Vanella World of Warcraft did everything perfectly right

delete5230 · October 2016

By far I'm not saying other mmos weren't good, in fact many were great.

Taking nostalgia completely out of the picture.......Nostalgia has nothing to do with it. This is a total open minded review taking everything into account from size of the game to features and graphics for it's time. I would even go as far to say, if it were released today with a slight graphics increase it would still be #1.

To start things off. If one were to purchase a copy and load it up, the player would know it's a journey. This feature alone is huge. It's the foundation of what an mmo is. Often you see talk about players chewing up game's content in two days, with Vanilla World of Warcraft this is impossible. Even the best basement nerd with no social skills couldn't pull it off.......By far the majority would spend six months to a year with their first character. The amount of content alone, alone ! Shows quality !

Next would be the sociological aspect. A World of Warcraft life was amazing from level one. The flow of progression was never challenged by any other mmo. Each starting zone had a perfectly calculated mini dungeon where the player had a choice to go alone and test their basic skills or grab a few players around them for a little fun. This happened six times for six starting zones, no one was left out..........The deep thought put into this game should win first prize for video game history. Many took the small but satisfying features for granted, They simply played it as a real life.

I would really like to talk about zones.

We fight about open world. We fight about progression. We fight about invisible walls and zoning. Never have I witnessed a perfect solution. However to this day ( October 2016 ) no other virtual world utilized the smarts Blizzard did to accomplish near freedom other than a few classless, leveless, progressionless, lifeless games like DayZ or 7 days to die. You have to admit something is missing in games like this.

What World of Warcraft did was have the player blend naturally from 1-60. Always ALWAYS giving the player other options. Hate Darkshore ? Simply go to Westfall. Hate a quest on one side of the map ? Skip it !.....Always options. Zones were large. You settled your character down for a week, bouncing around between three themes. This was your life for an entire week or more. With no load screens.

I would really like to talk about Guilds and friendship.

In order to have friends, you need this.....Slow leveling !.......This is the single building block to maintaining friends. You need to stay on level with others. Please, prove me wrong ?......Some newer games play around with a bad gimmick of down scaling. This never works and you know it. No one, I'll say it again no one likes to go back.

Other games lack content, two quest per level. Newer mmos are 1/5 of what Vanilla World of Warcraft was. They go as far to offer level up potions !!!!!.....Why the hell would anyone want to use one ? What did you pay for ? In an episode of Family Guy, Peter bought a puzzle book with the puzzles half done ......This is either crazy, lazy, or ridiculously end game minded. In that case, don't complain if their is not sufficient end game content. That one is on you.

To recap

A HUGE seamless world. More options than any mmo ever made. Themes are never duplicated for verity. A TOTAL social environment. Memories for players is so many respects, from predicament's the players get themselves into to playing with that guy from Germany for weeks on end. Lets not forget about Dungeons and Raids.....This would require it's own topic.

What happened to mmo's ?......By now we should have at least five games that expanded on this idea, yet we have none.

Jermzy · October 2016

Vanilla.

k61977 · October 2016

I can actually agree with most of this. WoW was way ahead of its time for when it launched. No game has come close to having the feeling I got playing vanilla WoW. And I did play some before it. I was actually addicted to it at one point in my life and had to step away from it, to get back on track. The zones were huge because there was no other way around then flightpaths or running. Getting your first mount at level 40 then the epic at 60 was this great feeling. I remember saving up all my gold just so I could buy the upgrade, it took forever to get gold back then. If you had 100 gold you were rich. But unfortunately we will never be able to go back to that. The industry has been moving to feed the content locust that just want to be first in everything. You create a game today that requires a 6 months to hit max level and people come out of the wood work just to complain about how long it is taking no matter how good the game is. I feel sorry for the players today that never got to experience vanilla WoW as it was a once in a lifetime type of thing.

SavageHorizon · October 2016

delete5230 said:

By far I'm not saying other mmos weren't good, in fact many were great.
Taking nostalgia completely out of the picture.......Nostalgia has nothing to do with it. This is a total open minded review taking everything into account from size of the game to features and graphics for it's time. I would even go as far to say, if it were released today with a slight graphics increase it would still be #1.

To start things off. If one were to purchase a copy and load it up, the player would know it's a journey. This feature alone is huge. It's the foundation of what an mmo is. Often you see talk about players chewing up game's content in two days, with Vanilla World of Warcraft this is impossible. Even the best basement nerd with no social skills couldn't pull it off.......By far the majority would spend six months to a year with their first character. The amount of content alone, alone ! Shows quality !

EQ2 done this.
Next would be the sociological aspect. A World of Warcraft life was amazing from level one. The flow of progression was never challenged by any other mmo. Each starting zone had a perfectly calculated mini dungeon where the player had a choice to go alone and test their basic skills or grab a few players around them for a little fun. This happened six times for six starting zones, no one was left out..........The deep thought put into this game should win first prize for video game history. Many took the small but satisfying features for granted, They simply played it as a real life.

EQ2 had this.
I would really like to talk about zones.
We fight about open world. We fight about progression. We fight about invisible walls and zoning. Never have I witnessed a perfect solution. However to this day ( October 2016 ) no other virtual world utilized the smarts Blizzard did to accomplish near freedom other than a few classless, leveless, progressionless, lifeless games like DayZ or 7 days to die. You have to admit something is missing in games like this.
What World of Warcraft did was have the player blend naturally from 1-60. Always ALWAYS giving the player other options. Hate Darkshore ? Simply go to Westfall. Hate a quest on one side of the map ? Skip it !.....Always options. Zones were large. You settled your character down for a week, bouncing around between three themes. This was your life for an entire week or more.  With no load screens.

WOW wasn't a full open world mmo, it had zoning between each continent and it had instances. Vanguard was more open world than WOW and had 120 dungeons and none of them instanced. I could also go wherever I wanted to at any level.
I would really like to talk about Guilds and friendship.
In order to have friends, you need this.....Slow leveling !.......This is the single building block to maintaining friends. You need to stay on level with others. Please, prove me wrong ?......Some newer games play around with a bad gimmick of down scaling. This never works and you know it. No one, I'll say it again no one likes to go back.

It wasn't that slow leveling, Vanguard was slower and EQ2 was slower. Then you look at EQ for how slow it can be.
Other games lack content, two quest per level.  Newer mmos are 1/5 of what Vanilla World of Warcraft was. They go as far to offer level up potions !!!!!.....Why the hell would anyone want to use one ? What did you pay for ? In an episode of Family Guy, Peter bought a puzzle book with the puzzles half done ......This is either crazy, lazy, or ridiculously end game minded. In that case, don't complain if their is not sufficient end game content. That one is on you.

Yes WOW had loads of content on release or levelling content, it didn't have many raiding content.
To recap
A HUGE seamless world. More options than any mmo ever made. Themes are never duplicated for verity. A TOTAL social environment. Memories for players is so many respects, from predicament's the players get themselves into to playing with that guy from Germany for weeks on end.  Lets not forget about Dungeons and Raids.....This would require it's own topic.

No it wasn't seemless, it was more open than EQ2 but in no way was it seem less.
What happened to mmo's ?......By now we should have at least five games that expanded on this idea, yet we have none.

I loved early WOW and EQ2 , yes you are right about one thing.

What the he'll happened.

kjempff · October 2016

When started playing wow, it was a huge step down from the game I used to play, everquest. That said, vanilla wow (and eq2 at the same time period) were so much more interesting (better?) than what they have become. I did like bc and wotlk in a way, but it was with a non caring distance, that I had never experienced in eq, and Only occasionally in vanilla wow and vanilla eq2 - I spend the time, kindda enjoyed it but in the end it was not that fulfilling. I have found the thrills in games in other genres after that, but in mmos only in short inspirational flashes since then (2006ish)

Theocritus · October 2016

It was a good game, far from perfect

VengeSunsoar · October 2016

I found the grind for the gold to get the level 40 mount to be the most horrible experience i have ever had in a game.

I would never wish that back.

On the other hand overall i found the game far less grindy than any other game I've played possibly except for coh.

natpick · October 2016

to be fair blizz added stacks of new features over the years,but most of them actualy added any real value to the game,fluff if you like,i recently went back to wow for legion and as much as i like the theme there is simply too many pointless changes to most classes and in some cases ie hunters are terrible to play now,i unsubbed probs for the last time,ive played most of the big mmos since eq 1 and honestly never known a company change classes so much,blizz simply cannot balance there own game to anywhere near what it used to be.blizz take flavour of the month mentality to a whole new level.

Quizzical · October 2016

I haven't played WoW since vanilla, so my views of it aren't colored by whatever has happened to WoW since then. You've got quite a few things wrong in your original post, though.

"By far the majority would spend six months to a year with their first character."

Yes, WoW had a lot of content. But a single character couldn't do more than maybe a third of it, as you'd level past it and then it would be stupid. That's not a bad thing, as it means you can make an alt that does different content from your first character. But it does mean that the time to play through a character is not the time it takes to play through all of the content. Even at an hour a day, I don't think it would take you six months to reach the cap, let alone a year.

Now, if you're counting the time to grind through the famously awful endgame and constantly waiting for raid lockouts, then it does take a lot longer. But that's stupid waiting, not interesting content.

"We fight about invisible walls and zoning. Never have I witnessed a perfect solution."

WoW did have a lot less zoning than most MMORPGs, and I'll give it credit for that. But the inter-continental zoning was catastrophically bad, and the worst I've ever seen in an MMORPG. Other than when Captain Placeholder was available for a while, it would commonly take a few minutes, and sometimes fail completely, both killing you and dropping you back in the zone you were trying to leave. On occasion, the other continent wouldn't even load before the blimp or boat returned to your previous continent, so you could take several minutes to zone right back to where you started.

I'd much prefer zoning akin to Uncharted Waters Online, where you do zone every few minutes, but it's at blink and you miss it speed (significantly under one second), not something you sit and wait for. And it actually works right, every time.

"In order to have friends, you need this.....Slow leveling !.......This is the single building block to maintaining friends. You need to stay on level with others. Please, prove me wrong ?......Some newer games play around with a bad gimmick of down scaling. This never works and you know it. No one, I'll say it again no one likes to go back."

A guild in WoW was a chat channel. Nothing more and nothing less. It's a chat channel sometimes used to organize endgame content, but it's still just a chat channel. That's the case in a lot of MMORPGs, but let's not pretend that WoW did something special with guilds.

But the very structure of WoW with very narrow level ranges being appropriate for content meant that you pretty much couldn't group with the same people repeatedly outside of the endgame. You mention the problem that "you need to stay on level with others" as though you don't realize that it catastrophically broke guild grouping. Some people level faster than others, as some people play more than others, and there's nothing you can do about that. I played vanilla WoW for more than a year and never once was I in a full guild group for any actual content. People in the guilds I was in were different levels from me so we couldn't group.

Now, at endgame, you could have a lot of people the same level. But WoW had nothing interesting to do at endgame, so grouping there still wasn't viable. In order to make guild groups viable, you have to do something like Guild Wars 1 where there's lots of players at comparable level and gear and lots of interesting content for players at that level and gear to do.

GladDog · October 2016

I liked Vanilla WoW, but it was hardly perfect. Some classes would blow through it solo with no problems at all, others would get their exercise on a regular basis running back to their corpse. I was in an active guild, but my hours meant I had to play about half solo, and the game was not that great playing alone unless you were a solo friendly class like a Paladin.

Also, I got my first taste of the elitist attitude so many guilds have, something that finally drove me away from the game. That elitist attitude was only revealed more deeply when I came back to the game after BC released, which really wasn't that far from Vanilla.

Altogether I gave the game plenty of chances, and I found it sorely lacking. Last time was 2006, and that will forever be my last time playing the game (knock on wood).

That said, I still think that Blizzard should give the players what they want, a never changing Vanilla server. MAYBE including Burning Crusade. That would make a lot of players very happy. Happy players are much easier to retain than pissed off players (like me).

Velifax · October 2016

The bugs and server connections alone render it imperfect, but it was quite good.

I definitely consider it seamless, because the seams were irrelevant; a seam at the door to a tower is irrelevant as a seam. A seam between continents is irrelevant because you'd take an absurdly long boat trip anyway. EverQuest zone lines are examples of seams that matter.

TheScavenger · October 2016

This is my experience of WoW vanilla

As a paladin

Auto attack! Auto attack! Auto attack! Auto attack! Auto attack!

In a group "you are playing ret? Damn noob" *kicked out of group*

Albatroes · October 2016

I do miss actually earning things in games, especially skills. Having to save up to buy specific skills taught you how to prioritize and not take even trash loot for granted even when you thought you had a lot of money because it could be gone almost instantly if you weren't careful about what you bought.

Kyleran · October 2016

Quizzical said:

I haven't played WoW since vanilla, so my views of it aren't colored by whatever has happened to WoW since then. You've got quite a few things wrong in your original post, though.

"By far the majority would spend six months to a year with their first character."

Yes, WoW had a lot of content. But a single character couldn't do more than maybe a third of it, as you'd level past it and then it would be stupid. That's not a bad thing, as it means you can make an alt that does different content from your first character. But it does mean that the time to play through a character is not the time it takes to play through all of the content. Even at an hour a day, I don't think it would take you six months to reach the cap, let alone a year.

Now, if you're counting the time to grind through the famously awful endgame and constantly waiting for raid lockouts, then it does take a lot longer. But that's stupid waiting, not interesting content.

"We fight about invisible walls and zoning. Never have I witnessed a perfect solution."

WoW did have a lot less zoning than most MMORPGs, and I'll give it credit for that. But the inter-continental zoning was catastrophically bad, and the worst I've ever seen in an MMORPG. Other than when Captain Placeholder was available for a while, it would commonly take a few minutes, and sometimes fail completely, both killing you and dropping you back in the zone you were trying to leave. On occasion, the other continent wouldn't even load before the blimp or boat returned to your previous continent, so you could take several minutes to zone right back to where you started.

I'd much prefer zoning akin to Uncharted Waters Online, where you do zone every few minutes, but it's at blink and you miss it speed (significantly under one second), not something you sit and wait for. And it actually works right, every time.

"In order to have friends, you need this.....Slow leveling !.......This is the single building block to maintaining friends. You need to stay on level with others. Please, prove me wrong ?......Some newer games play around with a bad gimmick of down scaling. This never works and you know it. No one, I'll say it again no one likes to go back."

A guild in WoW was a chat channel. Nothing more and nothing less. It's a chat channel sometimes used to organize endgame content, but it's still just a chat channel. That's the case in a lot of MMORPGs, but let's not pretend that WoW did something special with guilds.

But the very structure of WoW with very narrow level ranges being appropriate for content meant that you pretty much couldn't group with the same people repeatedly outside of the endgame. You mention the problem that "you need to stay on level with others" as though you don't realize that it catastrophically broke guild grouping. Some people level faster than others, as some people play more than others, and there's nothing you can do about that. I played vanilla WoW for more than a year and never once was I in a full guild group for any actual content. People in the guilds I was in were different levels from me so we couldn't group.

Now, at endgame, you could have a lot of people the same level. But WoW had nothing interesting to do at endgame, so grouping there still wasn't viable. In order to make guild groups viable, you have to do something like Guild Wars 1 where there's lots of players at comparable level and gear and lots of interesting content for players at that level and gear to do.

My recollection of Vanilla WOW is much closer to yours, guilds were convenient chatrooms until you got to 60 and joined a raid guild.

Leveling up I did PUG a lot, you sort of had to for the elite npcs and zone dungeons, and grouping with random strangers wasn't nearly so distasteful as its become.

It was a decent game but had designs I quickly tired of so moved on just before BC went live.

Came back for a month when Cata came out, game clearly had continued to go in a direction I didn't enjoy so I quit for good.

Dakeru · October 2016

So many answers saying Vanilla WoW was nice but not perfect...

Are you guys implying that the OP has a tendency to greatly exaggerate?
How dare you!

Johnxboy · October 2016

The tittle is the definition of looking at the past with "rose-tinted colored glasses".

Arglebargle · October 2016

Hyperbole plus nostalgia.

Tamanous · October 2016

Johnxboy said:

The tittle is the definition of looking at the past with "rose-tinted colored glasses".

And your response is the definition of "ignorance".

It is a post about why vanilla wow servers exist today and the thousands (tens of thousands) who play it. It is about why petitions have been signed for legacy servers to be officially supported by Blizzard and why Blizzard has officially responded to then and the tens of thousands of vanilla wow fans still awaiting for an official answer and possible solution.

Your world is a very small one indeed. Perhaps try understanding something before silly little responses like that.

There is a demand for vanilla servers and there is a long history behind why this topic is a hot one today. Enlighten yourself.

Quizzical · October 2016

Velifax said:

The bugs and server connections alone render it imperfect, but it was quite good.

I definitely consider it seamless, because the seams were irrelevant; a seam at the door to a tower is irrelevant as a seam. A seam between continents is irrelevant because you'd take an absurdly long boat trip anyway. EverQuest zone lines are examples of seams that matter.

A seam that takes you several minutes to cross and sometimes fails entirely is hardly irrelevant.

Brunlin · October 2016

I am big on classic Everquest and play on emulated servers, when not playing on Phinny. I love what Everquest was back in the day, no other game could break my addiction to Everquest, save one....Vanilla WOW.....I loved WOW early days..it was a little easier than Everquest but it was still challenging. I liked the way the game progressed the way quest were layed out but you could still grind if you liked. The early dungeons were fun. If Blizzard would do a classic server or even a progression server I would definitely jump on board.

Quizzical · October 2016

Kyleran said:
My recollection of Vanilla WOW is much closer to yours, guilds were convenient chatrooms until you got to 60 and joined a raid guild.

Leveling up I did PUG a lot, you sort of had to for the elite npcs and zone dungeons, and grouping with random strangers wasn't nearly so distasteful as its become.

It was a decent game but had designs I quickly tired of so moved on just before BC went live.

Came back for a month when Cata came out, game clearly had continued to go in a direction I didn't enjoy so I quit for good.

I did PUG a lot. I probably organized more than 100 PUGs for various dungeons. It typically took about half an hour to assemble a group and get everyone to the dungeon entrance. I put up with that hassle then, but there's no way I'd put up with it today. The hassle of grouping is really what led to the prevalence of soloing in MMORPGs.

Fortunately, a lot of games now have tools to make it easier to get groups. When I started, WoW basically had /who and lots of cold-call whispers as the only viable way to assemble a group. Blizzard added an auto-grouping tool after a while, but it was a complete failure. If it found anyone at all for your group, it would often be someone way out of the reasonable level range. My understanding is that WoW's grouping tools have gotten better since then, but this thread is about Vanilla.

Loke666 · October 2016

What really made Wow so much greater then EQ2 and earlier game was how well made and smooth flowing the game were. EQ2 was a buggy mess and even fixed up it still had it's problem. A similar game can't remake the same thing since it already have been done.

I am not saying that Wow isn't or wasn't a great game but making one similar just as good would not make nearly the splash Wow has done. If Wow would have been a buggy, badly running mess and if EQ2 would have been in great shape at launch it would have been the great game everyone remember.

If another MMORPG makes the same impact on the genre as Wow did it will be a very different game and looking on Wows features is a mistake, I do think we will see another giant MMO but it will be nothing like Wow and it might be many years in the future before we see that game.

I personally think there have been several MMOs as good or nearly as good but they never been close in popularity. Kinda like the first Matrix movie.

Eldurian · October 2016

I think part of the nostalgia surrounding early grindfests was that it was the first time you'd ever gone through the "Grind from 1-60 then rerun the same dungeons over and over and over and over to get better gear" cycle. WoW never captured my interest longterm but I did really enjoy my first 1-50 in LotRO and playing the endgame. Then they moved the goalpost and took the endgame away from me with an expansion like all these titles do and I never enjoyed it as much ever again.

Not because the Moria expansion was bad. It was actually a pretty cool expansion. It's because the content I wanted to be doing was PvPing in the Ettenmoors, not a quest grinding yawnfest.

And that is the problem with your standard MMO model. You're forcing people to do the level grind game and then gear grind game every new expansion. For me at least, that's a game that was only worth playing once. Every moment I'm being withheld from challenging group content and PvP is a moment I'm not enjoying the game.

I'm eating through the content so fast because I never wanted or asked that content, but it was forced on me, and I just want it out of the way.

That's why sandbox games where users generate their own content and thus there is no reason to keep moving the goal post are an infinitely superior model IMO.

bcbully · October 2016

Quest tracker was the beginning of the end.

Theodwulf · October 2016

I would pay $14.99 a month for WoW vanilla...i did like x-realm battlegrounds that came just before BC but I could live without it

waynejr2 · October 2016

delete5230 said:

By far I'm not saying other mmos weren't good, in fact many were great.
Taking nostalgia completely out of the picture.......Nostalgia has nothing to do with it. This is a total open minded review taking everything into account from size of the game to features and graphics for it's time. I would even go as far to say, if it were released today with a slight graphics increase it would still be #1.

To start things off. If one were to purchase a copy and load it up, the player would know it's a journey. This feature alone is huge. It's the foundation of what an mmo is. Often you see talk about players chewing up game's content in two days, with Vanilla World of Warcraft this is impossible. Even the best basement nerd with no social skills couldn't pull it off.......By far the majority would spend six months to a year with their first character. The amount of content alone, alone ! Shows quality !
Next would be the sociological aspect. A World of Warcraft life was amazing from level one. The flow of progression was never challenged by any other mmo. Each starting zone had a perfectly calculated mini dungeon where the player had a choice to go alone and test their basic skills or grab a few players around them for a little fun. This happened six times for six starting zones, no one was left out..........The deep thought put into this game should win first prize for video game history. Many took the small but satisfying features for granted, They simply played it as a real life.
I would really like to talk about zones.
We fight about open world. We fight about progression. We fight about invisible walls and zoning. Never have I witnessed a perfect solution. However to this day ( October 2016 ) no other virtual world utilized the smarts Blizzard did to accomplish near freedom other than a few classless, leveless, progressionless, lifeless games like DayZ or 7 days to die. You have to admit something is missing in games like this.
What World of Warcraft did was have the player blend naturally from 1-60. Always ALWAYS giving the player other options. Hate Darkshore ? Simply go to Westfall. Hate a quest on one side of the map ? Skip it !.....Always options. Zones were large. You settled your character down for a week, bouncing around between three themes. This was your life for an entire week or more.  With no load screens.
I would really like to talk about Guilds and friendship.
In order to have friends, you need this.....Slow leveling !.......This is the single building block to maintaining friends. You need to stay on level with others. Please, prove me wrong ?......Some newer games play around with a bad gimmick of down scaling. This never works and you know it. No one, I'll say it again no one likes to go back.
Other games lack content, two quest per level.  Newer mmos are 1/5 of what Vanilla World of Warcraft was. They go as far to offer level up potions !!!!!.....Why the hell would anyone want to use one ? What did you pay for ? In an episode of Family Guy, Peter bought a puzzle book with the puzzles half done ......This is either crazy, lazy, or ridiculously end game minded. In that case, don't complain if their is not sufficient end game content. That one is on you.

To recap
A HUGE seamless world. More options than any mmo ever made. Themes are never duplicated for verity. A TOTAL social environment. Memories for players is so many respects, from predicament's the players get themselves into to playing with that guy from Germany for weeks on end.  Lets not forget about Dungeons and Raids.....This would require it's own topic.
What happened to mmo's ?......By now we should have at least five games that expanded on this idea, yet we have none.

What happened to mmoRPGS? Mainstream people have become the majority of the players in the industry. You know what game did that? World of Warcraft....Starting with Vanilla!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Vanella World of Warcraft did everything perfectly right

Comments

The world is going to the dogs, which is just how I planned it!

Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV