Give us a game that is HARD, requires EFFORT, and requires COOPERATION

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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I played Vanilla back in 2005, and those were the things that made it special:

  1. Hard
  2. Needs effort
  3. Needs cooperation

Yes, we all sucked. And that’s exactly what the content was tuned for. The content was tuned for people who did the best they could, but didn’t have 16 years to theory-craft for optimal threat and dps. The content was tuned for people who had to figure out the strats as they went along, not for people who had entire wikis showing them optimal strats on day 1. The content was tuned for people showing up with a handful of consumes, not cheesing with world buffs.

We wiped repeatedly. We made games out of not healing a certain officer and letting him die. And when we died, we had a laugh, dusted ourselves off, and gave it another try. And when we finally killed Rag or Nef, people got drunk and had epic celebrations.

At some point on retail, you gave in to the ribbons-for-everyone crowd and lost your magic sauce. You killed the hard - people can now steamroll content on LFR. You killed the effort - people can now hit max level in a weekend and steamroll all the content on LFR. And you killed the cooperation - people can now play the entire game without saying a single word to another person.

You thought you were just giving us options. You thought all the people who want a challenge can go raid on Mythic, and everyone else can use LFR. Everyone wins right?

Wrong. Killing a raid boss on Mythic doesn’t feel nearly as special when everyone’s already steamrolling it on LFR. The fact that you gave the raid a different prefix and the loot has higher iLvls is irrelevant - people play wow to slay dragons, not for ilvl 90 loot.

Back in Vanilla and TBC, people joined guilds and formed bonds and became friends, so that they could see all the game’s content and eventually hope to kill the biggest baddies. If LFR had existed back then, 90% of raiders would have never bothered. They would have played WoW the same way they played Diablo, inhaled all the content in 4 months, then quit the game out of boredom. Which is exactly what has happened in retail for the past few years. You took a living world that required patience and community, and turned it into a Diablo slashfest.

That is why I quit and never came back until Classic. I was unbelievably pumped for Classic, and am still enjoying it. It fixes a lot of the problems in Retail. It brought back the effort - you have to really invest time into the game, to get results. It brought back the cooperation - you have to actually talk to people to really experience the game.

But what it’s missing is the hard. People have had 16 years to optimize the living daylights out of their classes and the raid encounters. 16 years to invent a whole new world-buff meta that the original game designers never intended. And as a result, the content has become trivially easy. Easy enough that it’s diluting the effort and cooperation aspects as well. Far easier than the designers ever intended. Far easier than what made Vanilla special.

Vanilla-classic is over. I don’t know what you guys have coming next, but whatever it is, make it hard. If you’re going to re-release TBC, re-tune the boss health and damage so that it’s still challenging given the latest meta. Re-tune any unintended gimmicks that were never used widely back the content was live. And when we’re done with classic TBC/Wrath, give us whole new raids with never-seen-before bosses and mechanics so we can feel like noobs again.

Give us hard. Require effort. Require cooperation. And you’ll have a killer MMO.

If there is a place where players can exploit gaining experience, items, currency, or reputation, then that’s precisely what players will do, because they always take the path of least resistance. Since MMO content is measured in months, not hours, the content is paradoxically daunting, so any shortcut to the top will become the most popular route, even if it isn’t fun. And if a game’s path of least resistance isn’t fun, it means the game isn’t fun. Lazy or inexperienced game developers blame players for “ruining” a game with aberrant behavior, but these accusations are like dog owners blaming their pets for eating unhealthy scraps - Original WoW game-design notes - 2002

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Play Shadowlands.

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Vanilla was hard for a few reasosn.

  1. You were 15 years younger
  2. Your internet connection was worse
  3. The game changed from release in 04 to tbc
  4. Bugs… lots of bugs
  5. You didnt know what was comming

All those things combied with the old school Tank mentality of Threat tanking and not DPS threat tanking were entierly different for how people played the game. Though you can try to be a guild that runs on only threat tank as opposed to Fury and see how long it lasts.

The effort required isnt anything special. People are putting in MORE effort these days than they did years ago. The only people getting all these buffs were the tip top guilds. Even Dragonslayer and ZG were not buffs the people would do for the most part.

As for your last point people still do that now. Guilds are doing it on a higher level than they did in the past.

In the end you need to really think back to 15 years ago and understand you enjoyed a game because of the things you did not know. This isnt going to some new restaurant where you think everything looks amazing and you want to have a taste of it all. it might be the same place but you know whats the best thing to order this time.

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I don’t think Shadow Legends will fix it…

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Oh, you want Final Fantasy XI.

Cant solo after Level 10.
Only one class can effectively solo at all and you gotta unlock it after Level 30.
Unlocking additional classes is a group effort.
Completing level breaks is a group effort at Level 50.
Gaining experience and gaining money are mutually exclusive.
Camping Notorious Monsters for hours on end for only a slight chance of a drop.
Crafting is not a guaranteed success and you can lose rare/valuable mats.
Killing a single mob in a group can take at least 5 minutes.
Loss of experience upon death.

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Heh. I didn’t give a serious response because, quite frankly, the OP didn’t deserve one. I don’t know what they’re asking for. They make this giant post about how the game has to be challenging and difficult and really test players. And I just think…‘It’s just a video game.’

See, that’s the biggest difference between then and now. Why was the game seemingly so much harder back then? Because players didn’t take it nearly as seriously. It was just a game. They played for gasp the fun of it. People would play AV for hours and come out of it with nothing but some good memories. I’d come out of a dungeon and the party would talk about how much fun that was. Now you come out of a dungeon and people only care about the gear they got, or the dps charts. The experience itself means nothing.

In any event, my ‘buy Shadowlands’ comment was in regards to him essentially wanting to play an e-sport. An mmo that isn’t designed to be fun, but rather designed as an interactive calculator. I found the quote about fun to be somewhat ironic, as it’s literally the opposite of what happened to the game.

‘Fun’ is obviously a subjective term. But I feel confident in saying that the game was more fun to the majority of players back in the game. Both because they took it less seriously, but also because the game itself wasn’t designed so ridiculously meticulously. There was room for players to be creative, have freedom and choices. That all gets sucked out of the game over the years as it becomes less and less a game and more and more a…whatever you want to call WoW now. But making raid encounters more difficult doesn’t make the game more fun to the average gamer. The average gamer doesn’t need or want to be ultra challenged in an mmorpg. They want to chill out, relax and just have a good time. Again…it’s just a game.

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Said like someone who has never cleared a Mythic only tier, or before Mythics were a thing, a Heroic only tier.

Killing Heroic Lich King felt LOADS special compared to the people doing it on normal.

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When WoW released in 2004, it was the easiest & most casual MMORPG on the market at the time.

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I’m sorry, but no. WoW’s big selling point when it launched was approachability–the exact opposite of what you were saying. In a time when EverQuest was pushing “you should need a group to ever even see your racial capital city!” WoW did, “You can solo the bulk of the game, needing a group only for content specifically marked as group content!”

At some point, Modern took that to the level of, “If you’re not in a raid, everything should fall apart if you blow on it!” And that’s even worse than ever-so-carefully pulling just one gnoll in EQ because if you get a single add you’re dead. But that doesn’t mean what mattered about WoW was ever “it’s hard.”

I want the game I enjoyed back in 2007 back. I don’t want it messed up for the fantasies of a few people who either don’t remember it, or never actually liked it.

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Have you ever actually killed a mythic boss? And I mean getting cutting edge not killing the first boss of a raid with a pug. If not then you really have no say in this. Mythic bosses require a billion times more coordination and cooperation than any boss in vanilla ever did. Take off the rose colored glasses, raids in vanilla were always a joke, you were just 12 and really bad at video games.

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I didnt read OP, but I can assume its about how you should tune classic according to player’s skill level and information, firstly they are not going to put in that much development time into this game, its easy money for them at a super low maintenance cost.

Secondly, you cannot make trivial mechanic fights “hard” unless you just out right make the boss hit super heavy or prolong the fights to ridiculous times making it war of nutrition, people who keep asking for “harder” fights, try retail, mythic is genuinely hard and complex from what I can see, but you will never get what you asked for in terms of old content being made harder.

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meanwhile in classic forums…

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Yes, but we all have different reasons for why a dungeon is fun. For me it’s that it was a challenge, that it required some effort. When I healed leveling dungeons in BfA I’d often come out without having to cast a single heal. I’d feel like I was on a boost run, just following along and clicking on the loot. It seemed like the game was designed to rush through ridiculously easy quests and dungeons so you could get to the real game, the end game. However fun the end game might be leveling in BfA wasn’t fun. Hard is a relative term but too easy is boring.

Vanilla wasn’t like that and classic has enough of those elements that it’s different than BfA too. Leveling is a real part of the game that can’t be just zerged though like you’re a god. The dungeons require some caution and unless you wait until you’re so geared you over power them you will occasionally wipe.

I’m not asking for changes to BC. But I’m hoping they don’t tune the game to the last patch with the pre-wrath nerfs. I hope they do the patches in order so the game is like I remember. Hard, requires some effort and cooperation.

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Even if they did patch progression it wouldn’t be hard.

I just don’t think the percentage of the player base who wants a tense, stressful experience is very high. It’s deceptively high in regards to forum posters, because they tend to be the most hardcore.

But if they did patch progression, that’s fine. Authentic is authentic. And so is 2.4.3 state of TBC.

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This is true, but while blizzard was increasing the difficulty of end game they nerfed down leveling until it was a joke. Maybe most don’t care about leveling and are happy that it’s very easy and something you can rush through without a worry or a thought. I’d like to see a game where leveling is a real part of the game as well as the end game. Why can’t we have both?

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I don’t like using the word hard because everyone has a different view of it. But i think it’s clear leveling and leveling dungeons in classic are harder than leveling and leveling dungeons in BfA. As I remember it the normal dungeons in BC were harder than the dungeons in vanilla. And there was a heroic mode after that. I’d like to play the game as I remember it in the beginning of BC not as it was with the pre-wrath nerfs. Was it hard is subjective but I think it’s objectively true that BC was harder when it was released than after the last patch.

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I’m interested in playing a remake, not a hardmode hack.

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That’s fair. I believe Blizz has all the patch data for all of TBC (unlike Vanilla). So it’s at least an option. But this is Blizzard of 2020. Expect the least amount of effort possible, which means final patch with staggered content releases.

Anyway, I’d suggest if you want a challenge try Retail mythics. Also…Demon’s Souls would like a word.

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The issue is patches include more than just balance changes.

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Right, so for them to go through and revert certain raid or dungeon changes, but keep say bug fixes would be a lot of work. So don’t expect it.

It helps me to just envision a TBC server as if it’s the end of TBC and Blizz creates a new server. And that’s what we’re playing.