Why is Classic World Of Warcraft so successful?

[PeaceHammer]

The original game has pacing (a game design principal) that was slowly diluted until completely removed.

What is pacing?

When ever you do something interesting you get a nice kick of stimulation out of it, it feels real good, you want more, and getting more often makes you need a higher kick to feel the same intensity of sensation as the first. It keeps climbing till you're numb.

Pacing is downtime, preventing activities that could cause this stimulation creep. It comes in the form of:

- Back tracking
- Slow regeneration
- Larger monster health pools
- Corpse running (another form of backtracking)
- Spontaneous world pvp
- Mob tagging
- High respawn rate rape zones (Dun Garok - honestly fuck this place <3)
- Low respawn rate quest monsters
- Low drop rates

Among many, many more things. It is the main drive in forming community by creating bottle necks of progression causing groups of levelers to coalesce in areas to simply have the chance to interact. But its main use is gives a higher value ratio of time spent in game. You remember things better because the higher investment required gives it meaning.

This is basic systems design. This is why mobile games tend to have long cooldowns on high stimulus game interactions. It gives you a large kick and then takes it away for a fixed amount of time, the alternative is to give you down time activities with low stimulus.

Vanilla used this principal very well. It's not present on retail.

Really good post.

[PeaceHammer]

Almost every change TBC made shows you the imperfections of Classic.

Vanilla is the only WoW for me.

While I'll not say TBC is horrible, it has certain elements that I do indeed think are very bad.

- Flying Mounts (one of the worst things ever added to WoW)
- Resilience (I liked being able to use PvE gear in PvP)
- Arena (where Vanilla is world PvP and a lot of large scale BG's, I can't get excited about arenas. And yet TBC forces you into them to get PvP gear)

So yea overall TBC started the downward spiral of WoW for me.

[Uidrae]

Because Vanilla is a giant fuckin Skinnerbox and we are stupid, little rats

Yeah, but there's more to it than that. The game is still a Skinnerbox, only now it's not a fun one. They log in and click the button, literally now.

The old Skinnerbox was still fun, because of several elements, which are now no longer part of the game.

I read about this years ago. Game makers (not just WoW) actually hired psychologists to help figure out how to make games more addicting. Some of the principles that were applied were the Skinnerbox paradigm but other things were woven in such as elements needed to make employees feel more fulfilled in their jobs / people their lives in general.

Classic WoW, and I'd say BC and early Wrath, had those principles down pat.

Autonomy - or at least a sense of autonomy, in that we had some choice in how we played. Which quests we did, or if we even wanted to quest rather than grinding mobs, for example. This was before questing on rails or things like being forced to build garrisons in WoD. When we logged on, WE could decide what to do to have fun. Now it's all treadmill. You do the "content" because you feel like that's what you have to do, not for fun.

Complexity / Challenge - Content that isn't so easy, repetitive, and boring that it's mind numbing. Sure, some things were repetitive in the past too, but they were challenging enough to keep us going. Elites were actually elite. Even regular mobs hit hard. Clearing a path to a cave now feels like bothersome mobs that are just in the way. Before, you had to figure out how to clear the path without dying, because the mobs were tough and some of them would pull others, etc. Things like that. You had to think instead of just charging in and aggroing a dozen of them and mowing them down while watching TV.

Risk to Reward Ratio - The sense of accomplishment. Completing a hard task and getting a good reward. They weren't throwing rewards at us for logging in. We felt like we earned them. If the reward wasn't good enough for the amount of effort required, we could choose to skip it. Now, it's probably tied into something you need, to force you to do something even if you hate it.

And, I'm only touching on mostly small, minor stuff here. Think about it in terms of bigger things, the greater game.

The Skinnerbox is still kicking in retail. In fact, I'd say it is worse than ever. The slot machine (RNG) is still there too. Unfortunately, the fun, the choices, the challenge, and the sense of accomplishment, are not there like they used to be.

This is simplistic (to avoid writing more of a novel here), and we haven't even touched on "community" (which is also a huge part of what made early WoW was SO much better).

[Reserverue]

Uidrea and Peacehammer said it all!

[Snagprophet]

Hopping to other zones to level also felt natural.

[Vaulken]

Hopping to other zones to level also felt natural.

The change in scenery really helped, and going back to previous zones that had higher level mobs you are now beating down feeds that power fantasy so hard its getting diabetus.