World of Warcraft: Future and past

Blizzcon is coming up soon, with Nostalrius stabbing us in the back and not releasing the code for their server after shutting down they are now saying that if Blizzard doesn't announce legacy servers at Blizzcon, they will take matters into their own hands. forum.nostalrius.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=44399
What they mean by this is anyone's guess, personally I can't wait to make America and Azeroth great again in the same month, but the only recent article I could find about legacy servers was from here: massivelyop.com/2016/10/14/the-daily-grind-blizzcon-vanilla-wow-servers/
Archive:archive.is/k8FFc

What do you think would be best? Nostalrius starting up where it left off, or official legacy servers being announced and supported by Blizzard? What do you think was the biggest "feature" that killed WoW? Was it flying mounts, badges, LFD, LFR, constant nerfing of the raids etc…

As a side note: I am currently making a campaign for the WoW RPG, and am having a tough time trying to parse all of this retconned lore, if anyone has any sources for lore up to WOTLK that haven't been tarnished by retconning, I would greatly appreciate it.

Cross realm shit. No longer did you have to spend 1 hour finding a group (good), but then again you never met anybody that you might see again. I remember teaming up with people and then later saving them from ganks while farming for materials, we recognized each other and friendships would form. The game catered to people who wouldn't take the time to form these relationships and thus cried endlessly on the forums that groups were too hard to come by. I remember running UBRS 15-man groups that people begged to get into because they were so smooth. This led to me having a good MC and BWL group as well.

This, so much.

Dungeon finder may have started it, but dear god, the cross-realm "Phasing" made it so much worse it is insane.

pretty much
dungeon/raid finder and crossrealm shit ruined any sense of community, which pretty much turned WoW into a singleplayer game with very convincing bots

I just want wc2 in hd.

WOW IS FUCKING SHIT
WOW IS CANCER
WOW KILLED WARCRAFT
MOST WOW PLAYERS HAVE NEVER EVEN PLAYED THE OTHER GAMES

Wow definitely killed warcraft. Sad too, I played a ton of ROC and TFT. After I killed Illidan I kept wondering how they were supposed to do WC4, and it was then I realized that it probably was never coming.

I'd have trouble justifying starting a new character, which I want to do, if my 60 on nostalruse was suddenly available again. Also, when it closed down it was still a pretty average server in terms of bugs and accuracy, it'd be nice if there was somewhere better for the non-chink population to flock to. CF or one of the upcoming burning crusade servers, maybe.

Any official effort would be tainted and made unplayable, because of poorly thought out progression, or a cash shop, or cross-realm cancer somehow jammed into the client. But it would be a useful source of info for pserver developers at least.

I just want my nostalrius account back.

these people are the worst


dont forget the people who nigger all the loot due to lack of consequences

I just want the frogs to setup another illegal server.

bartas?

That's always the worry when you play an unofficial server: you never know when it'll die.

Of course, all games die eventually, but still.

no
first and best hunter and guildmaster EU

Well, I thought I smelled a huntard :^)

With how well Legion is allegedly doing, the chances of getting an official legacy server announcement dwindled significantly. That said, the game's community was basically in decline since even vanilla. Once cross-realm BGs were implemented, several rivalries were decimated. Once server transfers came into existence, high-pop servers got more crowded, while low-pop servers became ghost towns. If you were on a lower-pop server and didn't already have a guild, good luck running just about anything that wasn't already in high demand (e.g. WC as Horde or Deadmines as Alliance). I remember having to solo the Hinterlands elite troll quests because despite hours of searching, I simply was unable to find anyone to help. Even around the time that Dungeon Finder came into existence, it could take a pretty good amount of time to get groups formed for even the daily heroics. Cross-realm is still a net positive for finding groups for more obscure shit that still can't be soloed. If they had managed server populations better, then odds are cross-realm wouldn't even be necessary.

No you stupid fuck.
If you can't get even that right, the rest of whatever you wrote isn't worth reading to begin with.

Shutting it down.
LFR was the beginning of the end and every fucking desicion since then has made it more akin to a sprpg than an mmo.
That shit is irreservable in the main game.
And you can bet your sorry ass that any form of legacy server will have some cash shop in it to help those poor lost sould not to be stuck in grind hell.

neither
just wait for a better private vanilla server to come alongsuch as hopefully crestfall, and if the time comes and it can be deemed necessary they can release the source code

the worst things for WoW were LFD and LFR

who the fuck are you

nostalrius had shit coding and kike mods.

If they released their shit to mangos, it would be a good start to progressing so that people could work towards a good server.

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whitekidney?

I agree their mods were shit, but their coding was still the best of any server out there. It was still shit

Back in vanilla I played a gnome mage.

eventually I managed to form a group to run that dungeon in the barrens, only to find another group of hordes trying to get in. Since we were still split up they wiped us out, except for me.
I tried to run, and somehow…

There was a tiny hole in the wall. A gnome fit in there.

I could see the troll and orc feet outside trying to somehow damage me with random AE spells, but they wouldn't get me.

I never felt so immersed in an MMO

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that's why it would be best for them to release it to the public.

If they restarted their server, they could just carry on with the broken stuff and pretend it was good. If they released to public there'd be a drastic improvement for the baseline coding and drastically smaller amount of effort needed to start a new server.

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a gnome acting like a coward

A gnome crawling in a tiny hole like a rat.

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If you think that sub count and quality of community have a 1:1 correlation, then I don't even give a fuck if you didn't read the rest of my post.

Trust me, finding grounds was usually not a problem before instance sharding happened. Saying that LFG is a solution to a self imposed solution to a problem that didn't exist is retarded.

Groups*

I guess it was dependent on server. I played the minority faction on a server that was medium-low in pop as is. Since I wasn't in an established guild at the time, finding groups was always rough. Doubly so back in TBC, but that was also due to how classes were designed back then.

Out of curiosity, I decided to see how the server in question was doing. Only 2 Horde guilds have cleared anything in the most recent raid on Heroic.

Like whitekidney browses 8ch.

but trollop was only other good hunter in the guild and he was never guildmaster.

oh shut up
At least I made the entirety of stormwind cry.

toomy get the fuck out of here

I'm the guild master, you can't banish me!

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Don't make me bring big memer to this thread, get the fuck out of here.

lame

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etst

Jesus Christ it's current year + 1 what the fuck are you doing STILL playing WoW?

I'd tell you but I'd have to meme you

Still can't wrap my head around anyone wanting Vanilla servers. Maybe that's because I played a Warrior in vanilla. But it taking up to a minute to kill a single mob, and being totally fucked if you accidentally aggro a second one, having to sit down after every fight to eat, and worst of all having to kill hundreds of bears to get 3 teeth and a spleen… Well I don't want to ever experience that again, I can't understand why anyone else would.

sounds like you been playin a single player game

Yes that's warrior stuff for you, theres a reason no one likes leveling them.

from the sounds of it you never took professions, if you were a mage on the other hand or did a profession like enchanting, the game becomes very social.

If you get social with WoW and interact with your class skills it becomes much more enjoyable.

ya, sometimes you gotta play alone. Also, no matter how many people you're with, bears not having teeth is bullshit.


same thing applies to any version of wow, why are people begging for vanilla/legacy? Is it just because of the dungeon finder?

it's because in vanilla and sometimes in TBC WoW felt like a world , not a game. That's the MMO success formula. When you play in avirtual world it's amazing, communities that get created on their own etc etc… I can go on but I ll just post a pdf..

Because WoW is no longer a social game.
Dungeon finder makes it so you can form a party without having to talk to people.

vanilla was also much more harder compared to what WoW is now.
You can be creative with the talent tree which they fucked up with current WoW.

In nostalrius I'd have people run up to me and ask if they could have some leather off me. Or help point out some directions to Undercity.

i ll just post what the pdf has inside. Soz guys i m drunk dno why i didn't do that in the first place lol

*

World of Warcraft at its peak was an adventure with a tight community. Every single character leveling up had an adventure. Think about the walk from Darnassus to Ironforge alone, a big event remembered by Vanilla players all around to this day. Nothing more than going from one capital to another could be an adventure in Vanilla. Part of that adventure was very slowly working towards almost impossible goals. 1000g for that epic mount was a boatload of money, every single person I met during my Vanilla leveling started saving up for it from the moment they hit 40 and got their first mount, gutting their wallets. The fact that they had almost nothing left after the first mount didn't deter them in the slightest, it became a shining beacon to work towards, putting in more efforts to utilize professions and the resources of the world than ever before. When someone would finally become level 60 it was a reason to celebrate, when someone got their epic mount it was a reason to celebrate. Seeing insanely geared people with crazy weapons and armor, batteling in places I was far from reaching wasn't some infuriating reason to cry out to the forums. It was inspiring. Setting the first steps in this new big scary place with 40 other people. Even getting to the entrance alone, often prone to clashes of horde and alliance. But also PvP itself, world pvp did not give any big rewards as incentive, yet there were massive raids and battlefields regularly. I remember the very first time was an Ashenvale raid, I suddenly got invited by a massive march of people (multiple full raid groups) slowly making their way. With the casualization, streamlining, removal of group requirements, exploration, and introducing multiple difficulty levels they have killed the adventure, community and atmosphere of the game. World of Warcraft is dead to anyone who played for that experience.

Alright, well, I don't see why people don't just get socialization from a good guild, rather than relying on it from begging for dungeon groups. I've been in the same guild since Ultima Online was a thing, have never wanted for conversation, but now if I were to fire WoW up I'd never have to beg and spam for a dungeon invite. Seems much better to me. As for people asking for leather and stuff being tight knit, that only happens when there are lowbies around, that will eventually go away no matter what you do.

I'm just gonna chalk it up to nostalgia goggles and walk away. I hope you guys get what you want and its actually what you expect it to be.

you can chalk it up to nostalgia goggles all you want. The truth of the matter is current WoW and current MMOs today do not play in a way that social contact and the feeling of playing in a world comes up to you as a player. You factually cannot disagree with this. I used to just do nothing and hang around a campfire with new found friends after a dungeon in Vanilla. We would talk about stuff. Can you do that with a dungeon finder and cross realm?

Thank you for saying you do hope we get that experience back though. I hope you enjoy your MMOs as well, sadly me and others cannot anymore. We played for a different experience.

I honestly can't tell which one of you is a larger dramafag

probably *you*

Opinions, man. I can disagree with that just fine.

However, I don't play MMOs anymore for the reasons you stated, but I put the blame elsewhere. When communities get big enough, and people have progressed far enough into a game, things are never the same. No MMO is worth playing more than a couple years after it launches, at most, because everyone is off grinding that level 99 raid and no one is in the lowby areas buggering about. Unless the game is wildly popular and has a steady influx of new players, which I don't think we'll see again.

Legacy servers will probably be great, for a while.


what drama?

AtleastIcanblacktext:^)

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Fuck flying. It was one of the many things that ruined WoW.

Say what you want and what you think about WoW or any of its versions, but chalking up our love of the original game to nostalgia goggles after us spending over a year on Nostalrius is simply wrong.
We do like that social aspect vanilla WoW offered, and what you said about progressing through the game with a community is true, eventually nobody is leveling alts or working towards anything and it gets stale. Yet it takes years to get to that state in a game as expansive as WoW. I don't know how to address the problem of it getting old eventually, but I do know the way Blizzard did it, killing all motivation to do old content in exchange for new content resetting everything with every expansion and changing the game to be more single-player focused is not the way to keep such a game alive. It's why so many of us hate the current iterations of WoW, they've changed their game so much it is unrecognizable, and has been for some time. The old playerbase left WoW, all that is left is normalfags who cry about not getting that super "rare" mount until they're able to buy it in a cash shop, or able to farm it solo in 15 minutes and people who resub every expansion just to level through the zones and never resub afterwards.

I'd like to see ideas on how to expand on WoW with expansion packs that don't essentially destroy the old world and replace it with a new one every expansion. I think the way they implemented prestige classes as simply different classes was wrong, I think being able to choose a separate class-specific prestige-class on top of your original class to level up would be the way to go. Giving access to new abilities, utilities, weapon and armor proficiencies, or even crafting as a reward for leveling up. It could be a way to implement the monk class as a subclass of the priest, give shaman the ability to tank, warlocks could become the original death knights (warlock souls trapped in warrior bodies) or necromancers, the list goes on. This would be a big way to incentivize alts as well, even ones of the same class! They could also use it as a gold sink if need be for inflated gold from extended play. Grand questlines and new zones not only for the highest level of players, but more variety for everyone looking to level as well.
None of that "everyone has to see everything we create" nonsense that plagues current WoW, raids that require us to split into groups and enter different rooms, ones where we have objectives such as defending a location from hordes of enemies, incentivizing off-tank specs, infiltration moments that might require invisibility potions and such, halls with hazards in them, (oozes in Naxx come to mind) even escort portions of a raid. One big thing to note is that Blizzard shouldn't ever nerf instances simply to allow people to progress through tiers of raiding more easily.

There are so many things that have gone to shit in the MMO genre simply because WoW had become a black hole that every other game looked to for how to make a good game. They ignored what made it good in the first place, instead trying to imitate it as closely as possible bringing all of the mistakes Blizzard has made over the years into their own games and destroying them.

This. So much this. Servers had a sense of community. People who were good at the game and people who sucked but were willing to put in effort and learn were invited to groups and you'd have fun running dungeons, raiding, making alts, PvPing, farming, whatever. Drama queens and ninja looters and ragers were ignored and nobody wanted them.

There was a sense of community. It was a MMO, not a fucking singe player game.


Other shit that massively hurt WoW: flying mounts killing world PvP, daily rep grind, removal/toning down the difficulty of 5 man content (primarily in WotLK and onwards) and limited fucking attempts.

Oh god limited attempts. If you didn't raid as a hardcore guild during ToGC/ICC, you evaded the worst period of raiding in WoW's history. Imagine this: you just got done clearing WoW's best and hardest and most satisfying raid tier by a large margin and you're still farming Mimiron's Head for your guild. And then you get a piss easy raid tier that took the second worst part of the super awesome raid tier you just did (worst: Hodir, second worst: Algalon timer) and turns it up to 11 with 50 attempts per week. Someone DCs or gets a lag spike at a bad time? You lose an attempt. Someone makes a mistakes? -1. Tempers flared real bad, people got pissed and it made raiding with friends aggravating. But the worst part of it was that since each attempt was limited, you always wanted to wait for Soulstones/brez before each attempt. You just wiped to anub 2 minutes in? You'll be waiting 25+ minutes after you're buffed and ready in order to pull again. Rinse and repeat in ICC. It was like 1½ years of this bullshit. Fuck limited attempts and fuck Blizzard.

Bump.

WoW killed MMORPGs, and it's basically a single-player game on a server with some co-op elements.