Originally Posted by
Bentusi
And this is the short version of what my feelings are on this subject. I met hundreds and hundreds of great players on ED, all equally fed up with waiting for Blizzard to stop wrecking their game to coddle lazy, incompetent people. In fact, if there`s anything wrong with private servers at all it is that the level of the players using them is too high, so things which would be very hard indeed on a more randomly populated server, like they all were in retail, can become almost easy. This of course is precisely the opposite of what the problem was when playing retail.
This is true and yet it was much more challenging than it is now. So a gateway MMORPG, instead of ramping up the challenge as players become good, does the reverse. Does that make any sense to you?
As for the raids it`s not as simple as you make out here. Sure, mechanically fights are more complex now. But with the lack of addons and general combat feedback in Vanilla, many of the fights are seriously hard. Of course sometimes the challenge is bosses oneshotting the MT or something, which they got rid of in BC already, excepting enrage situations. But healing Chromaggus and Nefarian was more challenging to me than healing anything in Wrath and basically anything in BC except perhaps M`uru and Vashj before you outgeared the fight. It sounds to me as if you`re taking Molten Core and pretending all Vanilla raiding was that basic or something. But it certainly was not.
And the stats prove this too right. Something like 2% of the player base even set foot in Naxxramas, so how can it be easy? This percentage doubled many times in TBC, except for SWP, and endlessly in Wrath and beyond. Clearly then raiding is easier after Vanilla by any reasonable measurements. Or are you gonna claim achievement contrivances, where you`re one of ten guilds to kill a boss while blindfolded and listening to Mongolian nose flute quartets?
And my main beef is not raiding anyway, but that everything else has been trivialized and made irrelevant. I mean, you can make a list of all the game elements of WoW imaginable and they will all have been nerfed at some point. Usually many times.