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Does Anyone Remember Vanilla WoW?
ArEf
Member Posts: 233
Some of my finest moments (not all of them, but certainly some) in MMOs came from Vanilla WoW. I was a nub who'd only really played a few other MMOs (Runescape, bits of post-Renaissance UO etc) and I didn't know what to expect from it.
I absolutely sucked at the game on the first character I rolled, an enhancement shaman who was as poorly specced as you could expect. Still loved that guy. Went on to roll a paladin who ended up getting played until WotLK on and off.
I was never much of a raider in vanilla. I'd love to blame it on my guild or whatever, but really I sucked as much as everyone else I played with. We were a pretty casual guild, and the only raidss we did were up to the 20 man ones. We didn't really progress far in them, either. Still, every time we got a kill, it felt special. Even if you didn't get the loot, you were happy that a guildie got a decent piece of kit. (By "decent", I mean "shitty epic or great blue". 
)
Saving the raid from a total wipe by throwing that silly execution-style hammer at bosses when they were low and health and everyone else was dead, watching a single priest wand down a boss that would kill them in a single hit and winning etc etc. All amazing stuff.
Maybe it was the fact the game was new, but I feel it really had something good compared to the later expansions. It might have been the community, it might have been the open world feel or it might've been the fact that you didn't just run into a dungeon and get "epic" weapons straight away.
What do you all think? Was Vanilla WoW better than the later expansions?
Comments
I didn't start until 6 months before Cata came out, but I have heard many many times people wish WoW was like Vanilla.
were you expecting something different?
"We have barred the gates, but can not hold them for long...
They have taken the Bridge and the Second Hall...
We can not get out. The end comes.
Drums, drums in the deep. They are coming..."
This is a common theme in my experience that I've seen in the games I've played. People long for what it was like in the beginning. Really what they miss is the game being new. Even if Xpacs are good I'm not sure anything is better than exploring a totally new world.
I created a Elf Rogue from the start. I had no clue about the game no one to talk to on how to play, I just had to figure everything out myself. It took me weeks to get to level 20, but I was in no rush. It was un forgettable taking the boat to DarkShore and seeing fifty players hanging around dueling and chatting. Leaving town to quest was like going out into the woods and felt good to come back to the safety of a small town. I would test my limits of how far I could venture away, sometimes to have my tail handed to me.
Later I was questing in South Shore around level 21 or so, and a group picked me up to go to Shadowfang Keep, first time ever in a dungeon and they showed me how to play as a group.
IMPORTANT :
Realistically if I were to play Vanilla WoW, I honestly would have almost as much fun. It would still be fun to take my level 5 toon across Metenhal Harbor to Ironforge, then to Stormwind. Remember how dangerous that was ?
Hay instead of all the crappy expansions, It would have been much better with a new Continent, Hay maybe even another Faction.
If vanilla WoW was released today, it would bomb quickly.
Almost unplayable for the most part, servers were down constantly, taking boats? Nope, you got dumped in the middle of the ocean and couldn't swim back due to fatigue.
Warlock? Broken, couldn't even cast a single fear before being killed by
Warriors? Broken, miss miss miss miss miss miss miss hit (you gain 3 rage!) miss miss miss.
Shamans? One button god mode, FROST SHOCK!
Druids? Oh hai, I can has innervate? kthxbai, go back to your hole now.
Paladins? You want to fight things? Auto attack until 60 please. 40 man raid? Please buff each person with your 5 minute buff and when you're done, start at number 1 cause they're starting to fall off.
Hunters? Grats you hit 60 in 3 days and rolled on every weapon you saw, also every 8 year old is playing one, for the next 6 years you will be known as huntards.
Mages? You want to dps as fire? Sorry, everything is immune to fire. Try frost. Arcane is for . . . umm. . . having more int.
Rogues? At least this game has one good class. Too bad vanish has never worked.
They completely redid the class trees multiple times, changed basic functionality of various things (rage, energy, runes, pots, drinking/eating out of combat) and so on. My god, vanilla WoW was mostly a train wreck, lots of fun as it was miles better than what had come before it (but still a train wreck). It wouldn't pass muster today.
Why for the life of me, would so many people think that if Vanella wow ever came back, it would be like day 1
It's the nostalgia of your first mmo.
I thought FFXI was a great game and I can't tell you many reasons it's not, but as soon as I login, it comes rushing back to me. Still a lovely game but yeah, you're just remembering the positive things.
Spec'ing properly is a gateway drug.
12 Million People have been meter spammed in heroics.
I miss the feeling of it being new and exciting and overall just being a noob and learning to play, but I appreciate how far it has come. The biggest thing for me is missing actually having to walk/run around Azeroth, and not getting mounts til a pretty high level, now it feels so easy!
I wouldn't disagree that WoW varied wildly from Vanilla to TBC, and again to WotLK. As a player who's been around since early beta, I can honestly say that Cataclysm has felt like more of a return to Vanilla than any previous expansion. I imagine part of this is doing tasks in the Old World, which I would consider the most important land masses of the game, and keeping the epics from spilling forth like we had seen during WotLK heroic dungeons. As a healer especially, I haven't felt this challenged in dungeons and raids since Vanilla, and I love that aspect. I know I've read a bunch of posts and blogs regarding the difficulty of Cataclysm, that many a-player find it to be far more difficult than they're used to, and I like that. The real question is whether or not Blizzard is going to make these dudes tough it out and actually L2P (learn to play), whether than just give them a bunch of free purples in a particularly anticipated and expected content update which likely features trolls.
"This is life! We suffer and slave and expire. That's it!" -Bernard Black (Dylan Moran)
What I remember of my times having played vanilla wow:
What was better compared to the newer WoW:
fewer fast travel (I can't stand too much fast travel)
actual differences between factions (shamans for horde only, paladins for alliance only)
epics were epic. If you had one, you were epic and could show off with it.
dungeons were far more impressive and harder to get through. I remember when we entered Molten Core with our first guild-spanning raid group, were impressed by the hugeass giants and cheered into the teamspeak when the first trash mob fell
no dungeon finder (I so hate that thing)
no battlegrounds (I'm no fan of pvp in general in MMORPGs)
mounts were special. You really had to safe for them
fewer flight points. So you had to travel more by foot, and thus the world seemed more thickly populated, because more people were travelling around
reputation mattered. People tried to play well in dungeons, because reaching them was sometimes a hassle, and you needed a good reputation to get into a good guild
the graphics were better at that time compared to contemporary games, while compared now despire the updates, the graphics are worse to newly released games. So you had more often "awwww, impressive!" moments
more adventuring. Like trying to get into dungeons in enemy territory
easier to find nice people, because you were forced to work together
higher difficulty (more elite quests and mobs for example)
no cash shop
What was worse:
more bugs (I hated the ones where you got stuck in a position while mining)
balancing in general (lots of useless stuff in the game. Such as certain talents which absolutely made no sense)
less compared compared to today (obviously), with fewer starting zones, races etc
the grind was in some cases extreme (ie getting timbermaw reputation for example, though I think in the very early times of WoW, there was no benefit (other than not beeing attacked) of having a good standing with timbermaws)
fewer quests
professions a pain to level (though that again made people special who actually did level up their professions)
Let's play Fallen Earth (blind, 300 episodes)
Let's play Guild Wars 2 (blind, 45 episodes)
No
Class balance was way worse hell many speccs weren't even usefull at all.
Pve was almost entirely tank and spank.
Quests design was just plain bad a lot of the time.
Pvp was "pointless" (and like mentioned above unbalanced) zerging mindlessly between TM SS was fun.. for a while.
Did i have more fun back then? yes, was it because the game was inherently better? no it was just new and exciting especially since it was my first mmo I was also younger and more easily entertained. The only real reason I quit wow was because everything just feels the same.
I remember hearing people talk about WoW in the DAOC guild chat. I was like, WTF are people talking about? Then one of my guildies got me a beta invite and I went off to test WoW for a couple days a week for a couple months. The download torrent patcher was terrible. In fact, after about the third beta phase I couldn't even download the next patch and had to stop testing.
I thought it was ok, but too cartoony. People kept talking about it. I thought the druid changing into a bear was kind of cool, hunters hadn't been let into the beta yet. I figured a few people would leave to go play it and shrugged it off as I went back to DAOC.
Next thing I know, my entire guild left DAOC either for SWG or WoW...the server was empty, even my former enemies no longer played. I left to go play WoW to be with my guild, lasted about 3 months and walked away from it. WoW wasn't all that great in the beginning. It had better pve than DAOC, but PvP of any sort was non existent. Though the battles at Tauren Mills were kind of fun before they added all those stupid battle grounds. I'm still sad that WoW killed so many other games. It's over abundance of genericness and eventual ease of play killed the market like a giant tree in the forrest killing all of the undergrowth because the smaller plants can't get any sunlight.
If your question is "Did I like Vanilla the most?" I would say YES!
But, BUT there is a HUGE amount of bias because it is when I started and the game was new. Of course, I will have the most fun when I've been playing for 1 month, 2 months, 1 year etc. When TBC came out, I have already played like what 2 years? That's already a lot of time spent on the game. I played every single month since release till the end of TBC. When WOTLK came I out I have been playing the game for 4 years. Thousands of hours /played. How do you want me to like WOTLK
So do you think that if I say WOTLK sucks it will be fair cause I sure as hell know that nothing can spark my interest after playing this game for this long. I have played every single race, every single class, have explored the entire world and have done every single quest!
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
i remember i fell asleep on my first molten core raid... boring ass game.
I still remember how amazed I was at exactly this. The world was amazing to explore and seamless. You could go anywhere you wanted. I still remember running my druid from Darkshore to Stormwind as my friends were in some place called elwyn forest :S Corpse running! But what could I do? That was the only race that could be a druid
So many good memories
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
Got a lot of great memories in Warcraft, like the whole server getting together in Moonglade and AQ for the gate opening quests and events. Was a good time to play the game, especially levelling when each zone was alive with people.
Newer games are way better than Vanilla WoW was and I wouldn't really want to go back.
But playing Vanilla WoW was more fun then that any current games are now.
Vanilla WoW wins.
Important facts:
1. Free to Play games are poorly made.
2. Casuals are not all idiots, but idiots call themselves casuals.
3. Great solo and group content are not mutually exclusive, but they suffer when one is shoved into the mold of the other. The same is true of PvP and PvE.
4. Community is more important than you think.
Vanilla was new, and that was it. So many classes were broken, so many things were unbalanced. Raiding content required 40 people, with the exception of ZG and AQ 20. Even then many of the raid encounters were boring as all get out. Casual players didn't get to see the majority of the content. These limitations bred a group of elitist idiots who felt that the game should be catered to them, and casuals being able to raid would somehow slight their accomplishments.
WoW is better off in so many regards. Unfortunately, the game is old and I think many of us are just burned out.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
I remember the day I started my very first character. A Dwarf Hunter named Grimbold on the Malygos server I believe. Everything was so new to me and incredibly exciting. Then as I leveled (slowly but surely) I found agreat guild and started raiding and doing dungeons for the dungeon gear (Beaststalker, Lightbringer, etc. if anyone even still remembers! haha). Back then World PvP was amazing. Defending Stromgarde and Raven's Hill from the Horde. I really wouldn't have cared if it never changed, just added some little things every now and then.
Nostalgic people are just nostalgic. Everyone thinks vanilla was better because when they first started playing, it was all new and exciting. Guess what? If WoW was still vanilla, a lot less people would be playing it. I'd wager 90% of you people pining for the "good ol' days" wouldn't be playing... burnout is burnout, and it happens regardless of whether the game stays exactly the same or changes over time. What would you all be doing right now in game if WoW was still vanilla? Almost everyone would be in full Tier 3 by now and absolutely screaming at Blizz to add some content. What you all are feeling is not a longing for the game itself as it was six years ago, but a return to the time period - when there were fewer people at max level, more folks leveling, and the game was new enough that only the hardcore players could raid on a regular basis. If the game reverted back to vanilla right now and all of you jumped back in, you'd all be out again in a few weeks with new complaints but the same old feelings of burnout.
About the only thing I really, really miss about vanilla was the retardedly long Alterac Valley battles, when collecting the resources to turn in was worthwhile, and watching the ice lord two-shot almost every enemy that ventured too close.
when vanilla wow came out i said i would never pay a monthly fee for a game like that (much less for EQ1 and DAOC) and indeed i never did untill cata came out (played TBC and WOTLK in private servers untill i subbed for cata) and i still hold my opinion that it was the best thing i ever did regarding game payment.... i dont think i would ever enjoy paying for a vanilla / EQ1/DAOC state of any game with archaic gameplay feel...
i did play archaic mmos for a while, but all were free
I loved no mounts until level 40, remember they cost 90 gold.
Why ?
Because you stayed put !.......You worked a zone, quest after quest, other than venturing off a little you always felt that you belonged to that zone. That is were your new found friends were everyday, and the same guy you played with the day before you could almost count on seeing him again. It was your neighborhood for a week, you would remember the music for the zone, it was your music because it was your zone. You felt grateful when you could move up to Duskwood. It felt like a way of life. Now you feel grateful for nothing.
Speaking of alive worlds, remember being around level 50 and afraid to go near Blackrock Mountain on a PvP server. Mobs hit hard, and there were always opposite factions in there ready to kill you.........Now what do you have ?.....nothen....It used to be a scary place.
Give me Vanilla WoW, make it hard, even harder to the point that it's almost impossible to move. Make it so I would have to find a friend to even do the easiest quest. Make it so a Priest can't play solo at all, yet make it so everyone needs a Priest.
Instead what do we have 1-10 in 2 hours, level 20 in about 5 hours, come on.....what crap !!!!
It still amazes me how badly Blizzard misread their audience when the game came out. They seemed to think that their playerbase would love doing 40man raids every week and spend the rest of the time farming mats for those raids. They completely failed to realize that their casual playerbase would go 'Raids are cute but when are you going to give us some real content?".
When I first heard of raids during open beta I imagined them to be server wide events where the players would come together once a month to fight a big dragon. If someone told me I would have to schedule raids and farm them for loot, I would have told them that it was a stupid idea.
Vanilla was the best time I ever had in any game, but I'm well aware it had vbery little to do with the game itself and so much to do with it being such a new experience for me. It was my first MMO and it was a good game. I still remember vividly the first time I ventired forth in contested tteritory and the rush I got when I saw a name in red ketters for the first time. Nothing can match that and I'm glad WoW poped my cherry, but sadly I'm aware that theres is almost no chance of geting that feeling back.
Only one more time I had such good time, it was near the end of TBC and I got a friend to play with me, so we leveld new toons and had had great adventures and then get together and talk about it, it was mad fun.
I had my fill of the WoW/EQ model and I'm ready for something new. I still come back for expansions to see the new stuff, but I just had too much of the good stuff to keep me interested.