Originally posted by Man1ac

Sup WoWers. When WoW came out I was only 14, a game £10 a month was too expensive to afford for me, heck my mum wouldn't even let me use her credit card on the net cause of the 'danger' of online fraud. So after that I tired endless free MMOS until I found Guild Wars. I really enjoyed GW, spent a lot of time on GW over a few years, it even became the only game I actually played for a while.

No that I've quit GW, I wanted an MMO to play, my mate nagged me into get WoW...so I did. I played it for a bit and thought the game's really cool until I find out all my friends, all said I need to get to lvl 80 asap then we'll do stuff together. I'm a semi-hardcore gamer at most so I really can't be asked to do that. So now I'm trying WAR which is an ok  game....being optimistic.

Even though I really enjoyed GW, I think if I had WoW from the start I would've had a much better experience as it's a proper MMO which owns most the bloody market. I probably would still be playing WoW as all the current MMOs are incredibly inferior to WoW.....and now I'm stuck here with WAR.

Thank you once again for proving WOW has no "GAME"it is a bunch of kids that need to feed their egos with end game only.If WOW had "GAME" people would be replaying it not worrying about end game or gear raiding.

If your own friends who have obviously played it to end game are telling you to skip past the 1-80 as fast as possible,they would be the experts/experienced WOW players that know the "real game" is weak.This is not me telling you this,it is your own friends lol,so that makes it quite an accurate analogy.

If i had a friend that wanted to join any game i like as in VG or FFXI or EQ2,i would be more than happy to play at level 1,because the WHOLE game has got "GAME",and i enjoyed it,i am not worried about how fast i can get past the game.

Originally posted by arenasb

Originally posted by Man1ac

Originally posted by Jdub402

 what do you mean by "Proper MMO"? guild wars is an awesome game, it just plays different then all others.

Guild Wars is great but it isn't a proper MMO imo. You can indulge yourself on reading thousands of threads on this forum on whether GW is an MMO, oh and there are lots of GW vs. WoW threads too lol.

 

Such a stupid argument, all opinions anyway, if you enjoy the game what does it matter whether someone considers it a mmo or a corpg or whatever. GW vs WoW is the most ridiculous comparison as well, they have nothing in common other than both being a fantasy genre game.

I played WoW since beta (quit 6 months ago). I think it's just nostalgia when people say the game was better back then. The big thing for me was that I made a lot of online friends back then and also the newness of the game as well.

No, GW's Dev's defined their game as a CORPG, so its really not a 'proper' MMORPG by most standard definnitions.

If you played until 6 months ago, then you were happy with the changes they made to the game, those like myself weren't and we left a long time. (and in my case,for the changes they didn't make)

I never played the last two expansions, however games do have to evolve because I'm sure I'd not still be playing if they hadn't made any changes.  They just took the game in the wrong direction IMO so I moved on to other games. 

11M other people disagree with me, good thing they are wrong.

I've always considered wow to be mmo-lite rather than a "proper" mmo, one of the main reasons it was able to capture such a large audience. 

I have been playing since beta and the game has improved in some areas and some parts haven't but to anyone that says you can't enjoy the game before 80 is a fool.  That's the problem with players these days it's all about rushing to brag but if you take your time you would realize that the low bg's are fun and there are many dungeons to run and quests to do so TAKE YOUR TIME!. Oh... Also don't let the WoW haters make your decision for you because those are the same people that cry when a twink kills them or they jump on the "This game is going to kill WoW" Bandwagon and we all see how the great almighty Darkfall went.. So basically play any game taking your time and enjoy it and being a level 80 doesn't make you a experienced player or even a good WoW player. P.S. They are replaying the game if you haven't noticed, LOL!

I loved WoW while it still had that "Fresh" smell.

Roleplay servers were actually inhabited by Roleplayers, and there was hope for actual enforcement of the Roleplay guidelines. The deterioration of Roleplay in WoW is the main reason I left.

World PvP actually occurred sporradically. The Southshore and Tarren Mill battles, anyone? The second most fun activity dealing with PvP when WoW came out. Always a blast, and then the "OMG120GUARDSJUSTSPAWNED" junk was put in. The world alerts in red flying across my chat window was exhilerating, and actually made it feel like a bloody war was going on.

The only instanced PvP I've ever enjoyed was the original version(s) of Alterac Valley. You know, the ones that took strategy, and there was more to do than just rush to the other side and kill the General. Korrak, the Eye, the bombers, summoning the Elementals, unleashing the calvaries - man, that was a blast. I stayed glued to my seat for 8 hours one day just to finish one bloody game. I hate, absolutely hate what it's devolved into, and sincerely believe that Blizz is aware of how much they screwed up.

I loved the feeling of going into the Plaguelands for the first time. You're level 48 (or early 50s), barely a handful of other people there, and the atmosphere was fantastic. Scholomance and Stratholme were incredible - save for the former's respawn-rate fun. When I left, people didn't even know there were instances in the Plaguelands outside of Naxx - unless there was a quest there (Paladins/Warlocks). The Mailman? Tobacco? Headmaster? Gathering pearls off the Scarlets?

Those were the days. Afterwards, Blizz's attempts at fostering world PvP have been fairly lame. TBC saw the end of lovingly-crafted atmosphere (save for the swamp, which I admit - I was in love with), and the quests became less creative and more FedEx/Game Hunter types. At least that's my subjective interpretation.

I left before Illidan was axed for the first time, so I dunno about Northrend. I heard it brought back a lot of fun that TBC seemed to lose, but I just can't bring myself to come back. I'll probably jump on their next MMO (assuming it's a setting that agrees with me) if it offers a similar "WoW 1.0" experience for a little while.

Well I did love open pvp in pre-tbc and early wow. used to love how places like Tarren Mill and STV (I was horde pvp) were utter gank-fests and pvp wars. Have lots o good memories of TM and STC lol.

But what I don't miss was the guild-dominated endgame. It was horrible. Can remember having to be "interviewed"; I mean an over-serious humourless bs interview that any adult suspected was a powertrip by some spotty nerd in his/her mum's basement. It put off a lot of mature players who had real-world jobs, responsibilities and a balanced sense that this was, er, a game, a past-time. To be in a guild and having all these demands on my time, my build, my play-style etc kinda made it feel like work with all the usual bs supervisors, managers et al. Basically the end-game was controlled by guilds, blizzard effectively handed the game over to them and the power went to a lot of their nerdy heads. Even when I found a good mature guild, the end-game became a chore and I remember - as other posters mentioned - creating alts to hide from guild demands. The best thing Blizzard did was take back the game from the guild-leaders and return it to the masses.

The guild issue was why I quit originally and why I quit rhe second and third time lol.

Game is more diverse now and supports a more varied player base. Guilds are still important - and rightly so - but they  no longer "own" the endgame thank the gods. Game is much improved, why I went back.

Regards

Melmoth

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Originally posted by Kyleran
 
No, GW's Dev's defined their game as a CORPG, so its really not a 'proper' MMORPG by most standard definnitions.

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That wasn't my point, you didn't read what I said. Who cares what the game is classified as.

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Originally posted by dougmysticey

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Originally posted by slask777

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Originally posted by dougmysticey

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Originally posted by Man1ac
Sup WoWers. When WoW came out I was only 14, a game £10 a month was too expensive to afford for me, heck my mum wouldn't even let me use her credit card on the net cause of the 'danger' of online fraud. So after that I tired endless free MMOS until I found Guild Wars. I really enjoyed GW, spent a lot of time on GW over a few years, it even became the only game I actually played for a while.
No that I've quit GW, I wanted an MMO to play, my mate nagged me into get WoW...so I did. I played it for a bit and thought the game's really cool until I find out all my friends, all said I need to get to lvl 80 asap then we'll do stuff together. I'm a semi-hardcore gamer at most so I really can't be asked to do that. So now I'm trying WAR which is an ok  game....being optimistic.
Even though I really enjoyed GW, I think if I had WoW from the start I would've had a much better experience as it's a proper MMO which owns most the bloody market. I probably would still be playing WoW as all the current MMOs are incredibly inferior to WoW.....and now I'm stuck here with WAR.

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No you don't. I was playing on and before launch day. Like all MMO's it had its challenges and has evolved a great deal. It is a much better game now. PVP was an absolute joke when they began launching that aspect of the game. I remember waiting in "queue" for hours to get into PVP games.
Enjoy your blissful ignorance of WOW in its infancy!!!

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What queue? WoW didn't had bg's and arenas at first. This smell of bs tbh.
Anyway, WoW had a better community back then. People weren't so obsesssed with the gear grind and dings as they are today.

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Your correct, that is why I said "When they began launching that aspect of the game". This was, of course, years ago, but you would wait for at least a half hour to get into the first Raid events and then that much or more for PVP events. I don't recall how long after game launch that all started but complaints were many.
Regardless, my point was, all of that is in the past and it is a better game now so be careful what you wish for.

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I'm pretty sure people who are referring to classic WoW PvP are not referring to the beginning of BGs, so your observations about their crappy launch (it really was crappy) is irrelevant. Open, world PvP BEFORE BGs and arenas was awesome. That's what I, and others, miss.

TM was usually the biggest "battlefield", and it was a lot of fun, but there were also a lot of smaller skirmishes that were just as much fun. I remember the first time I saw a small Horde raiding party invade Astranaar. This was back in mid December 2004, a few weeks after launch, and they already had their mounts. There were three of them vs about 30 of us, all lower levels. Eventually we killed two of them, and the third retreated with a bunch of us trying to track and finish him off. The battle lasted over an hour.

Another time a higher level Horde rogue went on a killing spree in Thelsamar killing NPCs and anyone else unlucky enough to be too close. Everyone was trying to hunt the guy down. Eventually a similar level NE rogue found him and the battle was on. Some of the Horde rogue's buddies showed up, and then more Alliance showed up. It was back and forth for a good 30 minutes at least before they finally retreated.

Those are just two examples, but that kind of PvP went on all the time. That's what I miss.

Originally posted by slask777

Originally posted by dougmysticey

Originally posted by Man1ac

Sup WoWers. When WoW came out I was only 14, a game £10 a month was too expensive to afford for me, heck my mum wouldn't even let me use her credit card on the net cause of the 'danger' of online fraud. So after that I tired endless free MMOS until I found Guild Wars. I really enjoyed GW, spent a lot of time on GW over a few years, it even became the only game I actually played for a while.

No that I've quit GW, I wanted an MMO to play, my mate nagged me into get WoW...so I did. I played it for a bit and thought the game's really cool until I find out all my friends, all said I need to get to lvl 80 asap then we'll do stuff together. I'm a semi-hardcore gamer at most so I really can't be asked to do that. So now I'm trying WAR which is an ok  game....being optimistic.

Even though I really enjoyed GW, I think if I had WoW from the start I would've had a much better experience as it's a proper MMO which owns most the bloody market. I probably would still be playing WoW as all the current MMOs are incredibly inferior to WoW.....and now I'm stuck here with WAR.

 

No you don't. I was playing on and before launch day. Like all MMO's it had its challenges and has evolved a great deal. It is a much better game now. PVP was an absolute joke when they began launching that aspect of the game. I remember waiting in "queue" for hours to get into PVP games.

Enjoy your blissful ignorance of WOW in its infancy!!!

 

What queue? WoW didn't had bg's and arenas at first. This smell of bs tbh.

Anyway, WoW had a better community back then. People weren't so obsesssed with the gear grind and dings as they are today.

Yes, there were queues upon launch.  Not bg or arena queues, but queues to login.  People playing in the newer servers didn't really notice, but those who were first day players on first day servers dealt with queues up to two hours long during the first 2-3 months of the game.  However, other than the queues there was very little in the way of bugs in the game, so wow was far (very far) from a bad launch.  Dude above me has no idea what he's talking about.  In fact, wow had the best launch of any mmo I am aware of, by a very long shot.  This is another reason why wow became insanely popular. 

I don't consider Old School WoW as Old School so much. The game still has the same fundamentals and whilst being much easier than it was, it still is, the same thing.

For the "fun" part.... Waiting on 12 people for a raid cause you "only" had 28 was a pain. But the actual fights were a lot more unique. Now it's really just Trash, Boss, Trash, Boss, Trash, Boss, yay upgrades. THE MOMENT I heard people actually successfully PUGGED raids... I thought to myself: This game is garbage now. I mean really, joining a guild and making e-buddies is a biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig aspect of any MMO... you don't even have to do that anymore. And yeah I know Ulduar 25 can't really be successfully pugged but hey... that's 1 instance / many.

If you REALLY wanna compare current to old school, look at raped games like EQ1 and SWG. Those got the big saucage.

PvE wise what was fun about 20-35 people waiting 2 hours for enough tanks or healers to show up for a raid? Or large elitist raiding guilds treating people like cogs in a wheel to be ground down to the point of burning them out? Open world PvP was fun though but sadly Blizzard went the route of instances for PvP instead of just making sure quest givers could not be ganked instead. BG's with diminishing returns was not fun either especially when the big raiding guilds on my server decided to monopolize the rank 14 spots to themselves by making sure they and their chosen players (usually their main tank and healer) got to keep the rank 14 titles long enough to gear them out by having folks take turn playing their characters. After a person got what they wanted they were rotated out for another person waiting line. If you were not in a large elitist raiding guild you were basically cock blocked from attaining rank 14. No one was allowed to get to rank 14 without the permission of the largest guilds on the server. That was shitty game design if you ask me.

 I've been playing the game from the beggining and here's a few thimgs that you missed and a few things that people get nolstagic about. 

First off 40 man raids, only MC and Ony at the beggining with Azuregos And Kazzak added a bit later followed by BLW and later AQ and Naxx. These good point about these were that it was awsome raiding with 40 people. The bad points were that it took a lot of organisation to run guilds and it was hard to balance the raids out. Todays raids are have much better levels of difficulty than back then, and they are also much more individually challenging. I did Naxx on original and I can tell you that even on todays 10 man runs, a hard mode Freya kill with 3 protectors up is much harder than anything on original Naxx. People get nolstagic about farming insane amount of resistance gear or hit gear for 8 tanks for 4 hoursemen and so on and cosider it as "hard".  These were just timesinks, todays raids give you much more choice and much more freedom on how hard the encounter is, which is a very good thing for casual guilds.

For pvp, the best thing about pvp at the beggining was how random it was. There was 0 rewards, no honour, no BGs or anything like that. I remember making raid groups to attack Crossroads and defend in Ashenvale at around lvl40 when there were no lvl60s on the server yet. Then later doing the tugg of war between Southshore and Tauren Mill. I've enver really been a pvp person, but I loved those fights, it got insanely laggy but it was very good fun. This is what people get Nolstagic about, these were great times, but they didn't last long because of 2 things, insanely powerful raid gear, and the Warsung Gulch (1st BG). If you were in a raiding guild doing BWL then you were a god in pvp. People tend to love pvp in those days because they were so overpowered. There was no resilience to balance pvp/pve gear, it was all the same so you could basically go round one shotting people if you had the best gear.

The biggest difference of the game from back then to now is simply the amount of choice that you have now. Back then, if there was no SS-TM battle, you would sit in IF looking for a group (15 people to UBRS, 10 to Scholo, Strat and LBRS). And that was it. Now you have tonnes of BGs, Daily quests, tonnes of normal and heroic Dungeons, Fishing competition, world pvp in Wintergraps, factions, and so on.

 I still miss original WoW for it's nolstagic value, although when I remember how many times I ran MC while waiting for BWL to come out I am glad Blizzard has taken the game in a direction that offers more choice to players and the game is much better for it now.

Originally posted by qombi

 Game design was better for me in original WoW. If they had a classic server I would play on it.

Originally posted by Palebane

Yep, you missed out on the era where personal relationships and fun were more important than loot upgrades.

I totally agree there.

Originally posted by dazaonline

Originally posted by Palebane

Yep, you missed out on the era where personal relationships and fun were more important than loot upgrades.

 

I totally agree there.

Oh shut up! Personal relationships were never more important than loot. 

Originally posted by Raztor

 The biggest difference of the game from back then to now is simply the amount of choice that you have now. Back then, if there was no SS-TM battle, you would sit in IF looking for a group (15 people to UBRS, 10 to Scholo, Strat and LBRS). And that was it. Now you have tonnes of BGs, Daily quests, tonnes of normal and heroic Dungeons, Fishing competition, world pvp in Wintergraps, factions, and so on.

 

 I still miss original WoW for it's nolstagic value, although when I remember how many times I ran MC while waiting for BWL to come out I am glad Blizzard has taken the game in a direction that offers more choice to players and the game is much better for it now.

The above is true.

More options. The launched WOW was a leveling game with a Raid attached to its end game and collecting epics.

Now you can play more the way you like it. Far more freedom. Gear is only a means to an end. That end being achievements or titles you are after in the playground you like most.

To me that's Justicar, Conqueror or PvP Arena ttiles. If Wow was a pure raiding game these days, I would have left 3 years ago already.

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----> I make plans for what I want and like to play. Present day plan is another Justicar at the end of Feb. Just dinged lvl 75 and my lvl 78 PvP resilience gear is already in the bank. Every flag I capture is a joy and every win I make is meaningful ... to me. Just need two more reputations at revered and the weapons will lay ready. Plan to stay 79 till the first week of Nov and having a full Deadly PvP set (will be no longer rated by then) around 6 weeks before the next season ends (I guess around Dec 15th).

The exalted status for WSG and AB is for the last 2 months, together with a new Arena title (hopefully).  Then I'll go for a Conqueror.

Who is even talking of a rat race and/or lvl 80.

Bored? what's the meaning of that word?  Just change a class for a few days and play with your old mains  to do a friend a favor. Or doing still arenas with my holy paladin, collecting a full set of rated deadly gear (only deadly I know but hey not bad for a 53 year old). :-)