DAoC , still play it even on the Phoenix free shard when i want to experience better PvP and a player based economy
For Midgard!
i mean, lets compare vanilla to other mmos of its time:
wow: instanced dungeons, instanced weekly raids that dropped epic level gear. no penalty for death outside of some repair bills. the ability to solo to level cap, the ability to quest to level cap, no grinding required.
other mmos: grind on open world mobs in a party to level. quests are few and far between. everything requires a group, even hitting level cap. no instanced dungeons or raids - upgrading gear means camping random spawn world bosses with your raid that are highly contested and on days long respawns. you’ll be
lucky to claim one once a month or so. dying can mean anything from losing xp, downleveling, to dropping the entire contents of your inventory.
Very people played MMOs before WoW.
It was a tiny niche genre, with maybe 100,000 people who had ever played any MMO at all. Then WoW came onto the scene and blew them all away with something like 8 million Vanilla players.
So statistically, if we assume that 100k and 8 mil are correct, that would mean that about 1.25% of Vanilla players had ever played another MMO; and conversely, that for 98.75% of Vanilla players, it was our first MMO.
The best part of city of heroes, was designing your hero.
The best part of Vanguard was uninstalling it. 
Look, I definitely agree with you. Other games are objectively harder, however if someone hasn’t experienced them, WoW would have its own level of subjective difficulty.
This isnt really accurate. FFXI’s peak was around 1 million subscribers. Everquest peaked at around 500k just prior to WoW’s launch.
6 Years in Everquest. Rodcet Knife server
i played a lot of icewind dale befor i played wow …
I’m not sure those numbers are right either, but sure, let’s assume it’s true.
You’d still be looking at about 12.5% of Vanilla players having played an MMO before, or 18.75% if we assume that every single EQ and FF11 player was unique (neither ever played the other game).
The general point remains true. WoW was a massive juggernaut that brought a ton of new people into the hobby, and the vast majority of Vanilla players had never played an MMO before.
Warhammer online was first mmo. Like 2 years iirc. It was good in the beginning. It was when they shifted away from pvp to more pve development it started to feel like wow’s ugly sister lol.
Then I spent close to 9 years in eve.
Now I am here.
They are accurate. 100k across all prior mmo titles is a MASSIVE underestimation.
Sony/Square were historically, quite transparent about subscription numbers.
1 Like
Nope. I’ve tried some since, SWTOR, Rift, FF14, but I always come back to WoW.
Sure. I don’t care.
There’s a reason I specified in my post that the numbers might not have been totally accurate. Unless you can find at least four million MMO players before WoW, the point is still there.
UO. EQ. EQ2. Asheron’s Call. Star Wars Galaxies. ESO. SWTOR.
Compared to all of the above, WoW is the best (IMO) in terms of graphics, game content, leveling experience, and lore. Best crafting hands down belonged to SWG, before they nuked it. I’m still trying to decide if I should go revisit it with one of the ongoing indie servers out there. But every time I look at the dated graphics I kinda defer actually doing it.
But yes, WoW is not a hard game. You can make it what you want, and there’s plenty of game content to spend your time on. I’m a casual solo player, with occasional LFG runs, and I don’t worry about chasing after the newest and best gear available with each new XPac.
Been playing since release in 2004, so I guess it’s still the best MMORPG I’ve known.
I miss my speeder from SWG… true smuggler here lol
1 Like
My first real mmo was warhammer online, a game I feel came out too early with people who were too lazy to make it stay the course and actually go somewhere.
1 Like
Best pvp/rvr of any game I’ve ever played.
1 Like
I miss so many things from early SWG… I miss hunting Krayt dragons out in the Dune Sea the most…First time I saw one of those it took so many people to take it down…
I also remember the first time I saw a legite jedi…was taking on like 25 other players at once… I think there were only a couple on our entire server at that time.
I used to spend days just decorating my house or setting resource harvestors…No chores you just did what you wanted and it was awesome… you didnt even have to pick up combat skills if you were not into that…
1 Like
My first MMO was DAOC. It was one of the big 3 MMOs, back in 2001. I played DAOC every day for 3+ years.
Then WoW came out, and I tried it the 3d week. It was better and I switched that day.
During the years WoW was being designed and created (2003-2004), the WoW designers had several very popular MMOs to compare and play. WoW had many things identical to DAOC. WoW also avoided the 3 or 4 biggest problems that DAOC had. That was enough to make it better.
I don’t compare WoW to other MMOs, just because players are so different. Each of us has a different favorite MMO or expansion.
The time between different places was MUCH longer in DAOC.WoW has flight paths. DAOC had horses. That was one of the top 3 DAOC problems that WoW fixed (or at least improved a lot).
To my knowledge the only ones that existed when i started playing were dark age of conan and everquest. tried both. enjoyed neither. tried wow in 07. been here ever since. wow has always had something in every expansion that really hooks me, even WoD, because the raids in that xpac were great even if there was literally nothing else to do. But this time around, I’m just…bored. I haven’t logged in in almost a week. I didn’t even notice that today is tuesday. That’s how boring this expansion is to me. And it makes me sad knowing my time with this game, which has been such a big part of my life for so long, might be coming to an end.