Wow was new and different. It was the natural evolution of some already-baked, solid lore and history. The setting was perfect, and the antagonists just felt natural. Instead of a good versus evil format, it was gray versus gray, with all the shades and flavors that come with gray.
The best AND the worst thing about WoW has always been it’s player base.
You keep replying to me, but you’re not stating anything relevant to anything I’ve posted in my comments. I’m not sure if you’re intending to reply to me, but I suppose since you’re quoting me you are!
This is not a conversation between people who have a common understanding of language.
You also seem to have completely ignored everything else I’ve stated to complain about something you seem to be assuming other people are claiming. It’s difficult to follow, but it’s definitely not related to my comments.
Anyway, I have no interest in arguing your point of view vs mine. You are entitled to believe whatever you believe and your opinions are valid.
I have. I played it for a bit at a friends house. The main reason I got into WoW instead of that was because I was invited by another guy, and got Vanilla for free. One of my best friends at the time played FF11. He actually tried WoW and went back to FF11.
But the main reason WoW was able to beat those games was because it was extremely causal for the time. WoW was basically considered a mild step up from Hello Kitty Island Adventures or Toontown. Another reason is because it basically was built on the back of Everquest, and ended up cannibalizing a large chunk of it’s player base.
I started playing WoW in 06 and when I did I was obviously terrible. I remember meeting people and they would “show me the ropes” or educate me on how to do my talent points and explain my skills to me. Even craft me some bags. The community then was amazing and something we will never have again.
Also this is a game that you could play non stop for years and still have plenty to do.
And not to mention the game has always (since I’ve started) been extremely optimized and played silk smooth. It was user friendly unlike other MMOs at the time.
It’s a combination of things, but largely it popped at the perfect time, and had a huge level of accessibility.
You’re being trolled, friend. He used to argue constantly that convenience features lead to subs plummeting:
He was completely against RDF until Blizzard announced they weren’t including it with WoTLK:
Except, it didn’t. RDF was added in late 2009, the game gained subs all throughout 2010 only finally starting to decline in 2011 after Cata’s release. And if you think RDF is why Cata wasn’t widely enjoyed … well I got a bridge I’d love to sell you.
No, Wrath cashed in on the love for the Arthas storyline from Warcraft 3 ontop of the continued success the game had from Vanilla & TBC.
Played before & after RDF, without RDf there was no shot I would have made it through the content drought post ICC where all we got for an entire year was Ruby Sanctum. It enabled gearing alts that I could bring into my main raid without having to slog through raids that I had been clearing for a year before.
And Well I’m posting on a level 70 that played at the start of TBCC and the end, I largely skipped the bulk of it because I’m still not a fan of the raids and so going through the whole journey of doing nothing but raid logging for raids I don’t enjoy made little to no sense. Difference between you & I is when I don’t want to relive the original experience I’ll step away from the game opposed to screaming for Blizzard to change the expansion, other people be damned. If they decide to not add RDF I’ll probably still play as I thoroughly enjoy Wrath raiding post-Naxx, but odds are it’ll just be 1 character and i’ll not have any interest in alts.
And to be clear, I’d prefer they release it with ICC as it originally was. Or if they decide to release it sooner, only have heroics farmable through it come ICC and strictly have it
leveling/normals. Why I’m annoyed about it now is because Blizzard refuses to communicate anything and I’d prefer to know if I’m getting some bastardized version of Wrath or something they’re trying to make authentic to the original.
WoW boomed in popularity because it was a more casual MMO than anything else on the market. In combination with the love for the Warcraft franchise that was created with the RTS games.
People are threatening to quit because we want Classic to be re-launches of the game, not these bastardized versions of the expansions that try to apply 2004 game design onto it that has proven to not be a popular choice (Classic era is dead, SoM isn’t much better off, TBCC was doing so bad they opted against even trying era servers or TBC SoM).
Why are y’all threatening to quit over the idea of something that wasn’t the reason for the game’s downfall being added in the expansion it was added in a product that is supposed to be a “faithful recreation of the original experience”? RDF is not LFR, borrowed power, horrendous class design, arrogant devs thinking they know best, or any of the other actual issues that has driven retail down. In fact, if the whole idea of dungeons being a manual grouping thing is to you what makes the game good or not, then surely you love retail as the actual relevant dungeon content is manual grouping.
City of Heroes actually was back in the day. I’m not surprised you can’t find anything definitive on it with web searches as it did make its launch in 2004.
It was a AAA title made by NC Soft but it was never designed as a ‘WoW Killer’. It actually fit a different niche which lead to Champions Online (originally designed as a Marvel MMO until Marvel pulled out seeing WoW’s beginning decline when they decided MMOs were a fad and not worth investing in).
I’ve played both of them btw and character customization was pretty neat. Tons of different power set combinations.
It was the first very clean and polished mmorpg that attracted both warcraft. starcraft, diablo players and other mmo players.
It started going downhill because people were probably burnt out, wow is a very time-consuming game after all.
In short, right place and right time.
dear op, the RDF came 1year into original wotlk (in the mid of wrath time line) during those time wow players got increased by 2millions players, so i dunno from where kids this days call upon rdf and lose of subs, however since icc lasted for many months and with some technical problems on certain server going offline for hours due the fishing macro spam issue, subs started to drop at the last 4months of wotlk, and once blizzard decided the release date of cata, tons of people did quit because war craft glory ended with arthas, at start of cata there was A LOT of problems from servers lag, insane queue, and tons of glitchs, millions did quit in the first few weeks of cata release before blizzard even bring the RDF at DS patch, yet mindless people also think that LFD destroyed the game, so just so you know if you were never arround? the RDF has nothing to do with the fail of wow, there are alot of other reasons that drive people away such as the hackers in cata, u can google wow hacker in cata and see insane problems with hackers doing anything and killing anyone, wow would still die even if blizzard never released rdf, and the best example for this? is current tbc now didn’t even have 1/10 of the numbers in original tbc, and wotlkc will not even have 1/100 of the amount of players in original wotlk even though wotlkc doesn’t have LFD 
I didn’t imply that RDF was responsible for the downfall. I might believe it was a contributing factor, but I didn’t state that in this thread. I simply said RDF was not responsible for the success of this game. Most of its growth happened without it then it quickly plateau’d after being added. I didn’t mean to imply causation there. I’m saying what got it to 10m subscribers was not RDF.
I’m asking why people thought this game was great, because from the sounds of people here, all they seemed to care about is RDF but when it was added it was just about at its subscriber peak already, so something else had to be going for it. That was the purpose of this thread, to find out what people believed made it a wonderful game.
you got a point in there but i already told u the game gained 2more million players after the rdf was introduced and the game was already mid wrath, so we can assume that the rdf helped alot of new players to Join the game during mid expansion which is something very hard to achieve in wotlkc & for that blizzard are selling the 70boost to make people come in easily not being aware that whoever buy the 70boost as new player wouldn’t mind to buy gold and get instant gear in gdkp’s and for that we have tbcc filled with gdkp’s and gold sellers / buyers.
However back in original wotlk game only started to lose the numbers because icc patch lasted for alot of months and also because most people never aimed to play any expansion after wrath of the lich king, but speaking about why the game was able to bring millions in 2008? because the players were playing for fun, joining wow to make friends and showing care toward each other, it was very nice to meet your random friends from wow in real life, but look at the game now! everyone is being selfish with so damn reserves and taking gold for any service, people doesn’t want to help each other unless they get paid and many toxicity from the gate keepers, while many people only play within their guilds/in closed circles and they never interact with anyone else, the sad truth about wow is that this game is no longer a place to have fun! people treat it as work, and most try to earn irl money out of it.
I screenshotted your post because I happen to agree with a lot of it and it is very sad but true. Thank you for sharing.
Funny you say that you don’t feel it anymore cause I still feel it on a new fresh class on a fresh server, that I never felt even my first time playing shadowlands. Shadowlands was a spam fest to lvl 60 in like, a week (yes my first char ever) and there was 0 sense of progression because of how easy and fast it was. All I wanted to do was get it over with and hit endgame asap and pvp cause of how garbage gear ilvl differences are.
Fresh wotlk still has that classic feel where, even powerleveling in dungeons has that feeling of progression. I try to mix up that and solo questing to enjoy wpvp also, which retail has absolutely none of until max endgame. Retail just feels like a mandatory minmax spamfest whereas classic gives you the option to slow down and enjoy it for what it is or speed up and minmax but both can be rewarded.
Simple. It was the first of its kind really.
The next gen of gamers don’t care so much for mmo’s.
None of my kids care for the types of games I do. They seem to prefer action based/twitch reflex games like FPS’s. An RPG of any sort to them just looks like homework.
Lots of people that played games from that era who were young at the time stopped doing so. We are what’s left of that generation of gamers that took it up as an actual hobby.
Just my observations living amongst the latest 2.5 generations of gamers.
While I agree with this, I also think that RDF coming when it did helped keep sub numbers up when they probably should have dipped pretty fast considering we were in a content drought. It made leveling alts a breeze. Especially for tanks and healers.
This is true, but I think it can be attributed more to market saturation than people not liking RDF.
A lot of people will call this “copium”, but this is the truth. The community was better about helping each other out back then. Even the old loot rules of need before greed was something that was established because it was helpful. It made pugging a more enjoyable experience, and that encouraged people, specifically tanks and healers, to keep doing it.
Unfortunately, the success of the game started attraction the wrong type of people, and you could see the mentality of the players change. By Cata, you started to see the rise of the “it’s not yours until it’s in your bags” crowd. They treated other players like NPC, and by that time, natural attrition and changes to the game started the exodus of the original player base.
When I logged into wow the first time it blew my mind and hooked me. I had played a couple online games prior to it but they were very different to wow. I started at the end of vanilla so never really experienced that much at the time, but I did reach max level during tbc and did a lot of pvp and some dungeons. I played wrath right when it came out but did quit for a bit in the middle there.
Personally for me at that time pve content was intimidating, and seemed hard to get into. I remember running some dungeons in tbc and between the time it took to get a group, and then actually running the dungeon with a wipe or two, it took me hours. I know we sucked, but still it was a turnoff. As I said I quit in the middle of wrath and probably would’ve stayed quit had the dungeon finder not come out.
To me the rdf is still probably the single best thing they’ve ever added to the game. It opened up pve content to me, led me to tanking which led me to a guild and then raiding. I know raiding was there before the rdf, but to me it seemed so far off and I think I really would’ve quit for good if it was never added. So while I loved what I played in vanilla and tbc, and the classic versions, the dungeon finder just made the game so much better for me!
Art style is unique and whimsical when it can be.
Lore was established and lots of threads to pick up and expand on for immersive story.
The world was very open and approachable, you could explore.
It launched with almost every feature it’s competitors had at the time plus some.
Pvp is better than anyone else for most of the games tenure. It’s still miles ahead of some other mmos.
horde vs alliance created identity, and that reinforced community.
Let’s be honest. EQ, FFXI, etc. weren’t exactly approachable games. I’m hindsight, FFXI did a few things horribly wrong. You could not level past like 20 without a group. In wow, you could solo to 60.
The end game provides a good soft ramp to raiding. BRD and BRS offered large scale dungeons so players could get their feet wet in a certain playstyle that allowed learning curves.
It allowed mods. This is huge and has always been embraced by the developers and players alike.
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Tl;dr:
It has historically had very weak competitors that don’t have the same depth of content. It’s friendly to casual and hardcore gamers alike.