I used to be a fairly hardcore leveling freak back in vanilla and it generally takes 10 days played. I don’t think I ever seen anyone do it in less than 7. Those guys that got down into the 7-8-day range were the people selling the guides on how to do it.
I was playing a rogue on a server that shall not be named and was running Deadmines with a pug. There was an actual Huntard, just a terrible player, rolling need on pretty much everything. I was only there for cruel barb and of course the hunter is the only other person to roll on it and wins. I just had to laugh. I can’t wait for classic, even the irritating stuff.
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Personally I “enjoyed” the open world plenty during original Vanilla when all I could do is laps around zones farming for raid guilds in hopes of getting a spot, only to realize I’ve been had. Saw it enough while watching folks kill those epic world dragons and being sad that I wasn’t cool enough to join their club. This is in between the moments raid geared folks would destroy my green geared guildless friendless butt out in the land of “questing”.
I have no intention of living that life again in Classic this time around. The endgame, raiding, gear and lording it over others in PvP is all I care about. I am hitting the game hard with the sole intention of reaching and conquering the endgame for that reason; because I already lived the life opposite of that.
There are. I’m not saying there isn’t but what has driven the competition to get the best gear/progress/power increase? It’s the players. In particular the ones who do it first. Aka the influencers.
No matter what. You’re going to progress in power to do whatever level of content you want to do.
What do you do when it gets too hard and you’re stuck? Ask someone who’s done it or Google. Regardless of what anyone says about not being influenced by others. We are.
Joanna holds the Vanilla record to 60. Whoever held it before him. Influenced him to try and beat it. Competition. It’s built right into every game.
What level the individual player takes that competition to is on them but they are indeed influenced by those who came before them and did it first.
Not just competition. Strategy, tactics, and skill are all influenced by those who did it first. You can look at any pro sport and see that. It really boils down to collective knowledge/ learning. Which in classic’s case we have a decade and a half of it being dissected. So we are all indeed influenced by those who did it first/best.
It’s going to be fun!
Power.
If you want to play a game where everyone chills around chatting and exploring, then you need to find a game that doesn’t greatly reward players for going as fast as they can.
The faster you get to endgame, the faster you gear and the faster you utterly destroy people in PvP. From the moment I touched WoW, my entire purpose was to get as powerful as possible as quickly as possible, without completely burning out. Progression is fun to me and Classic has the best progression system in WoW’s history.
Very little welfare gear for players who don’t put in the effort, it’s awesome. Welfare gear really took off in TBC and it slowly killed my desire to invest time in progression.
That is the heart of your post. Many gamers do enjoy competition, and doing things that are hard or take a long time. Clearing XYZ and having the gear that unmistakably lets others know you are in a pipe hitter guild is a serious motivator. There has never been a good MMORPG that didn’t have these things for players to do and aspire to. The three men most responsible for the tone and pace of Vanilla/Classic were way more hardcore in their raiding careers than anyone but the top 1%.
Of course most are going to enjoy the ride, and the game itself. Relish learning Plate Armor, or that thing you’ve been waiting for all this time. Asking people to YOLO it because you don’t like competition? You are in the wrong genre in general…
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I can really only speak for myself, but for me it’s because nothing else is actually in question as to whether I can do it.
For example, if I want to PVP, that’s gonna happen. I might (will. I totally will) lose, but picking the wrong spec or having inefficient gear doesn’t prevent me from signing up for a battleground. If I want to run a dungeon, I’ll find a group no matter what spec or class I’m playing, so long as I’m the right level. Soloing and exploring and collecting can be done by any character at any time, and the only change is difficulty.
It’s in endgame raiding that people get alarmingly selective about their raid members*. Thus, as people already know this’ll be the only part of their journey they might be involuntarily shut out from, it’s therefore the source of the most questions by far.
*I’m not saying they’re wrong, exactly, just that they do. there are fights that mandate certain classes and/or players to perform certain actions: if you’ve got the wrong class the raid may legitimately no longer have a slot for you. If the raid is full of people with clown specs, they may be having fun but it’ll peter out pretty fast if they fail to actually clear content.
Edited for clarity.
I see two reasons for the “race”:
A.) It’s become the standard mentality of the current gamer. Back in the early days of WoW, most people weren’t max level, so there wasn’t much of a rush to get there. Now, most remaining WoW players have had multiple max level toons for years. They’re so used to the “standard” gameplay being what happens at max level that it’s their sole focus.
B.) With the benefit of hindsight, people see how much more difficult it was to do endgame content in Vanilla, with only a minuscule percentage of players ever seeing most of it. Getting into the absolutely essential guilds to make that happen…if you’re not there early, there’s the fear of missing out on the only means of accessing that content. The benefits of multiple paths to end-game access present in retail today weren’t around back then, and people realize they’re going to miss that.
It’s actually a fact. Before the donut was a thing. Bakers sold round balls “donut holes”. The donut is a relatively new item.
People are competitive. I can’t imagine why this would shock anyone.
Also, there are certain things you straight up cannot see or do unless you push content. How many times are they going to open the AQ doors? Want to be scarab lord? Better push content HARD. Likewise, if you want to dominate people in PvP, you need to keep up with gear or be better geared.
The whole game rewards people who get content on farm first. This isn’t rocket science.
It has been the mentality of gamers since WAY before WoW was a thing. Even oldschool nintendo games would cater to competitive gamers by having a number show up at the end of the game so people could call and get some free swag.
The idea that gamers suddenly became competitive after vanilla is really short-sighted.
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Wow, this is the first time I’ve had a topic I’ve made really take off this well!
I wanted to say thanks to everyone for contributing to the thread and giving their take on the situation. I think a lot of people made good points about why this mindset is so prevalent. Some people even made some fair counter-arguments. But I’m really just happy that the consensus seems to be “play how you want and see how it goes.”
I haven’t even gotten to read through all of these responses yet, but I will try to at some point!
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OP, don’t be mislead into thinking the posters on this forum are indicative of the playerbase in general. People who post here aren’t the average player. They’re generally the most hardcore of the hardcore. Casuals players (which will comprise the VAST majority of the players) probably don’t even know there is a forum.
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im about the journey.
That’s cool. I was last time. Now I’m going a bit further this time.
The game will still be around a year from launch.
Some of us will hurry, some of you will take your time.
Live and let live.
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I mean, who doesn’t wanna climax?
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The best part about the initial release in Vanilla was how few hardcore “end game focused” guilds there were at the time. There were some of course, but this was also before YouTube, Twitch, and streaming in general. So even if you had a hardcore guild on your server, you didn’t know about them until months later.
Therefore most players took their time to explore the world, finish low level quests, run low level dungeons, and get a real nostalgic connection to the entire world. I went into Vanilla blind over Thanksgiving break in 2004, so I had no idea what the game had in store. All I knew was that it was super popular and all my friends were playing it. Raids, epics, “end game”, I didn’t have any of that in mind when I made my first character and embarked on the most memorable experience of my life.
To this day, I still get a special feeling riding through many zones that have nothing to do with end game content, because of the memories I have from leveling back in Vanilla. Had I been an EQ vet and known about raiding and gone into the game looking for a hardcore guild to rush straight to MC, I probably wouldn’t have had anywhere near as much fun.
Method, Asmongold, and hardcore poop sock players can have their sprint to the finish. I’m going to relive some of the happiest days of my life, get to MC a couple months later, and still end up decked out in purples eventually.
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Or maybe we can just be good at the game and enjoy end game content a lot? Just because we level faster then you doesn’t mean we for some reason don’t enjoy the leveling part of the game lol. You’re just nostalgic and bad. Which is a bad combo.
Wouldn’t worry about it. Come 1-2 years after P6 has been out, the endgame race will die down as people will just stop giving a crap about competing in a 15 year old race to nowhere.
That’s when the real game begins, when people start getting creative and experimental. It’s where they start being their own people rather than a copy/pasted NPC who sees nothing beyond numbers and data. The hardcore scene’s popularity is temporary because it requires constant fuel in the form of new endgame content.
Just let it be and don’t worry; it’s a ‘problem’ that will solve itself. They don’t pay your sub, so don’t waste your time being frustrated for their sake. Focus more on the people who you enjoy the playing the game with, not the people who you hate to play with.
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To me the game is the leveling, after that it kinda goes downhill after a couple months. I estimate 3 months of real hype for classic, after that only like half on the ones that started will remain, declining month by month.