Happy for the OP. For me vanilla WoW did everything exactly wrong. I really wasn't interested in the ultimate themeparky MMO filled with gold- and timesinks in all the wrong places. Progression milestones that WoW players saw as 'rewards', I saw as lifting penalties.
But then I played SWG before that. I went to play GW1. Less open world MMO, but mechanics made more sense to me. And great story and group PVP for that time.
Not going to lie, WoW did lots right, but some things people have moved on from. Problem is the people in the industry don't understand the "Why", so they just keep repeating the same thing and never works.
You should stop feel pity for yourself about the time you've waste. Vanilla WoW used to be a great game. However at the moment it suck. Normally I will share a pity for people have a poor life , but in that case I will give you an advice, stop stucking on the past and moving forward. I understand your feeling, you waste almost half of your youth for that game, then you cannot admit that it's a waste, but it's just a game, don't let it swallow your life. I really feel pity for you
WoW is/was an insanely popular game, but I wouldn't call it "open world"; there were instanced dungeons, for example. In fact, most people would probably cite WoW as the quintessential "theme park" MMO... which may not preclude the tag "open world" but seems philosophically tangent to it at the very least.
Yes WoW got many things right, and if one were to poll the street it would likely be the first game mentioned when prompted with "MMORPG" as an associated phrase. That stated, it's not the only non - instanced, factional PvP MMORPG in 2019 by a very long shot.
"The simple is the seal of the true and beauty is the splendor of truth" -Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar Authored 139 missions in VendettaOnline and 6 tracks in Distance
Here is something WoW got wrong (for me): I don't like the lack of physics in combat. Avatars feel ethereal, massless. I was playing a physics-based combat MMORPG when WoW launched, and being able to intuitively translate player skill into success in combat through spatial awareness and kinesthetic sense is something I greatly enjoy.
"The simple is the seal of the true and beauty is the splendor of truth" -Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar Authored 139 missions in VendettaOnline and 6 tracks in Distance
I haven't played many MMORPGs right at launch. But that includes WoW. A year after launch, WoW's server stability was still a disaster.
Or maybe your internet connection to the servers was a disaster ?
I've been playing since release (and beta before), past the first 3 months or so I had no more problems. The loot lag was gone, and the experience was smooth.
And Blizzard has been very honest and refunded all the downtime with free days.
Also, quite interesting that you say the stability was the worse when you actually seriously lack experience in MMO launches...
When I picked up Vanilla WoW, it only let you display one skillbar at a time. There wasn't any option built into the UI to display more skillbars. That required UI mods. Blizzard later saw that everyone was doing that and added it to the base UI. But it wasn't in there from the start. That wasn't the only problem with the base UI, but it was the most egregious.
Actually, to conclusively prove you wrong, I've dug around in the patch notes and found exactly when it was added:
"You can now have multiple action bars on screen at the same time."
Because before that patch, you couldn't, at least apart from mods. Requiring mods for that basic functionality does not constitute doing "everything right", as the original poster claims.
So you have your own definitions how to do things right, we all have. As I said, I've been playing since beta, multiple classes, and I never had any action bar problems.
And since we discuss what's right and wrong, their addon system has always been brilliant and is definitely done right. The fact you choose to not use it doesn't make it bad.
I could go on with your other points, like crafting being useless (WHAT???), combat being mediocre when WoW always had one of the smoothest "what you see is what you get" combat of all MMOs... no, I definitely can't take that post of yours seriously.
Seems to me that you are just riding the "WoW bashing" wagon.
There's one point I'd be interested in understanding better, about crafting being useful or not. (I'm of the same opinion as Quiz)
At launch, my son took goblin crafting while I took gnome and both turned out to be pretty useless.
I recall one alt armor crafting yet as with most games I never could wear anything I made as it always was of lower level than my crafter.
I can't actually recall ever using player crafted weapons or armor, always went with drops which always were superior to anything player made.
I know herbalists made useful potions, but I found it was best to just take two gathering professions and sell everything on the auction house for gold.
So this all happened pre BC, perhaps the situation improved in later expansions.
I did return for Cata and again wore nothing but drops and ran two gathering professions but perhaps I overlooked something based on my past experience?
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
You've got a weird definition of "everything". For starters, in Vanilla WoW:
1) Combat was mediocre, with a time to kill that was way too long. 2) The endgame was awful enough to actually be worse than games that didn't have an endgame at all. 3) Crafting was both boring and nearly useless, with bags as the main exception. 4) Grouping mechanics barely worked at all, with cold calling people you find with /who as the primary way to get a group. 5) The loot system practically begged people to ninja loot everything from the final boss. 6) Server stability was by far the worst I've seen in any MMO, ever. 7) Kill stealing was a major problem. 8) The ability to kill the other faction's quest givers brought gratuitous griefing for no benefits. 9) The means to switch continents were flagrantly broken, and liable to kill you or send you back where you came from, except during the Captain Placeholder era. 10) The stock UI was basically unusable, which made it mandatory to get UI mods that would break with every patch.
That's a whole lot of things that Vanilla WoW got very wrong. That's not to say that it was all bad. It did have some good points, such as:
1) No item mall. 2) Seamless zoning within a continent was pretty cool. 3) Well designed auction house.
I don't think you've actually played vanilla/classic.
WoW took the PVE straight from EQ and PVP from DAOC. They just made the game more accessible, less hardcore, They just found the right balance between too easy and too hard (talking about vanilla), that’s all.
WoW took the PVE straight from EQ and PVP from DAOC. They just made the game more accessible, less hardcore, They just found the right balance between too easy and too hard (talking about vanilla), that’s all.
I can't agree. EQ1 and DAOC both used camp grinding to progress in PVE while WOW has a quest driven model which I'm told made a first appearance with AC2, and EQ2 as I recall.
As for PVP WOW wasn't anything much like DAOC with its three faction RVR keep taking design including a second tier of progession outside of just raising traditional levels.
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
I haven't played many MMORPGs right at launch. But that includes WoW. A year after launch, WoW's server stability was still a disaster.
Or maybe your internet connection to the servers was a disaster ?
I've been playing since release (and beta before), past the first 3 months or so I had no more problems. The loot lag was gone, and the experience was smooth.
And Blizzard has been very honest and refunded all the downtime with free days.
Also, quite interesting that you say the stability was the worse when you actually seriously lack experience in MMO launches...
When I picked up Vanilla WoW, it only let you display one skillbar at a time. There wasn't any option built into the UI to display more skillbars. That required UI mods. Blizzard later saw that everyone was doing that and added it to the base UI. But it wasn't in there from the start. That wasn't the only problem with the base UI, but it was the most egregious.
Actually, to conclusively prove you wrong, I've dug around in the patch notes and found exactly when it was added:
"You can now have multiple action bars on screen at the same time."
Because before that patch, you couldn't, at least apart from mods. Requiring mods for that basic functionality does not constitute doing "everything right", as the original poster claims.
So you have your own definitions how to do things right, we all have. As I said, I've been playing since beta, multiple classes, and I never had any action bar problems.
And since we discuss what's right and wrong, their addon system has always been brilliant and is definitely done right. The fact you choose to not use it doesn't make it bad.
I could go on with your other points, like crafting being useless (WHAT???), combat being mediocre when WoW always had one of the smoothest "what you see is what you get" combat of all MMOs... no, I definitely can't take that post of yours seriously.
Seems to me that you are just riding the "WoW bashing" wagon.
If the problem was my Internet connection, then why did Blizzard so often feel the need to give everyone on the server a subscription extension as compensation for server instability or downtime so often? When I quit during Vanilla, they had granted my account a total of 30 days worth of such extensions. My recollection is that it was a single 5-day extension (as compensation for a server being completely down for 24+ hours), a single 3-day, and the rest all 1-day extensions, typically as a result of something like a couple hours of the server being completely down, or perhaps nominally up but constantly disconnecting people. Sometimes it would let you chat just fine, but not move or kill anything, so you could talk to other people in the game and learn that it was broken for everyone else, too.
My complaint about WoW server stability isn't a complaint about launch day. I don't care if the servers are down half the week when a game launches. I want stable servers, so I typically don't play games at launch. But I absolutely do care if the servers are stable a year later, by which the launch day problems really ought to be fixed. WoW's weren't.
Crafting wasn't quite completely useless, but it was awfully close to it. I got all professions to the level cap, and at the level cap (then 300 for crafting), what could you craft that had any value? For tailoring, there was mooncloth, which was worth about 10g on the auction house and had a four day cooldown. My recollection is that there was another profession that had something with a 2 day cooldown, but I don't recall what it was. And that was pretty much it, unless you had one of the few recipes that were rare enough to have any value, such as the bottomless bag. If you wanted to get any real benefit out of your professions, the main way to do it was to take gathering professions and sell whatever you get on the auction house.
I used add-ons during Vanilla. You pretty much had to in order to play the game. The main thing I used was Cosmos, which had a ton of stuff. I didn't use the sort of add-ons that would halfway play the game for you, and that Blizzard would repeatedly try to break. I much prefer that a game have a working UI right out of the box, rather than having to go fishing around for add-ons to try to fix what the developers couldn't. That's something that Blizzard botched, and badly.
I'll concede that WoW's combat being bad is a matter of opinion. As you say, the animations did match what was going on in combat pretty well. But games like EverQuest II that make them basically uncorrelated are unusual.
My complaint about the combat is basically that it was boring. You pull something, then you sit there and hack away for 30 seconds, going through some fixed skill rotation without otherwise moving. Then you sit down to eat and drink for 10 seconds. Then you rinse and repeat. Occasionally, you'd have to be careful to avoid roamers. Success or failure in combat depended almost entirely on your level and gear, with less influence of what you actually did than most other games. Though in hindsight, it was at least realistically possible to screw up and die, while since then, some games moved toward making sure that you win almost no matter what you do.
I also find it interesting that you quote a post that mostly consists of conclusively proving that one of your previous, mocking claims is objectively wrong, and completely ignore the post you quote to go on a rant.
You've got a weird definition of "everything". For starters, in Vanilla WoW:
1) Combat was mediocre, with a time to kill that was way too long. 2) The endgame was awful enough to actually be worse than games that didn't have an endgame at all. 3) Crafting was both boring and nearly useless, with bags as the main exception. 4) Grouping mechanics barely worked at all, with cold calling people you find with /who as the primary way to get a group. 5) The loot system practically begged people to ninja loot everything from the final boss. 6) Server stability was by far the worst I've seen in any MMO, ever. 7) Kill stealing was a major problem. 8) The ability to kill the other faction's quest givers brought gratuitous griefing for no benefits. 9) The means to switch continents were flagrantly broken, and liable to kill you or send you back where you came from, except during the Captain Placeholder era. 10) The stock UI was basically unusable, which made it mandatory to get UI mods that would break with every patch.
That's a whole lot of things that Vanilla WoW got very wrong. That's not to say that it was all bad. It did have some good points, such as:
1) No item mall. 2) Seamless zoning within a continent was pretty cool. 3) Well designed auction house.
I don't think you've actually played vanilla/classic.
I played eight characters to the level cap during Vanilla. In hindsight, I should have quit the game much sooner and picked up Guild Wars instead. It wasn't an awful game, but I didn't like it very much. I could respect that it did what Blizzard intended: time spent gives you progression, whether you're good at the game or not, and without making it blatantly obvious like an idle game. I just didn't like what the game was intended to be.
As for the more recent "Classic" version of WoW, no I haven't played that. If it's based on something that I didn't like much in 2005, then I don't feel the need to play it again today.
You've got a weird definition of "everything". For starters, in Vanilla WoW:
1) Combat was mediocre, with a time to kill that was way too long. 2) The endgame was awful enough to actually be worse than games that didn't have an endgame at all. 3) Crafting was both boring and nearly useless, with bags as the main exception. 4) Grouping mechanics barely worked at all, with cold calling people you find with /who as the primary way to get a group. 5) The loot system practically begged people to ninja loot everything from the final boss. 6) Server stability was by far the worst I've seen in any MMO, ever. 7) Kill stealing was a major problem. 8) The ability to kill the other faction's quest givers brought gratuitous griefing for no benefits. 9) The means to switch continents were flagrantly broken, and liable to kill you or send you back where you came from, except during the Captain Placeholder era. 10) The stock UI was basically unusable, which made it mandatory to get UI mods that would break with every patch.
That's a whole lot of things that Vanilla WoW got very wrong. That's not to say that it was all bad. It did have some good points, such as:
1) No item mall. 2) Seamless zoning within a continent was pretty cool. 3) Well designed auction house.
I don't think you've actually played vanilla/classic.
I played eight characters to the level cap during Vanilla. In hindsight, I should have quit the game much sooner and picked up Guild Wars instead. It wasn't an awful game, but I didn't like it very much. I could respect that it did what Blizzard intended: time spent gives you progression, whether you're good at the game or not, and without making it blatantly obvious like an idle game. I just didn't like what the game was intended to be.
As for the more recent "Classic" version of WoW, no I haven't played that. If it's based on something that I didn't like much in 2005, then I don't feel the need to play it again today.
Eight characters to level cap.... Then think of everything your saying here..... It sound like HEAVY burnout.
It would appear you loved the game in its day.
I've been playing Vanilla both on retail and emulators all along..... I know burn out, at times I can't stand it, but I recognize the difference between good game and burnout !
You've got a weird definition of "everything". For starters, in Vanilla WoW:
1) Combat was mediocre, with a time to kill that was way too long. 2) The endgame was awful enough to actually be worse than games that didn't have an endgame at all. 3) Crafting was both boring and nearly useless, with bags as the main exception. 4) Grouping mechanics barely worked at all, with cold calling people you find with /who as the primary way to get a group. 5) The loot system practically begged people to ninja loot everything from the final boss. 6) Server stability was by far the worst I've seen in any MMO, ever. 7) Kill stealing was a major problem. 8) The ability to kill the other faction's quest givers brought gratuitous griefing for no benefits. 9) The means to switch continents were flagrantly broken, and liable to kill you or send you back where you came from, except during the Captain Placeholder era. 10) The stock UI was basically unusable, which made it mandatory to get UI mods that would break with every patch.
That's a whole lot of things that Vanilla WoW got very wrong. That's not to say that it was all bad. It did have some good points, such as:
1) No item mall. 2) Seamless zoning within a continent was pretty cool. 3) Well designed auction house.
I don't think you've actually played vanilla/classic.
I played eight characters to the level cap during Vanilla. In hindsight, I should have quit the game much sooner and picked up Guild Wars instead. It wasn't an awful game, but I didn't like it very much. I could respect that it did what Blizzard intended: time spent gives you progression, whether you're good at the game or not, and without making it blatantly obvious like an idle game. I just didn't like what the game was intended to be.
As for the more recent "Classic" version of WoW, no I haven't played that. If it's based on something that I didn't like much in 2005, then I don't feel the need to play it again today.
Eight characters to level cap.... Then think of everything your saying here..... It sound like HEAVY burnout.
It would appear you loved the game in its day.
I've been playing Vanilla both on retail and emulators all along..... I know burn out, at times I can't stand it, but I recognize the difference between good game and burnout !
No, I never loved WoW. It was fun when I was new to it, but went downhill, and I should have quit entirely after about six months. I seriously considered quitting at that point, and didn't. Beyond that, it was never quite bad enough to quit (until I finally did), but not very much fun to play.
But I learned from that blunder. Today I ask, how fun is the game to play? If it gets to the point where it is "meh", like it was with WoW for a majority of my time there, I'm much quicker to quit and move on. But if a game is still a lot of fun to play, then sure, keep playing it.
And no, this isn't a case of burnout being a reason to rate a game down. I don't do that, as I'm aware of burnout. The two games I've spent the most time playing in my life are probably Guild Wars 1 and Uncharted Waters Online. And I still say that those are the two greatest games ever made. I don't keep exact track of time played, but other plausible contenders for most time spent are Infantry, A Tale in the Desert, Champions Online, Neverwinter, and Elsword. Infantry is one of the all-time greats, and the best PVP game I've ever played. The others I just listed are games that I regard as good but not great--which is a lot better than I'd rate most games.
And there are also games like Spiral Knights that are a ton of fun while they last, but get old after a while. I didn't put nearly as much time into that game as I have into some others, but I was still very happy with it because it was a lot of fun while I was there. It just didn't have enough content to be the sort of game that you play for years.
I'd like to clarify what I mean by Vanilla WoW crafting being "useless", as it's likely different from what the people arguing against me mean by it. I don't mean that all possible crafted items have no use whatsoever. Rather, if you could craft an item yourself, or you could buy an equivalent or better item from the auction house for cheaper, then I say it's useless to craft that item for yourself. It's in that sense that I say crafting things for yourself was very nearly useless in Vanilla.
I think Blizzard need Delete on their Q&A conference team, can you imagine what PR would be going through?
"Greed free, you get what you pay for….. I'll let your Imagination run free with that one. This alone is often a HUGE game breaker. It could take a Cleveland steamer dump all over a good game."
I'd like to clarify what I mean by Vanilla WoW crafting being "useless", as it's likely different from what the people arguing against me mean by it. I don't mean that all possible crafted items have no use whatsoever. Rather, if you could craft an item yourself, or you could buy an equivalent or better item from the auction house for cheaper, then I say it's useless to craft that item for yourself. It's in that sense that I say crafting things for yourself was very nearly useless in Vanilla.
You've got a weird definition of "everything". For starters, in Vanilla WoW:
1) Combat was mediocre, with a time to kill that was way too long. 2) The endgame was awful enough to actually be worse than games that didn't have an endgame at all. 3) Crafting was both boring and nearly useless, with bags as the main exception. 4) Grouping mechanics barely worked at all, with cold calling people you find with /who as the primary way to get a group. 5) The loot system practically begged people to ninja loot everything from the final boss. 6) Server stability was by far the worst I've seen in any MMO, ever. 7) Kill stealing was a major problem. 8) The ability to kill the other faction's quest givers brought gratuitous griefing for no benefits. 9) The means to switch continents were flagrantly broken, and liable to kill you or send you back where you came from, except during the Captain Placeholder era. 10) The stock UI was basically unusable, which made it mandatory to get UI mods that would break with every patch.
That's a whole lot of things that Vanilla WoW got very wrong. That's not to say that it was all bad. It did have some good points, such as:
1) No item mall. 2) Seamless zoning within a continent was pretty cool. 3) Well designed auction house.
I don't think you've actually played vanilla/classic.
I played eight characters to the level cap during Vanilla. In hindsight, I should have quit the game much sooner and picked up Guild Wars instead. It wasn't an awful game, but I didn't like it very much. I could respect that it did what Blizzard intended: time spent gives you progression, whether you're good at the game or not, and without making it blatantly obvious like an idle game. I just didn't like what the game was intended to be.
As for the more recent "Classic" version of WoW, no I haven't played that. If it's based on something that I didn't like much in 2005, then I don't feel the need to play it again today.
Eight characters to level cap.... Then think of everything your saying here..... It sound like HEAVY burnout.
It would appear you loved the game in its day.
I've been playing Vanilla both on retail and emulators all along..... I know burn out, at times I can't stand it, but I recognize the difference between good game and burnout !
No, I never loved WoW. It was fun when I was new to it, but went downhill, and I should have quit entirely after about six months. I seriously considered quitting at that point, and didn't. Beyond that, it was never quite bad enough to quit (until I finally did), but not very much fun to play.
But I learned from that blunder. Today I ask, how fun is the game to play? If it gets to the point where it is "meh", like it was with WoW for a majority of my time there, I'm much quicker to quit and move on. But if a game is still a lot of fun to play, then sure, keep playing it.
And no, this isn't a case of burnout being a reason to rate a game down. I don't do that, as I'm aware of burnout. The two games I've spent the most time playing in my life are probably Guild Wars 1 and Uncharted Waters Online. And I still say that those are the two greatest games ever made. I don't keep exact track of time played, but other plausible contenders for most time spent are Infantry, A Tale in the Desert, Champions Online, Neverwinter, and Elsword. Infantry is one of the all-time greats, and the best PVP game I've ever played. The others I just listed are games that I regard as good but not great--which is a lot better than I'd rate most games.
And there are also games like Spiral Knights that are a ton of fun while they last, but get old after a while. I didn't put nearly as much time into that game as I have into some others, but I was still very happy with it because it was a lot of fun while I was there. It just didn't have enough content to be the sort of game that you play for years.
Off topic, You mentioned GuildWars1 and got me thinking so I looked and it's still going. I didn't like it back in its day with so meany better choices other than an instanced questing game..... But I think I would like it now, for the fact it could be more challenge for groups.
They want $20 for it, no big deal, but it would only be for messing around a few days..... Or longer. I had a pile of Disc I cant find, I'm sure I still have it....Vanguard was one of them and you can play an emulator if you have it.
Comments
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Yes WoW got many things right, and if one were to poll the street it would likely be the first game mentioned when prompted with "MMORPG" as an associated phrase. That stated, it's not the only non - instanced, factional PvP MMORPG in 2019 by a very long shot.
"The simple is the seal of the true and beauty is the splendor of truth" -Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Authored 139 missions in Vendetta Online and 6 tracks in Distance
"The simple is the seal of the true and beauty is the splendor of truth" -Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Authored 139 missions in Vendetta Online and 6 tracks in Distance
At launch, my son took goblin crafting while I took gnome and both turned out to be pretty useless.
I recall one alt armor crafting yet as with most games I never could wear anything I made as it always was of lower level than my crafter.
I can't actually recall ever using player crafted weapons or armor, always went with drops which always were superior to anything player made.
I know herbalists made useful potions, but I found it was best to just take two gathering professions and sell everything on the auction house for gold.
So this all happened pre BC, perhaps the situation improved in later expansions.
I did return for Cata and again wore nothing but drops and ran two gathering professions but perhaps I overlooked something based on my past experience?
"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
They just made the game more accessible, less hardcore, They just found the right balance between too easy and too hard (talking about vanilla), that’s all.
As for PVP WOW wasn't anything much like DAOC with its three faction RVR keep taking design including a second tier of progession outside of just raising traditional levels.
"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
------------
2024: 47 years on the Net.
My complaint about WoW server stability isn't a complaint about launch day. I don't care if the servers are down half the week when a game launches. I want stable servers, so I typically don't play games at launch. But I absolutely do care if the servers are stable a year later, by which the launch day problems really ought to be fixed. WoW's weren't.
Crafting wasn't quite completely useless, but it was awfully close to it. I got all professions to the level cap, and at the level cap (then 300 for crafting), what could you craft that had any value? For tailoring, there was mooncloth, which was worth about 10g on the auction house and had a four day cooldown. My recollection is that there was another profession that had something with a 2 day cooldown, but I don't recall what it was. And that was pretty much it, unless you had one of the few recipes that were rare enough to have any value, such as the bottomless bag. If you wanted to get any real benefit out of your professions, the main way to do it was to take gathering professions and sell whatever you get on the auction house.
I used add-ons during Vanilla. You pretty much had to in order to play the game. The main thing I used was Cosmos, which had a ton of stuff. I didn't use the sort of add-ons that would halfway play the game for you, and that Blizzard would repeatedly try to break. I much prefer that a game have a working UI right out of the box, rather than having to go fishing around for add-ons to try to fix what the developers couldn't. That's something that Blizzard botched, and badly.
I'll concede that WoW's combat being bad is a matter of opinion. As you say, the animations did match what was going on in combat pretty well. But games like EverQuest II that make them basically uncorrelated are unusual.
My complaint about the combat is basically that it was boring. You pull something, then you sit there and hack away for 30 seconds, going through some fixed skill rotation without otherwise moving. Then you sit down to eat and drink for 10 seconds. Then you rinse and repeat. Occasionally, you'd have to be careful to avoid roamers. Success or failure in combat depended almost entirely on your level and gear, with less influence of what you actually did than most other games. Though in hindsight, it was at least realistically possible to screw up and die, while since then, some games moved toward making sure that you win almost no matter what you do.
I also find it interesting that you quote a post that mostly consists of conclusively proving that one of your previous, mocking claims is objectively wrong, and completely ignore the post you quote to go on a rant.
As for the more recent "Classic" version of WoW, no I haven't played that. If it's based on something that I didn't like much in 2005, then I don't feel the need to play it again today.
It would appear you loved the game in its day.
I've been playing Vanilla both on retail and emulators all along..... I know burn out, at times I can't stand it, but I recognize the difference between good game and burnout !
But I learned from that blunder. Today I ask, how fun is the game to play? If it gets to the point where it is "meh", like it was with WoW for a majority of my time there, I'm much quicker to quit and move on. But if a game is still a lot of fun to play, then sure, keep playing it.
And no, this isn't a case of burnout being a reason to rate a game down. I don't do that, as I'm aware of burnout. The two games I've spent the most time playing in my life are probably Guild Wars 1 and Uncharted Waters Online. And I still say that those are the two greatest games ever made. I don't keep exact track of time played, but other plausible contenders for most time spent are Infantry, A Tale in the Desert, Champions Online, Neverwinter, and Elsword. Infantry is one of the all-time greats, and the best PVP game I've ever played. The others I just listed are games that I regard as good but not great--which is a lot better than I'd rate most games.
And there are also games like Spiral Knights that are a ton of fun while they last, but get old after a while. I didn't put nearly as much time into that game as I have into some others, but I was still very happy with it because it was a lot of fun while I was there. It just didn't have enough content to be the sort of game that you play for years.
You mentioned GuildWars1 and got me thinking so I looked and it's still going. I didn't like it back in its day with so meany better choices other than an instanced questing game..... But I think I would like it now, for the fact it could be more challenge for groups.
They want $20 for it, no big deal, but it would only be for messing around a few days..... Or longer. I had a pile of Disc I cant find, I'm sure I still have it....Vanguard was one of them and you can play an emulator if you have it.