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  1. #121
    People don't have an idea of WoW when it was new that they long for. They long for the original WoW because it's old. The main difference I think between WoW then and WoW now is the models. Look at the models. Look at how ferocious this game used to look and now it looks polished and positively pg.

    That's the difference for me... a huge tone down in how badass the game actually looked and thus a big downplay in the "war" aspect of WoW.

  2. #122
    The real reason Vanilla was popular is that it was easy. It was one of the first casual MMOs to rise from the ashes of kick-your-ass MMOs like EQ1 and long grindiness with harsh death penalties were still the norm in many games at the time. At launch, EQ2 gave you a pretty sharp exp cut if you couldn't run back to your corpse...although at least you had your armor on this time.

    It also put an emphasis on solo questing rather than grinding, another revolutionary concept at the time. I remember flames erupting on mmo boards all over the place on the solo vs. group debate when people felt that the EQ1 style group grinding of elite mobs was superior gaming. It's obvious in the state of this game, and all others today, how that debate ended.

  3. #123
    Legendary! Deficineiron's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by LazyJones View Post
    I certainly didn't enjoy it. I found it completely inferior to the other MMO I was playing at the time.

    And if you look at subscription numbers, it was in fact the least popular of ALL of WoW's phases.
    that is a highly selective and misleading interpretation of the subscriber history - games start with zero, right??

    and they go up on release and then go up or down depending on how the game does.

    Wow went straight up to 8 million before tbc, 3.5m in the west. the game probably only has ~4m western subs today, and is well below mid-to-late tbc western sub levels.

    ---------- Post added 2012-05-07 at 03:48 PM ----------

    Quote Originally Posted by Skulli View Post
    Even with these listed limitations leveling is still a joke. I did it and i outleveled the zones very very fast. Half zone done and quests are turning grey. Mobs die in 2-3 spells and usually dont even reach you (caster).
    honestly, quests and questing is tuned for people who have very little video game experience or skill. It is all about new subscriber retention, and chasing that large % of players who leave the game before level 20 or whatever. existing players can eat cake and deal with it or do lfd/lfr, or exciting professions such as archaeology.

  4. #124
    Vanilla was better and worse than it is now. Better in that it offered much more to explore and do, more RPG like and worse in that the class mechanics especially were rather screwed up. They largely fixed this problem with TBC, then started screwing up class mechanics again after TBC. But in any case, they're improved over vanilla.

  5. #125
    Deleted
    Wow was probably also Popular because ''Back in the day...'' nobody saw such a huge multiplayer game
    Wow is good
    Swtor is good
    GW2 is bad
    End of story.

  6. #126
    Reasons why Vanilla was a popular game

    1) It wasn't a 7 year old, tired, aged looking game.
    1) Load the amount of weight I would deadlift onto the bench
    2) Unrack
    3) Crank out 15 reps
    4) Be ashamed of constantly skipping leg day

  7. #127
    Deleted
    Everybody who does not have nostalgic feelings about WoW has no heart. Everybody who really wants it back has no brain.

    Nostalgia rules, and the content available then was just a lot of grinding at it's core.

  8. #128
    IMO, the main reason was because it was fresh and new. Stuff gets old. Cataclysm probably brought the least new content of any expansion. It focused a lot more on reworking old content then adding new content, and while I'd say that while Cata improved just about everything it touched, most of those changes simply aren't as exciting as shiny new toys.

  9. #129
    I think the game felt more difficult and the game world felt "bigger" in vanilla because there wasn't as much of a community back then. We didn't have things like wowpedia, bosskillers, questhelper mods (well, at least ones that worked without making you lag like a mofo), etc. We had Thottbot, and that was pretty much it as far as I knew at the time. We have a lot more conveniences now (group summons, heirlooms, mass res, flying mounts, dungeon finder, etc).

    I'm not saying those things are bad, and I loved Cataclysm, but I do think those things made the game feel easier and smaller. Anything the in-game questhelper doesn't show you how to do, a quick Google search will. Even a lot of the "this is how you should spec for endgame raiding, these are your primary stats, this is what gear you should get, this is how you should enchant your gear" stuff wasn't as readily available back then.

    In vanilla, I honestly don't know how I would've made it to 60 if it hadn't been for Thottbot. We had so many quest givers at the very southern border of a zone basically saying "Well, you need to go somewhere to the north to find your quest objective." Asking in general/trade chat for help on anything generally got "LOL U R BAD NOOB" responses. It's pretty much a breeze going from 1-85 now, but 1-60 in vanilla absolutely was not like that. I'm not referring to dungeons/raids (because some of the current heroic stuff is kinda hard even with the progressing nerfs), but more the world outside of raids/instances. I think that world feels a lot smaller and less active now.

    But on top of any of that, some of us have been playing this game for, what, 7 years now? You're going to get slightly burned out after that no matter how awesome the game is. I still think a completely new player starting from the beginning would feel just like some of us did when we started. It's just that WoW is not a fresh, new game to some of us anymore.

    edit: also yes, WC3 is a good point. I started out with the original Diablo, then Starcraft (way back when it first came out when I was like 12) and moved on to WC3 when it came out. From there I moved on to WoW. A lot of us were hyped up over WoW just because we were WC3 players, and you're not going to see that anymore.
    Last edited by Ciddy; 2012-05-07 at 05:32 PM.

  10. #130
    It was a right place, right time game. It was new, had better questing than most of it's competitors at the time, had arguably better graphics than it's few competitors at the time, and was an easier, more forgiving game to get going in than said other games.

    Add that to the fact that it already carried a ton of clout with the Warcraft brand, and viola! Success.

    You won't ever see another single MMO dominate the market in such a fashion again.

    ---------- Post added 2012-05-07 at 01:27 PM ----------

    Quote Originally Posted by Hezip View Post
    Wow was probably also Popular because ''Back in the day...'' nobody saw such a huge multiplayer game
    Yeah.. no.

  11. #131
    Quote Originally Posted by Poppey View Post
    Most of the people don't know how the intial success of World of Warcraft did happen. I would like to mention some points why the game did become so popular. Feel free to add more or discuss.

    1) Warcraft 3 - most of the new players don't know what Warcraft 3 was or they knew, but they have never played it. Warcraft 3 was one of the greatest strategy games of all times and without doubt it was the best strategy game of its era. This game was revolutionary in every aspect, it had great graphics, gameplay, amazing music and sounds, great map editor and let's not forget the great story it had. I can say that the majority of vanilla WoW players(me included) played a lot of Warcraft 3. We all wanted to visit great places from game, explore them, do the quests and do it with your friends or even other random people. I can't even describe how if felt when I visited Ashenvale or Barrens - it was beyond amazing.

    btw there was bonus campaing in Warcraft 3, where you played as Rexxar and did quests given to you by NPCs, while you were gaining levels and items. Does it sound familiar?

    2) Leveling - people tend to hate on vanilla WoW leveling, but I have to disagree with them. Yes, leveling was tought, but we loved it. Mobs had high hp pools and were hiting for a lot, pulling more than two will most likely result into corpse run. You had to actually use your brain, develop a strategy and use all your class abilities effectivelly to level up quickly. Even AH was very important for quick leveling. Quests were very simple, but most of the time you felt like part of the world and you even felt like you are helping npcs - like in real RPG

    3) Social aspect - As I mentioned, leveling was pretty hard and the best way to make it easier was to group up with other players. I like how friendly people during vanilla WoW were. You could just talk to random person and 95% of time he would respond in friendly way. I've mad countless friends in vanilla.

    4) No addons - yep, there were almost no addons and it was great. You don't know where the quest mobs are? Ask friends, guild or even general chat. Try to do this in WotLK or Cata, you would get typical "google it, use wowhead" answer. Addons are taking the fun factor out of the game. Why are people using addon to help them with rotation or addons like DBM? That's just silly.

    5) RPG aspect - Why am I mentioning this? Back in a day... No, seriously. Back in a day you had to carefully choose your class and stick with it. There were no alts, only some people who played a lot could afford this luxury. Your character was part of you, you were part of your character. It was great, because this game is RPG after all and not just some Dota or LoL game.

    Why am I writing this? I just want to tell people that WoW wasn't always only about raiding, arena and daily quests. It was far more. Game had soul, it felts like RPG and leveling was important and possibly the best part of the game. The true mmorpg.
    There's some serious nostalgia glasses going on right now. I've played since launch, and all but point one is nostalgia filled and just plain wrong.

    2) Leveling was terribly designed in Pre-BC, to the point that early on people skipped specific quest lines due to how long they took, and how poor the XP and rewards were. The storylines were very bland, many felt disjointed and ended prematurely for no reason, and there were multiple zones that were heavily under populated in quests for some factions, despite them being a neutral zone (Azshara, Felwood, Bad Lands, The Burning Steppes, Hinterlands, and Silithus are just some that come to mind). Very early on in the games life, specific leveling routes were decided by the players to help them reach 60 the quickest, as in Pre-BC more than any other expansion in the game's life, the End-game was literally the only place that mattered. Blizzard added content only for level 60s after the first handful of patches (I believe 1.3 onwards is when the trend of Raid or Die began with content updates), and there was zero point to being a low level in WoW at that point in time.

    3) Actually, leveling was no more difficult than it is now, it was just more tedius, and it was in fact quicker to solo as group EXP was broken for the longest time in WoW outside of doing Instances. Also, the "friendly" thing only mattered to people that weren't in raid guilds. Once you joined a raid guild that was able to progress, you had zero reason to mingle with the "common folk", as they meant nothing to you, and you needed them for nothing. One only needs to look at all the AQ Drama that unfolded with the opening event in so many servers to see just how terrible the raiding guild community was in pre-bc. The sad thing, however, is people put up with that crap simply because if you wanted to raid or make any progress at 60, you were probably going to need to apply to these guilds and kiss their behinds in order to get anywhere.

    4) This is completely false. By one month into WoW after launch I was running Cosmos and a number of other Addon Packets to help with leveling, dungeoning, questing, and the like. The statement of "Don't know where a quest mob is, ask friends/guilds" is also false. We didn't have WoWhead, no, but we sure as hell had Thottbot, and almost everyone's reply was "Use Thottbot". DBM, Recount, Decursive, Pally Helper, and Healbot style addons were also very early additions to the game by the playerbase, and by mid-way through Pre-BC everyone who as serious about raiding or end-game content had them, as they were damn near mandatory for how awful the UI was back than.

    5) This is also entirely false and nostalgia filled. Alts were not a luxury, a number of people had them and leveled them. Hell, I had a few officers in my guild that had a number of healer and tank alts on standby if we needed them for MC or ZG. The idea of carefully choosing your class and sticking with it is also total bunk. You pickd a class based on what you wnated to do, Heal, DPS, or Tank, and that was that. If you wanted to Tank, you rolled a Warrior. If you wanted to Heal, you rolled a Priest, Paladin, Druid, or Shaman. If you wanted to DPS, you rolled a Mage, Hunter, Rogue, or Warlock. That was it. We didn't have viable specs like we did now. We had one proper spec for each class, and that was that. No one took a DPS Warrior, a Tanking Paladin or Druid, or a DPS Shaman or Priest into any raids that were more advanced than UBRS, because they were broken, useless, and simply worked better than as a shoe-horned spec.

    And lastly: The Raid or Die mentality was born in Pre-BC from 1.3 onwards, clear through BC. Blizzard only catered to end-game players back in those days, and the game didn't evolve more into something greater than that until Wrath.

  12. #132
    There have been improvements in the game since vanilla but generally the game has gone downhill especially the community. LFR/LFD really destroyed any sense of comaraderie that developed from putting groups together. People complain that groups were hard to put together but in reality I'd rather be able to put a group together from people on my server because people were held accountable for their actions. If you ninja'd something you didn't need word got around quick and you weren't invited to groups anymore.

    If that happened good luck rolling a new toon on a new server because there were no server transfers. Nowadays server transfers have radically imbalanced servers like my former server Sargeras. I believe the alliance to horde ratio was about 6:1.

    When you grouped together for dungeons like UBRS and scholo, etc etc, they were at least somewhat challenging and not just a total faceroll like the dungeon finders are today. I'd rather just have four other NPC's with me then 4 other players who i never even converse with nor need to because it's just a cakewalk. I rather enjoyed the game when it was challenging and took actual work to get things accomplished. When epics become easily obtainable for everyone they lose their value. They aren't that epic anymore when my girlfriend whose never played a video game in her life can sit at the computer and go into a raid finder and get "epics."

  13. #133
    I like your points, but just wanted to clarify if anyone is arguing against this that WoW is more popular now than it was in Vanilla. It might not be as good in your opinion, but it's appealing to a much wider audience. That's the only real change in the game

  14. #134
    Legendary! Deficineiron's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by topitopi View Post
    I like your points, but just wanted to clarify if anyone is arguing against this that WoW is more popular now than it was in Vanilla. It might not be as good in your opinion, but it's appealing to a much wider audience. That's the only real change in the game
    in western regions, where the vast majority of mmo-c posters post, I would say just barely. Classic closed out with 3.5 western subs (eu/na) in early jan 2007. it has roughly around 4 million now (dec 31st), having managed to lose over a million in 2011. western sub levels are now back at the mid-bc level.

    Now if you play in mainland china on a netease server, none of this matters to you.

  15. #135
    Deleted
    exploring the unknown... u cant ever have woah! feelin anymore.. u do everything on ptr... u are required to know boss before u face him... basicly u have completed game before u turn it on.

  16. #136
    Quote Originally Posted by Deficineiron View Post
    in western regions, where the vast majority of mmo-c posters post, I would say just barely. Classic closed out with 3.5 western subs (eu/na) in early jan 2007. it has roughly around 4 million now (dec 31st), having managed to lose over a million in 2011. western sub levels are now back at the mid-bc level.

    Now if you play in mainland china on a netease server, none of this matters to you.
    If there only was any proof of that, since Blizzard does not release per-region breakdowns of the subscription numbers.

    Actually there is proof of totally opposite in previous quarterly report where it was actually mentioned that most of the sub losses was in China specifically.
    Never going to log into this garbage forum again as long as calling obvious troll obvious troll is the easiest way to get banned.
    Trolling should be.

  17. #137
    The Lightbringer Adramalech's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by killidan View Post
    Bringing 8 million players and retaining them for years to come, unlike WotLK and Cata, is not rose tinted glasses, it's math.
    You're assuming that the same 8 million players were retained over these years. That's a mistake. You actually believe there has never been any subscription loss before Cataclysm? That's foolish. The thing is, before you had more people joining than people leaving at any given time. That is no longer the case. Don't fool yourself into thinking the game used to be some kind of perfection land where people loved it so much they never quit until Cataclysm.

    Also, my memory is really foggy, but wasn't there a bunch of doomsaying, complaining and tinfoilhat crap during TBC because of player activity *gasp* becoming smaller and smaller, while using the same arguments that are used today to justify it? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to recall that kind of crap happening then as well.
    Last edited by Adramalech; 2012-05-07 at 06:57 PM.
    Quote Originally Posted by Tya View Post
    As a warlock, allow me to be the first to say that I get tremendous amounts of joy from watching fear pathing take you to Africa.
    Quote Originally Posted by Drayarr View Post
    Twinking is like going back to school when you are 30, just to be smarter than the other kids.

  18. #138
    Legendary! Deficineiron's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by vesseblah View Post
    If there only was any proof of that, since Blizzard does not release per-region breakdowns of the subscription numbers.

    Actually there is proof of totally opposite in previous quarterly report where it was actually mentioned that most of the sub losses was in China specifically.
    vesselblah is a good example of a selective fact poster - he will post one fact from the q3 call that helps his argument, ignoring what was said in the prior sentence in that call.

    Over half of wow subs are in china, as of sept 30th/10.3m subs.

    there are other comments from q1 and q2 which further describe the character of losses, and comments in netease's earnings release which further clarify matters.

    also the 3.5m western subs in jan 2007 is a public statement by blizzard.

  19. #139
    Quote Originally Posted by Rambo View Post
    Reasons why vanilla World of Warcraft was so popular:
    It was new.
    pretty much this ^^ It was new and shiny. First best mmorpg.

  20. #140
    Vanilla wow was so popular because decking your character out with epics was actually an achievement (and you didn't need a stinking game rubbing an achievement in your face every time you leveled).

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