In playing back through WoW (more or less) for the second time via the Classic ™ series, I have gained a full understanding of what made Vanilla so great, then slowly begin to unravel. Accessibility. QoL.
WoW lost something important when it started catering to those who wanted the shortcut. It lost something important when there was no longer a select group of players in elite guilds and everyone on the server know who they were. They would park in Ironforge or Orgrimmar and get bombarded by whispers. “Where did you get that mount?!?” “Wow SICK gear dude.” It was a great thing that most players did not have an epic item in every slot. It was a great thing that not everyone could afford epic mounts. The game allowed people to do hard things and to rewarded accordingly.
Years ago, there was a commercial for a career website called The Ladders. It perfectly shows what happened to WoW. TheLadders.co.uk | Executive Jobs and Executive Career Services - YouTube
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Nah man, everyone is running around with their version of “post hoc ergo propter hoc”. Wow reached a saturation point where pretty much everyone who was going to play wow was doing it. It’d been about 4 years. Higher schoolers were going off to college, college dudes starting jobs etc etc.
Players were moving on to other stages of life, then cata hit and popped the nostalgia bubble. There was no one decision, one thing that killed wow, it just evolved. It was never going to reach the old heights, it’s almost 2 decades old at this point.
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This is the saddest thread on the front page.
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See, thats the problem. Vanilla was never great, it was just the best there was for its time. For today’s standards, Vanilla is awful. I’d go as far as saying its the worst iteration of WoW thats ever existed.
If you think Vanilla was so amazing, you should probably just stay there and rot and let the rest of us play a game that ended up becoming better than anything else on the planet.
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I really don’t think that accessibility was EVER the problem. In my opinion, the relative ease of the content itself was/is the problem. If dungeons are so easy that you don’t have to communicate and coordinate, then no one talks and no one forms lasting relationships.
What TBC Classic has shown me is that how you form the group and how you get to the dungeon are both comparatively unimportant, at least in regards to socialisation and the community feel of a server. In fact, spending time on the LFG channel is a NEGATIVE social experience – worse than not socialising at all, IMO.
No, I love(d) TBC Classic. Had a ball. But the wonderful social experience came from guilds and discord servers and raiding. It did not especially arise out of dungeon runs, and it definitely didn’t arise out of the LFG channel.
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Amazing how if someone believes different than you the hostility comes out. You’re on a forum playing a game that has all walks of life. Grow up if you can’t take someone thinking outside your small box of opinions.
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Because making the game more available and playable by the casual market aka the main draw of the base game when it launched compared to other contemporary MMORPG wasn’t at all a selling point.
Accessibility is good in games that want to live a long time and persist, you are very wrong and now flagged for trolling
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Oh you’re back from your vacation I guess.
Welcome back discount Lemonfront, didn’t miss you.
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Nah, Vanilla was great. When classic released, I returned to WoW and had an absolute blast. It took me back to the good ol’ days when vanilla ruled.
There is something very charming about classic / vanilla WoW that is undeniable.
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I’m not saying it was perfect. I think the grind to 60 should’ve been a little bit longer. Nothing drastic maybe 25%. But other than that, I can’t think of too much I would change, personally.
It was great when the devs were brave enough to not have every spec by viable. The off specs were like traps for bad players that allowed group and guild leaders to steer clear. One of my first raid leaders threatened to kick a paladin out of our MC run for DPSing. Having a best option allowed players to separate themselves. You could see who did their homework.
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This is just the natural progression of MMOs. This same thing happened in Everquest and it happened over 2 expansions - just like WoW.
“Gearflation”, players becoming smarter/better, new content invalidating old content - its just part of the life cycle of these kinds of theme park MMOs.
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The irony of that statement is that a HUGE contributing factor to wow’s early success is that it was wildly easier than everything else out there at the time. Die deep in in an area behind 100 mobs? ghost past them all, grab your corpse and hearth out, or take a debuff and keep all your stuff.
Other games had steep XP penalties and your stuff was with your corpse. No ghost, you had to run back naked. Bah, ease of content, please.
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Their was nothing quite like a corpse run in everquest
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Name checks out.
Hard disagree, accessibility is what made wow great from the very beginning.
WoW was -always- the casual friendly MMO even from Vanilla onwards, compared to the MMOs at the time that is.
WoW’s lifeblood is the casual player, purposely shutting them out of content to prop up the fragile egos of people whom get upset when people aren’t drooling over their accomplishments is what lead to the game dying off.
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Ye, not really. The reality was that most people didn’t care nor even remotely rembered a single name. This is some made up/exaggerated thing probably coming from the same people who were fake afking on certain mounts, who were in desperate need for attention and thought they were somehow special in a videogame. Literally almost no one cared, at all, besides a few groupies. 
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and then becoming worse than anything else on the planet few expansions later.
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Yup. It was Flying Mounts all along!
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I’m sure there are a few different elements that contributed. But I think the main one was the shift in target demographic. When they changed the game from an RPG to an action game they, naturally, alienated all the RPG players. We like playing with grandmas and girlfriends, and don’t have many options for group based RPG gameplay (EQ, FFXI, bout it).
But of course it was an astronomical success for the action gamer crowd, and for profits.
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This would require substantial justification, given how obvious it is that competition drives such a large portion of the population.
Sure some portion no doubt of the content locust swarm only really care about the social environment, but even among them a great many care about the social environment because of looking good.