Would surprise me that the Vanilla avg age was that young. The age demographic was pretty spread out. It just happened that each demographic kind of hung out with their own. Like, Barren’s chat was never funny. Neither was Leroy Jenkins.
You could do that if you wanted to, of course it would faster to just mix in a few Naxx/Ulduar runs which were being pugged at that point. Which is exactly what most people did for exactly that reason.
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They simplified and cheapened the game and made most drops while leveling insignificant. I used them on all my alts back then but I won’t use them this time.
that’s why I said they should make only 1 badge type so when they do Naxx they can still get badges for the current gear set.
Patchy raid content - “Noob Nax” is basically not even a new raid, it’s nerfed Nax with access via Northrend.
Ulduar was awesome and ICC pretty good, but ToC is just a loot pinata with no real story or pathing - it’s a boss fight arena. Very boring.
Dailies, god the dailies! They get taken to a new level of tedium in Wrath. There are way more dailies in Wrath, they’re boring ones too: fetch this 9 times, kill that 30 times, walk over there and talk to so and so and then come back and tell me what he said, than go back again …
The worst part of the dailies is that they’re tied to a token system that virtually makes them mandatory to do every day for progression. This is truly where WoW ceased to be recreation and becomes an unpaid job.
Grindy spammy dungeons. The dungeons are easy and where they’re not they’re plain irritating. Most of the dungeons are AoE spamfests with little to no mechanics. Again it ends up being a token grind. There’s a couple of dungeons that aren’t, they’re not difficult, but they’re annoying - involving pet flight battles etc…
I found that with the exception of two raids the whole experience of Wrath lacked community and flavour and was monotonous and repetitive. I quit wow a couple of times during Wrath (got bored of it) - something I never considered doing in Vanilla or TBC.
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What in the world are you talking about? I played all throughout WOTLK and the only dailies I had to do were the two for enchants. I ignored all other dailies because they weren’t necessary. I don’t remember any kind of token system tied to dailies. I didn’t do a single TOC daily throughout the expansion and did all the raids weekly.
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No. I did no dailies except the Sons of Hodir and the other one for shoulder or head enchant, I can’t remember.
Well subjective game experience is subjective. I got bored of wow for the first time during WoTLK. I think there’s numerous reasons - some of which may be valid and some not so much - in retrospect.
You might be thinking of another expansion. WOTLK was known for not requiring you to do dailies or grind reps to raid like TBC did.
Yep this is what I recall too. Felt like a hamster wheel.
Agree here - they removed the rep grinds. But they added dailies, and linked them to tier tokens.
Rep grinds are something I don’t mind btw, as they have an RP relevance. Dailies (unlike rep) have no plausible RP reason for why you should need to repeat them. They feel contrived. Obviously I don’t expected others to share my views - it’s subjective. I came to WOW from an RP background, which I understand is not everyone’s cup of tea.
But from what you explained, its not subjective. If you did the TOC dailies, thats cool, but they weren’t required by any means and do not lock you behind a ‘daily wall’ to keep current. One of the great things about WOTLK is that dailies are completely optional throughout the entire expansion. You can raid log from the day you hit 80 til Cata drops and not miss a thing.
Um yeah it is - it’s my recollections of what I didn’t like.
But you were doing something you didn’t have to do, and gave an entire paragraph about how you had to do it and how it kept you from doing content through an imaginary token system. So…yeah you did’em, sorry to hear that, but you didn’t have to.
Personally i enjoy people railing on retail all day everyday.
but then systematically and almost at the exact time tables as the original game release asking for all the feature’s, QoL, class balance changes and catch-up systems that they hate in retail.
It reminds me the game is largely what the playerbase asked for overtime.
you think you do but you don’t at its best.
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That’s a pretty solid observation.
I agree that many of Wraths approaches have pros and cons.
What gets the balance right for any given player is really going to be different for every player to various degrees. Also memories are fallible. Some people maybe romanticising “how great” WoTLK was. Likewise people like myself - who probably burnt out during Wrath - may have unduly negative recollections.
Statistically Wrath capped the player count for WoW (technically Cata first quarter). You could argue that in terms of momentum TBC was the peak (the first quarter of zero growth for wow was in the quarter following Wraths release quarter) - I won’t get into that in detail here. But the raw number of players was highest on release of Cata. Another stat is that Wrath had higher turnover than the previous two iterations.
It’s clear to my mind that Wrath was divisive and changed the direction of the game (for good or ill). It pulled in a lot of new players, but also lost a lot of old players (it was a changing of the guard), the net result being a sort of peak plateaux where the population didn’t really grow but didn’t really dip following Wraths release (end of TBC).
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The studies I’ve read put it in the 30s. But I’ve also seen 28 thrown around. Who knows the exact number. Depends on when in Vanilla. Changed slightly by the day probably. But what’s the point in quibbling whether it’s 28 or 31. That’s just typical WoW forums behavior in ignoring the discussion and getting caught up in the ‘IM RIGHT U WRONG’ bickering. What matters is that the average player wasn’t some grade school kid. It was a grown adult with a job, families, responsibilities.
Maybe the perspective is different from a person who was a child when they started playing back then. I couldn’t speak to that as I was in my late 20s when Vanilla launched. And some people can’t look beyond their own bubble and realize that what they experienced isn’t what many or most did. I played with all kinds of players, from super casual (like I was) to extremely hardcore raiders, whom I knew from my mudding days in the 90s.
What I’m addressing is this argument people like to make here for whatever reason that, ‘The players had so much more spare time back then.’ From an individual perspective, sure. If you were 10 years old and had all your free time to play a game and fast forward 17 years you’ve got a job, a mortgage, maybe some kids. Yeah, that’s a big difference. But referring to that as the playerbase as a whole is a nonsensical argument. Because in the broad scope it’s not true. The real difference is what I’ve already stated: the mindset of the average player. Why they played, what they expected from the game. That’s what has radically changed because Blizzard turned a game into a job with the way they design it.
They’ve taken the hardcore mindset that only a small percentage of Vanilla players had, and forced it upon every player of the game. What happened is the vast majority of truly casual players…just freaking quit. And the people who are left have been brainwashed over the years to think that an mmo can only be designed one way, for one purpose. And they apply that Retail mindset into Classic as well. That’s why you see ridiculous thread after ridiculous thread. They don’t want the Classic experience because they’ve forgotten how to relax and just play a simple game for simple fun.
I ignored most of them too. I did the daily dungeons and when the lfd was added I was actually able to do them most of the time. Unlike in BC where I was/am only able to find a group some of the time on my healers and rarely on my dps alts.
Something I think gets overlooked is that not every “casual player” is wanting “easy content”. A lot of casuals like to have grindy stuff to do and like to have long detailed chains to reach goals that lead to achievement goals. They like to have hard tasks that require repeated effort. But what makes them casual is a desire to be able to do this at their own pace.
It’s not so much that Blizzard made things harder but rather that they focussed everything in on one type of content - hardcore raiding. Crafting lost value for anything other than raiding, quest chains and rep with crafting and RP rewards, gave way to storiless daily quests and dungeon grinds for raid tier catchup tokens.
Raiding became everything and anything else became a means to that end - or worthless (again - this is my impression and how my fallible memory recalls it). The raid scene is all about keeping up with the Jones - getting the best gear to be admitted into a regular raiding team - you can’t really go at your own pace and do well.
While the raid scene can be fun and has always been an important part of WoW, I feel like Wrath made that the only genuinely important part of WoW (outside of Arena PVP). With ToC even raiding itself was paired back to only it’s most critical elements - a hardcore raider fantasy of all bosses no trash and no extraneous RP.
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You can also argue that wow reached saturation level for a MMO in wrath. I won’t argue that since we simply don’t know. For me wrath was far better than vanilla in virtually every way.