A IRL History of WoW

Community General Discussion
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I think we can divide World of Warcraft’s Retail history into four different ages.

  1. The Norrathian Age(Vanilla WoW to Wrath of the Lich King). Eponymous the time in WoW’s history where it was EverQuest to a tee. This heavily influenced the class/spec/role systems and the endgame content. This would have been the *heyday of EQ veterans. This ancient-style age was very limiting to the most specific role you chose upon rolling a class and more specifically, a class/race combo. Individual powers were dramatically limited.

  2. The “Guilded” and Golden Age(Cataclysm to Warlords of Draenor). This middle age period empowered guilds, and this was also an age of gold: never has anyone made as much money as easy in this time period. Emerging from the Age of Norrath, class/specs began to evolve and grow into their own niche identities. “Enlightenment” fell upon the players as they are no longer forced into niche EQ-style roles and can expect to hold their own as a DPS/Tank/Healer.

  3. The Borrowed Power Age(Legion to Shadowlands): this “industrial-style” period became the advent of far greater solo play. Class/specs did things never done before by new artifact powers, azerite powers, covenant powers, Torghast anima powers, and leggos. The zenith of all a class/spec ever was, was witnessed here. Certain class/specs could compete with others in the same 3 roles in a lettered tier system.

  4. The Decadent Age(Dragonflight to The Last Titan, pending). As a “final” modern-style age, this time period marks an overall ease and laze of having seen and done all, that the focus shifts more towards dynamic stories and characters rather than achievement and agency of the PCs. Class/specced heroes of any kind have nothing more to prove, but only that they take their place among the MVNPCs to right the wrongs at hand. As a result, this caused an uprising of trivial pursuits and interests in a world no longer at war.

So Norrath, Gold & Guild, Borrowed Power, and Decadence. What does it all mean? In WoW’s TWENTY YEARS coming up, it shows the evolution from WoW’s EQ roots, to something that has enriched the player overtime to the point where there can be no other enrichment besides that which is the theatrical and cinematic.

One age ends the one before it. It’s hard to say if and when the next age will begin or if the current one will last for all time.

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I’m glad you clarified what you meant, because I don’t think anyone has described WoD as the golden age before.

However you name them, it is the same way my mind divides them up as well actually.

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I get you’re going for word play, but seeing WoD and Golden Age together made me lmao.

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GOOOOOOOLD RRRUUUUUSSSSHH!!!

Don’t tell me you never ran multiple alts at the garrison that generated THE BEST LEGITIMATE GOLD INCOMES ever. We’re talking about untold tens of thousands of gold each week. It started out with late Wrath with CTA satchels and Argent Tourney dailies, so it’s literally an age of gold(money).

But also, see: “the period when a specified art, skill, or activity is at its peak.”

This pertains to everything we know of Cata, Mists, and WoD. Gold as in money, Gold as in the best idyllic experience of all time before Borrowed Power and current Retail kind of went different ways. And guilds, ofc, especially big guilds.

I would be lying to you if I said I DIDN’T make as much as 5M gold during WoD, the most I ever had.

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I actually didn’t. I really didn’t have my finger on the pulse and by the time I realised just how much money people were making from it it was too late. Still though, I made quite a bit from the shadowlands mission table towards the end. That one was actually really lucrative as well with the right addons.

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You would have gotten the big-time FOMO social pressure from me back in 2015. I would have been hounding you to get a bunch of 100’s(which was easy to do), multitask garrison upgrades, so you could reap the harvest as you multilog through each one.

I know that won’t come back even for Classic WoD, so that was a once-in-a-lifetime thing.

Now that it’s much of a big deal anyway, but imagine being a self-made multimillionaire after being mostly broke as a joke throughout your beginnings since Vanilla.

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Punny names aside, I don’t agree with a few sentiments.

Guild dominance was absolutely a thing in your “Norrathian Age” because, until late Wrath, you LITERALLY had no other option than a half broken and otherwise unknown LFG channel or trade chat to find groups that largely precluded raids entirely outside 10 man. Even with Wrath and LFG, you still didn’t get full access to reliable raid content until Cata with DS and LFR.

LFR and LFG put the first major screws to guild subjagation of the masses because they no longer got to gatekeep the unwashed masses from the most menial difficulty mode which literally allowed to finish and see the endpoints for storylines. The much bigger screws came with cross realm in MoP and then the brutal beating with mythic+ finally being allowed to be an alternate PvE progression path to equal-ish rewards.

It’s hard to split expansions out from BC to MoP into distinct seperations. Cata brought LFR, as previously said, which was the defacto biggest game changer…but it was the tail end of Cata and, in many respects, deserve more to be associated with MoP which had it from the get go. MoP introduced, again at the end, flex mode which became the biggest game changer for non mythic raiding to this day (or at least tied with the standardized multiple difficulties).

Every expansion has experimented to some capacity and some gameplay elements evolved or at least were iterated on and seen later. Again, it’s hard to have hard cutoffs because, like the generational age gaps, people even within the same generational band are likely to identify more with those on the respective edge of the previous/later band because, culturally, they grew up similarily. For example, as a 40 year old millennial, I identify much more with the younger folks of gen X than I do with the youngest millenials who more closely relate to zoomers. Again as an example, I grew up with actual floppy disks and my internet came from a CD we got in grocery stores. My youngest brother, born 10 years after me, never knew what dial up internet even was.

Also SL didn’t have borrowed power like Legion and BfA was rife with. In fact, it was the proof Blizzard had largely learned their lessons with the sins/evils of borrowed power. Every comparable “borrowed system” from Legion, BfA, and SL, SL had the most favorable and casual-friendly variant. They let you pick your legendary, custom build it’s item level, didn’t have infinite grinds for power (anima never led to power systems), conduits frontloaded power (greens had something like 75% of the total power unlike essences which started weak and got significantly stronger at higher ranks). The “worst” was your covenant ability which was more akin to trying to slap spreadsheet dorks and mythic tryhard raiders and their toxic minmax or it/you are worthless mindset (and they still had a compelling narrative reason to freely open it up after)…and borrowed power itself is already a bit of a misleading thing since we’ve always grown weaker as expansions launch. New level caps lead to new calculations for stats leading to each level getting “weaker” until we reach the new cap, level out, and then get stronger again with new gear and more tiers of power.

If anything, I think the evolution of retail shows more how Blizzard started as the casual-friendly MMO to the then titans of the time like EQ and then rightfully pivoted into the largely unoccupied (at the time) esport/MMO hybrid it is today…because had they stuck to their simple iterations basic/simple hamster wheel gameplay, the newer games learning and iterating/improving on what WoW was back then would’ve gobbled Blizz up like candy. Like FFXIV alone, feature for feature, trounces WoW on all but the most tippy top of “hardcore” content.

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not a popular opinion by any means but playing my rogue with crazy optimized gear in Challenge Modes and getting cool transmogs for my friends remains a highlight of my time in wow ;D

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To share a similar unpopular opinion, due to it being the first expansion I simultaneously started raiding with friends, doing keys, and trying out rated PvP, I will look back at Shadowlands fondly.

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one day, your knees will buckle under the weight of your endless sins, and i will spare you only because you are a void elf

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My little dirty secret. :shushing_face:

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I could remember when multiple guilds would join together. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting of a proper guild age. It just seemed to have more of a communitarian angle…dig? It was the pride of SERVERS, not necessarily individual guilds, for my take, that accomplished great things. If you were in a certain server in the Norrathian Age that was famous, you were golden.

I’m sure you’d agree with me on that one, that SERVERS worked together.

Yea. As much as it was good to be in a big guild because the best stuff you could get into was kept securely, more solo-friendlier options cropped up. This too was a boon for everyone.

Covenants were only going to be xpac-specific, same as the leggos that were in those times. It’s just a friendlier version of borrowed power, because chances are you won’t be taking it with you going into DF.

Because of borrowed power, literally. We’re weak, so we need to have power LOANED to us. Absolutely correct. Too bad that this caused major balancing issues, as this was Orwellian among the class/spec/roles.

Ah, the forerunner of Mythic+ that only supplied cosmetics and therefore a waste of time for progression.

Me too. Can wait some to play it on Classic again.

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when your knees buckle under the weight of your endless sins, i will not save you

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This is a thing even now, so, no. lol

Aside clataclysm nothing actually imrpoved for guilds in the upcoming expanson as a “mandatory system” they were far more of a thign in vanilla-wrath.

whats that suppsoed to mean? Certain class/spec is very good or very bad each patch since tbc lol.

Out of the 10 wow expansions, only three were about faction conflict.

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I’ll toss myself on the flaming pyre of public scorn because I literally do not give an eff. No cap, SL was THE best expansion since MoP.

Like I articulated above, it was the definitive proof that Blizzard was finally listening and learning how to have expansion-centric features and balance them between power and non power. They had a proper level canonical threat worthy of what our statuses and power levels rightfully are. We were literally facing a being who had the capabilities to erase reality itself and rewrite it to their whims/designs…now compare that to DF whose threats were a cranky proto dragon with the power to make it rain really nasty, a glorified science experiment mad he’s an unloved science experiment, and a psychotic proto dragon on shadowflame steroids who somehow is the “final boss”. DF, as an expansion, wouldn’t have been worthy for our squire’s 3rd string junior squire to even look into…much less drag us into it.

In fact the aspects are literal glorified planetary babysitters…and even with their power, they sucked at it and relief on us. Like we were dealing with more credible threats way back in Legion…

Dragonriding is the only part of the expansion I am happy about. I feel like COVID and the corporate scandals robbed us of a proper SL expansion and I’d much rather live in a timeline where that didn’t happen and SL was allowed to be all that Blizzard likely envisioned it to be.

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Calling something the “golden age” because the currency used in a game is gold is an odd choice of metaphorical speech.

If you believe in the cyclical nature of humans I’d mark the classic & post legion period of wow as golden, peaking around end of shadowlands and festering through dragonflight.

Original wow through wotlk was probably more iron/heroic in nature as the community pulled in people from all sorts of past worlds, something which classic couldn’t recreate since the entire nature of an undiscovered frontier was dulled due to the nature of rereleasing a scripted world.

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I was in tight with the Venthyr…

I don’t quite know about that, because the Priest class back then carried very specific class racials. As we all know, the Forsaken SPriest being the PvP powerhouse with Devouring Plague, or the Dwarf Priest being the PvE powerhouse with Fear Ward.

It was the least forgiving to play the wrong race with a certain class. If you were Alliance, you better pick a Human for Paladin because reasons.

Just without all the cool stuff big guilds could get.

“Bring the player, not the class”. Homogenization. The Borrowed Power Era, which began with M+ making its debut in Leg, started to make things VERY SWEATY as there are only 3 DPS, 1 Healer, 1 Tank slots to fill.

It’s not like the laughable Challenge Mode, early Mythic 5-man in WoD, or whatever such.

It would have been implied of the other seven.

“Times change” as we know. No more war, no more super-super-serial PvP. Look at xfaction stuff making its debut for Dragonflight. Both the Alliance and Horde now JOINING TOGETHER, EVEN IN GUILDS? UNHEARRRD OVVVF! SL would indeed be the last “war” WoW xpac.

It’s all peacetime now between A and H.

One aspect of it. All your wildest dreams of being rich came true.

Not to mention that Dave “Fargo” Kosak and Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street took over a lot of the design too, two awesomo legends that helped get rid of all the Norrathian style.

Ghostcrawler in particular was favored by the community and you can say it was a golden age because he was one who loved the community and spoke often with them. A solid stud of a developer. Jeff Kaplan by comparison was more of a…err, forgot my line.

Golden in the way that this might be the one time in WoW history where we had the best relationship with developers. Maybe? It was rocky in the beginning and rocky during Borrowed Power.

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I’m compelled to call “cap” on this one. Ain’t no way.

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The Golden Age: Vanilla-Wrath.

The Weird Age: Cataclysm-Legion.

The Dark Ages, aka the Sylvanas Saga, pure Nightmare Fuel (thanks a lot, Sylvanas!): BfA-Shadowlands.

The Renaissance: Dragonflight and Worldsoul Saga.

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Can you postulate for each? Current Retail is certainly a renaissance alright…

What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Azeroth, to be born…

Interesting that “spiritus mundi” was in that poem as well, which is Latin for soul of the world.

That’s not as flattering when you consider how Yeats’ poem could describe what’s going on with the status quo of current Retail and what is to come. A king’s feast of thought for another feasting day.

I think I’ll remain in the past…