Vanilla WoW.... and addiction

[Melgarh]

WoW in old days was brutal, addicting world.

Hence why websites like wowdetox.com existed - http://web.archive.org/web/201204260905 ... php?page=2

And there are some real, frightening stories on how people's lives were changed, forever, suddenly and brutally. Kinda chilling actually but then again, I guess they did not have the willpower to deal with their life or just wanted to live on pure joy of gaming?

[Dr. Doom]

On another note, I do think you are putting vanilla WoW on a big ass pedestal tho.

Hell, what we are playing at the moment hardly classifies as vanilla WoW. Although the mechanics and all that jazz are blizzlike, the game plays a lot different than 10 years ago. People are a lot more skilled now and tactics can be found anywhere on the internet (even up to date versions if you watch streams/videos of high-end guilds), so everyone and their mother has BWL on farm and is decked out in BiS gear. The only thing that is remotely hardcore about this game is the grinding for mats/consumables, but if anything that is more of a chore rather than a fun part of the game, especially as a healer.

Long story short, although the game is relatively hardcore compared to retail, it isn't that hardcore as you guys make it out to be

Of course, that's the reason why World of Warcraft was considered a casual MMO from the day it was released. The first one that didn't really punish you for dying. I think it's well liked because while it retains a restricted level of accesibility, it's not on EQ99 levels.

[Pottu]

so everyone and their mother has BWL on farm and is decked out in BiS gear

You should have seen some of the MC and BWL runs I've witnessed and you wouldn't make claims like that. There are plenty of people on Nostalrius who bash their heads against bosses for hours and hours. What people need to remember when comparing vanilla retail and Nostalrius is that retail had dozens of servers on three continents, while Nostalrius is unique (in the size of its player base). Every realm on retail had at least one guild on each faction that facerolled all raid content and had BWL on farm before TBC hit. The older and more populous realms had multiple guilds farming AQ40 and even Naxxramas. It's not that Nostalrius players on average are more skilled and more knowledgeable than retail players back in the day or that our emulation makes the game significantly easier than it was - granted, both claims are somewhat true in the sense that overall knowledge of the game is higher now than in 2005 and we get to use 1.12 talents throughout the progression - but that you are seeing the small percentage of hardcore players from each realm now concentrated on one server.

Just to illustrate, let's say that 10% of server population raids actively and has stuff on "farm status".On a retail realm back in 2005-2006 that would have been from 300 to 400 players split in two factions. So maybe 8 guilds. On Nostalrius we have roughly 130,000 active accounts (many players have only one account but numerous players have two or more so it is difficult to gauge) and a daily peak of 13k concurrent players on PvP realm. That 10% thus is at least 1300 players but in reality it's actually much higher than that because it's not the same 13,000 people playing all day every day. That makes for a lot higher number of good quality guilds that have BWL on farm.

As to the OP, remember that loading screen tip that Blizzard gave us: "Bring your friends to Azeroth, but don't forget to go out with them as well".

[Arucado]

"Bring your friends to Azeroth, but don't forget to go out with them as well".

It should say aswell, "but don't try to rank up unless you want this phrase to be legit"

[Dubiu]

Retail WOW still exists?
could swear that World of Warcraft blabla that exists now was a whole different game.

It has pokemon inside it! Grow up blizz

[Dr. Doom]

Retail WOW still exists?
could swear that World of Warcraft blabla that exists now was a whole different game.

It has pokemon inside it! Grow up blizz

Retail is... don't know. It's what you get whenever you take an idea, and corrupt it for the sake of short-term conveniences as well as emotional unfounded outcry, time after time, until what you get is a mere aberration.

AlphaGaming, the dude that convinced me to play Nostalrius, recently made this video that I find absolute spot on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WCmHkTGZSQ

The game has no internal coherence on what it wants to be (result on wanting to please everyone at the same time). It is currently: A team challenge of speed/rotation/movement with quite a steep difficulty in mythic raiding, that has very little preparation required; as well as a facebook-like game of click, wait, get reward mechanics in the garrison and shipyard. Those are the 2 things that get attention.

Professions are a non-factor, socializing is a non factor, arena pvp is completely dettached from the rest of the game with little to nothing being done over it.

I would like to ask Jeffrey Kaplan and Rob Pardo straight to the face today if what the thing has become, was what the hoped it'd be in the early 2000s when they left Everquest raiding to become an employee for Blizzard.

Aberrant, sorry for repeating myself, but that's the only thing I can see when looking at that game's move in every aspect, lore/story and gameplay alike.

[Xaverius]

IMO what ruined wow wasn't necessarily the simplification of the game (depending on what you like more, the social aspect or the mechanics), but it definitely was the chane in social aspect.
Retail: Want a dungeon? Click a button. Want a raid? Click a button.
Pre-TBC (and TBC too, actually): Want a dungeon? Better jump into that LFG channel and start asking. Want a raid? Either get a guild or find a pug and stock up on food, this is gonna be an arduous expedition of epic proportions.

Back then, server communities were much more tight-knit. And as there were only a few seriously raiding big guilds on a server, if you were being a dick, and kept wiping the group or ninjaing, you were kicked out of the group, and word of mouth carried loooot of weight. If you did that in an endgame instance, you basically couldn't find a guild ever unless you made a new char and tried to behave like a normal person.

And people had reasons to be friendlier too, because thanks to no automated LFG/R system, you had to actually *gasp* talk to others. The same for getting resources. And I feel this carried over to Nostalrius too, which makes it different from most cata + freeservers (with TBC being basically dead and I can't really talk about wotlk as I never really played it - took too long on TBC and my (free)server went to cata before I even hit 80).
Sure, we may spout crap in general all day long, but we do it in a friendly way and we answer questions.