Yep. I remember the terrible mechanics, the buggy, unbalanced mess ( sorry i mean game) . PvP where you could easily be one shotted just because your opponent picked a certain class. PvE where you were forced into one spec to be able to raid, then if you wanted to actually see the raid content you needed to raid 4-5 nights a week for 5+ hours each night. Lets also not forget that most talents and actual specs were pretty much broken .
Vanilla wow wasn;t really so great once you sit down and lay out the facts as they were.
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.
Casuals were whining so much it was hilarious. After every patch we would get the gazillion threads about "Amagad Blizzard another 40 man???? Where is the casual content??" And Blizzard would be like "casual content?????? what?? You had levelling wasn't that enough now go do raidZzzz"
But Blizzard eventually came around and now we have a gazillion threads about how easy it is....
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.
This is what we get in MMOs. Raids. Imho, they should just stick to what they have at the moment - dungeons (5man) and 10-man raids. Their current system is great for people who are casuals.
Of course, if you don't want raiding/dungeons, then obviously pve is not for you cause that's pretty much all you can do at max level Even though the game gives you a bit more - you can do achievements I love going for those achievements/mounts/pets.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
Well I started about 6 months before BC came out and retired perma at patch 3.3. I would take either of those over anything afterward, I DID like the Outlands A LOT, I liked Zangarmarsh so much I wanted a player house there. But I live for world pvp and messing with other people so the first two expansions were great for me. I also liked Arena and BC was really really good for that, as well as making it to where PVPers didnt need PVE or raid gear and VICE VERSA, which was important to me.
WOTLK was a HUGE let down and make a bunch of 10 year old kids with level 59 DKs expert players all of a sudden. I enjoyed killing them. Actually I had a twink shadow priest in winterhoof for 59 brackets JUST to kill level 59 dks who made me so sick I would lose games to hunt them down and melt their face. Which sadly was the only enjoyable thing I did in WOTLK, after realizing this I retired, also seeing Gnome priests would have just made me sick.
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.
Quoting for truth, thanks for this post.
Did I play vanilla? -Yes
Did I love vanilla? -Absolutely
Would I want to play it again in 2011? -HELL NO
Every expansion and content patch has improved the game for the better.
I ... have no idea. I only played during vanilla. My couple of trial returns with BC added didn't last long enough for me to see any difference between the game I played and what it became, other than the addition of a couple of races.
I think this happens to all older games with expansions, though, from what I've observed. Some people don't like things changing, and other people like the ever-evolving state of the game. Some people believe they'd be happy playing and replaying the game as it was indefinitely, while others see change as a good thing. It's just a thing.
I absolutly loved vanilla WoW and i would probably return to the game, if they added vanilla only server to the game.
Game sure was fresh and exciting back then, i did play mmo's before WoW but it felt just right. Sure there were bugs all over the place, but i didn't mind. People were a lot different then, i will never say that WoW community was awesome at any point in game history, but there was a lot less brats and kids around. You could not migrate to another server, so if you did bad stuff you didn't get any groups to play with.
Guild and players could get known very well back then. No crosserver stuff, we waited in queues for quite some times, but pvp was a lot more fun. There were epic world battles, tho there were no open world pvp mechanics around.
Instances were incredibly hard, and guilds wiped A LOT back then on bosses, but killing them ment something, and epix were rare.
Btw Hunter bow quest, was for me best quest ever done. It was incredible hard, long, and required a lot of preparations to do it.
I feel like I am unable to compare Cataclysm to Vanilla anymore. While Cataclysm is a very polished game, I no more am able to play it as a MMORPG. Instead, I look at it as an action lobby game, where you queue into different kinds of events from a main city. I also look it as a fast paced PvP game, but not as a roleplaying game, no. It's good at what it does though, except for the tempo of PvP, which I think at the moment is too fast.
Vanilla, it was a fine roleplaying game. It didn't have competitive PvP which only came into play in TBC, but I never looked at vanilla as if it was a PvP game. Vanilla, to me, was an actual roleplaying game, a game from a different genre than Cataclysm. It did have instanced dungeons and other similar things of course, but it felt much more like a world than Cataclysm does, to me anyway.
So, I am unable to say, which one is better. Both of the games are good at what they do now.
I am a paying WoW subscriber now, but I also play on a private blizzlike vanilla server. It took me a long while to find this private server, for most of the vanilla servers out there are either "high rate" or "fun" servers or have donation rewards, but it has brought back the feeling of being part of the world of Azeroth now that I have found it. Having had the feeling last for a rather long time of playing now, I don't think it can be just nostalgia, though it probably does have something to do with the fact you can not do any of the quests I do there on live anymore. On the vanilla server, I even read all the quest texts; and like it.
On live, I play when I want fast paced PvP. And that's how I view these games; as two different games.
BC was still WoW to me. I had no adverse reaction to it, nor did it cause massive conflicts with base gameplay.
Ken Fisher - Semi retired old fart Network Administrator, now working in Network Security. I don't Forum PVP. If you feel I've attacked you, it was probably by accident. When I don't understand, I ask. Such is not intended as criticism.
Comments
Yep. I remember the terrible mechanics, the buggy, unbalanced mess ( sorry i mean game) . PvP where you could easily be one shotted just because your opponent picked a certain class. PvE where you were forced into one spec to be able to raid, then if you wanted to actually see the raid content you needed to raid 4-5 nights a week for 5+ hours each night. Lets also not forget that most talents and actual specs were pretty much broken .
Vanilla wow wasn;t really so great once you sit down and lay out the facts as they were.
This is what we get in MMOs. Raids. Imho, they should just stick to what they have at the moment - dungeons (5man) and 10-man raids. Their current system is great for people who are casuals.
Of course, if you don't want raiding/dungeons, then obviously pve is not for you cause that's pretty much all you can do at max level
Even though the game gives you a bit more - you can do achievements 
I love going for those achievements/mounts/pets.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
Well I started about 6 months before BC came out and retired perma at patch 3.3. I would take either of those over anything afterward, I DID like the Outlands A LOT, I liked Zangarmarsh so much I wanted a player house there. But I live for world pvp and messing with other people so the first two expansions were great for me. I also liked Arena and BC was really really good for that, as well as making it to where PVPers didnt need PVE or raid gear and VICE VERSA, which was important to me.
WOTLK was a HUGE let down and make a bunch of 10 year old kids with level 59 DKs expert players all of a sudden. I enjoyed killing them. Actually I had a twink shadow priest in winterhoof for 59 brackets JUST to kill level 59 dks who made me so sick I would lose games to hunt them down and melt their face. Which sadly was the only enjoyable thing I did in WOTLK, after realizing this I retired, also seeing Gnome priests would have just made me sick.
Quoting for truth, thanks for this post.
Did I play vanilla? -Yes
Did I love vanilla? -Absolutely
Would I want to play it again in 2011? -HELL NO
Every expansion and content patch has improved the game for the better.
Tarren Mill raids and someone had epic item,it was epic.
Generation P
I prefer chocolate chip over vanilla anyday!
I ... have no idea. I only played during vanilla. My couple of trial returns with BC added didn't last long enough for me to see any difference between the game I played and what it became, other than the addition of a couple of races.
I think this happens to all older games with expansions, though, from what I've observed. Some people don't like things changing, and other people like the ever-evolving state of the game. Some people believe they'd be happy playing and replaying the game as it was indefinitely, while others see change as a good thing. It's just a thing.
I absolutly loved vanilla WoW and i would probably return to the game, if they added vanilla only server to the game.
Game sure was fresh and exciting back then, i did play mmo's before WoW but it felt just right. Sure there were bugs all over the place, but i didn't mind. People were a lot different then, i will never say that WoW community was awesome at any point in game history, but there was a lot less brats and kids around. You could not migrate to another server, so if you did bad stuff you didn't get any groups to play with.
Guild and players could get known very well back then. No crosserver stuff, we waited in queues for quite some times, but pvp was a lot more fun. There were epic world battles, tho there were no open world pvp mechanics around.
Instances were incredibly hard, and guilds wiped A LOT back then on bosses, but killing them ment something, and epix were rare.
Btw Hunter bow quest, was for me best quest ever done. It was incredible hard, long, and required a lot of preparations to do it.
I feel like I am unable to compare Cataclysm to Vanilla anymore. While Cataclysm is a very polished game, I no more am able to play it as a MMORPG. Instead, I look at it as an action lobby game, where you queue into different kinds of events from a main city. I also look it as a fast paced PvP game, but not as a roleplaying game, no. It's good at what it does though, except for the tempo of PvP, which I think at the moment is too fast.
Vanilla, it was a fine roleplaying game. It didn't have competitive PvP which only came into play in TBC, but I never looked at vanilla as if it was a PvP game. Vanilla, to me, was an actual roleplaying game, a game from a different genre than Cataclysm. It did have instanced dungeons and other similar things of course, but it felt much more like a world than Cataclysm does, to me anyway.
So, I am unable to say, which one is better. Both of the games are good at what they do now.
I am a paying WoW subscriber now, but I also play on a private blizzlike vanilla server. It took me a long while to find this private server, for most of the vanilla servers out there are either "high rate" or "fun" servers or have donation rewards, but it has brought back the feeling of being part of the world of Azeroth now that I have found it. Having had the feeling last for a rather long time of playing now, I don't think it can be just nostalgia, though it probably does have something to do with the fact you can not do any of the quests I do there on live anymore. On the vanilla server, I even read all the quest texts; and like it.
On live, I play when I want fast paced PvP. And that's how I view these games; as two different games.
R.I.P Vanilla WoW (sniff)
Voted other. Vanilla was excellent.
BC was still WoW to me. I had no adverse reaction to it, nor did it cause massive conflicts with base gameplay.