Early World of Warcraft

I agree. I think even removing the Dungeon Finder would be a good idea.

Now, were 40 man raids so awesome as people tell?

They were great, but what made them great was the social aspect and feeling like you were apart of something. Other than that it was basically just the same push-button-to-win grinding. WoW was definitely a game that was more about immersing yourself in the games world rather than any substance. And too be honest it did a fantastic job at immersing you in the world, but I think it was really only because you were there with other players.

Uh, what? It was 20 years old by then.

It was only 13 years old in 2004 user (The first Web Browser wasn't released outside of CERN until 1991) And even then it wasn't really until 1995 when AOLs marketing became more aggressive to the average home.

I mostly played early TBC, and played on Elysium's vanilla server for a bit. For vanilla, I didn't like the original honor system. Additionally, there was a lot of mention that bear druids, protection paladins, not-warrior tanks weren't viable for endgame raiding, and those hybrids were to be healers (e.g was told that Shadow/DPS gear was given to Warlocks over Shadow Priests). All previously mentioned because of stats, effectiveness, and efficiency.

I don't understand the appeal of tab target games at all

Not really. Although I love them, they were generally not that good. Not many tactics since 40 people is just too much to rely on everybody knowing what to do. Most of the time, too frustrating for raid leaders. Not many opportunities for individual skill to be worth anything.

But it did make everything slightly more epic because you were attacking with pretty much an actual army of players. 40 was kind of necessary in those days because people would actually drop connection pretty often. So it should be possible to have 2-3 players disconnect at any time and have the rest able to pick up the pieces until they are back.

I consider them awesome. But I understand that there are many reasons why they aren't that good.

It wasn't new, but things like wikis were, and looking up everything beforehand.
Many people do not understand that teaching players ingame instead of just having them read a wiki makes for a very different community. It immediately improves the community because being a retard will make people not want to teach you and thus make you unable to learn the needed mechanics and what not. The same is true for many quality of life improvements. They very often detract from the responsibilities that the community has to take, and thus reduce the quality of the community.

The appeal is the build and seeing how loot gradually makes your character stronger.

WoW was a very socially-driven "game" the appeal was the social aspects

LFG systems actually killed the fun of the game. It went from finding new friends to run a dungeon with and having fun, to picking and choosing applicants, making sure they had the optimal gear because you were too busy to help someone learn the dungeon or something. I tried the MMO bandwagon later in life, and no one on earth wants to raid or run dungeons if you don't have the SUPER PRO equipment, and no one gives a shit about talking to you when finding a person to support/tank is as easy as clicking a "run by AI" button.

...

No. WotLK was when it went downhill. TBC was the last good expansion for WoW.

It all went to shit with Cataclysm, with all the instancing.

They where the best because it was during a time where nobody really knew what the fuck was going on. You needed to do stuff yourself to figure it out, or talk to more experienced players to find out.
Nowadays all you do is type what you want to figure out in the search bar and you find a slew of information and tips to provide the most efficient means of achieving your goal, which even though its convenient, in all honesty makes things boring as fuck. Because like said, the combat/gameplay was never good. In fact, in vanilla it was mind numbingly boring at times, or an absolute nightmare shitfest (and not in a good way) depending on what class you where playing. The main draw of the game is to get loot and talk with the friends you made through WoW. But thanks to things like LFG, randomized loot boxes, and most importantly:
RANDOMIZED LEGENDARIES
and
FUCKING RANDOMIZED STATS
As well as more horrible design decisions that for whatever god awful reason they decided to take from Diablo3, made players less willing to play as the game became more about playing a slot machine and not in the way it used to be back in vanilla. Because now with how random everything is, everytime you spin and see what you get, even if you DO get lucky and get a cool legendary, the stats on it can be absolute garbage for the build you have, or the effect it gives is lackluster and sometimes absolutely worthless compared to other legendaries. Group finder is crap because with how you can easily just queue up with a bunch of randies and rush right through an entire dungeon with nary breaking a sweat as more often than not, the party leader made it so that at the very least the tank, healer, or a dps, is way too over the appropriate item level of the dungeon your clearing, making your dungeon run pathetically easy. As well as how that dungeon you've ran 50 times already has only given you complete dogshit. As well as how LFG and wikias completely nullify the need for human interaction.
Also how they streamlined combat into ASSFAGGOTS tier dullness.

In the earlier days lvling up was actually fun, instead of a chore to get to the end of the game when the 'game' actually started. Hell now they just give you max lvl toons to get people into it and all but the end zones are empty.

They need to get rid of levels in my opinion. Or at least levels of the character itself. Perhaps they should have spells level instead or something. Levels just make so much content obsolete, and currently it isn't fun either. Levels really do nothing but gate the actual content in the game. Anything before max level is really not worth your time.

I kind of like the steps guild wars 2 tried to make, but they were just not big enough steps. It is not dynamic enough. Levels are still there somewhat and so on.

The dungeon finder really did kill any interaction. It deceived me at first, I was pleased that it allowed me to run all the old dungeons that nobody ever ran any more like Blackfathom Deeps and Razorfen Kraul.
But then I realised none of the people I was grouped with wanted to talk or interact, it was just endless numbers of twinks in heirloom gear grinding dungeons in silence as they tried to hit the level cap as fast as possible. They weren't interested in exploring the wider game, they just wanted to rush right to the end. That's what the modern WoW player is.

I remember being in Westfall during TBC and the place was packed with players, I was having to camp mob spawns because there just weren't enough for the number of people that were trying to kill them.
I went back there after Cata and the place was fucking empty. It really made me sad.

I played GW2 and thought it was pretty fun but I enver played the first one. I did think it was kinda dumb there was no open world PVP, I mean the game is called "Guild Wars" and the Guilds couldn't declare war on each other.

I didn't play after Cata but I remember running around in strangle thorn vale gangking and getting ganked was the funnest shit ever

I don't know user. The leveling experience seems really boring to me playing on Elysium. Maybe it was different when the game was new.

Which is no longer the case since I remember the shitstorm on how blizzard made NPCs scale to your ilvl.

huuuh final fantasy XI? which was several times better?

wow was never good. XI was the real shame that died BECAUSE wow (and tigole) casualized everything.

Well it was fun because there were actually other players running around you could interact with and lvl with.

Yeah, because it was new. That's bad game design: if after years of being played a game loses one of its features, you've made a really shit game.

how do you make levelling up not boring compared to being max level?

True, I guess its just nostalgia, but I think another part is since the lvl cap was 60 instead of 80 or 100 or w/e it is now, it took longer to lvl so that helped populate the low and mid lvl areas

Good gameplay is good gameplay, no matter the level. Instead of having the literally brain-damaged develop filler quests, how about more dungeons? No one wants to kill the same generic enemies over and over again, they want to feel as if they really accomplished something. The thing I've enjoyed the most with this game so-far was my first run of Wailing Cavern.

I enjoyed leveling, but maybe that was so because I played with 4 friends. Even then we only did every dungeon we could together, we leveled solo, and the way the game is designed forces players to join forces and cooperate.
It was fun filling my friends list every 2 zones when I ended meeting and teaming up with the same people.

It's funny that you're lecturing people on novelty when that's what you're praising.

Day 1 player here. It was fun when a huge number of people were doing those areas with you as everything was /alive/. Everyone was trying all sorts of things as no one knew what mattered and what didn't, and they all wanted to do stuff with or to you. Creating a character after the vast majority hit max level was just a monotonous, solitary grind, a very different experience.
You can't relive those times. They're gone, and so is the community.

I reckon many of us were still in our teens back when WoW launched, yet to be overly plagued by cynicism, increasing the sense of wonder when jumping into the game at first. Nevertheless, I have very fond memories of vanilla, especially the world PvP which more or less died the moment battlegrounds were introduced. If you ask me they should have expanded upon the former instead of creating the latter. Another thing that I found interesting about vanilla was that enormous gap between the more casual players like me and the top tier raiding crowd. I knew I would never be able to get a full set of epics from Naxxaramas, which made it all the more awe-inspiring to see those who did walk around the main city hubs. I think it added a lot to the experience that you could always dream of getting to the top, though in reality it was unobtainable for most people.

The "new" Cataclysm broken world has existed longer than the Vanilla-Wrath world now.

Vanilla and TBC were gay for casters PVE. Like, if you were a warlock, all you did was sac pet and spam shadowbolt, and if you were a shaman, all you did was drop totems and spam lightning bolt. No rotations. Just spam one bolt spell over and over.

Fuck I heard that Legion was shit but I had no idea about all the random bullshit they introduced.

The one thing I hate about Legion is the artifact weapons crap. Now you can get stuff ike Ashbringer and Doomhammer just through questlines, instead of selling your soul to the Neet Gods and doing top tier raids like people were doing with Ateish and Corrupted Ashbringer. If you saw one player during your time in vanilla with either of those you considered yourself lucky. Now we're gonna see 10 paladins in Stormwind all carrying Ashbringers in different color. Fuck that shit.

It's a lot fucking better than collecting 12 bear flanks. If all the leveling could be done through dungeons or battlegrounds, the game would be fucking amazing. But that's not the case, you have to do shitty quests to actually get anywhere in this game.

I wonder how good XI is. I played through XIV and I thought it was causal trash for normalfags to eat up.

You can't see things clearly because you're a bitter faggot. MMORPG's don't suck now because your life sucks now, they and WoW changed in a hundred hundred ways, too many to list, none related to you.

Literally go play retail, it killed world questing and all you do is dungeons all day. Cancer.

I've heard that dungeons in retail are a fucking steamroll with little to no interaction or teamwork.

There are no good private servers, just slightly less shit ones

XI was good for the same reasons that WoW or SWG used to be good: it was a new concept, depended heavily on the community, and this was before everything in the game was listed on a wiki or built into a quest tracker in the game or something. it relied more on exploration and collaboration than on whiz-bang multi-stage boss fights. XI also had a really clever class/job system that other people can probably explain better than i can. i loved it and miss it dearly

Elysium is a waste of time with rigged loot tables.
I was the GM of a BWL guild up until about 2 hours ago.
Just gdisbanded and sold all my "lengthy" accounts for 6800 USD.

Best move I ever made.

Is there any way to go about selling my Elysium account when the email i used is not disposable?

Most people want the attached email but I use this email for personal shit so I cant give it away. If it wasnt for this problem someone would probably pay a pretty penny for my well geared warrior.

Can I change the attached email somehow?

WOW WAS NEVER GOOD
It's a meme perpetuated by brainwashed WoW addicts who realise their game is shit but don't want to admit they were wrong.

aaaand you lost me. seriously, what's up with all of these faggots repeating the "rose tinted" argument over and over when it couldn't have been more wrong. i doubt you even played vanilla/tbc now since anyone using this argument usually turns out to have only joined in wotlk or later.

i played on nostalrius and despite playing the same game 10 years ago, it was a ton of fun and it didn't really look bad either. your argument is false and you're a stupid cunt.

i've had to refute this "rose tinted" argument too many times now so i won't even bother but i'm sure others will. i've already seen a bunch of comments talk about it so just read through the thread.

Wow of Wowzers was never good.

That's true but the internet being as it is now started around that time.

One thing that I'll always remember about FFXI was the community. It was probably one of the friendlier ones out there. Though that might be because all the nips and the built in translator.

Lineage 2>WoW and it was released at the same time. Fucking 200+ player raids, Actual Territorial disputes, collecting tolls and taxes from other players.