Except it didn’t, you could always solo level. Dungeons were always massively pugged. Outside of high end raiding there was no real grouping requirement(and that wasn’t even necessarily about making friends just filling in warm bodies), and classic showed us that that was mostly just because of how new players were not because the raids were actually that hard.
I don’t know what happened in the original game; but in classic, at some points later in the game, there were not many people to group with. I can imagine that classic and TBCC will be barren when WOLK hits.
Making content solo-able was needed for a mature game at that point. It’s not like we have a constant inflow of people to group with for elites and dungeons. I don’t think the developers were stupid to change the game to be more solo-able, PUG-able, and less social. It probably was necessary at the time.
Right now I find it very difficult to find people to quest elites in Shadowmoon valley.
The intra-faction and cross-faction competition was so great back in 2004-2007, as was the trash-talking.
There’s next to zero competition in Classic. Nobody really cares who clears SSC/TK/BT/ZA first. There might be some very minor competition for ‘firsts’ in Sunwell, but since the content is 15+ years old, nobody really cares anymore (for better or worse).
There’s next to zero trash-talking in Classic, because there’s next to zero competition and Trans-Blizzard will just ban you for bruising some reddit-dork’s nerd-ego.
I’m not even in a guild and have not been in a guild since August 2019, and spamming chat for guild signatures for my own joke-guilds is too much of a hassle.
SoM by mere fact that’s a newish game is far closer than Classic is. Heck, you can argue that any new MMO is closer to the spirit of TBC/Vanilla than Classic has been.
It’s all relative. It’s not about being able to faithfully re-create something because that’s impossible. But there are games that are closer than others.
Honestly though, no-one will ever recapture the experience of Vanilla, because the people who are playing Classic versions are 15 years different. We’re not all students or working at the local burger joint. People can’t spend all their waking hours online because they have families jobs etc. The people who were there and still can are the ones who never really grew up, and want that time back not because the game was good but because the community was.
Communities completely exist, but you have to go out and find new ones, instead of expecting raiding teams to be your “workplace friendships” any more.
In 3.3 yes, which lasted for a year, but 3.0-3.2 heroics only gave badge of heroism, you had to do NAX25/Ulduar/TOC if you wanted better badges, except the daily heroic, so at 2 badges a day it would take awhile. 3.3 moved heroics to dropping triumph with frost for daily heroic. I think everyone is remembering just the final year and not the first year of Wrath.
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cataclysm upon release highlighted how much the game had evolved from tbc to wrath. that transistion from cc laden dungeon crawls in vanilla and tbc, to aoe-go-go-go in wrath, back to cc crawls again in cataclysm, nearly one shot the healer community. dps and tanks were not ready for mana regen nerfs. having to wait for healer mana was unheard of in wrath. cc was non-existent in wrath. wrath was like a vacation to the bahamas.
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Do you really think the majority of Vanilla players were hardcore no-lifers who lived in the game?
The actual difference is most people were content to log in for a couple hours a week and do some quests, maybe fish a bit, explore around. Just exist in this amazing world. Whereas now every second spent online is optimized and strategized and min/maxed to its full extent. The experience itself has no value for most players in 2022. It went from playing a game for fun to perfecting an interactive calculator.
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a prove me wrong post. these always lead to true quality discussions. 
Jeeze, this post is filled to the brim with people that are sure they are correct, while being so very very wrong.
The main problems with it were it began the trend of completely invalidating the previous tier instead of having a logical raid tier progression, so now you no longer had to experience any of the raids except the current one You could just farm badges to catch up and jump into TOC or ICC. Which also led to the rise of the cancer known as gear score which people will still use despite knowing full well that it’s bad and having proof that it’s bad.
It also introduced LFG which led to the destruction of community by making everything cross realm which also led to the absolutely toxic
gogogo mentality in dungeons that we have now seen leads to mythic+ And makes things even worse.
Homogenization to the extreme like they did was bad but I do feel that some of it is necessary.
Basically wrath was the initial spark of a lot of the things we saw over the years that have completely removed the RPG part of the game and ultimately led to the decline of the game.
Gear score was around at the end of TBC. It was a relevant addon all though Wrath, it only because Ilvl was added in 3.2 (I believe) that the addon stopped being used.
LFD was only added halfway though Wrath, it was only 5 man, it was mostly used for Alt leveling and farming TOC/ICC 5 mans. Anyone that says that it destroyed the community (during wrath) was not part of an active guild. I think I leveled most of my alts during wrath because of LFD and being able to solo quest while queued for randoms it was amazing. Just being able to not have to fly to a dungeon or fly back to where I was questing saved so much time.
This already happens, only a handful of items remain useful for more than 1 tier. The majority of your gear is and already was since vanilla being replaced every tier.
Yes but the main difference here is in Vanilla/TBC you didn’t get pushed into the new tier, you worked at your own pace not tried to “keep up with the Joneses”. That’s the main thing that changed, invalidating the tier automatically and pushing everyone into the current tier rather than letting guilds work their own pace through the content.
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In Vanilla the set bonuses were more useful (or broken). Rogue T0 6p bonus was OP and could out dps T1 and wasn’t far behind T2 8p. Once you got T.5 it could out dps T2 which should happen. Now set bonuses are meh so more stats = better gear. And you only get a 2p and 4p. If there were 8p bonuses in TBC or Wrath there would be more investment into gear.
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Congratulations on being one of “those” people.
Did the majority of Vanilla players log on constantly? yes. Were they “no-lifers”? No.
The difference was that our social circles of the time were within the game. People made friends in game, did social activities in game, had fun in game.
I remember having a Booty Bay BBQ as a big event on the server, where people intentionally spent days gathering outfits and food items. Was I a no-lifer? No. But I spent most of my time in-game having a life amongst the people there.
Which is the point.
The modern concept that MMO’s aren’t a social environment is the difference. You just illustrated the point by equating “no-lifer” with being online a lot.
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The moment Hyjal and Black Temple dropped, the number of SCC/TK runs dropped dramatically. The same will be true once we hit SWP, with only BT remaining in the rotation thanks to Glaives.
People are already ready to drop Hyjal like a bad habit. The place is boring, a lot of the loot is wasted drops, and I’m nearly at a full second set of tier gear.
Eh T6 is the most consistently good tier this time around. Not everyone wants it to be sure, but its a far cry from the “ignore anything past 3pc or 5pc” we had in Vanilla for a lot of folks… or me who had to wait until AQ40 to get raid gear replacements for 5man gear. Bad itemization drove most of the old-content-still-relevant in Vanilla, and that’s a bad thing.
This gets SOOO much worse in Wrath though. Because they changed the tokens each tier. You can’t do Naxx to get Ulduar badge gear. You can’t do Ulduar to get TOC badge gear. So each Tier you completely replaced your previous gear (save trinkets maybe).
At least in TBC you had Badges of Justice, so once Kara drops BoJ people will run Kara/Gruuls/Mags/SSC/TK or even Heroics for the P5 Badge gear.
What made wrath so bad is that they made it so you didn’t even have to step foot in those raids at all. Once TOC came out I think it was You could just spam heroic dungeons and get badges for tier.
That’s what the problem was. They completely invalidated previous raids to push everyone into the current raid and that trend has continued ever since.
So instead of having guilds at all levels of content you pushed everyone into what was meant to be the harder content with no place left to slowly progress your skills.
And we have now seen where that leads us to where The raids get harder and harder as you progress through the expansion but because everyone is pushed into the same one it becomes an uphill battle for some while some have no problem with it.
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To be clear, you could spam TOC heroics, and then the ICC heroics once those came out for their tier of badges. I think the daily Random gave you the current tiers badge but not the bosses (I.e. The Nexus didn’t drop Triumph badges but gave you 2 for the daily?? correct me if I’m wrong.