised just as much because of the item level measure, and how it is allowing geared but unskilled and even incorrectly geared players with high level gear into the content.
Dumbing down of content is flamed due to it removing the value or ego measure it had to those who completed it when it was hard, when it was appropriate.
The flat out nerfs in firelands and ICC in particular highlight that.

Both systems have their faults and neither one would have been a solution to the problem.
No doubt we can with hindsight find faults with system, but that is always easy as an observer after the event and not the one making those decisions.
There will never be a single or even group of solutions which will resolve the problem in the eyes of everyone.

[Schmilblick]

Yes it was, it was a different game though and wasn't so much about playing at level cap but more about doing what you wanted. It was much like MMO Skyrim TBH - sandbox.

So it was better because

-Slower leveling (but it wasn't an issue because level cap wasn't where the actual game begins)
-No flying mounts so exploring was an important part
-All gear useable everywhere with minimal disadvantages
-Epics were actually epics, not many freebies
-Much more immersion
-Almost sandbox, at least didn't give that disgusting theme park feeling
-Encouraged teamwork so better community
-Fun, different gear.. they weren't worried so much about balance so you could get very creative with that
-Most speccs had different roles instead of that stupid 3-role system. Sure, some were not very useful for raids but the game wasn't 100% about raids anyway.
-Good rewards that added spells, special abilities and attunements instead of that cosmetic crap they're trying to "sell" now.

Pretty much this (even if i started playing at BC.)

[Tko15a2]

Play on a vanilla server (TONS of free ones nowadays), level to 60, and clear MC. THEN come back here and tell us it wasn't harder in almost every way.

Stop talking out your ass, you clearly have no idea.

Considering that Yogg Saron with no Keepers is the longest standing (70 days) undefeated boss that wasnt bugged (C'thun was down within the hour he was hotfixed) in the history of WoW, while being in the "Theorycrafting" age of WoW where u pre calculate everything and was declared by one of the worlds top guild at the time (Ensidia) to be mathematically impossible..........What you said means prett much nothing.....

All that aside BC was my fav expansion(though I did enjoy Ulduar) and ive been playing since vanilla

[MoanaLisa]

The COMMUNITY was different in classic, just seemed to be less asshats around.

It was smaller.

[Pull My Finger]

Play on a vanilla server (TONS of free ones nowadays), level to 60, and clear MC. THEN come back here and tell us it wasn't harder in almost every way.

Stop talking out your ass, you clearly have no idea.

Whoever says it was harder than the current raid content is having a whole dictionary pouring out of his ass. Just sayin

[Deleted]

There will never be a single or even group of solutions which will resolve the problem in the eyes of everyone.

This maybe true but you know what the absolute worst solution is? Change things around constantly so everyone would get mad.. well at least everyone who doesn't just log in for the dailies or aren't the most dedicated fanboys.

You said it yourself too, it's like the nerfs to FL and ICC. Make it easy from the start or hard from the start, that would make at least some groups happy. However if they dance around and nerf/buff things like that, the hardcores will be mad because their efforts are trivialized and the bads or casuals will be mad because they were excluded from the content at the start.

[Brodeo]

tbh when the bad parts are shitty it makes success that much more rewarding.