I recently reactivated my old WoW account and purchased Warlords of Draenor out of curiosity, and ended up getting my Orc Death Knight to the new level cap of 100. This article only scratches the surface on why the old worlds are abandoned.
As with most modern MMOs, the endgame begins at max level. In order to help players level faster, Blizzard added a heirlooms mechanic in the second expansion (Wrath of the Lich King) to allow low levels to have above-curve gear while leveling, with a 30% EXP boost. The third expansion (Cataclysm) revamped Azeroth, making new questing much easier and straightforward, and therefore less time is spent in the old world. The fifth expansion adds Dungeon Finder, which is a faster way to level than normal questing. So there is not much incentive to explore until you hit 90 and can go to Draenor. And then once you hit Draenor, you have access to Garrisons, which is a FarmVille-like mechanic which has the easiest financial ROI in the game, making even less of a reason to just explore period. I did not renew my subscription.
Guild Wars 2 had a great solution to this; all zones have content, which the player downscales to. Unfortunately, Tyria (the world of Guild Wars 2) is not as robust as Azeroth.
I think you're clearly correct about the game beginning at max level, but I don't think heirlooms or exp boosts changed anything. Even in vanilla, there were accepted "do this to level as quickly as possible" routes. No one really hung around silithus pre-AQ, with the small exception of people who chose to level there (and there were much better zones to do that).
WoW and mmos in general just don't encourage exploration very much. It doesn't contribute to making your avatar any better. So unless you're really into just having fun - which the game mostly does not encourage in lieu of running dungeons and getting gear and etc, a lot of these zones have just ALWAYS been abandoned, save for some event bringing people to them.
The reason the population is 15-20 in these zones as opposed to 60+ is because there are better ways to level nowadays, not that anyone cared to visit these zones in the first place and heirlooms ruined that.
That being said, I realize you're not blaming this entirely on heirlooms and exp boosts, I just wanted to clarify on that specific part of what you said.
Having played both WoW and Guild Wars 1 (not 2), I think Guild Wars 1 had the best solution of them all -- virtually all the content in the game is "max level" endgame content. They don't use the mechanic of more and better gear as a reward, so content doesn't get obsoleted by that.
I think FFXIV has a great solution for it - at various stages in the endgame content you need to revisit all of the areas to perform your MMO regular kill ten rats activities (to level up the ultimate weapons, basically). It also has far less areas (although I think bigger zones), and almost each zone has content for a wide swath of levels. There's also quests (again for the ultimate weapons, mostly) that make max level people redo the older dungeons, and they're often quite helpful for the newer people doing them for the first time - without those players being too powerful (level sync mechanics).
TL;DR: WoW needed to do more to encourage people to revisit all existing areas four expansions ago. I tried to get back into it a couple of years ago (WotLK era), and I was just put off by how few people were everywhere - and if there were people, they were ignoring you and just grinding through quests.
This contrasted my initial experience with WoW quite a bit - that was either BC or even before that. Lots of people questing, and it was before the dungeon finder so people actually still had to physically form a team of players at the actual location (and spam the chat channels) to get into the dungeons, making it much more of a challenge - and more importantly for an MMO, a social endeavour.
the issue with a guild wars 2 model is that you can never really feel like the hero as no matter how low of zone you go to you are not more powerful. There is something visceral about mowing down opponents who only mere levels ago would strike you down if you were not careful.
wow mediates the issue of content going stale by allowing people to mow through, especially older raids to get accomplishments and gear; mostly for transmog of current gear or mounts and pet. This to me is a better solution. The GW2 solution leads to a more annoying world, where everything has to be taken into account and there is no breezing past low level content on your way to more excitement
The scaling zones of GW2 were not very popular for those of us that played in the beginning. Traditional MMOs allow your character to gain power. The power gain of your character is a large reason for many of the game systems to exist. To develop a system that takes away all this character power that you've gained felt boarderline 'slap in the face' like. Stripping character power is never a proper solution for an MMO.
Apparently there is a class-specific (monk) 50% EXP boost¹ too. Also you can pay $60 for a character boost² to lvl 90.
I wind up playing for a few months each time a new expansion is released, sometimes jumping in for a month if something interesting happens. (For example, WoW will be aping Guild Wars auto-scaling in the next patch, experimenting with 'Timewalking' weekends.)
God that was painful :-). I lost a lot of time in WoW, perhaps it was an escape, but I spent hours learning the various nooks and crannies, leveling up over 3 dozen characters of various types to the max level. I had people I never met that I felt were good friends, shared battles and triumphs and failures. Laughed at the sometimes incredibly subtle in game humor, and sometimes not so subtle. Collected odd recipes to cook, outfits to wear, and trophies and achievements. I loved having the 'two ring' which was one better than the One Ring.
But as others point out, the 'traditional' way to build an MMO is 'learn skills by levelling up / start playing at max level' The game set a number of challenges for 'max level' characters which depended on gear, group composition, and various strategies to overcome the game mechanics. That is where it failed for me.
In WoW while leveling you often needed to join up with groups to run through a local dungeon together. It was fun when you had a good group, annoying when you had children in the group. There were too many ways for 10 - 12 yr old boys to grief people.
In an effort to increase its appeal, Blizzard changed it again and again. Skill changes, techniques, complexity was removed, buffs and nerfs to various skills. Lots of change and slowly less and less appeal. All of the components were there to make it better (arenas were a great testing ground for devs to evaluate PvP changes).
I stopped playing when Mists shipped. It was just too stupid at that point and the similarity to kung-fu panda to stark. Oddly, if you could provide servers that stopped at one of the expansions (Wrath or maybe even Cataclysm) I would still be spending money with Blizzard, but now not so much.
I look at it periodically and see the makings of a durable world/gaming simulation environment. I hope someone picks up the challenge.
Lot of nostalgia and time lost. My wife and I played together before we had kids so we could stay up to 2-3 AM on weekends and 40 man raid Molten Core or Blackwing Lair. We were lucky to find some married people who played and/or some more mature players. We stopped after we had kids (time crunch LOL) but we still keep in touch with some of our guild mates.
I once went as far south as I could, I was determined to find something new. There were mountains, so I spent hours trying to climb them, using a combination of jumping and my horse I did eventually get to the top!!
It was all WEIRD and FLAT!! The textures were stretched really really long, you could see the pixels. And the textures seemed random, from different realms and stuff. There were deep valleys in places, but you could run around them given enough time. I took a bunch of screen shots, eventually I fell off the back of them and had to swim four hours to get back to land. WoW is a crazy game.
I regularly play private servers with friends for the nostalga. They will have 10+ times the XP and gold rates so you don't grind pretty much at all, and it is nice having persistent characters that you can come back to after a while that are not tiers of content behind and obsolete.
I think Blizzard is on a path to at least making level 60 the free to play level cap of the game soon, though. It just makes way too much sense not to. I know I'd have to problem running the old 40 and 20 man raids with pugs (because the way the game mechanics have changed, those raids are now trivial with even half the number of people it took in 2006) for fun. That actually sounds like fun. The current game sounds like the most auspicious waste of time sink, which is why I got off that merry-go-round in Wrath of the Lich King around the time where they stopped doing tiered progression at all and made every patch effectively a game reset.
Interesting note: every ghost-town of a zone in WoW, and some of them were ghost-towns immediately, cost N fully realized software startups to develop. (Like, mid-single-digit million dollars per zone.)
It's one of those things to keep in perspective when folks say "Why did anyone sink $1.2 million into $A_FIELD_I_DON'T_CONNECT_WITH?" I don't know, but that's literally less than it cost to put that mid-30s swamp level in Ogrimmar that nobody ever went to, so don't fret too much about the misallocation of society's resources.
The whole game cost somewhere between $50 and $60 mil, so individual zones were not quite as pricey.
Additionally, it was specifically designed to avoid dumping lots of players into chokepoint zones (what they called 'player collision') and providing multiple paths for progression.
I imagine they were quite aware some places will be less populated than others, from the get go. Still, on high population servers, it was perfectly normal to run into random players in the middle of nowhere.
They were used and played to death. I remember getting so bored of them, and they are still there for other people to discover. It makes the world feel so big, part of the compellingness of wow.
I played wow from beta. I quit in Cata, came back in Panda and have quit again in WoD. In vanilla I saw that there was much money in the game and lo, I did say, arriveth the $$ arriveth the MBAs.
And so it was, much sadly for all when Tigole went off.
But here are the sums.
They've lasted for (on average) 5 years. 30 * $10 * 200 = $60000pcm * 60 = $3,600,000.
My WoW experience started with Vanilla. Long hours were spent but I had so much fun. Looking back, I had so much free time and no concept of getting older. MC raids were a blast and getting ganked in STV was a daily occurrence.
Today, I'm nearing my thirties and can't seem to get into the game for more than an hour at a time. I'm a very happy homeowner, married and kids are in the plans in the next few years. I have other interests now that take up my time and grinding for drops for hours on end isn't in the cards anymore.
I logged in recently and found it so different. Cataclysm was my last true experience with WoW. I played MoP, but only for a few weeks. The magic was lost for me with flying mounts and easier grinds. It's heartbreaking to a degree because I loved this game and really want to get back to it. I suppose those years are long gone, but it's fun to think about.
Almost two months ago, an unofficial (completely reverse engineered) Vanilla WoW server called Nostalrius launched. I had a blast reliving the time I spent on the original game as a teenager, but had to wrest myself away after sinking a few too many days into it...
Last I checked, the server was averaging between 4000-6000 players concurrently, so I had quite the opposite experience from what the author was describing: for the first day or two after launch, it was very difficult to find mobs to kill at all, when you're sharing starting zones with literally hundreds of players! It got better over time, as people grinded at different rates, distributing their numbers more evenly, but even when I quit, it was pretty rare to find a zone without a decent number of players.
I recommend anyone with fond memories of Vanilla turned off by newer versions of WoW check it out. Or, maybe I shouldn't, having experienced first hand just how great of a time sink this 10 year old game can still be...
I played WoW a lot when I was in University. I find it really incredible how much nostalgia I'm feeling looking at these screenshots. I reactivate my account once a year or so just to fly around for a couple hours.
I'm glad I can still do this, but it concerns me that this generation of online-only games won't be relivable decades later like the games of my earlier childhood will always be.
A bit sad/cheeky story from me, but still relevant I believe. The time was around TBC, I think right in the middle of its launch, I managed to hack an account back then of some characters, and thought I'd log-in to have a good time. It was my first experience of the game, granted I never did destroy any characters or items, since it was my first time playing the game, but I did spend a reasonable amount of time in-game -- killing mobs, checking out gear of other people, seeing the chat activity, even the character activity in the World (haha, wow, such a rush of feelings), only a few months later when I got my own account to play with, did I realize what this game is and how magnificent it is -- I'm so, so lucky to have had the pleasure of playing during the original TBC when the game was booming with players and such pleasurable soul, one of the best times of playing any video game in my life, hands down.
You can't replicate those experiences, because for the most part -- it was the people who were passionate about the game, that made it what it was.
I'm sure we all have some stories like this, but I did fucking love this game with my whole heart. From a creative Mage to a passionate Druid.
The 'level' thing is something inherited from old RPGs and computer RPGs and reused to death. It is nice for a sense of progression, but ultimately leads to all sorts of issues.
Why can a 99 level whatever kill dozens of level 1 charaters effortlessly, by mistake even? Why does it have N times more health? Makes no sense.
One of the first successful MMORPG games was Ultima Online, which didn't have any levels. Just skills. And they didn't matter all that much. Equipment did to a degree, but noone was walking around alone with a +9 weapon for fear of losing it. So it was relatively even.
It was FUN. All areas mattered, even if they didn't have as much variety as WoW. Monsters didn't give XP, so they were mostly killed for resources. And some tiny skill increase, sometimes.
Honestly, that was what I loved about EvE: no levels. Pick a goal and the skills to get there. Enjoy the journey along the way.
Edited to add: There was once the perception that if you weren't an older player you could never catch up with them because of the first-come nature of skills, but that was demolished long ago (for better or worse) by blobbing with Caldari battlecruisers. Sheer numbers will beat anything, and if you are losing it is because your sheer numbers aren't big enough.
It's worth bearing in mind, of course, that WoW is vastly more popular than UO ever was -- UO peaked around 250k subscribers, WoW peaked around 12 million (~48 times the population). This presumably indicates that far more people found it "fun".
This makes sense to me, since pre-Trammel UO was a griefer paradise, as you hinted at with your "for fear of using it" comment. :)
Levels are an amazing skinner box. You want power, they are literally a numeric increment of power, and the way most of these games work you consistently gain them in regular fashion to reinforce the response to play more to get more levels. It is why a game like WoW ended up being magnitudes more successful than Ultima Online, fundamental enjoyability besides, and it is why mobile games are literally Hitler and some can make boats of cash.
I found an old folder with screenshots of multiplayer maps from Team Fortress Classic where I had played many hours with friends. Looking at the pictures, I realized that I had an emotional connection to the virtual places just as if they were real places.
I've recently started my first adventures in Azeroth, and its been quite an experience.
Being very familiar with the genre I knew what I was getting into, but didn't quite understand the differences of WoW versus Guild Wars, Wild Star, or another MMO.
I really enjoyed how they continue to have players level through the expansions, the over joyous feeling of a new loading screen when I reach the next leveling milestone was super rewarding, but quickly became overwhelming.
There's SO much content in the game, thousands of quest lines you quickly out level and never see, stories told through quest dialogs I had been skipping over. I passed right by the entire culture of this hand crafted digital world in a rush to raid, and now have no incentive to see what I've missed.
I finally got my druid to level 80, and now entering the Cataclysm expansion it quickly shows how much has changed from each iteration of the game. I went from running dungeons over and over in hopes of a single drop, to now being overburdened with item and item, all far superior than my previous expansions hard earned gear (ilvl ~170 to 300+).
It feels so forgotten, what I was first looking as like an archived museum of this game's vast history is beginning to feel like its own changes are detrimental to reliving the experience of a veteran as a new player.
Seeing complex constructed runes, swirling tornadoes out in the distance, living see creatures in the background, all without content or content worth doing makes the game feel vast and empty. Although its still very enjoyable.
You are well beyond the level you can go back and run the raid content from past expansions by yourself. The Blackrock Mountain raids specifically, saw hundreds of thousands of players run through them in groups of forty for hours every night for over two years. You just cannot get that scale anymore, and games that try (hic, Wildstar) don't see popularity like WoW did.
So you don't know empty in WoW until you run up and punch a giant rock monster to death in fifteen seconds that would have taken forty people fifteen minutes of coordinated combat to slay a decade ago.
I played a lot of WoW in vanilla through the second expansion. The world was, I feel, the most explorable in vanilla. The game designers had started but never finished lots of content, and there was lots of randomness and hidden gems that weren't calculated 'content'. Just artistic touches that had been added to the world. After vanilla, it started to feel like everything was very much added 'on purpose', which detracted from the feeling for me. [This is a feeling I have about lots of games, and even software and real-life experiences too. Methodical polish can really make things less endearing.]
I have great memories of wandering zones I had no business being in. Especially wandering Alliance zones and cities on my Horde rogue. When achievements for exploring the whole world and doing so many thousands of quests came out with the second expansion, I had them all (Loremaster, Seeker, Explorer, ..). And I probably did 500+ quests beyond Seeker - I would just keep doing every low level quest I could find, just to experience all the random hidden pockets of content. It was a great feeling, and one that I didn't grow up finding IRL.
The vanilla world was also... rusty.. in a really charming way. It was pretty easy to crack the holes of the world open and find things that weren't meant to be found - like half finished zones, giant peculiar monoliths, and tidbits of things that had been mentioned in lore here and there but never fully implemented.
The soundtrack is really great too. It's electronic / trance-style stuff that I guess isn't very popular (or wasn't where I'm from). But, the first song ('When Things Go Wrong' by Airwave) became my favorite thing to listen to for at least a year or so in high school. When I got my driver's license I would put it (and similar) songs on in the car and drive around my town at night, aimlessly. Those are some memories I'm really fond of.
(the soundtrack of the youtube video, that is. The takeaway being: that video so helped me romanticize wandering a giant, mesmerizing, alien world that I started wandering the giant, mesmerizing, real world, and enjoying that too. With the help of a soundtrack to set the mood.)
On a related note, WoW has plenty of private shards where you can relive old WoW content. Everquest has one too, Project1999, dedicated to the first two expansions only.
It's fun to hop onto random Minecraft servers and explore. You find a lot of abandoned buildings, mining tunnels, pets, etc. Some are recognizable as a player's first temp house they built quickly and abandoned to build something better. Some are players that invested a lot of time to build something nice but stopped playing.
Each server has its own type of abandoned buildings. Chaos servers, for example, have a lot of ruined buildings covered in lava.
I play Minecraft on a small server (semi-vanilla PvE). Some stuff I found can be downright creepy. Here's an example: http://imgur.com/52wZxvp. This was a huge structure in the middle of the ocean that I stumbled upon. The giant sign on it said "HAIL TITO" or some such. The inside was really strange too: dark, with random traps and creatures roaming about (all intentional, such as golems). Abandoned Minecraft buildings in general are really interesting, but this takes the cake.
After some asking around I did find that the person didn't in fact go crazy, and this was supposed to be a temple of sorts, with traps and treasure. But at the time (3am) it really creeped me out.
Yes, me too; PvP, raids, dungeons etc left me completely cold. I just liked wandering around the map, finding the weird things in the corners, working through the storylines (although a lot of them finished up in dungeons which required more than one person to play, which I was annoyed at). I think I solo'd my way all the way through WoW Classic, and then through a couple of expansions. (The article dumps on the Outlands a lot, but they were some of my favourite content. The designers had just gone nuts. I know someone who painted a scene from the Outlands because it just looked so awesome.)
I think I swam all the way around both Classic continents. Took flipping ages. There are some strange things tucked away in corners, though:
I have played my fair share of MMOs, and the game I spent the most time exploring the world was LOTRO. (lord of the rings online) It has been 5 or so years since I played, so not sure if it is still the same, but back then they had some deeds system where each region had challenges to kill a certain amount of creatures or explore different locations and would reward you with permanent stat boosts. I remember our guild would have nights where we would group up and tackle these challenges together, those are some of my favourite memories in gaming. Sigh, growing up sucks.
LOTRO also has an equippable item ("Stone of the Tortoise") that prevents a character from gaining EXP. If I had the time to play still I would get this. The low-level content is some of the best in the game, IMO.
I am just so lucky WoW started after I was done with education. In fact I picked it up during a recovery from knee surgery. I figured if I couldn't walk in the real world, I could explore an imaginary one.
It's a beautiful place. The thing is, you can't explore it without levelling. And it's also pretty vast, at least the size of zone 2 in London tube terms. So I ended up spending a lot of time there.
I got so deep into it I even attended a wedding. I mean where the IRL players got married and their characters and online friends got together.
Anyway, there is something about the way it's constructed that gets boring after a few months of playing time. It's as if there's two games: levelling and raiding. Raiding is where your friends are, so levelling is what you have to do to get your friends the Tank/Healer that they need. (Nobody needs DPS).
It would be cool if the content just scaled so you could level everywhere, instead of having a predefined optimal quest/zone path. On your third character it does get tedious, because everyone levels by doing solo DPS.
Perhaps there is also a smarter mechanic for gold grinding. When I was playing there was always some zone that was optimal for finding the best ores, so I'd just fly a loop of that each morning.
Lastly, is it really hard to generate content? I mean of the type "here's a warrior, a druid, and a warlock, find us something to do that can't just be googled". Maybe smarter minds have thought about this than me, but I thought it could be worth a stab.
To me, WoW taught me a lot for startups, especially PvP, because arena games were simply intelligence vs. intelligence fights. I think there is no other game or competition where such a broad range of skills is required in such a short amount of time (team play, application of knowledge of your character, of all other characters and their skills, use of surroundings, application of knowledge of game mechanics, very fast reactions). That's why it was so much fun chasing the gladiator title, pure application of skill (got it in S3). I've never seen something alike before, just startups I feel have the same kind of "game type".
A bit of a shame that the vanilla feeling is gone, I think it would have been important to keep the game hard, so that powerful items are very, very hard to get. It seems like they wanted to make high end content accessible to everyone in order to grow the user base, but it seems like the opposite effect was reached. Reminds me of the startup wisdom, if you want to be everything to everybody, you end up being nothing to no one.
I got into WoW for a couple months just before the launch of the newest expansion, though I fell out of it in favor of a few other games before the expansion came out. Even if you're not into the endgame grind of the modern MMO (turns out, I really wasn't, as much as I tried to be), there's just a ton of fantastic content to explore as you level up a character. It's definitely worth picking up on sale and just maxing out a character to explore the world. I plan on getting the new expansion and leveling through Draenor next time I've got a lull in my games backlog.
[+] [-] minimaxir|11 years ago|reply
As with most modern MMOs, the endgame begins at max level. In order to help players level faster, Blizzard added a heirlooms mechanic in the second expansion (Wrath of the Lich King) to allow low levels to have above-curve gear while leveling, with a 30% EXP boost. The third expansion (Cataclysm) revamped Azeroth, making new questing much easier and straightforward, and therefore less time is spent in the old world. The fifth expansion adds Dungeon Finder, which is a faster way to level than normal questing. So there is not much incentive to explore until you hit 90 and can go to Draenor. And then once you hit Draenor, you have access to Garrisons, which is a FarmVille-like mechanic which has the easiest financial ROI in the game, making even less of a reason to just explore period. I did not renew my subscription.
Guild Wars 2 had a great solution to this; all zones have content, which the player downscales to. Unfortunately, Tyria (the world of Guild Wars 2) is not as robust as Azeroth.
[+] [-] FlannelPancake|11 years ago|reply
WoW and mmos in general just don't encourage exploration very much. It doesn't contribute to making your avatar any better. So unless you're really into just having fun - which the game mostly does not encourage in lieu of running dungeons and getting gear and etc, a lot of these zones have just ALWAYS been abandoned, save for some event bringing people to them.
The reason the population is 15-20 in these zones as opposed to 60+ is because there are better ways to level nowadays, not that anyone cared to visit these zones in the first place and heirlooms ruined that.
That being said, I realize you're not blaming this entirely on heirlooms and exp boosts, I just wanted to clarify on that specific part of what you said.
[+] [-] Blackthorn|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|11 years ago|reply
TL;DR: WoW needed to do more to encourage people to revisit all existing areas four expansions ago. I tried to get back into it a couple of years ago (WotLK era), and I was just put off by how few people were everywhere - and if there were people, they were ignoring you and just grinding through quests.
This contrasted my initial experience with WoW quite a bit - that was either BC or even before that. Lots of people questing, and it was before the dungeon finder so people actually still had to physically form a team of players at the actual location (and spam the chat channels) to get into the dungeons, making it much more of a challenge - and more importantly for an MMO, a social endeavour.
[+] [-] Shivetya|11 years ago|reply
wow mediates the issue of content going stale by allowing people to mow through, especially older raids to get accomplishments and gear; mostly for transmog of current gear or mounts and pet. This to me is a better solution. The GW2 solution leads to a more annoying world, where everything has to be taken into account and there is no breezing past low level content on your way to more excitement
[+] [-] Nullabillity|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oconnor0|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimwalsh|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j_s|11 years ago|reply
I wind up playing for a few months each time a new expansion is released, sometimes jumping in for a month if something interesting happens. (For example, WoW will be aping Guild Wars auto-scaling in the next patch, experimenting with 'Timewalking' weekends.)
¹ http://www.wowhead.com/spell=130283/enlightenment#comments
² https://us.battle.net/shop/en/product/world-of-warcraft-serv...
[+] [-] ghrifter|11 years ago|reply
This gutted the economy (especially on small-medium servers) and led to me quitting.
Raiding was fun, PvP was alright, but when the economy was mustered into farmville-time gating...I gave my favorite MMO up.
[+] [-] digi_owl|11 years ago|reply
The PVE side of GW2 have a bunch of other issues though.
[+] [-] macspoofing|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|11 years ago|reply
But as others point out, the 'traditional' way to build an MMO is 'learn skills by levelling up / start playing at max level' The game set a number of challenges for 'max level' characters which depended on gear, group composition, and various strategies to overcome the game mechanics. That is where it failed for me.
In WoW while leveling you often needed to join up with groups to run through a local dungeon together. It was fun when you had a good group, annoying when you had children in the group. There were too many ways for 10 - 12 yr old boys to grief people.
In an effort to increase its appeal, Blizzard changed it again and again. Skill changes, techniques, complexity was removed, buffs and nerfs to various skills. Lots of change and slowly less and less appeal. All of the components were there to make it better (arenas were a great testing ground for devs to evaluate PvP changes).
I stopped playing when Mists shipped. It was just too stupid at that point and the similarity to kung-fu panda to stark. Oddly, if you could provide servers that stopped at one of the expansions (Wrath or maybe even Cataclysm) I would still be spending money with Blizzard, but now not so much.
I look at it periodically and see the makings of a durable world/gaming simulation environment. I hope someone picks up the challenge.
[+] [-] ropman76|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monk_e_boy|11 years ago|reply
It was all WEIRD and FLAT!! The textures were stretched really really long, you could see the pixels. And the textures seemed random, from different realms and stuff. There were deep valleys in places, but you could run around them given enough time. I took a bunch of screen shots, eventually I fell off the back of them and had to swim four hours to get back to land. WoW is a crazy game.
[+] [-] zanny|11 years ago|reply
I think Blizzard is on a path to at least making level 60 the free to play level cap of the game soon, though. It just makes way too much sense not to. I know I'd have to problem running the old 40 and 20 man raids with pugs (because the way the game mechanics have changed, those raids are now trivial with even half the number of people it took in 2006) for fun. That actually sounds like fun. The current game sounds like the most auspicious waste of time sink, which is why I got off that merry-go-round in Wrath of the Lich King around the time where they stopped doing tiered progression at all and made every patch effectively a game reset.
[+] [-] bm1362|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patio11|11 years ago|reply
It's one of those things to keep in perspective when folks say "Why did anyone sink $1.2 million into $A_FIELD_I_DON'T_CONNECT_WITH?" I don't know, but that's literally less than it cost to put that mid-30s swamp level in Ogrimmar that nobody ever went to, so don't fret too much about the misallocation of society's resources.
[+] [-] pvg|11 years ago|reply
Additionally, it was specifically designed to avoid dumping lots of players into chokepoint zones (what they called 'player collision') and providing multiple paths for progression.
I imagine they were quite aware some places will be less populated than others, from the get go. Still, on high population servers, it was perfectly normal to run into random players in the middle of nowhere.
[+] [-] monk_e_boy|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spiritplumber|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drewbug|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sgt101|11 years ago|reply
And so it was, much sadly for all when Tigole went off.
But here are the sums.
They've lasted for (on average) 5 years. 30 * $10 * 200 = $60000pcm * 60 = $3,600,000.
That is a NPV of 3.
Can i haz MBA?
[+] [-] leemac|11 years ago|reply
Today, I'm nearing my thirties and can't seem to get into the game for more than an hour at a time. I'm a very happy homeowner, married and kids are in the plans in the next few years. I have other interests now that take up my time and grinding for drops for hours on end isn't in the cards anymore.
I logged in recently and found it so different. Cataclysm was my last true experience with WoW. I played MoP, but only for a few weeks. The magic was lost for me with flying mounts and easier grinds. It's heartbreaking to a degree because I loved this game and really want to get back to it. I suppose those years are long gone, but it's fun to think about.
[+] [-] throwawayorc|11 years ago|reply
Last I checked, the server was averaging between 4000-6000 players concurrently, so I had quite the opposite experience from what the author was describing: for the first day or two after launch, it was very difficult to find mobs to kill at all, when you're sharing starting zones with literally hundreds of players! It got better over time, as people grinded at different rates, distributing their numbers more evenly, but even when I quit, it was pretty rare to find a zone without a decent number of players.
I recommend anyone with fond memories of Vanilla turned off by newer versions of WoW check it out. Or, maybe I shouldn't, having experienced first hand just how great of a time sink this 10 year old game can still be...
https://en.nostalrius.org/
[+] [-] burke|11 years ago|reply
I'm glad I can still do this, but it concerns me that this generation of online-only games won't be relivable decades later like the games of my earlier childhood will always be.
[+] [-] codecondo|11 years ago|reply
You can't replicate those experiences, because for the most part -- it was the people who were passionate about the game, that made it what it was.
I'm sure we all have some stories like this, but I did fucking love this game with my whole heart. From a creative Mage to a passionate Druid.
[+] [-] outworlder|11 years ago|reply
Why can a 99 level whatever kill dozens of level 1 charaters effortlessly, by mistake even? Why does it have N times more health? Makes no sense.
One of the first successful MMORPG games was Ultima Online, which didn't have any levels. Just skills. And they didn't matter all that much. Equipment did to a degree, but noone was walking around alone with a +9 weapon for fear of losing it. So it was relatively even.
It was FUN. All areas mattered, even if they didn't have as much variety as WoW. Monsters didn't give XP, so they were mostly killed for resources. And some tiny skill increase, sometimes.
[+] [-] cjslep|11 years ago|reply
Edited to add: There was once the perception that if you weren't an older player you could never catch up with them because of the first-come nature of skills, but that was demolished long ago (for better or worse) by blobbing with Caldari battlecruisers. Sheer numbers will beat anything, and if you are losing it is because your sheer numbers aren't big enough.
[+] [-] kemayo|11 years ago|reply
This makes sense to me, since pre-Trammel UO was a griefer paradise, as you hinted at with your "for fear of using it" comment. :)
[+] [-] zanny|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshuaheard|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bearlikelion|11 years ago|reply
Being very familiar with the genre I knew what I was getting into, but didn't quite understand the differences of WoW versus Guild Wars, Wild Star, or another MMO.
I really enjoyed how they continue to have players level through the expansions, the over joyous feeling of a new loading screen when I reach the next leveling milestone was super rewarding, but quickly became overwhelming.
There's SO much content in the game, thousands of quest lines you quickly out level and never see, stories told through quest dialogs I had been skipping over. I passed right by the entire culture of this hand crafted digital world in a rush to raid, and now have no incentive to see what I've missed.
I finally got my druid to level 80, and now entering the Cataclysm expansion it quickly shows how much has changed from each iteration of the game. I went from running dungeons over and over in hopes of a single drop, to now being overburdened with item and item, all far superior than my previous expansions hard earned gear (ilvl ~170 to 300+).
It feels so forgotten, what I was first looking as like an archived museum of this game's vast history is beginning to feel like its own changes are detrimental to reliving the experience of a veteran as a new player.
Seeing complex constructed runes, swirling tornadoes out in the distance, living see creatures in the background, all without content or content worth doing makes the game feel vast and empty. Although its still very enjoyable.
[+] [-] bovermyer|11 years ago|reply
One of my favorite "wow, that's random" discoveries in WoW is the Plants vs Zombies minigame by the Dalaran crater in the Eastern Kingdoms.
[+] [-] zanny|11 years ago|reply
So you don't know empty in WoW until you run up and punch a giant rock monster to death in fifteen seconds that would have taken forty people fifteen minutes of coordinated combat to slay a decade ago.
[+] [-] ajkjk|11 years ago|reply
I have great memories of wandering zones I had no business being in. Especially wandering Alliance zones and cities on my Horde rogue. When achievements for exploring the whole world and doing so many thousands of quests came out with the second expansion, I had them all (Loremaster, Seeker, Explorer, ..). And I probably did 500+ quests beyond Seeker - I would just keep doing every low level quest I could find, just to experience all the random hidden pockets of content. It was a great feeling, and one that I didn't grow up finding IRL.
The vanilla world was also... rusty.. in a really charming way. It was pretty easy to crack the holes of the world open and find things that weren't meant to be found - like half finished zones, giant peculiar monoliths, and tidbits of things that had been mentioned in lore here and there but never fully implemented.
A famous (at the time) video was "Exploration the Movie' by DopeFish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWMz7-7SGlo
The soundtrack is really great too. It's electronic / trance-style stuff that I guess isn't very popular (or wasn't where I'm from). But, the first song ('When Things Go Wrong' by Airwave) became my favorite thing to listen to for at least a year or so in high school. When I got my driver's license I would put it (and similar) songs on in the car and drive around my town at night, aimlessly. Those are some memories I'm really fond of.
[+] [-] ajkjk|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pyrocat|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] garbage_stain|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] driverdan|11 years ago|reply
Each server has its own type of abandoned buildings. Chaos servers, for example, have a lot of ruined buildings covered in lava.
[+] [-] IgorPartola|11 years ago|reply
After some asking around I did find that the person didn't in fact go crazy, and this was supposed to be a temple of sorts, with traps and treasure. But at the time (3am) it really creeped me out.
[+] [-] spiek|11 years ago|reply
I used to love wandering around the world, finding hidden spots, and exploring the different pieces of Azeroth.
Now I'm older and feel way too guilty devoting that amount of time to a game.
Incidentally, one of the main pleasures of Minecraft (for me) was the same exploration.
[+] [-] david-given|11 years ago|reply
I think I swam all the way around both Classic continents. Took flipping ages. There are some strange things tucked away in corners, though:
http://cowlark.com/2009-03-31-south-kalimdor-farm/index.html
(Man, WoW looked awful back then. Six years ago!)
[+] [-] Skilleen|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MikeTV|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lordnacho|11 years ago|reply
It's a beautiful place. The thing is, you can't explore it without levelling. And it's also pretty vast, at least the size of zone 2 in London tube terms. So I ended up spending a lot of time there.
I got so deep into it I even attended a wedding. I mean where the IRL players got married and their characters and online friends got together.
Anyway, there is something about the way it's constructed that gets boring after a few months of playing time. It's as if there's two games: levelling and raiding. Raiding is where your friends are, so levelling is what you have to do to get your friends the Tank/Healer that they need. (Nobody needs DPS).
It would be cool if the content just scaled so you could level everywhere, instead of having a predefined optimal quest/zone path. On your third character it does get tedious, because everyone levels by doing solo DPS.
Perhaps there is also a smarter mechanic for gold grinding. When I was playing there was always some zone that was optimal for finding the best ores, so I'd just fly a loop of that each morning.
Lastly, is it really hard to generate content? I mean of the type "here's a warrior, a druid, and a warlock, find us something to do that can't just be googled". Maybe smarter minds have thought about this than me, but I thought it could be worth a stab.
[+] [-] nalidixic|11 years ago|reply
Mr Smite - Deadmines
[+] [-] searine|11 years ago|reply
It added a whole level of meta-gaming and risk. It also made me ungodly rich in gold.
Then I hit the level cap and stopped playing. Oh well.
[+] [-] wellboy|11 years ago|reply
A bit of a shame that the vanilla feeling is gone, I think it would have been important to keep the game hard, so that powerful items are very, very hard to get. It seems like they wanted to make high end content accessible to everyone in order to grow the user base, but it seems like the opposite effect was reached. Reminds me of the startup wisdom, if you want to be everything to everybody, you end up being nothing to no one.
[+] [-] avolcano|11 years ago|reply
There's also some great articles about unfinished content in WoW, like this one about a half-implemented zone with lots of lore around it, giving it a particular mystique: http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/05/wow-archivist-the-karazha...