World of Warcraft®

are all of you high?
technologicly speaking cata has surpased vanilla.
All of you have realy missed what made vanilla and even bc so great.
A true sense of accomplishment. A sence of perpose to those you played with; do to yours and theirs investment into your charicters development. i.e. you try farming chimerok meat bye your self! rofl
Another i.e. it took an entire guild to get one person the required mats, to summon an outdoor raid boss to get more mats to finish a quest wich sparked an event so epic and amazing that it shut down realms and lagged people offline for days! The dark portal is a close second!

At what point since then have you been in awe of the sheer magnitude of awesomeness do to the efforts of you and your friends! ya havent!

How about the sence of emershion thru attunement! gone now but hopefuly on its way back!
remember haveing to bust !@# to 70 cause you so wanted to see new raid content! at wich point the plot thickened for each new raid encounter you came to. Leading you thru rich lore that gave you chills and excitement about the horrors that lie behind the swirling portal for you and your friends.

honor and glory to defend your capital from your enemies!
Tenasity, stealth, cunning when it came time to raid brc or go to onys lair!

I see above that we lost individuality, i say yes and no. if anyone every played a rogue long enough to know that at some point you where going to the mysterious ravenholt manner and you couldnt wait to get their to check it out.
or getting your charger for your pally etc etc. Then yes that has been dumb down and even lost in some cases, but to the one that matters most is your main cause we've invested over 400 24 hour periods of time in their journeys building up the lore around the charicter we where so excited to begin 7 years ago.
Then i also say no! just look at how we play our charicters now. each spec hows its unique abilitys letting the indvidual player find and excel at the specific job and their being a need for them in alot of diffrent place now.
Take being a hunter, back when~ one spec only. Now i can start a raid as marksman get to the first boss inturpt and dps. get the second boss and im no longer in a primary dps positon.I now switch to surv to support the group with crowd control and crowd suppresion. hell i can even assume an off tanks roll aggroing and kite tanking mobs and bosses. their was no way in hell i could do that in vanilla.

Theirs no challange left. are you kidding me. roll a hunter and get into extreme soloing. see if you make that remark again!
how about H25toc full raid group ds geared pug! that is a challenge!
even getting 25 people who actualy care about their team and its goals over them selfs!
Getting your goods sold in trade chat. Haveing a 3k rated battle grounds team.
Finding more then 5 nodes of khorium in a day. Doing 25man Mimron with out anyone setting off a dang land mine!
Point is: Challenge is where you find it!

continued:

On the subject of faction rep! it no point should i have to spend 6 months running around a freakin desert filled with bugs and the whorde at wich point i have to fight for the ability to kill a mob to get x amount of items to turn in for rep! absouluty not ever again. it was bad enough they had us running around all over northrend doing it again. Blizz wants us to repeat silithus like rep & gear grinding....REALY! i have better stuff to do with my game time than that. Like farm mats for the gb or my own coffers for that matter. Heck even spending hours in one spot spaming a macro waiting on a rare spawn kill or tame is better than that! and thats aweful all in its self....(so no complaing other peoples that dont have hunters! weather we choose to or not is beside the point if we want it thats what we have to do unlike the rest of you who dont even get the option to)

makeing gear epic....they blew that when greens from trash mobs in hellfire where better than t3! they where never going to recover from that foly so we geat one or two "legendary" items to make the feeling of it epic once more.
Think about it? Could u imagin putting in the work to gear your tank 8/8 in a 25man heroic and a week later he quits playing or leave guild etc etc. not only would it demorlize your guild and raid team but it would significantly dampin your ability to function as a team huh? Thats why its been so easy to get up to atleast par. Now not only do you have to gear the new tank but you have to train him on the dynamic of your group make up.
So what do we do now. We run dungeons that have the last raid patches ilvl equivelant gear for ONE day solid and the new guy is now on par. yall think of this as cheapaning up the game i call it WINNING! Cause my team dosent have to miss a run, i dont have to buy it out of the ah! the guild saves gold, mats and time and still keep on a progression scheduel instead of waiting 2 months to gear up another toon before getting back on track.

Addressing the rp situation here. I left for 1 year to aggramar, it was horid!!! not cause i didnt know anyone or the people where bad. its do to my being raised around the rp atmosphere and the type of daliy interaction we have with one another here on this server. Weather it be hawking your enchants on the street corner to people with only proper nameing conventions too calling for the deffenders of stormwind to come to your aid in the deep run tram and retake iron forge. we all have /waved at people down to lickin the and flexing at them. over their its like going to a swamp meet with a bunch of deaf mutes. very solen and boring.
They dont have blood fueds over their like we do here on CC. i dont know how many boozeing sessions ive been to at the blue recluse lost count years ago. or going to check out the warlock conventions at the slaugthered lamb. yall might not know it but you rp and dont even know it. You will if you leave to a non original rp server or sister servers.

So weather your a spontainus rper, a consumate rper, or one that doesnt even know their doing it. be happy your here and if its not your thing just pretend your at a Renaissance Festival! enjoy the music, food and laffter cause festivals come and go, lols just like rp events.

one last thing, heroic 40man hard modes! that is what im wating for!

08/20/2012 10:11 AMPosted by Giadalcain

one last thing, heroic 40man hard modes! that is what im wating for!

Cause our server would have so many of those!

I remember playing during vanilla quite well. I remember a lot of it being annoying as hell too. Perhaps I'm not remembering that place with roads paved with gold like you are.. I dunno.

The challenge to most of the old dungeons wasn't about killing bosses. No, it was getting a group of 5 people to go there instead of 10 people. Oh, those rep grinds. Yea. They weren't terribly fun either. Fighting dozens of people for the mob spawns just to kill them and then wait to fight for other spawns. Oh hey, remember the challenge of having to do stupid gold farming because you could barely afford to pay for repairs from raiding? Let alone for food/potions/whatever else gave buffs you were so demanded to have? Oh yes. Raiding. Raiding was a real joy. If you were lucky and had dedicated people, you could spend several hours a day, perhaps several days a week...in that drab place called MC to kill things, PRAAAYING for the right piece of armor or a weapon to drop, then PRAYING you could even win the item. There was no time for fun chat half the time. Too many people in the raid, the chatter'd bog down everything.

*Deep breath*

Hey, what about the fun challenges of gathering materials to kill those really tough world bosses? And man, did you feel so awsome to help take part in that! Oh, no, no you didn't. Not unless you were in the main raiding group in one of the top raid guilds on the server. So you were lucky if you did. Hell, most of the people who remember it and had fun doing it, I'd point out Imperon for my own perspective, did it in BC, when it was a lot easier to do. And those huge epic world events it lead to? HA! Yea right. First some alt from H&E started by charging for information on when they'd open the gates. Then after that little fiasco was dealt with, they tried to do it secretly and without anyone but guildies to see it. Same with the nightmare event in Moonglade. I was personally there, and whispered/harassed several times by members to gtfo of Moonglade.

No, I think a lot of people are looking at Vanilla through rose-colored glasses. Sure, some of it was fun. PVP before resilience and arenas especially. But the rest of it was a lot of suffering through the ups and downs of a new MMO that slowly got its act together. Sorta like playing KOTOR.

And if you survived my massive paragraphs of crit, you sir, survived Vanilla and its painfulness too.

I'm inclined to agree with Irtwaz; I don't think at this point Cenarion Circle could logically support more than perhaps one dedicated 40-man raiding guild per faction. We just don't have the population.

While it seems obvious per Blizzard's current stance that we aren't ever going to see a return to raid sizes like that, the outdoor bosses in Mists of Pandaria look like they could support that level of play; I'd be curious to see if one of them could be downed by a 25-man raid.

As for the other issues Giadalcain raised, I can't invalidate his perspective, I can only say that while those things were fun when they were new, I have a personal feeling that they were fun because they were new, not because they were inherently fun in and of themselves. I think 25-man raids are much more manageable, quicker to put together, etc. This said, 10-man raids have their own unique challenges: you can sometimes slack off a bit in a 25-man if everyone else is doing a solid job, but in a 10-man, everyone has to bring their A-game, or it isn't going to work.

Everything else has been done to ameliorate the issue of how long it now takes to get from 1st level to the level cap. Ninety levels, even with heirlooms, is going to be a long haul. Things like Dungeon Finder, Heirloom equipment (if you're able to afford it) and speedier leveling all help make that a bit more palatable, and I consider them a net win.

are all of you high?

How about the sence of emershion thru attunement! gone now but hopefuly on its way back!
remember haveing to bust !@# to 70 cause you so wanted to see new raid content! at wich point the plot thickened for each new raid encounter you came to. Leading you thru rich lore that gave you chills and excitement about the horrors that lie behind the swirling portal for you and your friends.

I also want to point out that the attunement wasn't very rich in lore. Most of them were cheap little quests that were more a bother than any kind of immersion. "Hey, run the hell out to the middle of nowhere in the sinkhole that is Azshara to talk to an elemental." Oh. Oh. I know. "Hey, go raise your rep to exalted with the Argent Dawn, or prepare to pay out the bum for attunement." Yes, the Onyxia attunement was awsome. But then they gave the role to the King and I felt dead inside. Along with attunements to heroics simply being "BUY A KEY" or for the caverns of time, follow someone and listen to them rant for a couple minutes before you can go into Old Durnehold.

08/20/2012 10:10 AMPosted by Giadalcain

honor and glory to defend your capital from your enemies!

Oh the joys of this among other things.

This is kind of like the original models vs. SOGA models argument in EQ2...

Some people like the old, some people like the new, and neither are crazy for their preferences.

Well, except for any of you who ground out the "Insane" title while it still required Shen'dralar rep and Darkmoon wasn't some fancy Gilneas-redux isle of creepy. YOU folks are crazy.

You see this first part I can be fine with but if you look closely it has nothing to do with the game and it's only about the people present during the time period and nothing about actual gameplay

Not only do i raid i also lead rp raids as well, while not directly influnceing the game code its self it does provoke an emotional and mental responce wich for some enriches our experince and makes succses more memorable :)
and giveing more value to the subscripton to a never ending interactive novel.

08/20/2012 11:13 AMPosted by Kod

honor and glory to defend your capital from your enemies!

Oh the joys of this among other things.

ode to the splendor of crushing the spirits of our eniemes and tearing them a new !@# on the battle fields of azeroth!

08/20/2012 05:11 PMPosted by Giadalcain

ode to the splendor of crushing the spirits of our eniemes and tearing them a new !@# on the battle fields of azeroth!

It goes further than crushing their spirit I assure you. It is like demoralization on a whole new level.

Akin to going rambo on cats (thx to Irtwaz for that btw).

Well I started on Vanilla, and it was awesome! But to me, so was BC, and it would have been Lich King if I had continue playing back then. And now that I returned on Cataclysm, you don't know how AWESOME it has been to me to explore Azeroth once more, and see all the little changes, like the world destroyed, or the Thousand Needles flooded, I mean, I "Wow"d big time when I saw that. I miss, and will probably miss (unless I find a proper guild, or I level up to be able to solo) the old raids, I have dear memories of the Molten Core and Ahn'Quiraj, and admiration to those who got to see BWL and Naxx. I never saw half of the raids in BC and got excited when I saw that Naxx was going to be revamped for Lich King. That's what I miss the most.
And on the same level, I also miss the fact that you had to use the "LFG" channel to find people to do an instance. And if you had the luck to find them, you then had to go to said dungeon, "travel to far lands". The Dungeon Finder has me with a bit of a double feeling, for one I don't like that "lose" on interaction with the world, but on the other hand, the cross-realm (including pvp) is pretty awesome and make it a quick way to find people to instance with. I would only change, that to actually enter the dungeon finder thingie, you had to go to the dungeon and click on the meeting rock. That way you'd have to travel to get to do the dungeon and it'd be that much more meaningful xD (And it prolly would suck for everyone else but me lol)

So I pretty much like everything, even if I started in vanilla.

Like few have said, it's nostalgia, and the fact that if you've been playing WoW since 2004-2006, it's now gotten pretty redundant. I was really young when my older brother brought WoW home, but I was still completely enchanted by it. WoW was my first MMO, and it was incredible, as f*cking hard as it was. Now it's been ... nearly 8 years? and it HAS gotten old. I know everything, I've seen everything, I've played each class at least 2 times, and people have gotten dumber. [ The birth of trolls.] The one thing to be missed about Vanilla, honestly, is how amazing it was for the time, and how great everyone was. Of course there were !@#$%^-s that sat around back then, but it is NO WHERE NEAR as terrible as it is now. People were willing to just talk to you randomly, and that was nice.
So... in the end, people miss the fact that WoW awed them, and now it doesn't.

The game has evolved for me and really the only thing I miss are the folks I played with back in Classic, not necessarily classic itself.

well any thoughts on it 2 years later folks?
game is definitely getting better. what do y'all think

05/01/2014 05:46 AMPosted by Giadalcain

well any thoughts on it 2 years later folks?
game is definitely getting better. what do y'all think

Get the necromancer!

To answer the question though, in terms of mechanics, gameplay, and accessibility, I don't think there's much disagreement that the game in its current form is superior.

From my perspective though, I miss the days when the game's lore didn't upset me on a near-constant basis, to the point where it impairs my enjoyment of the overall product. For those looking for clarification on that, there's a thread on the story forums titled "Are you proud of your race", which I think serves as a decent summary in the more recent pages of my problems in greater detail. I won't take the time and energy to list them out here, however. With exception granted to this point:

Vanilla and BC did a great job of showing me a world, and making me feel like my character existed in a world. Few events were large enough to demand everyone's attention - I met scores of minor characters, participated in a variety of minor conflicts, encountered different philosophies, cultures, and ways of living. There was a sense of discovery and even nuance to a great deal of what we were doing.

Blizzard hasn't forgotten how to do this - we saw them do it again in 5.0, but it does seem like they're a bit too focused on the large world-ending conflicts, their super-characters what we're supposed to just follow around and agree with, and of course, on cramming the unique aspects of the races we as players selected into singular, factional, identities. Vanilla and BC also weren't crammed to the gills with "just make it work" story decisions, which wreak havok on lore, consistency, and expectations.

What I said previously stands true.

Just ask Garrosh.

Vanilla was the bestest because it was like vanilla ice cream! And I love ice cream!

Oh and hurray for a two year old necro thread!

...

Ok I'll try to be terse since I could probably write a dozen pages commenting on all of the changes I've noticed since quitting toward the end of TBC and coming back late last year.

I feel the gameplay and mechanics are overall better. There is more to do and it is very accessible. The specs of each class also seem more viable and PVP, while it has a lot of issues right now, is still superior to what it used to be. Of course the sense of accomplishment is harder to find but it does exist for those who look for it. I am concerned about some of the habits Blizzard has developed over the years though. Specifically their trend to make the game even more like a theme park and, ergo, dictate exactly how we play it. Their tendency to solve problems with a sledge hammer and take "solutions" to the extreme is pretty pathetic as well.

Story, lore and characters flat out blow in my honest opinion. I really find it just... awful. The writing for smaller stuff, like side quests and minor characters, is usually fine if not enjoyable (I particularly like goblin quests and characters) but I would immediately fire all of the head writers. Lore is butchered at the drop of a hat, main story lines are nonsensical, racial distinction (particularly on the Alliance side) is diluted, and character arcs are mind-numbingly mishandled. Granted the writing in vanilla and TBC was not award winning either but at least it (usually) was not insulting. More importantly it was done in such a way to lend context and even ambiance to the world. Now it feels like I'm a red shirt in a really bad comic book.

The game's community is even worse now... which is quite an accomplishment because it was horrible in the old days too. Heck, I played both DDO and SWTOR well after each game went free to play and their communities were better than WoW's player base back in vanilla and TBC. Thankfully there are still plenty of great people out there but I usually remain quiet unless I'm at an RP event because the average WoW player is innately hostile.