Originally Posted by
Raugnaut
A) There was absolutely NO camped mobs in Vanilla, except for a possible few rep maws, like Felwoods Furbolgs. Rare mobs in Vanilla droped crap gear.
B) I played during Vanilla. The amount of ppl in the world depended on your server- A high pop server, nothing really changed since Vanilla. A low pop server, you could easily be the only person farming herbs/ores/skins in EPL.
C) Any "competition" was because ore/herb nodes were VERY scarce compared to now. Early Pandaria, when you could literally go between 3 ghost iron nodes for a good hour before they stoped respawning? That rate was over 50x the rate back in Vanilla. You herb a herb, it wouldnt be back for almost 10 mins, rather then the 1 min it is now.
D) During BC, the "compitition" was more due to the wanted herbs/ores being in highly concentrated areas that were ALSO lvl 70 daily questing areas.
E) During Wrath, we get more of the non-CRZ emptiness of the world. Northrend was very large, and the good stuff was spread out over a HUGE area, most of which, you quested through once and then you were done. When LFD came out, most ppl either sat in cities queing (Nobody being near the BG warmasters out in the world helped with that) or manually entered raid instances. Only time you would see ppl out and about was either VERY quick dailies or farming.
F) The main emptiness came with cata. 5 zones of interest to max lvl ppl, down from 7-8. Herbs located in 1 specific zone, rather then spread out amongst 4 zones. Ores were extremely plenty, and you could use phasing to your advantage to get a significant amount of phased nodes. Zones were big, nodes were plentiful, the only time you might see another player on your realm was in TB.
The way the world used to be during Vanilla was because of the small number of servers, the scarcity of herbs, and the smaller size of zones compared to now. You were much more likely to notice someone farming at the same time as you, because the nodes were scarce. During BC, on my small server, a rare spawn could be up for a week before 3 ppl got together to down it (Or someone awesome/geared managed to solo it). During Wrath, there was no noticable competition for ANYTHING but the TLPD. During Cata, same thing except with Aeonaxx/Posidus after 4.1
Even now, in Pandaria, on the smaller servers, the world is relatively empty, except for whereever you need to do dailies at. CRZ was not very thought out by blizzard- Realm communities that had been a small server suddenly found themselves thrown into an area that had the feel of a large server. Large servers got even more competition, without anything going back to the realm itself. Low levels who could level in relative peace in a pvp realm (Beyond the occasional high lvl searching for low lvl stuff, or equal lvl pvp) now find themselves constantly ganked by players who camp a low lvl zone for hours.
When Molten Front came out, I didn't hear anything much about how ppl lagged in it, or how there was too many players. PvP realms would occaisonally feel some pvp when a 10v10 happened spontaneously, but it wasn't common. CRZ comes out, and ppl are either like "I CANT GET ANYTHING DONE DUE TO LAG" or "I CANT GET ANYTHING DONE BECAUSE OF THE 80 ALLIANCE TEABAGING US 20 HORDE" or w/e. There are some ppl who like the feeling of more ppl out in the world- theres either a louder group, or a larger group that hates CRZ with a passion.