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Have the things I disliked about Vanilla changed?
Quizzical
Member LegendaryPosts: 25,348
I played WoW in Vanilla quite a bit. I got eight characters to the level cap of 60, and then quit the game shortly after that. Some of the objections that I've brought up off hand over the years since then have resulted in people telling me that it has since been fixed. So I thought I'd make a more complete list and ask how much of what I disliked about Vanilla WoW has been fixed. If the answer is most or all of it, then maybe I should have another look at trying the game again.
1) The combat was slow and repetitive, so much so that some people had macros to basically play the game for them. Getting rid of the macros while leaving you to press 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3 until the mob dies doesn't really fix the problem. A much shorter time to kill would have helped a lot. So would some need to actually pay attention to something other than potential adds.
2) Combat was based very heavily on level and gear, and very little on the skill of the player. A level difference as little as 3 brought harsh penalties for being too low level or make it trivial if you were too high level. The reasonable level range to do content was thus very narrow, much more so than in any other MMORPG I've played.
3) Finding a group for group content was an enormous pain. The best available method was using /who and then cold calling anyone you could find of a suitable level. If you could fill a group in 15 minutes and then get everyone to the start of the dungeon in another 15 minutes, that was pretty good.
4) Travel was slow, which made (3) much worse than it could have been. Need to go to a dungeon that you just got a group for? Get on a griffin (or whatever they were; I think there were a few different types), go AFK for 10 minutes, and then come back to see that you're still not there.
5) Inter-continental travel was flatly broken. It didn't always move you from one continent to the other. At worst, it would drop you off far into the deep water so that not only would you die, but it would be impossible to return to your corpse. Blizzard offered instant transport via Captain Placeholder for a while, but even when they removed it, it still didn't work.
6) Extreme server instability. WoW was the worst online game I've played in this regard since the turn of the millennium. They'd have several hours of unanticipated downtime, then compensate you by extending your subscription for a day. And then do it again the next week. By the time I quit, I had about a month worth of compensatory subscription extensions. Blizzard tried to make it right by compensating players, so it was hardly a scam, but what you really want is to be able to play when you want.
7) Dungeons were too long. To do a dungeon, you may need to be online for a solid two hours. In some sense, you don't want to spend half an hour assembling a group, only to finish the dungeon in 10 minutes and then break up. But requiring two hour time chunks is just too much.
8) The grouping culture was that if you wanted to do a dungeon, you find someone way too high level for the dungeon, get him to join your group, and then he carries you through the dungeon and you get your loot. I think that's completely stupid, as I play games for fun, not for loot, and tagging along while a high level solos everything isn't fun. As hard as it was to get a group at all, getting a group of players of a reasonable level was much harder. Sometimes I'd ask literally every single person on the server online in the appropriate level range and not be able to fill a group.
9) Endgame content was completely inaccessible if you weren't willing to schedule your life around the game. That's a non-starter for me, but ignoring the endgame entirely is also a valid option.
10) There was too much downtime between battles. Spending half of your time sitting and waiting for health and mana to refill is not my idea of fun. Whatever you think of opportunities to socialize, that's just way too much when you're off soloing, as most of the game was.
11) There was considerable potential for griefing from the enemy faction killing quest givers. Hillsbrad was pretty terrible about this. But occasionally, some high level player(s) would decide to camp a quest hub and make it so that no one of the opposing faction could acquire or turn in any quests for the next hour. They couldn't kill you on a PVE server, but they could make it so that you couldn't play the game.
12) Too many of the players were gold farmers who spoke basically no English, even on the English language servers. When forming a group, I'd customarily ask people "what is two plus three?" The inability to recognize that numbers or arithmetic were involved filtered out a considerable percentage of people. I haven't had to do that in any other game I've ever played.
13) The built-in UI basically didn't work. Downloading potentially dodgy add-ons from external sites was pretty much mandatory to play the game. And then every single update would break the add-ons in various ways. Sometimes I'd have to spend an hour fixing it before I could play.
14) Some content expected you to go get custom gear just for that content, even though it's completely useless elsewhere. And spend a bunch of time farming the gear for that content. For example, fire resistance gear for Molten Core.
15) The group loot system practically encouraged ninja looting. Anyone could roll need on anything, and some people rolled need on everything. For example, "I need it to disenchant for shards." I customarily used master looter in groups that I ran, but some people don't take kindly to that in a PUG.
16) The crafting system was completely stupid. It was mostly a case of, you can spend a bunch of resources to level it up by crafting something useless that you can vendor, and then being higher level allows you to spend higher level, more expensive resources to craft higher level useless things to level it up further. The only benefit to top level crafting was certain recipes with a long recharge, such as mooncloth for tailoring. Professions such as blacksmithing that didn't have some top level recipe with a long recharge had no purpose at all other than to waste resources.
That's all that I remember off of the top of my head, but there might be others that I'll add later. So, how much of that is fixed? And if it's fixed, then how? I really hope that (5) and (6) are fixed by now, as those seem fixable and can't plausibly be intentional. But I don't have much of a read on the rest of it.
I'm not complaining about the quest hub nature of the game, which some people disliked. I regarded that as superior to asking players to go grind the same particular mobs for hours on end.
1) The combat was slow and repetitive, so much so that some people had macros to basically play the game for them. Getting rid of the macros while leaving you to press 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3 until the mob dies doesn't really fix the problem. A much shorter time to kill would have helped a lot. So would some need to actually pay attention to something other than potential adds.
2) Combat was based very heavily on level and gear, and very little on the skill of the player. A level difference as little as 3 brought harsh penalties for being too low level or make it trivial if you were too high level. The reasonable level range to do content was thus very narrow, much more so than in any other MMORPG I've played.
3) Finding a group for group content was an enormous pain. The best available method was using /who and then cold calling anyone you could find of a suitable level. If you could fill a group in 15 minutes and then get everyone to the start of the dungeon in another 15 minutes, that was pretty good.
4) Travel was slow, which made (3) much worse than it could have been. Need to go to a dungeon that you just got a group for? Get on a griffin (or whatever they were; I think there were a few different types), go AFK for 10 minutes, and then come back to see that you're still not there.
5) Inter-continental travel was flatly broken. It didn't always move you from one continent to the other. At worst, it would drop you off far into the deep water so that not only would you die, but it would be impossible to return to your corpse. Blizzard offered instant transport via Captain Placeholder for a while, but even when they removed it, it still didn't work.
6) Extreme server instability. WoW was the worst online game I've played in this regard since the turn of the millennium. They'd have several hours of unanticipated downtime, then compensate you by extending your subscription for a day. And then do it again the next week. By the time I quit, I had about a month worth of compensatory subscription extensions. Blizzard tried to make it right by compensating players, so it was hardly a scam, but what you really want is to be able to play when you want.
7) Dungeons were too long. To do a dungeon, you may need to be online for a solid two hours. In some sense, you don't want to spend half an hour assembling a group, only to finish the dungeon in 10 minutes and then break up. But requiring two hour time chunks is just too much.
8) The grouping culture was that if you wanted to do a dungeon, you find someone way too high level for the dungeon, get him to join your group, and then he carries you through the dungeon and you get your loot. I think that's completely stupid, as I play games for fun, not for loot, and tagging along while a high level solos everything isn't fun. As hard as it was to get a group at all, getting a group of players of a reasonable level was much harder. Sometimes I'd ask literally every single person on the server online in the appropriate level range and not be able to fill a group.
9) Endgame content was completely inaccessible if you weren't willing to schedule your life around the game. That's a non-starter for me, but ignoring the endgame entirely is also a valid option.
10) There was too much downtime between battles. Spending half of your time sitting and waiting for health and mana to refill is not my idea of fun. Whatever you think of opportunities to socialize, that's just way too much when you're off soloing, as most of the game was.
11) There was considerable potential for griefing from the enemy faction killing quest givers. Hillsbrad was pretty terrible about this. But occasionally, some high level player(s) would decide to camp a quest hub and make it so that no one of the opposing faction could acquire or turn in any quests for the next hour. They couldn't kill you on a PVE server, but they could make it so that you couldn't play the game.
12) Too many of the players were gold farmers who spoke basically no English, even on the English language servers. When forming a group, I'd customarily ask people "what is two plus three?" The inability to recognize that numbers or arithmetic were involved filtered out a considerable percentage of people. I haven't had to do that in any other game I've ever played.
13) The built-in UI basically didn't work. Downloading potentially dodgy add-ons from external sites was pretty much mandatory to play the game. And then every single update would break the add-ons in various ways. Sometimes I'd have to spend an hour fixing it before I could play.
14) Some content expected you to go get custom gear just for that content, even though it's completely useless elsewhere. And spend a bunch of time farming the gear for that content. For example, fire resistance gear for Molten Core.
15) The group loot system practically encouraged ninja looting. Anyone could roll need on anything, and some people rolled need on everything. For example, "I need it to disenchant for shards." I customarily used master looter in groups that I ran, but some people don't take kindly to that in a PUG.
16) The crafting system was completely stupid. It was mostly a case of, you can spend a bunch of resources to level it up by crafting something useless that you can vendor, and then being higher level allows you to spend higher level, more expensive resources to craft higher level useless things to level it up further. The only benefit to top level crafting was certain recipes with a long recharge, such as mooncloth for tailoring. Professions such as blacksmithing that didn't have some top level recipe with a long recharge had no purpose at all other than to waste resources.
That's all that I remember off of the top of my head, but there might be others that I'll add later. So, how much of that is fixed? And if it's fixed, then how? I really hope that (5) and (6) are fixed by now, as those seem fixable and can't plausibly be intentional. But I don't have much of a read on the rest of it.
I'm not complaining about the quest hub nature of the game, which some people disliked. I regarded that as superior to asking players to go grind the same particular mobs for hours on end.
Comments
Well with the scaling you cannot simply go into a dungeon with someone way higher level since the mobs to a certain extent unless your friend is level 100 or something scale with you so you're not going to be able to simply powerlevel like that.
Combat has never been that complex as a priest I basically use three attacks and repeat one that has no cd till the others recharge. The only time I use different buttons are in dungeons when I heal and damage what I can. I must admit my experience hasn't been at higher levels so I cannot tell you how it is at higher levels but I doubt it will be that different or may involve one or two extra buttons to press.
You could alleviate the boredom of combat by playing a more complex class that has slightly more varied rotations but a lot of games of this type don't actually have that much more complexity in combat. Scaling has made combat in dungeons more difficult in that people die more in dungeons now as I noticed even in low level dungeons or may be especially in low level dungeons. I attribute that to people rushing ahead and not waiting to engage and that is never going to change I'm afraid but if you play a tank you could set the pace. I mean you could but if the DPS decide to just run ahead...well with scaling they die. Damn I hate healing monks they really drop in hp real fast. Yesterday in Wailing Caverns the monk died 2 times and I managed to keep the mage alive while the monk kept dying, he kept running ahead while the paladin was not even losing any hp. So there is that.
The dungeons you don't have to wait any more with 'looking for dungeon'. You pick a role and queue and you will be teleported to the dungeon and the maximum it takes is like 40 minutes because they shortened the dungeons considerably.
The travel time between areas are the same I think not sure if places that are far now take less time to travel. The UI has improved. The server is very stable and has been for a long time. There's rarely any problem except during expansion launches by too many players crowding in one area but which game does not have that. WoW is successful and it pays for that at launches.
Your loot is now tailored to your role. Crafting is not really worth it. May be jewel crafting and something you can perhaps use but stuff like tailoring,blacksmithing and leather working are not particularly useful in my opinion. Engineering can have some fun gadgets but you know I think that it is difficult to get an edge and make money with product based crafting. Gathering is where the money is .
Some of your complaints that are about things that are particular to this genre and I am not sure how to answer because take resist gear, it is something that people do and collect the necessary gear to do that dungeon. I can see how you might consider that tedious and discarding them once you outlevel that dungeon but that is typical of this genre. In fact some games you need complete sets to do different dungeons it is the nature of the content that you need to jump through certain hoops but I think now WoW uses item level for higher level content. You might need also different gear to perform different roles in a dungeon like when you quest you play a DPS role and when you're in the dungeon a tanking or healing role and what drops in the dungeon will be tailored to your role and you will thus be precluded from collecting any DPS gear unless some random gear drops that you get while looting corpses.
There is definitely certain patterns of bosses you might have to learn and that was a lot less than in vanilla ,the bosses in WoW have become more complex in that some require some youtube knowledge
The game is vastly different from vanilla and in fact I cannot even consider it the same game.
Some even contradict, such as complaining how end game was all about overly long raiding, implying you didnt do it along with the hassle of having to gear up to do raids, which only someone who raided would have experienced.
I experienced much of what you listed, yet never to the extreme you mention nor was I as aggravated by most of it. As @kitarad mentioned, some "issues" are troups of the theme park MMORPG, which I personally loath so haven't played one in many years.
Blizzard actually fixed or addressed almost every 'complaint' you listed, (most many years ago) so much so the game is nearly unrecognisable in its present form and now there is a huge groundswell movement asking for the return of Vanilla WOW .....minus the unstable servers of course.
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
In fact you are the perfect fit for modern WOW.
WOW live is the game for you!
Unfortunately what you dislike, I like. So I cannot wait for Classic.
I would say that nearly all of your points have been addressed in one fashion or another. If you were to try the game today, going in blind, you would still come out with a list of things you may think could be improved, but it would look completely different.
I come back sporadically, and I've skipped a few xpacs. I did play through early Legion, but haven't tried out the latest xpac yet (maybe this fall when I have some time). Some of my comments:
* Community is still rough around the edges. You'll still come across an awful lot of people who believe that the only way to play is to min-max according to whatever the FOTM is amongst top end raiders, that you should know every encounter stone cold before going there, or that your playstyle doesn't conform to their ideals. This isn't to say all WoW players are AHoles, or that you can't find nice folks and good guilds. Maybe I'm thin skinned and a really bad player. This has always been one of my biggest criticisms of the game really, and it's not really Bliz's fault directly, but a lot of their mechanisms help to re-enforce it.
* Game mechanics still strongly lend themselves to FOTM builds. Blizzard has got better with the see-saw, but there's still a lot of back and forth between buffs and nerfs. At least now you can make pretty much any build work, it's not like Vanilla where some builds/specs were just flat out broken. Whether the community will let you enjoy playing pretty much any build is another matter.
* LFD/LFR is a lot more efficient than the old /who and can get you a group. The issue is it pairs you with totally random people -- which is fine with me. But you know how the internet gets when people assume they are totally anonymous and can say/do anything without repercussions. Most of them just want to get through whatever random dungeon they popped in, so there isn't any time to do anything but go-go-go, and if you don't already know the dungeon and boss mechanics, good luck (or, rather, you should have watched it on Youtube and become an expert without ever having seen it in person). This goes back to the community is rough around the edges again moreso than anything else
* LFR can get you through most end game content. There are different difficult tiers, LFR is pretty laid back; you get to see the encounters (in some basic sense), you get to see the lore unfold, and you get some of the same loot models. The ~good~ loot is still locked behind the harder difficulty tiers; the groups are much smaller than vanilla, but apart from that it still works pretty much like it did for vanilla.
* If you skip an Xpac, you've pretty much missed it. You can occasionally find people going back for the content for the achievements, but don't count of getting much out of it other than perhaps a speedbump as it occurs in the leveling process. You will find a lot of mostly abandoned game mechanics and zones across all the XPACs -- Legion's Legendaries, Warlord Garrisons, a lot of the old reputation-based systems, etc.
* Mechanics are still keyed around a rotation, but it's not nearly as bad as in vanilla. A lot more based on reacting to triggers/counters than it was just macroing 1-2-3-4., although you can still 1-2-3-4 your way to the finish line if you wanted to. There's still a good deal of GCD/off GCD and some macroing, but it's not nearly as bad as it was.
* Economy inflation is crazy. Blizzard Tokens help, but not that much. The asian gold farmers are pretty much gone and have long since been replaced by auction house bots. The game will now throw gold at you, and coming from Vanilla it will seem like you are amassing a fortune... but if you need to go to the AH for anything it won't last at all.
* Heirloom items make alting a bit more tolerable. However, back to the community comment, now you see people who refuse to group with low levels unless they have a lot of heirloom items.
* Graphics and models have been overhauled a couple of times now. WoW is actually a DX12 game now.
* PvP still exists, if you don't want to get ganked in the open world roll on a carebear server (PvE Server). World PvP on those servers is consensual, not implied.
* Your old characters will probably still be there, although you will probably want to re-roll from Level 1 to get back into it, and then maybe come back to one of your older characters. Leveling has been significantly accelerated; however since I last played a few months ago they adjusted level scaling and I don't know how it is right now. Supposedly now almost all zones level scale; most people are saying it takes a bit longer to level, but still nowhere near Vanilla time scales.
* There is almost no down time anymore, unless you die. Everything is go-go-go, and pretty much every class/build has some form of resource management, be it stamina, mana, rage, whatever. A lot of classes have multiple resources to manage (DK runes + runic power, for instance).
It's a totally different game today.
OP will hate WoW whether they made the game specifically for him or not. His posting history is proof that perfection is all that he will accept. There is no such thing as perfection, thus he will never find what he seeks.
I really don't understand why people cannot accept that other people might like different things.
What is the scaling? Do the mobs in the dungeon scale to the highest level in your group? Does the game block you from having large differences in level within your group? Does it scale the level of the players to the level of the content? Are there limits on this?
In Vanilla, the point of taking players of the wrong level wasn't for experience. It was for loot. You want the boss loot from a dungeon, but you don't want to take two hours, the first half hour of which is trying to assemble a group. So you get someone 20 levels above the dungeon level to run you through it much quicker. Most non-endgame grouping basically consisted of that, and much of the level cap content consisted of taking a 10-man raid into 5-man group content. If they've made it so that you can't do that anymore, I'd regard that as a major improvement. Have they?
My complaint about combat wasn't so much about the number of buttons but what you do with them. It wasn't as bad as Anarchy Online, where literally getting up and leaving the room in the middle of combat scarcely mattered. But nearly the only way that WoW asked you to pay much attention was to watch for adds.
I'm aware that WoW has a dungeon finder. The real question is, how well does it work? WoW had a dungeon finder in Vanilla, too, but it basically didn't work. You'd hardly ever get a group member from it, and even when you did, it was usually someone way outside of the appropriate level range. For comparison, FFXIV has a dungeon finder, but it commonly takes about half as long as it does to clear the dungeon unless you're a tank or healer. Elsword has a dungeon finder that actually works, so you can get a group quickly, jump in, and play.
Suppose that I wanted a group for a relatively unpopular dungeon not part of the latest expansion. Could I expect to join the dungeon finder as a DPS class and typically have a full group ready to start the dungeon in five minutes? Would it commonly take half an hour? Would the queue never pop unless you want one of a handful of the most popular dungeons?
And when the queue does pop, does it give you a reasonable group composition and players of reasonable level for the dungeon? Or will most of your new teammates be really low levels and just hoping that someone high level joins and runs them through it? Things like that make a huge difference.
You said that some of my complaints are particular to the genre. Certainly, WoW isn't the only MMORPG that has some of those things I didn't like. But Vanilla WoW had a much worse case of (2), (5), (6), (8), (11), (12), and (13) than any other game I've played. For comparison, Guild Wars 1 had exactly zero of the problems on my list.
The only one I remember was the getting stuck bent over while harvesting (or looting?) bug.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
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How badly does skipping an expansion pack mean you've missed it? I'd assume that anything that used to be endgame is basically undoable at this point in anything remotely resembling the original form if it's even still accessible. But you have to get to level 110 somehow. Does that mean that the entire 1-110 road is soloing in a deserted world? Or is it still possible to do the group content along the way using the group finder?
A substantial amount of reacting to what mobs are doing and countering it would be a welcome and enormous improvement over Vanilla WoW combat.
The wiki says that heirloom items start at 500 gold each. Even if they're throwing out a lot more gold than they used to, I'd assume that you don't amass 500 gold by the time you hit level 3. How soon is it viable to get the heirloom items? And do they particularly matter, or would I be fine without them?
I was considering starting fresh. From Blizzard's site, it looks like it's free up to level 20, then a subscription alone is sufficient up to 110, and you only need to buy an expansion beyond that. Having bought the box for the original game wouldn't benefit me at all now. And leveling from 1-60 is probably also massively faster than it used to be. Is there some reason why that would be massively inferior to trying to recover my old account?
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
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Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
2) Combat is based very heavily on level and gear, and very little on the skill of the player. This changes with the difficulty level of the content you do, but overall, naw; its the level and gear.
3) Finding a group for group content is easy almost to a fault; see the 10k threads on 'group finder'.
4) Travel is no issue at all except in rare 'oops, I didn't think ahead' ways.
5) Inter-continental travel has no issues.
6) Extreme server stability. Stay off a "full" server around launches and you shouldn't have an issue. Blizzard has hiccups on launches that effect everyone, but relative to other companies, they are generally on top of it.
7) Dungeons can be too short or zerged through so that if you are a first time player, you may feel like someone threw you in a tornado and you came out with 3 levels but can't recall anything but flashing primary colors. At max level this isn't accurate; but as you level you won't find a group that won't railroad through in like 7-10 minutes. Exceptions exist.
8) The grouping culture is that if you are in a random pick-up group, don't expect any conversation or understanding if you don't know what's going on. If you are in a guild that caters to new and returning players and groups often, you can have a great social time levelling. These guilds can be difficult to find - lots of promises from guilds and then you find they are unsocial solo levelling machines. Do the research and you will find what you need though.
9) Endgame content is completely accessible, again some would say to a fault. However, that is really on like a 'tier 1 difficulty'. Even keyed dungeons become unkeyed by the time a casual player is ready for them. Endgame content on the toughest difficulty is doable with a medium to heavy amount of game time.
10) There is next to zero downtime between battles. Exceptions at the endgame.
11) Griefing is not a problem that I know of in anyway.
12) Probably the least amount of visible gold farmers of any mmo I know. You see it, but it is not like the old days. In fact, they have there economy set up in such a way that I have no earthly idea why anyone would even want to buy gold for WoW anymore. Money is easy to make for an imbecile in this game.
13) The UI is servicable with many stable options on twitch/curse as add-ons.
14) Gearing is important, but very very different. Your issues don't really exist anymore to a large extent, but there are other gear arguments to take its place. I have no issues with gear in WoW.
15) I don't think you'd have an issue with loot distribution now - there are some specific issues with the current expansion, but by the time you hit max, I can't imagine they would exist in the same way. You will actually have the option of creating a max level character if you'd be buying up to the current expansion, and honestly, it would be a little awkward at first, but a little reading on your class/spec and I bet you'd feel pretty comfortable pretty quick.
16) Crafting has been revamped with this expansion and I haven't tried it. I hate crafting with a passion so I am not the right person to ask.
Note: I didn't actually read any of the other posts carefully, so I apologize if there is repeat information.
My final thoughts are that if you haven't played WoW since Vanilla, there is a new video game you should try; it's called WoW. It's almost a completely different animal.
Being able to create a max level character singular doesn't do anything for me. If there are a lot of classes, then I will want to play them all, and will split time between them. It looks like it's 12 now, up from 9 in Vanilla, but that's manageable. It looks like Blizzard still accommodates people who play alts pretty well, which is something that basically hasn't changed much since Vanilla.
It sounds like the level scaling could be pretty good. Pick a zone and gain 20 levels over the course of doing that particular zone. Send different characters to different zones and I can see all of the content without having to do any particular thing twelve times.
At the moment, I'm leaning toward giving it a go, but not tonight. I need more time to plan things out than that. It looks like I can go with just a subscription until I get everything to level 110, which will probably never happen.
When I pick up a new game (or return to an old one), I spend a lot of time reading up on it and planning out what I'm going to do. People often say that the game has changed a lot, but most of the time, the game ends up feeling awfully similar to how it did when I last played. I didn't want to put a bunch of hours into planning out what I would do in WoW, pick it up, promptly be reminded of why I quit in the first place, and quit again. People make it sound like WoW has changed over the years more than most MMORPGs.
When I played before, I used a keyboard and mouse. I can't do that very much for gaming anymore, but need to use a gamepad. WoW is famous for having lots of toolbars full of all sorts of stuff, even if you never use most of them, and that means I'm going to need more actions than I have gamepad buttons.
So long as WoW gives you a way to map them to combinations of multiple keys to actions (move left, jump, use skill 3 on hotbar 2, etc.), I can use that to remap combinations of gamepad buttons to the various skills that I'll need to use. If every action is single key only, I probably won't be able to play. If it can do combinations of two keys, that is much better. If all but one key in a combination has to be shift/ctrl/alt or something like that, that's usable, but not as good as if I could map a combination of two arbitrary letters or numbers to mean some skill. Arbitrary combinations of three keys is ideal and should make the game readily playable with a gamepad.
Now, it's all just throw-away. But, I'll give them this, they've done a helluva job keeping the game relevant this many years later.
I haven't been back since Gobbo's. So what was that Pandaria (I can't keep track)? I played Vanilla, maxed hunter. Played Wraith and went so far as to get my Shadow Priest into Raiding (I think I quit sometime after the 10th run of a dungeon for a mace I was farming). I briefly popped on for Cataclysm and the Wetlands (my favorite zone) was gutted. I tried continuing during Warlords and just couldn't get into it. I am debating going back now. I've been eyeballing it for a few weeks. I just don't have the time it took in WotLK to keep up with dailies + life. So I dunno if it's for me anymore.
At some point I worry I've just outgrown MMORPG's. Which is funny because I find time for PNP D&D.
What I can say is I don't think I've ever gotten a Horde character out of their starting area (I tried the Gobbo island and it bored the everliving shitake out of me)
Though if vanilla WOW was your last one its been a while eh?
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
In just 4 years the game had changed so much. Leveling was super quick, despite the cap being up to 85 I got a warrior from total fresh start to cap in a little over 4 days played.
Contrast it to my first character in vanilla, a Paladin which took me a whopping 16 days played.
Despite the revamp of the world, I spent some time running in groups using the cross server dungeon finder which did result in very short queue times even though I advertised as a DPS and not a tank.
Thing was, every time I returned to the open world all of my quests were grey and had to be dumped.
The pacing was furious, players ran through dungeons at a scream, rarely resting and I found it exhausting just to keep up with the group, I quickly grew to loath hearing "Go, go, go, go go!" but little else in terms of conversation during those runs.
So yeah, even then WOW had changed in so many ways that you probably would like, I didn't so quit after that first month and have never gone back.
I can't even imagine what WOW must be like these days.....
But that said, I'll probably give the "classic WOW" version a go once Blizz stands them up, just for old times sake.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon