It was never about quests. It was always about player interactions.
and a monthly payment to continue doing it
Compares to gatcha
Hmmm
My first WoW experience was Horde. I created an orc hunter, did the training area and got to the Crossroads in the Barrens. As I was figuring out what traders and so on were available, a bunch of high level alliance characters turned up and started laying into the guards. Word went out and high level Horde characters began arriving from Orgrimmar by wyvern. Ended up with about 20 or more characters on each side. It was epic!
Yeah but while killing the boars another guy comes round and helps you kill some quicker and then you team up and go around helping anyone else you come across
why do real chores when virtual chores
“Honey, can you go out and powerwash the side of the house this weekend?”
“Awww, c’mon… I was planning on playing Powerwash Simulator this weekend! 😩”
Now I kind of feel guilty for enjoying Crime Scene Cleaner. At least in my defense, my house is not covered in blood.
I’ve been playing Hitman: World of Assassination all weekend.
Not sure if that’s better than the alternative.
A real power washer can run out of water or power unless you tether it to outlets. Meanwhile in the simulator, you can parkour onto the roof with an infinite water tank.
Real chores give us no sense of pride and accomplishment
If powerwashing the house got me new socks that gave me +.25 an hour pay I’d be doing all kinds of side quests
I hear those are in the next patch release of Earth
Pride And Accomplishment™ 🤤
Surely you are referencing the EA comment, yes?
TBH they kinda do. It’s just that there’s all sorts of real-world issues attached to them, while a game is at worst boring.
For a lot of people. they don’t. Chores are just painful and annoying and unrewarding and they hate them objectively.
I’m sure lots of people don’t feel a sense of accomplishment from gaming, either.
but gaming is fine-tuned to be fun, real life isn’t
but real life achievements are much more real and often more lasting than in-game achievements
lol what world are you living in? chores never stop.
Neither did WOW ones, every time I’d complete an impossible task and get my reward they’d nerf it and start giving it away the next week
it’s less about the moment to moment gameplay and more about the vibes and ambiance tbh. Players love zones like Barrens and Nagrand even though a good chunk of both zones’ quests are just hunting animals because the vibes of those zones are immaculate.
You’re not wrong about Alliance zones feeling more fleshed out… but over the last two decades of playing vanilla WoW on and off, every single time that I’ve rolled an Alliance character and tried my best to commit, I would eventually see a primitive ass Horde outpost with hanging feathers and dreamcatchers, with some bulky spiked Orc and a noble Tauren standing there… and I would feel such an immense feeling of homesickness unlike anything I’ve ever felt in another game, and I would immediately delete that character and start over in Durotar.
Something about fighting for the honor of the Horde and the glory of the Warchief out there in an inhospitable land, with the inspirational swell of horns and indigenous drums just puts me in it. Like, really puts me in it.
Kinda ironic that alliance zones are more fleshed out, but horde lore and characters tended to get much better treatment.
Barrens compared to Goldshire was so garbage in vanilla at launch. Alliance aesthetics was so much more developed and implemented
I think Duskwood was peak WoW for me. I spent years chasing that early high, and never really found it in that game or any others.
I’d argue the Horde aesthetics is meant of be raw.
Although I am myself an Alliance connoisseur. Darnassus and Auberdine still being my favorite throughout the Classic, despite some immediate confusion over the location of some merchants.
The Burning Crusade only reinforces this notion, with Silvermoon being initially part of the Alliance and growing to be the majestic city I love wholeheartedly. Truly a gem of the Horde.
You may like the Alliance aesthetic more but there’s plenty of people who enjoy the Western feel of Barrens.
Hell, people are still making jokes about Barrens chat in this very post, do you see anyone talking about Westfall? If we wanna go off cultural relevancy, Horde is way more well known. Nobody cares about asking “Where’s the Defias Messenger,” but everyone knows Mankirk’s wife.
I agree that the size of Barrens meant that the chat was something else. I meant that while Alliance got three zones that felt unique and populated, horde had one giant open plain.
Might be because I started as Alliance and switched to Horde quite early
Horde also had Silverpine if you weren’t hot for the plains, and it’s not like you were actually meant to level nonstop in Barrens from 10-20, though I won’t pretend Stonetalon is that much of a change of scenery.
But again, you’re comparing two very different vibes. The Alliance was meant to feel civilized because they’d existed in the Eastern Kingdoms a thousand years. The Horde had only been on Kalimdor for like a decade, and their start reflected that.
I appreciate you saying that. I did not want to sit still for the Silverpine erasure. Leveling my little undead priest at launch is the most fun I’ve ever had in a computer game. Me at level 10 going a bit to far up the path to Scarlet Monastery in Tirisfal was a truly confusing moment. The whole undead area is amazing and Undercity filled my little Tim Burton adjacent heart with joy.
I remember trying wow in their 10 hour demo being like “I’m just killing spiders when does this get fun?”
Then a friend told me “it takes 20 hours to get to the fun bit”. I then uninstalled and never looked back.
It doesn’t take 20 hours to get to the fun but, it just wasn’t for you.
Yeah def not.
There is fun in changing zones sightseeing and getting really powerful abilities, running in raids. But if the hook for the core kill loop doesn’t catch, you’re going to have a bad time.
Yeah probably not.
Which is good for me as it saved me $15/month.
So what? The grind is the fun bit to you?
I never actually said one way or the other if I like it or not.
I remember leaving the dwarf starter zone for the first time. Passed some NPC dwarfs, got chased by a mob that was way too powerful for me and barely survived. When I was done running, and was safe, I looked around and saw the entrance to IronForge.
That’s when I knew the game was for me
It was more because it was a virtual chatroom and community in an age where such things were not widespread
Also, I think this undersells how good the game looked.
Yes, you were hunting boar livers but you were doing it in this beautiful tropical jungle beside a giant waterfall. And then you’d peak behind the waterfall, discover a mermaid who was at the gate of a giant dungeon themed like a water park. And you completely forgot about the quest to go play in the water park for a couple of hours.
I’d say the bigger problem with WoW was the gradient of zones. You’d be hunting zebra-taurs on the high planes. And then you’d walk through a mountain pass, see a dinosaur, get all excited, and aggro a creature +30 your level.
AHHH! RUN! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! I’M TOO LOW LEVEL TO DIE!! sorry ptsd kicked in there
Now that’s just not true.
Repeatable quests weren’t added until much later. You had to collect all sorts of organs with shitty drop rates from a variety of animals in different zones.
It was actually barely worth doing quests in the original game, because most of the XP was on the kills rather than quest hand-ins, and the rewards were mostly crap.
Wow was fantastic when it came out. I never had the money to pay for a subscription so I played on pirate servers. I never got to the endless grind stages, but I adored exploring the early zones with all the original classes. The world looked great, the magic felt real and the fantasy was engrossing. I don’t think I ever made it passed lvl 35 on any characters, but thoroughly enjoyed getting there, sometimes with friends and sometimes alone.
Me, a refined person, playing Guild Wars instead.
Well, in Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2, you also have reasons to collect lots of the same stuff to do stuff.
The difference is that you don’t have to collect 10 boar asses in boar ass forest for a specific boar ass quest, but instead you may want to craft a legendary bone weapon, so you need to gather bones, and you can go anywhere in the world that drops the bones, or that gives gold you can use to buy the bones from other players, or that grants a special map currency that you can use tyo buy boxes of bones from a map currency vendor, all while doing whatever you feel like doing, progressing your bone gathering in a wide variety of ways.
Guild wars 1 and 2 are good games. The second one is still very active.
GW1 my beloved, how I miss you.
I got GWAMM like 3 years ago before I started playing ff14.
I honestly miss playing WoW. It was a fun game, especially if you had a group to raid with. If only I didn’t have to give Blizzard money to play it.
In 2004 (the launch year) the original WoW was an amazing time I lost and entire year of professional growth and productivity to. When the first expansion (Burning Crusade) came out, I was equally excited as as the original launch, but after seeing Green gear fall of simple mobs that was better than the epic Purple gear I spent weeks getting in 40 person raids, I could instantly forecast how the entire rest of the game would be forever: and endless grind with your hard won efforts simply trivialized in the first month of the next expansion. I stopped playing WoW about a month after, went back to school instead, and finished the college degree I had started 8 years earlier. Quitting WoW lead to my actions which launched my career to new heights.
I credit WoW with teaching me an incredible life lesson in my 20s to never get drawn into something like that again.
Learned this exact same lesson and quit.
I dropped out of college because of this game. And honestly, it was worth it.
Because you had so much fun in the game or because college was (or would in the future) serving you so poorly?
My reaction exactly to BC!
And flying? Walking around was a core part of the game, seeing stuff, getting whacked by +10 monsters so you had to sneak around, now you just spend 50% of the game in the skybox.
did better than me, took me till legion before i truly gave up on it, and then came back for classic
and even now my brain sometimes randomly is like dude you should play wow again
You know you have a WoW problem when you’re spending an appreciable amount of time on Thottbot looking up in-game items and locations while at work.
Games are just story+art+button timing+math. Mmo’s almost entirely remove button timing, and what is left is extremely formulaic. Given that, number go up isn’t worth anyone’s thousands of hours, and neither is the overall content. I know, as I had the hours and the same epiphany.
I think a lot of people had this experience. Yahtzee Croshaw had a similar experience, albeit compressed to a month, and it resulted in a book. It’s a really fun book, too.
With your post, I went looking for the book and couldn’t find it. I only found his novels. I’m on the fence about trying to find/read the book. I carry some personal shame from the time when I wasted so much time in WoW. This may be an embarrassing reminder of a mistake of my youth.
It’s called Mogworld.
I played for a while on the Warmane private server. High population, very active, and completely free.
Nice! Is there an invite process for private servers?
Check out their website. They run a number of servers/realms. There is a torrent to grab of the client bins that have been tweaked to connect to their stuff. Check out the forums for more details. But generally, you just create an account on the website and just go. I recommend donating and getting some gold. It will help with the mats for professions without grinding. And playing on a 7x XP, you progress without the grind.
X1 rate, original experience. No pay to win. Best server!
Not gonna yuck your yum, but me and boys had lots of fun with a meme group of druids. Healing, tanking, DPS. Super non-optimal. But it was fun. Only really possible to do that either buying the toons, or training up your own. Training up with 7x means that you basically have no good gear by the time to get up to the upper levels where it matters.
I did that with a friend on Lordaeron. Tank + heal and rdf the dps. Was a lot of fun. 7x would have meant lvling so fast the dungeon runs would have been irrelevant.
Ive tried to go back a few times but nothing topped WOTLK, game play was peak and the community wasn’t jaded and as sweaty. There was still a sense of community and mystery before things got min-maxed. Last time it felt about as friendly as playing League and you were essentially locked out of non LFG raids unless you had a guild and were chronically in there discord.
My feels…
Everyone plays to the meta that unless you’re on your class’ best spec you won’t get in.
Fuck me for thinking for my self and not copy pasting my spec.
Happy Cake day! Also yeah, this push in video games to play them optimally sucks. They’re supposed to be fun, a way from work. Not more work.
Yeah and some of the less common ones were fun or even more optimal.
Like I had a paladin tank in classic. It was difficult holding threat especially if the targets weren’t undead, but it was so rewarding to succeed.
My mage was a frost mage like so many were after Molten Core basically pigeon holed mages into frost spec. But holy shit could fire/arcane mages put out dps. The PvP spec was incredibly bursty but the PvE spec could do more damage than frost spec (outside of MC) plus was more interesting than constant frostbolt spam.
Though affliction warlock was probably my favourite spec out of them all, due to the different durations of each of the dots making you have to constantly think about spell order. I didn’t play one in classic but switched to my affliction lock as my main in WotLK and remember getting in the top 3 dps on that PvP zone raid boss, desopite being a filler that wasn’t even max level.
I brought my all in that game and if I was trying to join a pug raid, it was because I knew that character was ready for it regardless of spec or gear. But I did get tired of raiding on a schedule with a guild and pugs could be shitshows, so I kinda understand it.
Pokèmon had a neat answer to that by randomizing each Pokèmon’s stats. Unfortunately people bred them to minmax their stats so that mechanic is gradually getting removed
I forgot cake days were a thing, the clock hasn’t rolled over in my timezone yet.
I got kicked before with warlock unending corruption, seed of corruption spam build. I could max dps charts for some fights because I could hit all the adds and keep dps on bosses that are out of range, but not a pasted build and your gears not capped, your out. I couldn’t get back into it if I wanted to at this point.
Curse of agony and corruption spells were the thing before they got nerfed
there are private servers that don’t require blizzard money
I am literally in WoW classic killing boars for their snouts while reading this on the other monitor.
Is Barons chat still and endless spam of people asking for the location of Mankrik’s wife?
I play alliance, so I’m spared that.
But back in the day, the horde side had an over-representation of edgie teenagers. Now almost everyone is adult, most with kids and many old and retired like me. So you on’t see as much of that stuff as before.
I remember noobs being called Kevins (bc lots of kids were named kevin after that kid in the movie “home alone” IIRC) and were like 13 yo and all over the place.
Good times!
I started playing in early 2005; I was in my 40s and far older than most of the people playing. I kept playing the expansions through 2017, then quit until fall 2024. Came back to The War Within and played for a while, but they’ve dumbed the retail version down so much, it just doesn’t feel like it has any soul.
Tried classic early last year and I’m having a blast, even with all it’s issues. But the funny thing is that most of the people are the age I was when I started, and many are older. Hardly any teenagers. It’s funny how much it changes the game.
Ha ha yeah classic was really fun, got all the way up to the big raids and all, reliving the excitement once again.
Death to Hogger
I have four max level characters and recently started a fifth. It’s funny doing all the different starting area stuff, but including hogger. I just killed Bellygrub and Yowler an hour or so ago, twenty years after the first time for me.
I haven’t played since Wrath of the Lich King (started with vanilla around launch) and still have super fond memories of the Alliance starting areas in particular
I solo leveled my first character after coming back to classic until 58. I’m just not much of a joiner, so don’t use Looking For Group or whatever. But as I approached 60 I realized I’d either have to mothball the character or do groups for endgame, so I bit the bullet and joined a guild.
It’s been so much fun. Really good people, who I end up hanging out on discord with a lot. Like I said earlier, they skew older now. I’m retired, so I spend a lot of time helping folks with those quests that are impossible to do solo, or running them through dungeons. I’m actually becoming more fond of some of the classic content.
You’re forgetting the part where there are 6 boar spawns that respawn every 2 minutes and there are 15 people waiting on the next spawn.
