Argent Crusade was after Ulduar. That’s pretty much where they began transitioning away from expansion-long progression so new and returning players could get in on the latest patch right away.
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The oldest kind of season gearing I can remember would probably be the Sunwell patch of TBC, both with people trying to gear up alts through the Magister’s Plateau instance and badge gear getting updated rewards.
Sunwell killed non-seasonal gearing forever, because doing that sucked.
“Oops we lost some geared players who hopped to a BT raid guild! No more progress on Vashj, back to recruitment and Gruul!”
I’m 80% sure Wrath had badge gear by the time Ulduar came out, still remember trying to do the daily heroic when the RDF did not exist yet.
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I so agree with you.
It’s just a matter of reframing how people look at it to make it seem like the game has only ever been about esports. Seems to be working.
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I like it when people explain to me it has always been like this. It’s at that point I tend to walk away & I know they have no clue wth they are talking about
Or, they try to claim it is similar to tiers of armor.
wanders off mumbling
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WoW.
Where we demand alt friendliness, but suddenly change our minds during the “season” topic.
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If you are interested you can try Vanillia Classic. That is the way the game looked when it first became an MMO.
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In vanilla you would still be doing Molten Core to get BIS items even with Naxx out and in TBC you would need to do the previous raids to get attuned for the newer tiers. That said I think the seasonal content thing works best for the modern state of the game.
I’m sure it’s been said. I’m gonna say it again.
Old WoW was seasonal too.
Raid Tiers were seasons.
No, this did not fully apply to Vanilla & TBC.
Unsure on Wrath. I know the least about how Wrath functioned.
It DEFINITELY applied starting in Cata and in every Expansion after it.
I do think they exaggerate it now. Part of that is just that they made the ilvl range of a season much wider than it was for the sake of the DF/TWW item upgrade systems – So when everything bumps up in ilvl for the next season, it feels like starting over more than it used to because of the larger gap between the current you and the new gear.
But the core design of it hasn’t really changed. It’s just that Dungeons are part of the endgame progression now instead of a stepping stone / currency farm. So specifically saying “Tier”, meaning “Raid Tier” no longer made seasons. “Season” is a lot more general and more fitting when the game is supporting more than one path through Endgame now.
That is disingenuous and untrue. We did not have breaks in the game to suddenly give us a dungeon, we simply progressed.
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Are you implying that in older versions of WoW, all content was open and available from the start and that you just had to get skilled & geared enough to get to it?
Because that is verifiably untrue to a hilarious degree.
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Are you just salty about the one week of downtime?? Is that what you think seasonal means?
yes all the tier 3 gone in 5 mins lol
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No I am having a blast, I truly am enjoying this new content & the only thing salty around here is my Koji & Kimchee
Ok but then there’s no difference. When TOT came out, you went and did TOT. If you weren’t geared from T14 then there was catchup gear and LFR, nobody ever went back and kept raiding Terrace to get new guildies up to speed.
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People really don’t remember, but every raid tier outside of Vanilla/early TBC always came with catch-up.
Isle of Quel’danas was like the first patch island zone ever, in Sunwell, and I remember people complained because it was the first dungeon that dropped epics that were pretty good, easily better than what came before.
And again in Wrath with ICC, those 5-mans that dropped epics including battered hilt. Before that, we had the Argent Tournament 5-man as well.
It’s been like this, starting in late TBC but it’s an ongoing thing.
Catch up systems have existed for way longer than they haven’t in WoW.
I did prefer the old way of having to play through everything in order to progress, but that’s just not new player or alt friendly.
But I’m an old head, and I enjoy grindier games so it’s not something I ever had issue with.
Made your main characters, and the game as a whole, really feel more like an investment.
Seasons started with the Sunwell patch in TBC and for good reason.
The only people pining for non-seasonal gearing are people that are still playing, and they wouldn’t be one of the suckers coming into the game when the 3rd tier of an xpac is the relevant content. Guilds being forever stuck in the 1st or 2nd tier isn’t as fun as you are imagining.
It only “worked” back then because there was a constant flow of new players coming in.
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It 100% worked the same way…it was just not called seasons but just referred to as patch “x”. Gear got reset, etc.
These seasons always started in new raid tiers. Its been happening for like like ever(I think Wrath is when it started fully. Its always happened, there are more difficulties sure but I think accomadating for those that aren’t strictly hardcore and “casual” is fine.
The vanilla days of going to farm each raid from previous raid tiers(I don’t remember exactly how I just know gear resets have been going on since like Wrath)…yeah naw, I don’t want to go back.