My favorite vanilla memory: I was levelling in Duskwood, when some guy in zone chat said "LF 1 DPS SM". We're all alliance characters, we don't have a lock in our party, and the nearest flight point anyone in the party has is Ironforge (except that one night elf who did the Wetlands run). So we literally all met in IF, two of the toons lagged out and had to reconnect. 15 minutes later, we were able to set out from the front gates, ON FREAKING FOOT. It took us the better part of an hour to get to the instance, counting the times we wiped in Arathi. If we were on a PVP server it would have been even worse. We were running on the road with that one hunter having Aspect of the Pack on (one of the only times that spell has ever been useful in my experience). The reason why it's my favorite: It truly felt like we were on an epic quest across the world to destroy an evil force, contending with all sorts of dangers along the way. It was like living Lord of the Rings. It didn't matter that millions of people were progressing in AQ at the time. THAT was the defining moment that made me love the game. It was never the same after that.
Ha, love that story. Just to show how different vanilla culture was: I remember in Ashenvale, I was probably early 20s level...and there was a mid 50's alliance rogue that kept owning me and this other guy in that satyr camp quest. Then some other guy was getting ganked and we banded together to try and kill him. We'd just meet up in some hidden spot and /say our plan to eachother LOL. Since we couldn't kill him, one of the guys just got his level 55 brother to logon his warrior and he snared the rogue and helped us kill him. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world haha.
I remember spending an entire Sunday doing Maraudon, finding a group and finding the damn place. I think it took at least six hours before we cleared it. I just started playing again and used the group finder to do mara and beat it in under 15 mins. It was so boring there was no challenge just a big rush to clear the instance. We didn't even talk, it was like playing with a bunch of bots. I wouldn't want to go back to vanilla, I missed a lot of content back then because it took to long to find a group and get to the instances but what they have now is ridiculous. I'll never forget that 6 hour Sunday wipe fest, it was a bonding experience and we all added each other to our friends list and even quested together a few time after that. I've been playing for 5 days now and am already it level 60 flew through every instance seen it all but didn't really experience it. The epicness is gone, the challenge is gone I don't know if it's because I'm better now (probably I was a warrior during that 6 hour mara run and I didn't know what a tank was) or wow has gone easy mode. I'm guessing both.
Rob Henson Omg finding the Maraudon entrance was a fucking nightmare, especially since all the mobs around dungeons in vanilla were elite. I can't remember if they employed the LFD in late vanilla, but I know they had the meeting stones. Finding your own group was kind of a love/hate thing.
Vanilla was epic. Just because i never played an MMO before. the world was massive and i was a complete noob - that is what made the game epic! I think no matter what blizzard does - I can never re-experience that epicness just because it can only happens once per life time.
***** yeah me too. i honestly think its a one in a life time experience. now if you try another mmo or any future wow expansions - it will just never be the same!
EggmanVideos I think no matter when you started playing, it was still fun. Vanilla was epic because there wasnt so many "elite" players. Almost all players helped each other etc. Now i usually just disable trade chat, its filled with spam and kids yelling anal jokes
Holy shit i remember back in the old days when i mad a nelf and i wanted to go to goldshire..I had to take boats trough gates of Loch modan...I won't lie it was hard but it felt like adventure.
+Blazer Ashbringer I remember I made a Nelf in vanilla because my brother was a Nelf. He showed me the way to Menathil Harbor. Neither of us knew how to get to SW but my brother found a way. We swam along the Mountain all the way there from M.H. I think it took like 2 hours but we got there. Felt hella retarded when we found out there were better ways to get there lol. =D
+Adrian Rowley and i remember having my pally horse at 40 while my best friend had to do the impossible to earn the money to buy one... warriors had it tough
Shaman Vanilla leveling: Flametounge, Autoattack, set up Stoneskin and heal totem, Make some tea, go to the toilet, Buy some stuff, come back, forget something and go back to the shop, return and the mob is at 50%
Yes. Although this includes the real historical circumstances as well as the game as it evolved instead of the 1.12 experience everyone got. So, both experiences are relevant.
David Nash Strange, because all the top guild dps'ers are fury warriors :) warrior is hard to level to 36 ish, after that, they are awesome!... but so are all class'
As a alpha and beta tester of vanilla wow. A lot of the points here are correct but even some of the negatives I feel are missed. Searching for quests being one of them. They were supposed to be all over the place and not necessarily always easy to find. Hell, finding the ghost quest outside MC/BWL for the depths key was always cool and very awesome when you first found it. I think some of the issues of vanilla are some of the things missing in todays games and definitely current wow.
Dude rem the days without dps meters and no quest helper bullcrap? you actually had to figure out where the mobs where that u had to kill. I miss those days.
card969 it was cool at the time but nowadays i just havn't got the time to read and research just to get a quest done. I think I prefer they stay as the 'good old days'.
Positive things about Vanilla WoW: 1) No gold sellers in the chat (Well atleast not on my servers ^^) 2 Because dungeon finder didn't exist yet, people had to make groups from scratch and from the same server and had an easier time getting along. But now everytime I queue for a dungeon I usually end up with 2-3 douchebags who can't even speak english..... 3) Epic was EPIC. Anyone who had the Tier 1,2 or 3 set gear usually found himself/herself surrounded in Ironforge by players who could only sigh in envy. Back then, having full Epic gear MEANT something. 4) Alterac Valley...where to even begin. Battles that lasted hours...even DAYS. Now THAT was PvP ;D 5) Raids were actually DIFFICULT back then, and some required you to having completed a long and tedious quest chain. Ahh, I still remember the old raids. Those were epic raids. Zul'Gurub....okay maybe not Zul'Gurub ;D But Molten Core, Onyxia's Lair, Blackwing Lair, Ahn Qiraj....and I dare not even mention the original Naxxramas. Just getting attuned with the Argent Dawn to set foot into that raid was a nightmare. 6) The Keymaster. Remember back when some dungeons required you to have a special key to get there or make it to the final boss? -"LFM UBRS, need the key!" That was a classic line on the chat usually. Those who had the key were automatically given a spot in the group, even tough they sucked ^^. But hey, it meant that you got to see all the adventures ;D
+Iwan Egerström Raids weren't harder, people were just worse and it was way harder to direct 40 people. Raid mechanics in Vanilla compared to now, the world first would probably be in like 1 day. But I agree with everything else.
+NoProbLlama You got a point, but I still remain divided on that issue. To me, some raids in those days were challenging BECAUSE it was 40 man, which automatically causes problems. Just to gather up 40 guys for a nightly raid was a pain in the ass, and sometimes even worse when coordinating them. And altough I agree that the bosses in itself werent always truly "hard", many of them had unique abilites that made it fun to play. For examples: When you faced off Nefarian in Blackwing Lair, he used the players abilities against THEMSELVES (Hunters gets their bows/guns broken, warlocks gets feared, paladins puts shields on Nefarian). Or when facing C'thun in AQ40 and you get instantly killed by his eye beam as soon as you enter his room....^^ Or when you did BWL and faced off with Razorgore and had to make sure that 1 player mind-controlled him and made him kill the eggs while the raid kills off the adds. WoW rarely has those moments or unique encounters anymore. Compare that to bosses in the present.... * Avoid void zones/fire on the ground * If you get a debuff, stay away from the raid until it expires or is dispelled * Or alternatively, run into the raid to split the damage among the raid so you survive the damage * Kill adds That's it.....
+Guy We had serious issues with Magmadar and Baron Geddon for some time, but yeah MC wasen't all too hard in the end. Good thing tough was that mages finally had some time to use their Decurse spell ^^ As for TBC, I only really liked Kharazan ^^
+Iwan Egerström The only one that actually required you to complete a long ass quest chain was Onyxia, and the boss herself was EZ. Though I agree with everything else.
I miss vanilla :(. I started as a warrior, made it to 60 as was so addicted to this game for like 2-3 years haha. Only got to raid zul gurub and molten core before BC came out unfortunately because I joined vanilla a bit late to the party. Still though i'll never forget the memories I had with this game. What made it so fun was the interactions and the community. I had so many friends from school that played also and we all made a guild together, ahh good times lol. I made it to level 70 in BC but all my friends started to quit one by one through that expansion and I eventually gave it up a year into BC as well. I came back to the game a year ago for nostalgia when WOD was out and man was it different. So much different from the old WoW and it felt a lot easier to level through everything. I leveled to 60 so damn fast lmao. It's just not the same and it feels empty compared to the old days and even doing dungeons just seemed rushed and no one even talks anymore. I only played for about a month and stopped again. Oh well. I had a great time with the game 10 years ago and I'll never forget the memories of exploring kalmidor and the Eastern Kingdom. I have to admit though just hanging out in goldshire again and hearing the music of Elwynn forest was very nostalgic haha.
Lol, everything in this video is what made vanilla so, so epic. I remember back then it was a big deal getting your riding mount (yes, the lvl 40 one was a big deal back then) and once I had mine a friend challenged me to a race... It was so dumb, but just small things like that were what made vanilla so much fun. I also remember I met these two paladins and we became dungeon levelling buddies for a while. So it was me as a bear tank and these two ret paladins who would take turns healing me with whoever else would tag along. We would sometimes colossally fail (naturally), but nobody got mad at each other and we would just take hours to work at it because that's just what people did back then. I'm on such a nostalgia trip right now it's unbearable. Share any great memories of dumb yet fun things you did back then!
The thing I liked about WoW back then was that it had a much more social aspect to it.... You join a guild back then with 20 people, they all talked about everything and it was awesome. You join a guild with 200 people now.... No one says anything besides "LF Carry"
Well, granted Vanilla forced you into corners sometimes, it was for your own good. You couldn't just Q up for LFG for a week and grind to 60... That would be too easy, and that's what the game's become, instead of refining the flaws it had, they've taken the game, and just simplified it for children. It was simple enough in Vanilla, it just needed refinement. I don't think most people who think the game has progressed for good understand that. BC was good, only because it refined what needed refined to an extent, and added solid content, while keeping the game almost as hard.
+JS8222 I can agree with that... It's terrible going into Orgrimmar as Horde and seeing absolutely no one, because everyone is cooped up in their fucking garrisons, running LFR from there. Maybe spamming LFG wasn't that fun, but it sure beat running a god damn raid with twenty four random players...
+JS8222 Same there, I bought WoD when it was on sale for 20$, i played a week-end and stopped because i was bored. I'm having much more fun on Vanilla even though I never had the chance to experience it at the time. thx you Nostalrius :D
+Josh Lynch "Maybe spamming LFG wasn't that fun, but it sure beat running a god damn raid with twenty four random players..." You're not forced to do LFR. That choice is left up to you. Did you try to put a 40 person group together in the LFG channel pre-group finder? Hell, just trying to gather 10 people together to do UBRS was painful enough as it is. One time it took us nearly an hour and a half to put together a group.
Rhambus If you ran raids with twenty four random players, you probably wiped a shit ton. I guess that's why guilds were popular back then too... Seems like it would be common sense. Thanks for your dull input.
Vanilla WoW was modeled after more hardcore MMO's like EverQuest and did reflect this with alot of grinding and quite punishing levelling time. Also, raid progress was insanely difficult cuz bosses only dropped 3 items at most, and raids were 40 man. It took a long damn time to gear up properly to even have a chance. We could spend 3days wiping on a boss, at some point 2 weeks, and remember - gold was not easy to farm so repair bills were very punishing after such wipefests...but oh man, when we did down a boss - The feeling was epic. I think, all in all, those times were...not harder, just required more dedication...but that dedication led to the forming of very nice communities and friendships. I can say without a doubt that communities and the social value was amazing back then. Reason? Because the design forced people to behave, be social and interact. Today, you can be in a guild where no one even talks, they are just there to gain guild boons, the rest they can solo through. People are rather rude and will have none of it unless your itemlevel is above X. Such is the price of casual design.
"Today, you can be in a guild where no one even talks, they are just there to gain guild boons, the rest they can solo through. People are rather rude and will have none of it unless your itemlevel is above X. Such is the price of casual design." This applies to all online games of any genre. I honestly think its the millennials. People too young to remember a time when gaming was only for nerds and nerds weren't cool. Smaller communities where you HAD to be follow etiquette if you wanted to ever get a group or game going. Hell, just today I saw the 2nd thread in a week on Heroes of the Storm forums where some oversensitive, cynical kid thought it was insulting to him to say "GG" after a game he lost. Kids these days...
syntaxed2 Agree 100%, MMO's were super grindy and hardcore in those days. One of WoW's unintended issues was that it was a very attractive game, which lured more people of a more casual mindset, so Blizz feels the need to dumb the game down to cater to them. It's a never-ending balancing act.
+Capnsensible80 I must say there's some things that are without a doubt influenced by nostalgia (and even then i kinda look back at vanilla and realize that whilst i did have a blast because of all the fun times with guildies and friends and still kinda see what a shitfest vanilla was) the social aspect i frankly can't avoid missing. Sure the PUGs (which frankly if you managed to set up a group of people you could do actual groups with like friends or with your guild you tended to avoid like the plague anyway) could be toxic as hell as people tended to be really high strung and quite demanding of performance because with how long they took you really didn't want any delays you could avoid, but in general the community was just quite nice, and you stumbled onto really kind people with a very pleasant regularity who would help you out quite alot. Frankly overall the internet in general whilst smaller, wasn't the cesspool it has manage to devolve into (though one thing i find wildly amusing is the fact that there's immature douchebags both young and very much not running around everywhere just being douchebags and thinking that nothings going to happen because you're anonymous on the internet, lol at that, anyone with frankly just a handful of knowledge about the area can fairly easily track someone down in just a couple of minutes if they're the standard moron, i always find the stories about trolls and stuff getting just a letter or something from people they've behaved like garbage to absolutely delightful)
The greatest vanilla glitch I ever saw was one night the instance servers crashed and disconnected everyone. When we logged back in everyones dead bodies had appeared under the terrain in Stonetalon Mountains in a giant mile-tall pile of dead people. Apparently that location was some kind of failsafe spot to send people when Bad Things happened, so the entire server worth of anyone in an instance appeared there.
No comparison. The first characters I made went on an epic journey. It was an entire world, and it took time and effort to make it to the top. Now, you get a free 90. Not that you need it as you can power through the first 40 levels in days. The world itself is meaningless, since there is no reason to explore it. You don't spend enough time at any level or any location to make it meaningful. Originally you actually had to read the quests and find the locations, rather than going from one map marker to the next or just standing around waiting for pugs. All the things that made the world feel alive have been replaced with ways to rush through without any real impact. I try to get back in with every new expansion, and find myself quickly bored and putting it back down. Now I play on a blzzlike vanilla private server, and I love WOW again. It truly feels like a WORLD of Warcraft. Putting all the emphasis on end-game and greasing the track to get there just ruins the epic feel and invalidates any sense of accomplishment.
The best time I had in WoW was doing the paladin quest that sent you across the world to Shadowfang Keep. I was only lvl 18 or so, so I had to grouped up with another lvl 20ish paladin and we traveled there together. It was literally an adventure. In the end we got our 2h hammers, Vergins Fist. I also miss looking for groups and walking across the land to the dungeons. It was difficult to find a group but it prevented people from leaving after the first wipe so it made players a lot nicer, I think thats why people say Vanilla had a good community.
with the announcement of classic wow I remembered your video and wanted to rewatch it ; and as someone who started playing in cataclysm, thanks for sharing this vid and all the hard work that went into it
Got to be honest, at first i thought the Legion campaigns/artifacts will bring back the times from class quests in vanilla but i havnt got anything near of the old feeling. Its still missing this "i become stronger and stronger"-feeling, hope someone understands what i mean ^^
elysium/nostalrius is the way to man. Started 3 days ago and I'm having a fucking blast. Grouping up for a lot of quests, dying in elwyn because of merlocs and pulling too enthousiasticly. It's fucking great :D
yea my first MMO was a korean grind game called Lineage 2 so when i came over to wow it was so new to me that i grinded mobs instead of questing as well lol
i think i need to learn Asian so i can find me a real grind game.. I hate being told what to do... all i need is a world, some monsters and a reason to kill them,..
why is it racist? lol... we all know alot of Asian mmos are a bit more grind-y... i find that attractive... how dare i!!! we talk about wow back in the days where there was alot of grind... so i found it appropriate
Watching this 6 years later, I like the contrast between the our expectations of Vanilla when it came out, to now, to ~half way between those two times. It's an interesting look.
Grinding Rock Elementals in the Badlands to get from 38-40 and make enough money for the mount from the rocks they dropped haha.Keeping a tab open for Thottbot. Warlock and Druids had great class quests too. Berserker quest was a twist on the cult film Highlander by the way, hence the name "The Islander" and the names of the NPCs being a twist on the movie characters.
I remember sneaking a level 10 dwarf hunter into Mulgore just to tame The Rake on Bonechewer. Also finding hidden quests like the scroll half buried by rubble underneath the Thandol Span bridge. It lead on a quest to have a statue made for a widow in Ironforge. I miss moments like that from vanilla.
I actually enjoyed the questing in vanilla and bc. It was difficult, many quests required you to go through different zones. Many quests chains ended with a big finish that needed multiple people to complete. I greatly miss my guildies from back in the day. Played from beta to mid cata.
I agree with you, i play since european beta and vanilla was something amazing, that is hard to describe.. i had so much fun.. i still remember creating a night elf druid in beta and looking up at the huge three's of teldrassil while loads of players pass by me, killing mobs, etc.. Actually the Night Elf first zones soundtrack, still gives me amazing memories...
*Wishes I could have that lovely music that plays in background* :D. I do remember using thottbott a lot, funny how it was basically wowhead of vanilla until wotlk or so. With no quests shown on map and my terrible direction sense I relied upon it quite a lot for some zones! But that mystery was part of the fun, added an element of surprise. Fuck yeah nostalgia!
ah the good old days. Making my own poisons on my rogue, going by foot up and down stranglethorn valley, working up pick locks in multiple maps, and class quests...oh class quests(hint-don't ever interupt a hunter on that or he will curse you out for hours as he waits for his rare boss mob to respawn). On the flip side though, I did enjoy lvling up my rogue in just over a month compared to the year I spent in everquest doing the same. And being allowed(even encouraged to use addons) unlike wow, where they were a ban-able offense. It had its up, and its down. I'll never forget the excitment and awe my friends & I felt upon beating the 45min speed run of stratholme....only to get t1 armor the following week in mc. Good times....
Remember that small tower outside of Orgrimmar as part of the poison quest? I think you got a really long debuff, zanzill? Didn't know how to get rid of it, and finally asked someone to dispel it haha. That was back when wow was mysterious, or I was a noob, same thing I guess.
What in the actual fuck? I absolutely loved questing in Vanilla. Having to hunt down quests and make huge treks to explore everything. Actual hard quests that were meant to engage you with other players. If you couldn't kill a level 38 with the recommended player count you probably had no business doing that quest line anyways. I still remember the first time I entered West Fall, then Duskwood. Then learning about a huge dragon that spawns in the middle. Learning about every instance and actually exploring to get there. Opening of AQ was one of the best things in WoW I've ever done. Everything was so right about the mixture, some annoyances, but 99% engagement and fun. Imagine leveling, meeting people, forging friendships, then eventually guilds to lock down end game. I remember when I started I grouped up with two or three people in west fall and we never split up all the way to 60. Questing was just 100% more fun in a group. Almost everything I have described is missing from the current iteration of the game. Now everyone has a million different alts, can level legitimately in a few days, and play solo for the bulk of the game.
I know this video is older but I really enjoyed it. I often get nostalgic for vanilla wow, back when things were sort of a challenge, where you didn't really have *time* for an alt, unlike me nowadays where I have like half a dozen. It took me SIX MONTHS to level my Shaman, Torrg from 1 - 60 and it happened just *barely* after Burning Crusade came out. Ammo bags, reagents, hard enemies, mounts at 40. And Class quests.... oh dear god I loved the class quests. The amount of immersion was what I loved about it. I still enjoy playing it because every new expansion delivers some epic stories, but the catering to make content 'easier' for people just starting out burns me out sometimes.
There are a huge influx of people on vanilla private servers now in anticipation for next summer. Kronos 3 is suprisingly populated if you want to check it out. Pst me (Phlasid).
Not sure what you're on about with vanilla not having enough quest xp. I never ever grinded mobs for xp in vanilla. I did however do all the dungeons at least a few times, and all the quests I could find in all the zones and some pvp to boot. But I loved that. In fact I hate that in all of todays mmo's there is WAY too much xp for everything, so that I constantly outlevel things I would like to experience at the appropriate level. Also, it didn't take as long to get max level as you would have it. Maybe if you did it the grind mobs way. But if you knew what the good order of zones and quests were you could easily get to max in two weeks of full day gaming. (By which I mean 10h+/day.)
+Gaute Løken I think you kind of proved his point there - by doing all the dungeons at least a few times you made up for the xp gap. Back then, if you only did the quests, you would end up behind in levels.
Beredaman08 Sure, but that's preferable to me. I find it completely lame that you can hit end-game and having seen only a fraction of the leveling content in todays mmo's. Back then, the leveling experience was a fun experience in and of itself. Today it seems it's something you "have to get through to get to end-game". Meh... No wonder they can't be bothered making good quests. Nobody reading/listening to what's being said - just plowing through...
And that's a tangent to your original question, which was about what he meant by not having enough experience from quests. My point was that in mentioning that you also ran dungeons while stating you didn't have a problem with experience gains you showed that it took more than just doing quests to get enough experience to move on, which wasn't an opinion or preference back then, it was a numerical fact. Zones back then simply did not award enough experience from quests and you had to supplement it from other sources. Whether that was a better design, etc., is a different debate.
Beredaman08 I stand by my original claim. If you did all the content; quests, dungeons and pvp included, you didn't have to grind shit. (Unless you count doing quests as grinding.) And to me that means the game had sufficient content to support itself xp-wise, and I still think he simply didn't do all aspects of the game, and consequently bitch about there not being enough xp.
No one was disputing that if you did all the content of quests, dungeons, and pvp, you didn't have to grind. That's also not what he said in the video - he specifically called out quests, and only quests, in Vanilla WoW - you wouldn't have enough experience to move on to the next zone. Your original claim, for some reason, decided to dispute that (which is a numerical fact, not an opinion) with a counter claim that basically said the same thing - that quests alone were not enough.
The inability to level in a single zone is what I loved. You had to level in all the zones. if your lvl 30 go to desolace. vanilla desolace was my faveroute zone. these days you do the starter quests for a zone and suddenly you've outleveled it. never get to read all the lore before your forced to leave. and the streamlined questing may be convenient but its way less immersive.
I remember I was just a level 20 paladin, and all my friends were in the barrens, all humans and lvl 20. All from Goldshire. We ran through the south of the eastern kingdoms, which took forever, deaths, and deaths and gy running, then we finally got to booty bay which was amazing, we'd never seen such a cool port, so we explored everything, and repaired, bought some white gear that was better than our quest items and set sail for ratchet. what a day that was.
my favorite time in the game was the days leading up to hitting level 40 so I could get my first mount. When I made my way back to Darn to train riding and buying my first mount I went back to Darkshore to see how much time it would take me to ride from Darkshore to Ashenvale. It felt like a big deal then to hit that level 40 mark, no one walks anywhere anymore in the game.
Márk Nyilas Who cares? If he likes it, THAT is really the end of story there. And honestly, it's not that hard to find literal reasons why Vanilla was great. But WoW has always been great as it has evolved for different reasons.
In my opinion and from my experiences, back in vanilla people really made the game fun. There really was a sence of adventuring, finding crazy bugs and things happening, and since the game was new, it was fresh and exciting. When something would happen people would flock around and cause havoc and mischief. I really enjoyed everything and the people I met. I took time to take it all in, peoples names, what they looked like, their gear. Doing random pugs I always tried to be social and become a part of my realm, for better or for worse. Dueling my server nemesis' in the middle of goldshire and winning never felt so good. Running a long dungeon or raid with random guild leaders, server legends and few of your RL friends and just killing it in style and walking around with swagger wearing your new gear... priceless.
I haven't played the game the entirety of its lifespan. On and off. And now that im older and Ive played multiple expansions live/private servers I still feel the same way. The game is more about power leveling or boosting to the end game and getting carried to top gear status for a breif and unsatisfying run at the top.
Chris Jeritroll Just saying you can't really say a game was "better before" cus' you just grew tierd of it & knew alot more then you did back then, 'lost its mystery'.
Damn, I remember taking my night elf on the journey to Stormwind... you had to take the boat from darkshore to menethil harbour, then walk all the way across the zone into loch modan, then walk through dun moroph, then finally to Ironforge where you could take the tram to SW. (This was in TBC, idk if it was even worse in Vanilla)
I will never understand the argument and idea that silver quest givers meant you had to sit there and grind mobs until you were that level. The intent was for you to explore/quest in other areas and come back later! As were those quests that sent you all over the world. They encouraged you to TRAVEL and explore. You really think the new/current system of 'pick up a batch of 4 or 5 quests at hub A, complete them all in the immediate vicinity, get the quest to move to hub B, and repeat' is better? It's souless and so obviously manufactured. The old system was interesting. Finding a lone quest giver in the middle of nowhere made you wonder about their story and reason for being there and the travel made you anxious as to what you might find and learn on your QUEST. All the current design makes you think/feel is how obvious it is that you're playing a videogame.
I have to say. I MUCH preferred having the long walks to what it is now, where everything is centralized and you get mounts super early. All this does is push people into smaller, tighter areas so worlds feel far less populated than they did in Vanilla.
BC was hands down the best time for WoW... I'll never forget my glory days during Season 1 PvP. Getting laughed at in high school by RL trolls mocking me for being a duelist rather than a gladiator at the end of the season... and busting my balls in the following seasons to finally get gladiator rank... screaming my lungs out when I logged in to see a note from blizzard in my mailbox with a gladiator drake attached. *sigh*. I'd kill to have a game THAT fun again. And I didn't even mention the amazing pve side.... I'm just sitting here bored out of my mind with these new MMOs/FPSes and advancements on previous ones... I honestly MISS the days that I looked forward to sitting on my ass for 16 hours playing one character on one game, and loving every minute of it...
There were some things about Vanilla WoW that I liked - but there were some things that honestly we wouldn't like. You've already mentioned how there were not enough quests to do. One consequence of not having enough quests to do were the fact that players would get bottlenecked around certain zones - Specifically Ganklethorn Hell and Ganklestan. If you played on a PvP server, you HATED Those zones just as you hated Hellsbrad Foothills because you couldn't go three steps without getting some 60 ganking you. Or in Ganklestan, some rogue walks up, sticks a knife in your side, vanishes, then leaves the guards to beat you up. Or a hunter shoots you, feigns death, and leaves the guards to kill you. Sure I like how the zones now usually have a story arc around them - perhaps the best are the Badlands and Thousand Needles. Heck, the Thousand Needles feels really unique because you get a boat to ride around the zone on. I know there are people here saying that they outlevel the zones, and honestly, I've tried this - and unless I have Heirlooms on, then I am not having that happen. Sure I can dungeon spam, but I'm not always dungeon-spamming. With the dungeons... holy crud. Sure I know a lot of people hated attunements and 'grinding towards heroics to get the keys' but one reason we hated that? Because we would never find anyone to fucking do it with us. Don't you just love spending an entire evening sitting around in Ironforge or Orgrimmar saying "LFG Black Morass!" We didn't. We hated it. I was so so so SO glad when they added the dungeon finder because I remembered that hell. I played on Dentarg trying to get a fresh start - and trust me, if you played on Dentarg, you would have hated attunements like mad. There were only two guilds that actually ran stuff, and if you weren't BT geared, then they wouldn't even look in your general direction so the best you could hope for was Karazhan (And until 2008, nobody else would run the dungeon except those guilds.) Wanted to work on your attunement? Ooooh too bad - you missed the group that formed... I hear there's another one forming next month. I hear Warlords of Draenor will be bringing back attunements, but as long as the quests are soloable or at the very least inside dungeon finder stuff, then it won't be this bad at ALL. The main reason we hated them was because nobody would ever want to do them. Heck, my guild leader was threatening to /gkick people because I was standing around the city asking for a group. A lot of people love to say 'LOL THEY JUST GIVE OYU THE LOOT'. Well... I would much rather have this "Everybody gets SOMETHING" system than what we had in classic. Have you ever run Molten Core or Blackwing Lair, and been one of the 30 people who walked away with nothing but gold for repairs? Four weeks in a row? Especially because most of what dropped was stuff for Warlocks and your three warlocks already HAVE that gear? Yeah. We hated it. Our hunters were going into Blackwing Lair in blues because their gear would never drop. As I mentioned before, we had the catch 22 - to get into Blackwing Lair, you needed gear from Molten Core and Blackwing Lair. However, without 39 other people, you couldn't GET the gear!!! D:< I kind of like what Mists of Pandaria has where you can, at the very least, get gear that will get your gearscore READY for raids, but you still get upgrades in the raids themselves. And even then, all having a gearscore good for the raid means is the game thinks you're ready. You still have to learn the mechanics of the boss fight and will still have to learn your rotation. Especially if you're a tank or a healer - a healer who doesn't know what they're doing is a HUUUUGE difference.
I couldn't have said it better myself. There is vanilla nostalgia for me, but some of the facepalming is burned deep in my memory. I was never close to raiding in vanilla, most of what I remember was pvp ganking, running for EVER, and not enough people wanting to dungeon. Whenever ppl whine about LFD or LFR I want to cry.
Em Vambell Yeah. I mean, there were a lot of things that I liked about vanilla - one thing that honestly can't be replicated no matter how much talent blizzard has at their hands is the fact that for a lot of us, that's what we started - we were also how old then? I mean, when I started WoW, I was 16. You can't replicate that unless you manage to regress me back to the age of 16 with none of the experiences that I had since then. The sooner people realize those days are over the better. Some of the things I had remembered about that could be chalked up to "You're 16-18, you're experiencing all of this for the first time. You've NO idea what's out there." Now, a few things that we liked about Vanilla? Those Hillsbrad battles. Once they started implementing honour kills, people gathered in Hillsbrad and just duked it out. Seriously, it was amazing. It would be nice if they made an effort to do that, but honestly, I can understand why now that I'm an adult - because battlegrounds need to have a "win" condition, and the Hillsbrad battles never had a "Win" condition. The alliance couldn't retake Tarren Mill for themselves, and the Horde couldn't run the Alliance out of Southshore (...okay, I mean during classic.). That's why they went on - there was no "win" condition. Heck, Wildstar is pretty much vanilla WoW... for better and worse. :(
Terestrasz i wasted so much time in strangle and i loved it. i didnt give a damn about leveling anymore but to kill any horde guy i found. and when i encountered a lvl 60 it still was a thrill to escape his fangs. yes, if you were only there to level then this would be a bad thing but for me it was awesome.
Man I used to have a lvl 55 prot warrior in Vanilla that I fell in love with Tanking on, I would stand in Stormwind and sell runs to people my level and lower through BlackRock Depths (My favorite Dungeon Ever) for usually 1 gold each, ( at the end I would usually just tell them to keep their money because I just enjoyed playing that dungeon so much) Never had a game that was so perfect. (1-70) That was probably my favorite WOW memory ever..
+Assassin Cactus The Warlock fel puppy quest and shaman totem quest on the other hand SUCKED. My UD Lock had to run all the way from Hillsbrand to 1K needles to finish that fel puppy quest.(which was useless back then lving wise) Still have nightmares about walking to 1K from crossroads.
You might be right about a few things. But i very rarely got ''stuck''. Just did some instances and help some mates with their quests and you were good to go :)
My favorite Vanilla moment was in STV, I was a paladin at the time, a clicker and barely in all greens, an undead rogue around the same level as me tried ganking me. Me being a paladin the fight lasted so long and when I was about to die. Me being a noob clicker and adrenaline running in my veins. I bubble hearthed. Helping solidify the hatred of the bubble hearth.
Vanilla was the best because it actually felt epic. It was grindy as fuck. If you saw someone in all purple gear, you knew they commanded respect. I came back to WoW for both Cata and Panda, and I cancelled both after a month because it only took a month to see absolutely everything. Every dungeon, every raid, every boss. I never came close to seeing all of Vanilla.
Well, you did start Cata and Panda with probably max-level characters, and when you played Vanilla, you started off with a completely new character not knowing what to do in raids, etc.
Nope, started from level 1. Worked up to 85 as a warrior and 90 as a rogue. I still don't know what to do in raids. I can't tell if the ground is on fire because of the boss or because of some friendly aoe spell. That never got in the way of completing LFR.
Shawn Smith I doubt you saw everything in a month. If you started from lvl 1 most of your time was consumed by lvling. Let's say you did it in one week. You had 3 more to complete every raid on highest diff. You goddamn liar. "vannilla was the best" ppl say it only becouse of the nostalgia feeling. That's it. Vanilla was an incomplete game. People enjoyed it so much becouse it was sg. new... End of story.
+Shawn Smith First of all i fully agree with the fact that vanilla felt epic, not because it was a great fully developed game but because it was simply better then the alternatives and a very new experience, on to the seeing everything comment though, sure i played vanilla for a significant while, but seeing all the bosses wasn't really a problem to be quite honest (except for the faction specific dungeons bosses of course and the bosses of the dungeons which noone ran meaning it was close to impossible to find a group for it), sure you might end up missing some extreme high end bosses, i personally for example missed out on most naxx bosses, but in general most people cleared a decent amount of the content, and essentially everyone cleared the dungeon content (again, the accessible content).
Yeah BC was awesome. A mix of some Vanilla Stuff (such as the World which was just sooooo full of Secrets and Beauty and what not) with BC's Raids and Dungeons which were far better.
The exploration the first time around is awesome. I haven't been playing a super long time, but since I didn't play much in LK before the Cataclysm changed things, I'm taking my time to look around zones while I'm leveling. And in the beginning all of that is really cool. but as time goes, each zone loses a little bit of that beauty because you've seen it. I think that's something a lot of people want BACK out of Vanilla when it gets rereleased as Classic. And people won't get that. And they'll be disappointed. The leveling experience and everything will be great. People will be able to do play like they did back then, they'll have their fun and take their time to level up and do all the old content again, and that'll be great. But there are going to be things that no one will get back. Seeing all those secrets and stuff is cool the first time, but it's also much less mystifying the 2nd time around. As much as the BC stuff was better than Vanilla, I got pretty bored with BC stuff. Even just leveling through it today, or playing through it on a BC server, it just got really old. At the moment, it's the oldest content still in the game(Since Cataclysm revamped a LOT of the old Azeroth stuff) and it's really the only thing that's still the same, added it has had some nerfs and stuff to make the game easier. It still feels like a slog to level through.
Hahahahaha... Warrior Qs... plz don't make me laugh... WARLOCK! Warlock Qs... for every single minion... Imp... Void... Suc... Felhunter... (Felguard)... Infernal... and ow the so Epic Doomguard... not to mention worth while gear Qs... like that darn Arcane Robe! And let's not forget the Dreadsteed... Ow our lovely lovely Dreadsteed... so yeah... And those were not single quests... but chains of 4 - 7 going back and forth over WHOLE Azeroth... I miss those Quests...
+Henry M. vanilla was even more unbalanced then a feather and a rock ... i played vanilla it was great .. but if you look back now .. 1 boss now had more tactics then a whole raid back then
I don't think it's the content that everybody misses about Vanilla, but the community and the feel of the game back then. The world was alive and vibrant with people out leveling there characters and professions. Guilds were families, and you had a hardcore allegiance to your faction. You also only knew your server. For example, I would see the same Horde guys that were leveling the same rate and zones as me from Stanglethorn Vale all the way through being level 60. I developed feuds with many of them over the 30's 40's 50's and at level 60 as well. Also my guild back then (which was the top Alliance guild on the server) had a feud with a Horde guild (which was top Horde guild of the server) and about every Friday night one of there guild would gank one of our guild and then a few of ours would show up then a few more of there's and so on until a massive guild war broke out in some random "noob" zone as we called it back then. World PvP isn't even really around today. And I was on Illidan too which was the top server back then and probably is the most infamous WoW server out there. The main thing, however, is simply the fact that the game is 10 years old now. Everything was new and fresh back then, so of course every single little thing was epic and questing new zones was fun even though it was always the same thing with new monsters (kill 10 of these, collect 10 of those, kill this boss). Does that mean the game still isn't fun? No! It just isn't that same epic game it once was. But, WoD actually looks pretty cool! I've been there since the beginning and every single expansion, and the reasons above are why everybody says Vanilla is better. -Vanilla through Cata (then quit mid Cata) Mop through present.
My first forsaken. I was screaming at every mob and monster that chased me through the forests like Courage the Cowardly Dog, hoping there was somebody on the road to help me. Good times.
I don't know why ervery body was grinding for levels. You needed to zone hopping the goal was to explore the world. Do half of your level range in one area for the level range, then switch continent and do the other half of the quest range in the range zone on the other contintent and back for the higher level quests in the first zone etc. I never level grinded in vanilla ever and had both continents explored at level 60 with all flight spots
Arrghroth Yh i dont understand. Wow was one of the few mmorpgs back in the day wich didnt make you grind for quests. It stayed p2p for that reason. I have seen so many korean games that were p2p and then fp2 simply because you didnt have enough quests to level and made people keep grinding for those extra levels.
Exactly. Finally someone who gets it. The grinding for levels meme is so painful to listen to and is obviously perpetuated by players who simply didn't travel and explore enough.
Your problems are only relevant in the context of single player experience, attempting to reach max level as fast as possible. If you're fine with taking it slow and interact with other players, it's quite enjoyable and rewarding.
I kid you not. i never quested. i farmed monsters from 1-30~ b4 i started doing quests. And i was levling as prot warrior. spent most my cash for food to eat between every mob. loch modan ogre camp was and is my best memory from wow. I loved exploring the map while killing mobs.
You know, I have seen these vanilla videos quite a few times and I gotta say that I was very fortunate in vanilla. I had played a prot/arms warrior with my father who was a holy priest. We mostly did dungeons because we had so much fun doing them so I actually missed a lot of content while on my way to 60. I never even knew there was an xp problem until well after vanilla and didn't even know zones like Winterspring and Azshara even existed until I went back to do the quest and exploration achievements. It's just about 13 years later and that warrior is still my main, even though I can't play with my dad anymore. I wasn't there for the AQ gong event, I never raided past MC, and I did the bare minimum of my class quests because I thought they were a pain my ass. I basically coasted through vanilla on dungeons and actually hated leveling through it when I went back and tried to play it on a private server. However, I would give anything to be able to level through vanilla with my dad again.
I think that the community has changed a lot and that fucking sucks, it used to be a much more friendly, interesting and social experience back in the "good old days".
For me what I want in Vanilla is the return of the social game, a slower leveling experience that entices you to stay i a zone until questing out, and enjoying the leveling aspect by seeing and being integrated into all areas before moving on to the next area. The speed of modern WoW pushing you towards max level is what I do not like. Lower level experience is gone, professions are pointless (because an item you make will most likely be replaced by an npc drop within 30 minutes). To prove the point of what Blizz has done is the re-naming of "low level quest" to "insignificant quest". I want to spend my time leveling up and enjoying the world, not spending my time doing repeatable world quests and the same raids over and over and over. But this is just my opinion.
I guess people don't get the joy of having things done the hard way. Finding quests then walking to different zones on foot and after you buy your mount you realize how epic that mount is even tho it isn't epic but why does it feel epic? because you know how hard it is. Today you get mount at lvl 20 heck they could have made it lvl 1 insta drop in your bag epic flying. You get instant lvl 90 characters??? You walk up to the quest hub click on them and walk to the quest place and take stuff and fly back... What's the fun in that? PvP? It's totally unbalanced and boring. Raiding? It's been downgraded to only 10 players raiding. 25 is worthless and boss mechanix? I don't want to start about that. Everything has been simplified to the point where i feel i'm getting dumber and dumber every time i play it. You know how they say games evolve your brain makes you think and stuff... Well today WoW thinks for you. Pathetic.
***** Oh man when i bought my first kodo... I felt like it was my birthday! When i saddled up... All that was playing in my mind was the song from Pilot - Oh ho ho it's magic! Was riding almost all of the azeroth... Then I started tuning my ride... Gotten a carrot and mithril boots enhancement and can't remember one more thing... Man when i was riding and see the other riders eat my dust oh man... That is... Unforgettable! I will never forget that day how fast my heart was pumpin' out of joy :D It just saddens me to see wow so casual... I want to play it so badly but i don't feel like i'm really playing WoW. :(
let's not forget the most annoying thing about vanilla WoW. 1. hunters kill a boss with there bow and then get a new gun then after the bos is pulled they relise they dont have bullets only arrows, yes its true you had to actually buy ammo back then i cant count the ammount of times i heard OMG im out of ammo
Love the people who complain about wow yet still play 8 hours a day.... doesn't make sense to me. I've loved wow from the moment I started playing in 05. still the best mmorpg on the market by a country mile.
+Jack J everything after wrath was complete shit. cata ruined everything, they made practically ALL quest solo'able so you wouldn't have to find people to do quests, introduced LFR which is by far the most cancerous thing WoW has ever produced, and ruined 50% of all of the nostalgic zones that we used to love. all of these things ruined the community and made everyone in WoW antisocial and made people ONLY care about gearing up
+Dragon Tiger all valid points, but it's still the best mmorpg by far. I loved vanilla but I really believe it was because it was all new and fresh. All games get stale the more you play, so if you play for instance 2 hours everyday for 10+ years, the game isn't going to be as appealing as when you first played. its common logic.
+Dragon Tiger also, my comment was aimed at people who complain and be salty about the game and still play. doesn't make sense at all. If I don't like a game, I don't play lol. It's idiotic
I leveled 1-80 in a guild of 5 one evening a week. It was an amazing experience and one I will cherish. We had really good times. Our healer's husband died and she had to drop out. Three of the original group got to 100 and we still play once a week but it's not quite as good as it use to be. Wow is about the people and the memories not so much about the gameplay. Granted the new world seems to discourage those bonds and that's kinda sad but we'll always great memories of Azeroth.
I really liked Cata. A revamp of the old world so that questing was more streamlined, all the dungeons were nice and difficult(At release...)and required communication to actually handle. Maybe LFR has some problems with it, but it's something that could easily have been tuned to not be what it is now. Maybe giving a MUCH lower ilvl or removing the ability to get tier sets out of it or something along those lines so that those people who don't have time to raid during the week can still do the raids, and still get some better gear. Of course that comes with it's own set of problems. Nostalgia is great. Sometimes. Rose tinted glasses and all that. But it wasn't just LFR and a changed quest experience that "ruined the community". Perhaps your perception has been ruined, but the community is far from it. With patch 7.3.5, even in LFG groups, people are chatting a lot more. You can literally get into a group and type hello, and 9 times out of 10 someone will respond and you can start a conversation. doing LFR last week, The entire group was chatting and joking around in between boss pulls. And that's generally been every week I actually do LFR at LEAST since Antorus released. Maybe you're staying silent in groups or not trying to talk to anyone. But then that would be your fault. I'm pretty sure you're not getting into every dungeon or LFR group and trying to chat. As far as gearing up..well. It's an MMO. To do content at higher levels, you HAVE to gear up. Once you reach max level...you have to gear up more to do entry level heroics and raiding. To do end game content, a level of gear to do the content is required. It was like that in Vanilla too. It never changed. The methodology changed. But the concept didn't. You wanna do molten core? You do dungeons to farm up gear, and make sure you have your fire resistance. Farm up consumables. Get into the raid and do it, Get lucky and you get a piece of gear. Today, get to max level. Farm dungeons/heroics/world quests. Gear to do LFR, which helps you gear for the next level of normal raiding or next tier of raiding in LFR. It's the exact same thing. You just do it in a different way. And it's accelerated because waiting a month to MAYBE get a piece of gear wasn't very fun for the VAST majority of people. I like a lot of stuff about Vanilla so far. Most people don't seem to like the gear drop rate. And judging by how many people did all the raiding in Vanilla(Through Naxx) most people weren't getting enough gear, or didn't have enough time to get the gear. Or maybe a mixture. Either way, when you're BARELY progressing, it makes the game a lot harder to enjoy. Especially for people who don't actually have any time.
Anyone else remember actually getting disconnected cause of your computer being too slow? Most of the times when i flew into Ironforge, the stuttering would be so bad i would have like 0.000000001 frames per second until i just saw the disconnected screen after about a minute, good times :P 256 RAM was not ideal...
come oooon, leveling never required grinding for me. From what i remember i had to switch zones and go to another zone of the same level and then i would get to the level for the higher zone. It just required you to move around, which was fun.
+denius1704 no it definitely required grinding. I spent weeks in stranglethorn and arathi. Even BC had some grindyness to it. Not like Asian MMO's but still there.
+denius1704 A fine example was Nagrand in BC where you had all these mastery quests plus all these reputations plus Haala that could award you awesome gear.Nagrand was a fine example of grinding,which I personally loved because it gave the feeling of progression.
+Kostas Kavourinos Let's also not forget what kind of a goldmine Nagrand was for professions. You just spent weeks farming and grinding in Nagrand, flying back to shattrath, trade, bank, maybe do some shattrath quests, back to Nagrand.. God, I miss the old WoW
+Vahlir TBC Grinding? LOL. Buddy, Early after release World of warcraft might have had some grinding, But after a few patches there was enough quests to reatch 60, the problem in Vanilla was that people didnt know where to go to find all the quests.. Its as simple as that, People did not find all the quests in Vanilla wow so they had to grind.... And TBC had 0 grind involved if you had addons for questing and knew where to go.
lvling and questing in vanilla wasn't nearly as bad as it was in BC. I think there's no denying it got improved in cata. quests we really bland in vanilla. it was always the same shit over and over, in different zones. It's not exactly a joy now, but at least blizz worked in some new stories, and occasionally, some mechanics and things to break up the monotony. But, of course, you can't make everyone happy. There's a group of hardcore players that isn't happy unless everything in the game is as difficult as possible, and I thank god that blizz doesn't listen to these people.
the game now is lacking alot of things that would actually make you feel connected to other players and your own faction. basically now its an individual mmo. you dont need other players to help you do anything and thats whats missing. i dont even think about the fact that im on a faction anymore. horde and alliance never have conflict....EVER. if they would have another world event where the 2 sides met up and fought eachother that would be amazing. if they would add another war effort that made players feel like they where actually contributing to somthing that would be amazing. everyting now is way too fast and way too easy. you dont feel challenged at all to do anything. they have made the game into a super casual game and taken out the things that make you want to actually sign on and work towards somthing. hell theyve even made you picking a faction not really mean anything. if i pick a side what diff does it really make now?
Exactly back min Vanilla i knew the best players of pvp in ally side.And i didnt care if we were losing , it was so exciting,Guilds battling each other, even the fact that ally side didnt have shamans and horde side didnt have paladins was amazing.U needed help to make quests even at 13-15 lvl .Not to mention guilds were a HUGE thing back then. I so miss those times!
you brought up some great points. i loved the difficulty of the quests early on, it required teamwork. the shaman and paladin split was fucking brilliant, it made you feel like there was actually a division between the factions and it made you feel like you where in a war with a foreign enemy
you don't NEED other players, but its boring and horrible if u don't have them. Proffesions -> a pain, with help, a breeze. Gearing: Alone(Hell, LFR, pugging, pain pain and more pain) With people, a fun experience. Not to mention hard content can't be completed with pugs. The current trivial content was the difficulty of hard content in vanilla, with the difference that it all scaled in such a way that needing people amount to most of the difficulty. Vanilla was good don't get me wrong, but it was closer to Everquest and EVE type games, where the gameplay is teaming up with others, rather than a game with meaningful gameplay where teaming up is benifical With all of that said, questing could be a bit more social honestly.
This was a really good look at what it must've been like back in vanilla. Anyone wanting to try and get a feel for that experience or simply re-live vanilla should try looking at the Feenix private servers. They're really awesome :)
I only started playing In Cata, but my favorite memory from even back then was my first and only real raid team experience in the Firelands, i remember doing the hyjal dailies to try to get geared enough to run it, as well as heroic dungeons with my guild, sadly that guild fell apart shortly after mists launched, the raiders xfered or went to a new Guild and that was the end of it, the game hasn't been the same since. The realm i'm on is also pretty much dead, so that makes it worse. Here's to the good day's and all those memories of a time long gone
