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I have been longing for the vanilla World of Warcraft for a long time now. I have a friend like me who loved the game at that point too, so when he suggested me of a private server a few days ago to play together, I immediately jumped in and started playing. So far it has really been a great, eye-opening experience. You immediately start to notice what made vanilla WoW experience so amazing. This made me thinking and I wanted to make a blog.
To start off, there is very little, if any, hand-holding involved. The game, except maybe the first 2-3 levels, has a really steep learning curve. The user interface is not as helping as today's game, for example quest items don't shine or there are no detailed quest locations shown on minimap/world map.
The health points of the creatures and also their damage are much, much more compared to today. Killing one or maybe two is allright, but pull three and you will most likely die, as it is difficult for a solo player. Elite creatures are really tough, you need a party to deal with them.
All of these factors make the game much more easier to play by interacting with other players. I would even say that in a sense, this is necessary to enjoy the game, because otherwise you'd become frustrated easily.
The server population is really, really good. Even at late hours there is 2500-3000 players online. At peak hours it is over 6000. Every zone has an healthy amount of players, and I see what the effects of the above mentioned characteristics of the game result in. The people party A LOT. In every zone there are people playing together, partying up, tackling the elite quests and looking for people to do dungeons.
There is a feeling of community and togetherness that I remember when I was playing back then, and I see it now. The gameplay of vanilla WoW is riddled with obscurity, inconsistencies, things that don't make sense or otherwise weird design choices. However, what made the game this good was never totally due to the gameplay. Game was fun, however even better was the community! This is an MMO, and that is all that matters. Otherwise you could pick up a game like Oblivion, Morrowind etc. and play that too, and you would be doing similar things in the game (except for the party)
This is also, I think, due to the maturity of the players. I assume most of the players playing in Vanilla server are like me and my friend, who miss that time of the game and want to relive it again. This means they are naturally over a certain age, and therefore not only are mature as in age, but are also used to and prefer a certain kind of gameplay and social interaction when playing a game. I saw all kinds of people who are friendly and helpful, just as I remember back in the day.
The playerbase of WoW today has changed. It no longer caters to the crowd I described above, but to a crowd that expects to consume the content as fast and as efficiently as possible. It doesn't matter how they play the game or who they play it with, only thing that matters is the next "content" and the next "gear". After the game become more popular with Burning Crusade and WOTLK, these players started to slowly replace and overtake the core crowd playing the game (this by the way is natural, as people get older and have responsibilities etc., not to mention any game can get boring after a while)
Blizzard listened to this vocal group, who did not want anything to do with having to play with other players except raids or pvp settings. The solo content has become way more important than group content, which should be much, much more important in an MMO. Today you can do a couple raids, dungeons or pvp and then go sit at your garrison. Back in 60, there were people doing stuff in every zone. So by agreeing to give these players what they want, in my opinion, Blizzard destroyed the core part, what made the game such a great experience in the first place. It is really unlikely that I'll go back to WoW in the future, that ship has sailed for me since WoD was such a disappointment. However, provided that this private server is alive and well, I can see myself playing and enjoying vanila WoW for years to come.
Oh, and if Blizzard offered the opportunity to play the game, I would definitely pay to play it officially, I would even be okay to pay an higher subscription fee for that. I am still perplexed as to why they don't do it, my guess is that they are waiting for the final days of WoW to do this. They probably want to milk it as much as they want before they start to offer legacy servers.
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Yeah, I feel the same way. The game doesnt make much sense to me. It is a multiplayer game but you mostly play alone.
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Vanilla WoW was an awesome game and I still play it also  It has a lot of the oldschool MMO flavor to it, ofcourse at the time it was considered super casual, as opposed to everquest etc. For example, weapon skills, which was kind of a relic from earlier MMOs like ultima online, implemented in a half-assed way. What made it stand out is imo the huge amount of polish Blizzard put into it, how fluent the abilities and movement worked, 40 man raids etc (which is still unmatched today pretty much).
I wish I would have gotten to play it in the patches before battlegrounds were out, as back in that time it was world PvP all over azeroth :D, which is just so much more awesome than sitting in a queue all day. I get the impression that some time after BWL was out, the designers simply took it to the direction of 'max efficiency gear grind' for both PvP and PvE and it lost the kind of spontaneous experiences I had in vanilla. And the unfortunate thing is that not only Blizzard's designers, but many MMO devs seem to copy this design, they mistakingly assume WoW's popularity is due to people liking the super linear gear threadwheel, rather than just the feeling of being in an open world with all these other players and having fun, pvping, raiding etc. And that has kind of ruined every new MMO after WoW up til now.
I'm right now setting my hopes on Camelot Unchained, which a game in development right now from the makers of DaoC. (shameless plug)
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TBC was pretty much vanilla: improved! It kept the same hardcore approach, added some great aspects & refined
everything. The only negative aspects i see people complain about are flying mounts (yuck) and 25 vs 40 man raiding which is polarizing since some loved 40 man raids and others hated the roster boss, most people agree it was a good switch anyway.
WOTLK is where everything started to go downhill with dungeon finder, raid nerfs, making all races/classes the same, flying everywhere and all the rest.
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I love vanilla WoW, but private servers don't give the same thing that retail server would give... It would be good that Blizzard would start these servers again...
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On November 06 2015 03:41 Capped wrote:
TBC was pretty much vanilla: improved! It kept the same hardcore approach, added some great aspects & refined
everything. The only negative aspects i see people complain about are flying mounts (yuck) and 25 vs 40 man raiding which is polarizing since some loved 40 man raids and others hated the roster boss, most people agree it was a good switch anyway.
WOTLK is where everything started to go downhill with dungeon finder, raid nerfs, making all races/classes the same, flying everywhere and all the rest.
TBC was the worst. The reason I stopped with WoW completely. How they fucked up the WC3 story line is just unforgivable.
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On November 06 2015 04:39 Bastinian wrote:
I love vanilla WoW, but private servers don't give the same thing that retail server would give... It would be good that Blizzard would start these servers again...
Which they will probably never do for various reasons. Don't get me wrong, its the only thing that would make me play a retail wow again, but Blizzard are pretty stubborn when it comes to that.
I played various private servers over the years, including going back to raiding in vanilla and stuff. The game was definitely a lot more "fun" to play, and it's not just nostalgia. Nowadays, the game feel so polished that it becomes incredibly bland. Everything is easy to access, every class can do everything etc... There is no soul to anything in the game anymore. I think you described that pretty well in your opening.
I still think TBC is vastly superior to vanilla tho and is probably my favorite, especially for the PvP which, apart from the godly open-world pvp, was pretty stupid in vanilla (well atleast it is now that everyone knows how to play better, some classes become extremely gimmicky). Too bad there is no really good server at the moment for tbc, atleast not at the level of the vanilla one you are talking about (yes we all know which one it is).
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Yeah, they killed the community aspect when they brought in cross realm instances and dungeon queueing.Once you get to level 10 you barely need to leave a major city now.
Also don't forget that in vanilla it takes twice as long to level up.Blizzard patched it a few years ago to push people to end game content.
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people miss vanilla wow because the initial magic you have when exploring the world, and the friends you make at the time (everyone in the world was leveling  )
you never forget and its an insane experience
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On November 06 2015 04:39 Bastinian wrote:
I love vanilla WoW, but private servers don't give the same thing that retail server would give... It would be good that Blizzard would start these servers again...
Well Nostalrius is really good, around 16k ppl online on weekends. People team up, people play together, a lot of raiding guilds around and people are overwhelmingly mature and helpful. I think this is closest to what it could get.
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EPT
