I hear this a lot on the forums, from people complaining how Old WoW used to be…
“It took forever to travel somewhere!”
“You had to carry all of this extra stuff…my bags were always full!”
“Leveling took forever, it took months to reach level 60!”
“I participated in 2 raids last week, and didn’t even get any gear!”
etc…
My question is, why is quick and painless the better way?
Isn’t the point of a MMORPG or even a regular RPG to experience the game-play as if you were actually there?
Adding in convenience just takes you out of the immersion and it basically defeats the purpose of actually playing the game.
A bit of inconvenience adds character to a game… having everything handed to you to me is just plain boring and pointless.
Why do people play a game like WoW but want to skip over everything just to get on a gear treadmill that will be reset every time a new patch comes out?
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Lots of people have short attention spans and an entitlement problem.
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You now have an entire generation raised on getting a trophy just for showing up. Their abusive parents did not prepare them at all for the real world.
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Convenience is simply a tool. It’s neither good nor bad.
In a MMO having a sense of size and scope to the world is important which travel time gives, but just because a RPG is meant to be played as if you were the character doesn’t mean we do every bit.
In tabletop often we wont bother going through every bit of travel time. If people have any RPing then we do that, then it’s “On the third day you come across…” when the random encounter table has spoken.
Vanilla WoW felt like it struck a good balance where you had enough to satisfy the immersion factor without it being so prevalent it felt like it was always in the way of actually playing the game.
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The times have changed, that’s really all I’ve seen. Loot grinds, open worlds, and battle royales are what’s “in” now for shooters and rpgs. People, not just kids, don’t want to take the time to get to the loot grind, they just want the loot grind since that’s the direction WoW took.
I’m excited for the slow pace of Classic WoW.
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First I like vanilla wow, i play plenty of old school mmos on pservers and don’t mind more grindy and rough experiences.
But I also think immersion is overrated or at least secondary. I don’t really care about stories or fictions (scenery is nice). I like games. And playing games means stripping away the surface and seeing what lies beneath.
As well, and rightly so, many feel the game doesn’t start until max level. For one most of what you do while leveling has NO impact once you get to max level. For many they want to limit doing pointless things, even though many would consider playing the game in the first place as pointless.
Many also have limited time and don’t want to spend the time they have walking somewhere and not getting to dive into the gameplay.
I personally like grinding, I like exploring, I like climbing, I like ganking (which means waiting), I like the journey. But I can see why others just want to get to meat and potatoes as quickly as they can.
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I think you’ll understand more when Classic releases and you’re running through Westfall with auto-run enabled. It’s a lot of boring travel and occasional mouse adjustments
I found myself questioning how much time it was taking and how I was spending it just getting from point A to B.
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The reason why convenience and quick game play is better is mostly play time of the user. Not everyone can play 12 hours a day anymore. More games are developed for quick action so that people who have little time to even play video games at all can get a quick match or two for what little free time they have.
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In addition to what’s already been said, I submit that video game challenges are essentially a test, when you look at them the right way. Phrase it as a can you do X question, with specificity as to what’s being measured.
“Can you jump these platforms?”
“Can you solve this puzzle?”
and so on.
Modern raids or mythics read rather like this:
“Can you keep up N amount of boss DPS and M amount of add DPS, in appropriate targeting priority, and your healers keep up X tank HPS and Y raid HPS and the tanks absorb Z DPS while fulfilling boss conditions A-F?”
Any PVE content easier than a normal difficulty raid isn’t even worth bringing up as a challenge question, so this is all that’s there.
Whereas classic WoW questions were typically more like this until the raids:
“Can you put in the time and effort to level up, acquire BIS or close enough, until you’re accepted into a raid team?”
Because if you worked at something pre-raid long enough, your chances of achieving your goal effectively approached 100%. While the modern question does apply to most of BWL, AQ40, Naxx, and ZG, a vast majority of players never saw that back then because the answer to the first question was “no.”
The primary test question itself has changed, and the conveniences are part of making that change happen.
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It’s not better or worse, it’s just one of those subjective things and is up to each individual player to decide what their preferred style of gameplay is.
Me personally? I just enjoy wow. It’s history, it’s lore, the people i’ve met along the way, all of it. It’s the reason I still play, and it’s the reason I’ll play both games when classic launches. Gameplay is somewhat secondary to just enjoying the game I love.
In a way retail being in the state it’s currently in is sort of a gift for people like me, as i’ll still be able to remain competitive there, while at the same time being able to devote enough time to classic to achieve whatever goals I set for myself there, albiet at a slower pace than those of you that will be spending most if not all of your play time in Classic. Best of both worlds for me.
“Imagine an MMO where your experience is a string of quests where you’re rewarded with a cool item, recipe, or a decent amount of pocket money. A game where the grind is virtually eliminated–a game where downtime is relatively nonexistent, where enemies respawn rapidly and dynamically according to how many players are in the local area; where you can use a healing spell, or bandage yourself, or eat some food, or all three, before diving right back in again. Your character’s death doesn’t result in the loss of many hours of experience points, or one of your items, or any money (although there is item decay, so whatever you have equipped currently takes a 10% durability hit). When you die, you resurrect as a ghost who moves quickly, runs on water, and cannot be harmed on its way back to its body. You can also have a player resurrect you in a matter of moments, even after you have entered ghost form. This is a game that understands Fun.”
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Instant gratification types versus those who understand that the journey is more important than the destination.
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“but doesn’t understand a sense of satisfaction”
Ah, so you’re saying Vanilla WoW doesn’t provide a sense of satisfaction after playing it then?
That whooshing sound is the point going over your head.
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I love the game that is classic I can’t wait and even subbed up already playing Heirloom Twinked BG’s, but I Will be quitting when Raid gear ruins my fun in BG’s.
For me PVP is at least half my fun in the game and Raid gear is not something worth my time because doing the same raids over and over again is far worse than bouncing around the world and running the same BG’s.
Thus Classic is only good for so long, but if I get 1-2 years of fun out of it fantastic.
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You’re talking black and white on a scale that is a vast sea of greys.
Taking an hour to get somewhere is boring. Most people will find ways to switch off like watching a movie on the other screen etc. It’s not what people are playing the game for.
However, getting there instantly is unrewarding for the journey. It’s “handed to you”.
WoW balances the two by providing fast options to general regions (Zepplins, Boats, Tram, Flight Masters) then slow options to get to specifically where you want to go.
WoW has a lot more convenience than any other MMORPG of the era. It was the “casuals option” of its time. Levelling was fast, travel was efficient, quests were plentiful, story was inherent, characters were self-sufficient.
It’s only the fact that they kept pushing that further towards convenience that made things tip out of balance.
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Zeppelins and boats were a perfect balance IMO…but their importance to modern WoW is almost zero now.
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I don’t disagree. That’s why I prefer Classic.
But the obsession with “remove all convenience” is as extreme as “give me everything now”. WoW was convenient.
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I remember when the boats broke down and we got Captain Placeholder to teleport us for a while.
I miss him.