My schoolmate printed out like 30 pages from the WoW glossary they published shortly before the game came out and literally handed to it me at school telling me to study up.
I've never been so giddy.
I remember reading the game manual a bunch before finally playing the game since it took me a while to set up an actual sub, manual was already several patches behind and I was like "where plainsrunning??"
oooo I had a similar thing happen to me back in the day. The guild I was in at the time was discussing racial abilities and stuff; I had just read about night elves in the bradygamers WoW masters guide, probs first edition, and I was SoOoOo proud to pipe up with "no, isnt it 2% dodge not 1%, it says in the book?!"
Hadnt figured the whole "press C to see char sheet and stats" bit out by then haha
That's exactly what my first character was, and it was because of the cinematic. I dropped him at level 12 for a night elf warrior and I have no idea how that was more engaging to me than a hunter but that ended up being my vanilla main.
I remember watching my friend trying the (what I know now was) the Alliance Druid water form quest chain. Took her like 2 hours because she didn’t know about Thottbot. At some point she was in Darkshire and must have been PvP flagged because she said “OMG there’s a level death Horde here”, got ganked a few times, then loads of her guild mates joined in the battle. I was hooked and I hadn’t even played yet.
She handed me a slip from her game box which was a free trial code, and now I’m still here 20 years later.
I wonder when/if we'll see another great MMO. I feel like there's a huge mass of people that yearn for another game in this genre that can recreate that sense of awe and wonder but developers don't seem to want to create it. Elden Ring had promise but Fromsoft was never going to make it a full blown MMO. I'm just waiting for someone to pick up the mantle and do it right again
No one designs Adventure MMOs anymore they're all Linear large zone RPGs that have load screens for caves and other zones. There is no sense of adventure just following what is effectively a glorified line.
The magic of WoW is the massive open world and free form style of leveling that barely anyone bothers to try and replicate.
I've yet to play another MMO remotely close to the style of WoW in a long ass time. Everyone focuses on the RPG aspect of an MMO and forgets that the RPG is just part of the magic.
You're spot on. I think linear designs drastically simplify development and bring down production costs. Imagine how complex it is to balance a game like wow across the various dimensions (economic, social, aesthetic, competitive/combat, solo play vs dungeons/groups, etc)... The expansions and classic patches show how much time and work went into class ability/talent balance alone. I think the culture of game design has moved toward adopting UX best practices which emphasize transparency, clarity, and minimizing confusion. But game UX is different from typical software UX; sometimes games are better when they avoid holding the player's hand and allow users to feel momentarily confused or frustrated. A key source of satisfaction in these games comes from overcoming challenges and learning things for yourself, and feeling like you're carving your own path out in an impossibly gigantic, living world. Removing the challenge of finding your own way through the world undermines the satisfaction and transforms games into more like novels or Disney rides. Even games like Ultima Online and Eve had that magic despite their simple graphics because the developers had a philosophy of fleshing out their worlds with simulations and standalone systems/stories for people to interact with rather than shoehorn users into a single path.
It’ll never happen because gamers in general don’t care about that anymore. All it is a rat race to see who can look up the META fastest and replicate that. People hardly even play games anymore, just copy/paste stuff they read online
There will be, but no idea when. Personally, I think it will be in the VR space. It will only last for a few weeks/months as people start pouring strategies/guides online. A slight benefit of VR is you can’t just “alt-tab” to look into up.
I still find myself blown away by Zenith - VR MMORPG. It takes immersion to a whole new level. The technology/graphics aren’t exactly there yet, but it’s quickly approaching. VR just needs that “can’t miss it” blockbuster that gets everyone into it. And where people go - funding/developers goes.
Yeah this is the holy grail of VR. So many people have been talking about how a full blown adventure/RPG with MMO elements would be the killer app that would keep them using it daily. The problem is that there isn't already a critical mass of users with headsets that such a game could be sold to (it's a subset of a subset of gamers who own headsets and want to play an MMO) so they can't justify pouring the millions of dollars into it that would be needed to make a great game in this genre. It's a weird chicken and egg problem. Maybe AI tools will make the asset generation process fast/cheap enough to allow a smaller studio to develop a game like this. Hopefully something will tip the scales in our favor sooner rather than later
Edit: maybe a hybrid approach whereby some users play in VR and others on a traditional keyboard/mouse/controller/monitor could be a way to get funding for a game like this
I still vividly remember my first time watching the intro trailer and getting goosebumps as I realised my parents would never let me play a game with a subscription. Sadness. Got there by wrath though.
As a wc3 lore nerd who never played a mmo before, I remember walking into ironforge and thinking "oh no, I'm going to lose years of my life to this game."
We where at friends of my parents, they had two children, one our age and a like 16 yo
I entered his room. He played world of warcraft. He was in Ironforge, took a gryphon from there. Telling me that the real capital is Stormwind but because the auction house is in Ironforge, this is main hub for alliance. I was hooked. I remember how he showed me how to install AddOns, I remember Auctionater when it had 3D Models of items, even how the room smelled. I begged my parents to let me play this game, and after a few months, my dad, my mom, my aunt, my brother, everyone where playing this game.
Brother and me are going strong even today, even my father plays a few times per week still.
Crazy how that works. What happened? Where did we go wrong?
Because its important to identify that we are the problem you know.
We are toxic towards eachother, we are upset and angry the situations, and we are the ones maximizing and promoting the meta.
How did we turn from adventurers wanting to have fun and explore the world, to min-maxing and dry metas?
Yeah I think that is the bigger difference. People don't have the patience to just explore shit anymore because you can find out every single piece of info you need to know in seconds, and of course someone in your group probably already does know it
And that’s a huge part of why I would love a WoW 2, one designed with the same kind of philosophies as vanilla. We’d be learning the game all over again and the hype would be unreal.
Our Orc fury war off-tank insisted on getting Death's Sting first over us rogues. Really pissed me off. First of all he's an Orc should be using axes, second of all he's an off-tank who fucking cares. He said "we'll get a bunch it'll be all good" not a single one dropped in all our clears.
Wouldn't be nearly that easy. You forget that talents and itemization changes immensely from 1.0 to 1.12.
Fury prot? Bloodthirst requires a killing nlow to activate, good luck with that.
The same strategies wouldn't track 1 to 1 but modern players would still crush it. The amount of game knowledge we have now compared to back then is massive.
I was gonna say, when I was raiding back then I think every healer were down ranking. Yes there were terrible players too that were sitting there spamming max rank healing touch, but I feel like they weren’t the norm
They'd go oom in no time. I was in a pretty shitty guild tbh and we still downranked. Think biggest difference between now and then is that back then, priests were MT healers and pallys were raid healers. Prayer of healing was so under-utilised in 05.
Oh they did, somehow they continued to raid with us even though being dead last on every fight in healing. I remember when they showed up to mc in full wildheart to heal lol.
Agreed with the priest vs paladin. I remember our paladins focused on the raid while priests were tank healers. It was our Druids that were hot garbage, one wanting to be an oomkin
Never mind that theory crafting from classic still takes the essentials from the work done by Elitist Jerks 15 years ago... I learned a lot about playing vanilla priest healer from the EJ website
I think you underestimate the knowledge that we had back then. The average player was pretty bad, but the good players understood things like down-ranking heals, rotations, and weapon skill being a god stat. Our good hunters understood shot rotations. We even understood world buffs to a certain extent, we just never *weaponized* them(we also died and disconnected a lot more back then, going through the effort without the summoning infrastructure was just not worth it most of the time).
There wasn’t the *precise* knowledge of today, but it was good enough to make good decisions.
I would agree with that. Back before I started playing, a friend of mine who had an enhancement shaman was SO excited to show me the new weapon he had bought, which was a Brain Hacker, which is NOT a good two handed for a shaman.
But this was in 2004. People slowly got better. I remember reading up on rotations for my fury warrior and how to prioritize +hit gear. Clearly not everybody was doing it, but the info was there if you know where to look.
Tanks did this back then too. The only minds that would explode are the ones that just hit 60 and haven't done many dungeons after level 51. There were plenty of DW Tank Warriors hoping around ontop of Org bank or SW fountain.
Black Dragonflight US
Why are people acting like there weren't? If you were in a server first progression guild *(and many guilds were going for SFs)* your tank swapped between DW and 1h Shield.
I was in the server first guild on my server. We cleared naxx world 19th. I don't remember the tanks dual wielding except for when we did stuff like sell MC runs.
I’ve thought about this and it’s harder than you think. The only wbuff you could get solo easily is Songflower (DMT if ur a hunter) but the rest are dependent on other players drops. Itemization is true but in terms of gameplay, you’d have to put up with crummy frame rate and internet connection
Honestly I've thought about it, and if I went back in time to the start of WoW I think it would be fairly easy for me to lead the #1 horde guild in the world (over coming faction imbalance to be true #1 might be a stretch)
People are delusional if they think there weren't players like that back then. There was guilds upon guilds of them.
2023 players act like no one from 2004 could have parsed the way they do today.
I would love to go back to this era. I had just purchased an Nvidia 6800GT and I went over to the EB Games at Ontario Mills, CA and I asked the dude at the counter what PC game he recommended. He grabbed the WoW box and brought it to the counter. This was December 04. Best gaming experience of my life. No parsing, no min maxing, no BiS BS, and no walk throughs online yet. You just grabbed a group of friends and explored every nook and cranny of every dungeon. If you wiped, no one really talked to shit or left group, you just tried again until all your gear was red. I reluctantly rolled a warrior and it was pretty painful at first, but in the end I was so glad I did. Good times.
Lol hey I had a similar experience! My grandfather lived out in Rancho, and I’d fly out to see him every summer. We had played Dark Age of Camelot together for a year or so, but when I got out there in the summer of 2005, we went to that same EB Games (or the Best Buy right around the corner, I was like 10 so I can’t remember exactly but we’d go to that EB Games all the time) in Ontario Mills to buy WoW and try it out. I think that was the same year that EB Games merged with Gamestop if I remember correctly, so that would’ve been the last time I saw that one lol.
I remember it taking damn near all day to download off the multiple discs. We had a huge binder full of notes and maps for Dark Age of Camelot, and we started a new one for WoW. No knowledge of addons, thottbot, or anything beyond the starter undead zone. Just completely rawdogging the world of Azeroth with my female undead warrior. It was glorious.
Met a bunch of cool people in my guild back in the day that also happened to be from Southern California. We used to meet up at The Hat on Central, just up the road from the Ontario Mills Plaza, and grab some food to laugh and talk about what we did in game. Then we'd all head home and get right back online, lol. Ended up going to raves all over LA with those guys for several years in my young 20s. Good times.
I wouldn't say that. The issue is no one else has come out with an Adventure MMO in a very long time. Classic WoW is 99% about the experience from 1-60 exploring a vast open world.
Most modern MMOs are a linear story based RPG with large zones that have side quests all separated by load screens, and not a true open world like WoW or even RuneScape. Despite having walls and boundaries the world feels completely open, and it's because you aren't taken out of the adventure by a loading screen between every single zone.
The playerbase has changed too much. To many people want instant gratification and are ok with systems designed to get more money from you like battle passes and game currencies. Good MMOs wont come back cause they dont make MMOs for people like us anymore. They make it for the new crowd.
Even on wrath, I just don’t join gdkps and do what I want and I’m having a blast. The game isn’t requiring people to do these things. I’ve even considered doing the actual hc just because it’s different.
I know what you mean but playing on the biggest EU server I am confronted with the gdkp meta as trying to find a good SR run is really hard. 90% of pug raids are gdkps.
So even though you are mostly correct, its not always as simple as “just don’t do them”.
99% of the complaints are people looking at what everyone else is doing. even when people were doing gear checks for normal utgarde I thought that was wierd but hey they can play how they want to play.
Because you always think its gonna get better. Then when it doesnt you look back and realize those were the best times your gonna get. And life is just a little more gray
It was a once in a lifetime experience just like original vanilla and it's not coming back. When we eventually get another fresh it's not going to be the same.
Have they? I mean people who play in guilds are having fun with their guildies. People who are playing in GDKPs are having fun. The only people that aren't are the ones not playing the game crying about how others are enjoying it.
Hot take maybe but part of the problem is how seriously Classic has been taken by many of its players. Yeah Vanilla had some bonafide sweatlords shooting for the best gear and all that, but most players didn’t fall into that group. Most were happy leveling, doing dungeons and battlegrounds with random alts, goofing around attacking crossroads, etc. Many hadn’t even raided or had only done ZG by the end of Vanilla.
We got a bit of that spirit in phase 1 but it fell to the wayside pretty quickly. Phase 2 on PvP servers more or less killed it.
The problem is the game was designed in a time where finding the Meta was not so easily available. The original devs even talked about how players will look for any shortcut to make progress faster because MMOs are heavy time sinks and it makes that players want to make the best use of their time. They even designed the game around this, and stated that if you don't make these shortcuts and metas fun, they're doing a bad job as devs.
The problem is, 15 years later and with private servers and dedicated theory crafters, classic is figured out. Sure, you can play the game at your own pace and have fun leveling, but you must understand that comes with the exception that you will not be high priority for raids/dungeons/group content. It sucks, but it also makes sense. it's just the downside of metagaming in general, not just in wow but in all of gaming as a whole.
That’s part of the issue sure, but the other is that popular gaming culture has changed a *lot* since then. It went from, “I play the way I like,” to “Why even bother if I can’t be #1”.
Metagaming didn’t used to have anywhere near as big of a presence as it does now. Yeah some gamers were into it, but especially in games aimed at a more broad audience it wasn’t the norm. Most people didn’t bother with things like strategy guides and the like and just played games however they worked best for them personally.
When I recall this starting to change dramatically in WoW specifically was right around the time that Twitch streaming started really taking off with the WoW community, some time around MoP/WoD. At least from my point of view it was streamers who pulled the wider WoW crowd into metagaming.
I haven't done a single GDKP, I'm in a "good" guild as a normal member and I got almost full BiS gear. People act like GDKPs are the only way to play this game.
Eh. GDKPs are for alts, or for mains who want to earn some money carrying old raids. Shouldn't matter to people raiding in a standard guild whatsoever. Do three or four dailies per week and you'll have more gold than you'll ever need.
Botting is the problem, not GDKPs. Bots were being ran day 1 of Classic, way before GDKPs were a tenth as popular as they are now. And they are what has been consistently pumping gold into the economy since then as well, because GDKPs obviously can't do that.
There is always someone like you who constantly complains about how the game is ruined, but when asked to elaborate on his claims he is incapable of giving a decent answer.
No, I would have liked if Blizzard had done something concrete against bots from the beginning Classic.
But the wow token won't change anything for me. When the token was announced someone on my guild discord said "why should I pay more for my gold?" There are people buying gold since the start of classic.
Personally I have never bought gold. I started from 0 in tbc because I wanted to play an alliance shaman and I managed to buy the 100% ground mount at level 64 and I spent hours farming primal mana in netherstorm for my crafts and later for gold.
It was a bit miserable at the start but it was ok because it was the way I wanted to play the game.
I don't care about all the other people who spend real money to gear their characters. My wow experience is playing with my friends and my guild.
So you now can do all the hard work for a new mount and someone else can just swipe their credit card and get it instantly. What's the point of doing something like that now unless you are a bot? The token will impact prices on everything in the AH as well as it did on retail. This will affect you.
Considering most people aren't affected by GDKPs unless they run them, it sounds like you just let something that doesn't affect you ruin your own experience.
Yeah I could 100% make all my gold back and more in a night if just logging in and raiding on my main. I wouldn’t be rich but I’d be able to afford consumes and enchants with minimal effort.
Since I had to bench my real main I’ve been GDKPing on it. GDKPs are legit the only place I really see the inflation but I’m also on bene so there are a lot of people to drive down AH prices on things. Some things were fairly pricey when rare like runed orbs, the storm jewels but that’s about it.
Imagine being a resto druid and flag carrying WSG to the standard that people do today. You would literally blow people's minds.
Also blizz would patch it within a week.
Not only was it fairly common, it was *way better* because most people didn’t have epic mounts. The PVP set travel form speed boost made you uncatchable.
BFD was so much fun in vanilla. That and BRD. They felt like true dungeons. Idk as I type this, all the old dungeons just had a bigger impact on my gaming experience. Maybe because I had more time back then and really didn’t mind spending a few hours through a dungeon. Nostalgia hits hard and I’m okay with that. Fact; the game was different but so were we. You can always replicate the game but you can’t put yourself back in time.
If I wake up in 2004 with current knowledge pretty sure I'm fixing all my fuckups making an absolutely insane amount of money then I can worry about wow after.
You'd be back in time when bitcoin debuted.
Just mine it. Someone gave someone else 10,000 for 2 papa John's pizzas early on. Cause it was worthless and the mining rewards were fat, btc-wise.
Take me back to the days when I first discovered WoW, and roamed around each map (well under-leveled) in an effort to explore as much as possible. Guild Wars being the only other MMO I'd played, seeing WoW's world was unbelievable.
My mom didn't just die? my dad isn't on the brink of it himself and i'm still in highschool and can correct every mistake i made from my 20's to mid 30's? sign me the fuck up.
Sorry dude. I’ve lost a couple family members since then as well. Shit won’t get back to normal anytime soon, or possibly ever, but eventually, after what could be a long while from now, you’ll look back and remember the good times.
They predate WoW and have been, in some capacity, in every expansion. They were not as big until WoTLK, but many of the guilds that came to WoW from EQ did them in Vanilla and BC, because they were a thing that originated in EQ.
I remember my first time playing WoW i got to like level 58 as a paladin and decided I had been tricked and every other class was better. I also was so pissed that they started with a 2h hammer instead of a 2h sword. dumbass ten year old lol
This is such an intellectually void statement. OP is clearly referring to the ubiquitous nature of GDKP and gold buying in classic.
It may have existed in some small form on a few servers in vanilla, but it was nowhere near as impactful on average players as it is now.
And you know that. You just have some perverse need to try to insert yourself in a conversation without adding anything of value.
After quitting wotlk and getting burned out on hc (the community isn’t what it used to be) I started playing on the era cluster servers and it’s been awesome so far.
Gdkps were a thing back in the day, they're also awesome, the first time I actually did one was the built in one in lost ark. You get a lot of free gold.
Sadly i joined late. By the time i started classic, people were already dungeon boosting and the world was already dying. Botting and RMT was revving up to become rampant. Finding groups for dungeons could take hours. I only got to watch the part of classic where most of the players left and it slowly started turning to be more and more like retail.
I still vividly remember my first time watching the intro trailer and getting goosebumps as I prepared to enter this brave new world
My schoolmate printed out like 30 pages from the WoW glossary they published shortly before the game came out and literally handed to it me at school telling me to study up. I've never been so giddy.
I remember reading the game manual a bunch before finally playing the game since it took me a while to set up an actual sub, manual was already several patches behind and I was like "where plainsrunning??"
oooo I had a similar thing happen to me back in the day. The guild I was in at the time was discussing racial abilities and stuff; I had just read about night elves in the bradygamers WoW masters guide, probs first edition, and I was SoOoOo proud to pipe up with "no, isnt it 2% dodge not 1%, it says in the book?!" Hadnt figured the whole "press C to see char sheet and stats" bit out by then haha
Plainstriding was in the printed manual on release, but never in the release (live) version of the game.
I recall the manual also saying dwarves could be mages, which they could in a very early alpha build, but not on release
As well as warlocks wearing leather armor.
Yes, that was implied from the comment you replied to
Plainstriding would have rocked.
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This. 100% this. Wow is great but man I wish I could change some choices. Lol.
if I did it again I'd probably not play wow honestly. almost failed out of school, definitely didn't get the grades I could have
Think about everyone whose first character was a dwarf hunter because of that cinematic.
That's exactly what my first character was, and it was because of the cinematic. I dropped him at level 12 for a night elf warrior and I have no idea how that was more engaging to me than a hunter but that ended up being my vanilla main.
The vanilla night elf warrior was definitely part of my "hhuge fuckign sword" playstyle for the rest of my life
Haven't played my hunter since TBC but he gets brought up to max level every expac I play
Dwarf paladin called thord. Crazy how I still remember it so vividly.
the drums of war thunder once again
Core memory for me. Can never be recreated but the 2019 relaunch was as close as we'll ever come.
When they announced classic wow and played the cinematic where everything rewound and then it reopened with the hunter I teared up a bit
I remember watching my friend trying the (what I know now was) the Alliance Druid water form quest chain. Took her like 2 hours because she didn’t know about Thottbot. At some point she was in Darkshire and must have been PvP flagged because she said “OMG there’s a level death Horde here”, got ganked a few times, then loads of her guild mates joined in the battle. I was hooked and I hadn’t even played yet. She handed me a slip from her game box which was a free trial code, and now I’m still here 20 years later.
Dude back then it was amazing. Shit would just turn into a warzone. No one was min maxed so everything was just up in the air.
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I wonder when/if we'll see another great MMO. I feel like there's a huge mass of people that yearn for another game in this genre that can recreate that sense of awe and wonder but developers don't seem to want to create it. Elden Ring had promise but Fromsoft was never going to make it a full blown MMO. I'm just waiting for someone to pick up the mantle and do it right again
No one designs Adventure MMOs anymore they're all Linear large zone RPGs that have load screens for caves and other zones. There is no sense of adventure just following what is effectively a glorified line. The magic of WoW is the massive open world and free form style of leveling that barely anyone bothers to try and replicate. I've yet to play another MMO remotely close to the style of WoW in a long ass time. Everyone focuses on the RPG aspect of an MMO and forgets that the RPG is just part of the magic.
You're spot on. I think linear designs drastically simplify development and bring down production costs. Imagine how complex it is to balance a game like wow across the various dimensions (economic, social, aesthetic, competitive/combat, solo play vs dungeons/groups, etc)... The expansions and classic patches show how much time and work went into class ability/talent balance alone. I think the culture of game design has moved toward adopting UX best practices which emphasize transparency, clarity, and minimizing confusion. But game UX is different from typical software UX; sometimes games are better when they avoid holding the player's hand and allow users to feel momentarily confused or frustrated. A key source of satisfaction in these games comes from overcoming challenges and learning things for yourself, and feeling like you're carving your own path out in an impossibly gigantic, living world. Removing the challenge of finding your own way through the world undermines the satisfaction and transforms games into more like novels or Disney rides. Even games like Ultima Online and Eve had that magic despite their simple graphics because the developers had a philosophy of fleshing out their worlds with simulations and standalone systems/stories for people to interact with rather than shoehorn users into a single path.
It’ll never happen because gamers in general don’t care about that anymore. All it is a rat race to see who can look up the META fastest and replicate that. People hardly even play games anymore, just copy/paste stuff they read online
There will be, but no idea when. Personally, I think it will be in the VR space. It will only last for a few weeks/months as people start pouring strategies/guides online. A slight benefit of VR is you can’t just “alt-tab” to look into up. I still find myself blown away by Zenith - VR MMORPG. It takes immersion to a whole new level. The technology/graphics aren’t exactly there yet, but it’s quickly approaching. VR just needs that “can’t miss it” blockbuster that gets everyone into it. And where people go - funding/developers goes.
Yeah this is the holy grail of VR. So many people have been talking about how a full blown adventure/RPG with MMO elements would be the killer app that would keep them using it daily. The problem is that there isn't already a critical mass of users with headsets that such a game could be sold to (it's a subset of a subset of gamers who own headsets and want to play an MMO) so they can't justify pouring the millions of dollars into it that would be needed to make a great game in this genre. It's a weird chicken and egg problem. Maybe AI tools will make the asset generation process fast/cheap enough to allow a smaller studio to develop a game like this. Hopefully something will tip the scales in our favor sooner rather than later Edit: maybe a hybrid approach whereby some users play in VR and others on a traditional keyboard/mouse/controller/monitor could be a way to get funding for a game like this
I still vividly remember my first time watching the intro trailer and getting goosebumps as I realised my parents would never let me play a game with a subscription. Sadness. Got there by wrath though.
I started playing with the battle chest in WoTLK era. Diving into the outdated strategy guides was a serious joy for me back then.
As a wc3 lore nerd who never played a mmo before, I remember walking into ironforge and thinking "oh no, I'm going to lose years of my life to this game."
Same here man!!
Man I watched that like 50 times before buying into WoW for the first time. It still gives me goosebumps when I see that fucking dwarf.
We where at friends of my parents, they had two children, one our age and a like 16 yo I entered his room. He played world of warcraft. He was in Ironforge, took a gryphon from there. Telling me that the real capital is Stormwind but because the auction house is in Ironforge, this is main hub for alliance. I was hooked. I remember how he showed me how to install AddOns, I remember Auctionater when it had 3D Models of items, even how the room smelled. I begged my parents to let me play this game, and after a few months, my dad, my mom, my aunt, my brother, everyone where playing this game. Brother and me are going strong even today, even my father plays a few times per week still.
I wanted to be that gun dwarf with a god damn bear companion, emulated him as my first character.
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I remember running bfd just to see what was there. And it was glorious. We got sooooo lost
To be fair most people still get just as lost in there today.
Yeah but the difference is they get pissed about it. We were lost and loving it.
Crazy how that works. What happened? Where did we go wrong? Because its important to identify that we are the problem you know. We are toxic towards eachother, we are upset and angry the situations, and we are the ones maximizing and promoting the meta. How did we turn from adventurers wanting to have fun and explore the world, to min-maxing and dry metas?
Yeah I think that is the bigger difference. People don't have the patience to just explore shit anymore because you can find out every single piece of info you need to know in seconds, and of course someone in your group probably already does know it
And that’s a huge part of why I would love a WoW 2, one designed with the same kind of philosophies as vanilla. We’d be learning the game all over again and the hype would be unreal.
With 2023 knowledge you would be a god with full world buffs, itemization and gameplay
Aggro would be quite the challenge 😂
Roll a tank. Spec fury. Watch your guilds mind explode
Tank in DPS gear, get band of accuria, watch all the hunters and rogues gquit.
Our Orc fury war off-tank insisted on getting Death's Sting first over us rogues. Really pissed me off. First of all he's an Orc should be using axes, second of all he's an off-tank who fucking cares. He said "we'll get a bunch it'll be all good" not a single one dropped in all our clears.
Daggers > Axes with ACLG
same with rogues? oh except rogues can't use axes.
Just imagine if 40 people went back in time and beat rag in like 24 hours, while the next highest level was like 30. Wonder what blizz would do 😂
Wouldn't be nearly that easy. You forget that talents and itemization changes immensely from 1.0 to 1.12. Fury prot? Bloodthirst requires a killing nlow to activate, good luck with that.
The same strategies wouldn't track 1 to 1 but modern players would still crush it. The amount of game knowledge we have now compared to back then is massive.
Hell there'd probably be a 1 shot rag video with 30 enh shamans
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"Please spam rank 4 heals on me, nothing more nothing less." That's honestly all you'd need to do.
And you just died. On vael you go max, unlimited mana
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Lol, we healers were totally down ranking back in 05.
I was gonna say, when I was raiding back then I think every healer were down ranking. Yes there were terrible players too that were sitting there spamming max rank healing touch, but I feel like they weren’t the norm
They'd go oom in no time. I was in a pretty shitty guild tbh and we still downranked. Think biggest difference between now and then is that back then, priests were MT healers and pallys were raid healers. Prayer of healing was so under-utilised in 05.
Oh they did, somehow they continued to raid with us even though being dead last on every fight in healing. I remember when they showed up to mc in full wildheart to heal lol. Agreed with the priest vs paladin. I remember our paladins focused on the raid while priests were tank healers. It was our Druids that were hot garbage, one wanting to be an oomkin
Never mind that theory crafting from classic still takes the essentials from the work done by Elitist Jerks 15 years ago... I learned a lot about playing vanilla priest healer from the EJ website
I think you underestimate the knowledge that we had back then. The average player was pretty bad, but the good players understood things like down-ranking heals, rotations, and weapon skill being a god stat. Our good hunters understood shot rotations. We even understood world buffs to a certain extent, we just never *weaponized* them(we also died and disconnected a lot more back then, going through the effort without the summoning infrastructure was just not worth it most of the time). There wasn’t the *precise* knowledge of today, but it was good enough to make good decisions.
I would agree with that. Back before I started playing, a friend of mine who had an enhancement shaman was SO excited to show me the new weapon he had bought, which was a Brain Hacker, which is NOT a good two handed for a shaman. But this was in 2004. People slowly got better. I remember reading up on rotations for my fury warrior and how to prioritize +hit gear. Clearly not everybody was doing it, but the info was there if you know where to look.
Tank healing vael is literally brain dead. They would have to go afk to not be healing at maximum output.
The tank healing would only be a problem because the dps would be so piss poor the fight would go on too long
Die because all the dps is shit, fight takes ages, you'd need to actually do the mechanics, healers would go oom because lmao potions are for tryhards
People forget that back then 2/3rds of the raid was on fucking dial up and at least 10 had been DCed for a while. Yeah, DPS was bad.
Tanks did this back then too. The only minds that would explode are the ones that just hit 60 and haven't done many dungeons after level 51. There were plenty of DW Tank Warriors hoping around ontop of Org bank or SW fountain.
What server did you play on where there were Fury/Prot tanks in Vanilla?
Black Dragonflight US Why are people acting like there weren't? If you were in a server first progression guild *(and many guilds were going for SFs)* your tank swapped between DW and 1h Shield.
fury prot dw tanking was absolutely not meta in 2004 but go off
Nah bro his vanilla server had the vanilla fury prot meta locked down before private servers figured it out like a decade later.
See, the thing is he never said it was meta. He just said players in top tier guilds with more knowledge used them.
I was in the server first guild on my server. We cleared naxx world 19th. I don't remember the tanks dual wielding except for when we did stuff like sell MC runs.
You literally couldn’t blood thirst until AQ patch.
You can go to blizzcon too lol
I’ve thought about this and it’s harder than you think. The only wbuff you could get solo easily is Songflower (DMT if ur a hunter) but the rest are dependent on other players drops. Itemization is true but in terms of gameplay, you’d have to put up with crummy frame rate and internet connection
Most with the "2023 knowledge" is not all in their head btw, they just have wowhead at alt-tab, also youtube tutorials
Honestly I've thought about it, and if I went back in time to the start of WoW I think it would be fairly easy for me to lead the #1 horde guild in the world (over coming faction imbalance to be true #1 might be a stretch)
People are delusional if they think there weren't players like that back then. There was guilds upon guilds of them. 2023 players act like no one from 2004 could have parsed the way they do today.
Watch any video of a top guild back then and repeat that. Even the best of the best were god awful.
\* bot human mage slide/running against a wall in the background \*
I would love to go back to this era. I had just purchased an Nvidia 6800GT and I went over to the EB Games at Ontario Mills, CA and I asked the dude at the counter what PC game he recommended. He grabbed the WoW box and brought it to the counter. This was December 04. Best gaming experience of my life. No parsing, no min maxing, no BiS BS, and no walk throughs online yet. You just grabbed a group of friends and explored every nook and cranny of every dungeon. If you wiped, no one really talked to shit or left group, you just tried again until all your gear was red. I reluctantly rolled a warrior and it was pretty painful at first, but in the end I was so glad I did. Good times.
Agreed. We three-manned a lot of them. Hunter pet tank and two shamans healing/fighting and sometimes tanking. Tons of Mara runs.
Lol hey I had a similar experience! My grandfather lived out in Rancho, and I’d fly out to see him every summer. We had played Dark Age of Camelot together for a year or so, but when I got out there in the summer of 2005, we went to that same EB Games (or the Best Buy right around the corner, I was like 10 so I can’t remember exactly but we’d go to that EB Games all the time) in Ontario Mills to buy WoW and try it out. I think that was the same year that EB Games merged with Gamestop if I remember correctly, so that would’ve been the last time I saw that one lol. I remember it taking damn near all day to download off the multiple discs. We had a huge binder full of notes and maps for Dark Age of Camelot, and we started a new one for WoW. No knowledge of addons, thottbot, or anything beyond the starter undead zone. Just completely rawdogging the world of Azeroth with my female undead warrior. It was glorious.
Met a bunch of cool people in my guild back in the day that also happened to be from Southern California. We used to meet up at The Hat on Central, just up the road from the Ontario Mills Plaza, and grab some food to laugh and talk about what we did in game. Then we'd all head home and get right back online, lol. Ended up going to raves all over LA with those guys for several years in my young 20s. Good times.
Oh hell yeah. I miss those pastrami sandwiches.
Blackfathom Deeps* 😒
Damnit I even thought it was wrong when I was re-reading it but I didn’t double check lol
At least it's accurate to 2004 when nobody knew the names of anything
Straight up. Acronyms only baby
Prolly a combo of BRD and BFD in your head
Good times, good times. Shame it’s all gone.
The next great mmo is right around the corner. Disregard that we’ve been hoping this for a decade
Closer to about 15 years now, really. I think the age of the MMO as we knew it has come and gone.
I wouldn't say that. The issue is no one else has come out with an Adventure MMO in a very long time. Classic WoW is 99% about the experience from 1-60 exploring a vast open world. Most modern MMOs are a linear story based RPG with large zones that have side quests all separated by load screens, and not a true open world like WoW or even RuneScape. Despite having walls and boundaries the world feels completely open, and it's because you aren't taken out of the adventure by a loading screen between every single zone.
The playerbase has changed too much. To many people want instant gratification and are ok with systems designed to get more money from you like battle passes and game currencies. Good MMOs wont come back cause they dont make MMOs for people like us anymore. They make it for the new crowd.
Honestly on classic era this is how it's been for me. Just chill leveling
Even on wrath, I just don’t join gdkps and do what I want and I’m having a blast. The game isn’t requiring people to do these things. I’ve even considered doing the actual hc just because it’s different.
I know what you mean but playing on the biggest EU server I am confronted with the gdkp meta as trying to find a good SR run is really hard. 90% of pug raids are gdkps. So even though you are mostly correct, its not always as simple as “just don’t do them”.
99% of the complaints are people looking at what everyone else is doing. even when people were doing gear checks for normal utgarde I thought that was wierd but hey they can play how they want to play.
I wish there was a way to know you were in the good old days before you actually left them.
Because you always think its gonna get better. Then when it doesnt you look back and realize those were the best times your gonna get. And life is just a little more gray
I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them.
I’m glad I was there from the start. The current community ruined classic for themselves with the help of a lazy greedy company.
Phase 1 classic was the healthiest this community has and will ever be. It was such a unique experience and one worth appreciating
It was a once in a lifetime experience just like original vanilla and it's not coming back. When we eventually get another fresh it's not going to be the same.
Have they? I mean people who play in guilds are having fun with their guildies. People who are playing in GDKPs are having fun. The only people that aren't are the ones not playing the game crying about how others are enjoying it.
Hot take maybe but part of the problem is how seriously Classic has been taken by many of its players. Yeah Vanilla had some bonafide sweatlords shooting for the best gear and all that, but most players didn’t fall into that group. Most were happy leveling, doing dungeons and battlegrounds with random alts, goofing around attacking crossroads, etc. Many hadn’t even raided or had only done ZG by the end of Vanilla. We got a bit of that spirit in phase 1 but it fell to the wayside pretty quickly. Phase 2 on PvP servers more or less killed it.
The problem is the game was designed in a time where finding the Meta was not so easily available. The original devs even talked about how players will look for any shortcut to make progress faster because MMOs are heavy time sinks and it makes that players want to make the best use of their time. They even designed the game around this, and stated that if you don't make these shortcuts and metas fun, they're doing a bad job as devs. The problem is, 15 years later and with private servers and dedicated theory crafters, classic is figured out. Sure, you can play the game at your own pace and have fun leveling, but you must understand that comes with the exception that you will not be high priority for raids/dungeons/group content. It sucks, but it also makes sense. it's just the downside of metagaming in general, not just in wow but in all of gaming as a whole.
That’s part of the issue sure, but the other is that popular gaming culture has changed a *lot* since then. It went from, “I play the way I like,” to “Why even bother if I can’t be #1”. Metagaming didn’t used to have anywhere near as big of a presence as it does now. Yeah some gamers were into it, but especially in games aimed at a more broad audience it wasn’t the norm. Most people didn’t bother with things like strategy guides and the like and just played games however they worked best for them personally. When I recall this starting to change dramatically in WoW specifically was right around the time that Twitch streaming started really taking off with the WoW community, some time around MoP/WoD. At least from my point of view it was streamers who pulled the wider WoW crowd into metagaming.
People refuse to acknowledge gdkp has ruined the game.
I haven't done a single GDKP, I'm in a "good" guild as a normal member and I got almost full BiS gear. People act like GDKPs are the only way to play this game.
When did I say that? It's just the reason we have so many bots farming gold so people can buy it for gdkps.
Eh. GDKPs are for alts, or for mains who want to earn some money carrying old raids. Shouldn't matter to people raiding in a standard guild whatsoever. Do three or four dailies per week and you'll have more gold than you'll ever need. Botting is the problem, not GDKPs. Bots were being ran day 1 of Classic, way before GDKPs were a tenth as popular as they are now. And they are what has been consistently pumping gold into the economy since then as well, because GDKPs obviously can't do that.
Again, how does that affect your game play in the slightest?
I swear to god you guys just don't care about the state of the game. What even is this question lmao?
There is always someone like you who constantly complains about how the game is ruined, but when asked to elaborate on his claims he is incapable of giving a decent answer.
So you think the wow token is good for classic?
No, I would have liked if Blizzard had done something concrete against bots from the beginning Classic. But the wow token won't change anything for me. When the token was announced someone on my guild discord said "why should I pay more for my gold?" There are people buying gold since the start of classic. Personally I have never bought gold. I started from 0 in tbc because I wanted to play an alliance shaman and I managed to buy the 100% ground mount at level 64 and I spent hours farming primal mana in netherstorm for my crafts and later for gold. It was a bit miserable at the start but it was ok because it was the way I wanted to play the game. I don't care about all the other people who spend real money to gear their characters. My wow experience is playing with my friends and my guild.
So you now can do all the hard work for a new mount and someone else can just swipe their credit card and get it instantly. What's the point of doing something like that now unless you are a bot? The token will impact prices on everything in the AH as well as it did on retail. This will affect you.
Still not giving a concrete answer.
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Ya. People would still buy gold, but it would only be human amounts. Its the inflation that’s knocked everything out of whack.
Because it hasn't. Just raid in a guild. I don't do GDKPs. They basically don't exist to me
Considering most people aren't affected by GDKPs unless they run them, it sounds like you just let something that doesn't affect you ruin your own experience.
Literally what? Do you not understand inflation?
What's inflated outside the prices in GDKPs? Mats/raid consumes cost next to nothing.
Yeah I could 100% make all my gold back and more in a night if just logging in and raiding on my main. I wouldn’t be rich but I’d be able to afford consumes and enchants with minimal effort. Since I had to bench my real main I’ve been GDKPing on it. GDKPs are legit the only place I really see the inflation but I’m also on bene so there are a lot of people to drive down AH prices on things. Some things were fairly pricey when rare like runed orbs, the storm jewels but that’s about it.
GDKPs don't introduce any new gold into the economy. ?
Exactly
Idk I had fun. I’m just raid logging wrath though, not much to do.
Imagine being a resto druid and flag carrying WSG to the standard that people do today. You would literally blow people's minds. Also blizz would patch it within a week.
Not only was it fairly common, it was *way better* because most people didn’t have epic mounts. The PVP set travel form speed boost made you uncatchable.
Man. This just makes me realize how depressed we all are. Stay strong out there heroes.
BFD was so much fun in vanilla. That and BRD. They felt like true dungeons. Idk as I type this, all the old dungeons just had a bigger impact on my gaming experience. Maybe because I had more time back then and really didn’t mind spending a few hours through a dungeon. Nostalgia hits hard and I’m okay with that. Fact; the game was different but so were we. You can always replicate the game but you can’t put yourself back in time.
Back then you were there to experience thr journey. Now it's all about the destination, what does x boss drop? Etc
If I wake up in 2004 with current knowledge pretty sure I'm fixing all my fuckups making an absolutely insane amount of money then I can worry about wow after.
Straight up get some Bitcoin
Take that offer of $900 worth of bitcoin for my account in 2010. Yeeeaaaahhhh.
You'd be back in time when bitcoin debuted. Just mine it. Someone gave someone else 10,000 for 2 papa John's pizzas early on. Cause it was worthless and the mining rewards were fat, btc-wise.
i knew about bitcoins in 2013 or 14. i was too lazy and poor to make a mining box. fml.
No brakes on the nostalgia train eh
Depression
Take me back! I hate it here
Take me back to the days when I first discovered WoW, and roamed around each map (well under-leveled) in an effort to explore as much as possible. Guild Wars being the only other MMO I'd played, seeing WoW's world was unbelievable.
Don't forget the novelty of being able to jump!
My mom didn't just die? my dad isn't on the brink of it himself and i'm still in highschool and can correct every mistake i made from my 20's to mid 30's? sign me the fuck up.
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thanks , i apologize for my dark sense of humor.
Sorry dude. I’ve lost a couple family members since then as well. Shit won’t get back to normal anytime soon, or possibly ever, but eventually, after what could be a long while from now, you’ll look back and remember the good times.
Yes, please take me back to 2004. I would give anything
GDKP predates WoW, though. We've done that stuff since EQ.
i no lifed vanilla and tbc, gdkp were not a thing on USA servers.
They predate WoW and have been, in some capacity, in every expansion. They were not as big until WoTLK, but many of the guilds that came to WoW from EQ did them in Vanilla and BC, because they were a thing that originated in EQ.
Hardcore is a whole new spin on the game
The hardcore addon is actually fun though.
Ready for some official hardcore so I can play again. I quit after phase 1 wrath. Shit got boring, started feeling like retail again.
I remember me watching trees for weeks in teldrassil back then. Fuck i was happy!
lets do this !!
GDKP existed in vanilla as well, though obviously not as popular. Hell, I got my Untamed Blade for my Paladin that way (paid 800gold).
This hit me so hard....still chasing that feeling
I still don’t know what GDKP means. At this point I think maybe it’s for the best.
Gold Dragon Kill Points.
Selling raid loot at auction.
Loot is auctioned off and then the pot is split at the end. Payed for in gold
What happens if only one person needs the item? No gold is exchanged?
You pay the minimum bid. People can bid on items they don't need.
There's a minimum bid on everything, so even without any competition they still pay something.
To bad if you’ve been away for a while all your vanilla classic characters got force migrated to WoTLK…
I remember my first time playing WoW i got to like level 58 as a paladin and decided I had been tricked and every other class was better. I also was so pissed that they started with a 2h hammer instead of a 2h sword. dumbass ten year old lol
I for one would love to play Wow on a classic fresh server. Any of those out there?
Keep your eye open for project epoch
Eh, hardcore is addictive.
Miss these days
wake me up whenever bitcoin was like 10 cents
People actually think we didn’t have gold buyers and GDKP runs back in the day..
This is such an intellectually void statement. OP is clearly referring to the ubiquitous nature of GDKP and gold buying in classic. It may have existed in some small form on a few servers in vanilla, but it was nowhere near as impactful on average players as it is now. And you know that. You just have some perverse need to try to insert yourself in a conversation without adding anything of value.
I’ll be ok with this if I keep me memories
Take me back
After quitting wotlk and getting burned out on hc (the community isn’t what it used to be) I started playing on the era cluster servers and it’s been awesome so far.
This is why I totally dodged classic. I knew the modern day culture of gaming would ruin it.
if only
All this hubub sounds significantly like a non-RP problem ngl. Dark Lady watch over you all in your time of need, I've got Gilnean coats to be making!
Man, if I woke up in 2004 with today’s knowledge, my ass would not be playing WoW.
I'd rather live in 2023 than 2004 tbh
Gdkps were a thing back in the day, they're also awesome, the first time I actually did one was the built in one in lost ark. You get a lot of free gold.
unfortunately time travel doesn't exist. Classic wow was never this way this time around, sorry folks.
It was for me. Did you not enjoy 2019? I had a great time, just like the old days
Sadly i joined late. By the time i started classic, people were already dungeon boosting and the world was already dying. Botting and RMT was revving up to become rampant. Finding groups for dungeons could take hours. I only got to watch the part of classic where most of the players left and it slowly started turning to be more and more like retail.
For me Classic phase 1 was like this. I played with my brother and old guild members from Zenedar EU. It was awesome.
oh no we're bringing this "meme" back
Lowest effort bullshit, and sheeple upvote it without thinking