Old-time WoW players : Do you still play it now?

[Pawnless Endgame]

How did you get on with vanilla WoW and for those who still play it, how do you find it now? What's your wargaming or roleplay background before WoW?

I played Warcraft 1 and 2 in the second half of the 90s. Blizzard kept delaying the release date for Warcraft 3, so I jumped ship from Warcraft 2 to Age of Empires 2. So in my opinion, Age 2 is the successor of Warcraft 2. For roleplay, I played Final Fantasy 7/8 and Paper Mario which are both turn-based games. The characters were also quite customisable so there was no real concept of class.

So over to WoW, I rolled 2 warlocks. Silly in hindsight, but I wanted a wizard type character and I wanted to try out both factions. This was Christmas 2005 when I started. I got both warlocks to around level 15 and I figured out that my Alliance warlock was getting into more groups, so I continued with that one to max level which was 60 back then. I joined a social/raiding guild and by the end of 2006, we had BWL on farm and AQ40 was half completed, so Naxx was the only raid that we never saw. In the Burning Crusade, there were guild politics due to the smaller raid sizes, so we became 2 guilds. Both of us managed KZ, Gruul's and Mag's and we were parts way into Sunwell when the clock ran out in late 2008. After that, I lost interest and only got as far as completing the new Naxx raid + all heroics before quitting in late 2009, 4 years on. It was a thoroughly enjoyable game though and I have several friends from it who are now also ex-gamers but we still meet up IRL.

I heard now that mounts can be had at earlier levels and the levelling is faster? Also, max level is 120 but I've no idea what the latest expansion is called! I think warlocks no longer have soul shards? Did warlocks get any new pets after the imp, voidwalker, succabus and so on? What's the community like? I guess the youngsters prefer Fortnight to WoW?

 

[Pawnless Endgame]

Thanks a lot guys Good mix of responses from players and ex-players. It seems like it did start to go downhill at around Wrath then, after I left in 2009.

What I did notice when I was leaving was that epics was getting easier to obtain. So this might be a reference to the same player base starting to have family responsibilities and more work in the work-life balance.

It never struck me that it's 14 years old now until I read the replies! Graphics were amazing at the time though. I was running it on a Geforce 6800 which handled the game well on high settings.

I did hear about a launch for vanilla servers, but I thought that was a few years ago. Didn't realise it's still slightly in the future, so I might have mis-read / mis-remembered what I saw. I will look into ESO (Elder Scrolls) as well

 

[Pawnless Endgame]

I reactivated 3 days ago and have played about 30minutes. It doesnt feel the same anymore.
Little to no socialising in the world, PUGS might as well be bots as none of them talk.
I know BFA has been out a while but I might see 1 or 2 players in the world wile out questing the game almost feels single player now.

I miss the vanilla/bc days where you had to work with others just to achieve much more minor things.

The worst thing about it now compared to vanilla days is the lack of interaction with other people on the same server due to cross realm gameplay. From purely a gear perspective, the pay to win element is also a lot stronger. The fact pugs ask for curve achievement for heroic uldir when so many will have purchased a run gets silly fast. The artwork, graphics and general gameplay and balancing are all still very good I think.

From what both of you have said, the lack of social interaction would be a deal-breaker for me. Although I loved the raiding and we were quite a good guild, the socialising was the most addictive part of the game for me. I would go from having 0 friends to a dozen friends, and I ended up meeting nearly all of them in real life on several occasions. 6 of them were British, 2 from Germany, 1 from Sweden and 1 from Norway. The German ones I've met both here and in Germany.

Off-topic, but WoW seemed to have gone the same way as the British clubbing scene. I used to meet people from clubbing forums on a weekly basis, then the clubbing scene slowly died and the forums dropped out one by one.

 

[Pawnless Endgame]

They will screw up "classic" wow, guaranteed. They will slip in some of the stuff people don't like and it won't be real vanilla. Because in all but name, it's really a different company now and they don't seem to grasp why most vanilla players left years ago.

Interesting and good point! I think there was a comment up-thread about the game going south when Activision took over. I totally forgot about the Activision Blizzard branding. I think also, it depends on where on the timeline Classic will be deployed. E.g. widescreen support wasn't patched in until early 2006. The weather system was patched in around March or April 2006. Certain materials that used to stack to 5 were later able to stack to 20. I think that all of these features should be in the Classic reboot. Also, all of the raids up to the last raid that opened. So no opening events as such. All of the raids are already there.

I'm not sure where I stand with the graphics though. I believe there have been numerous graphics updates since I left, but I'm not sure to what extent they should be incorporated in the Classic reboot.

Got to max level, solo'd Smoulderweb, got in to a guild, started raiding, realised raiding made it like a second job, that I paid to play, and then I quit.

I think I was lucky in that my guild had an age limit of 16 which meant that a lot of us were at uni or working and some had families. Therefore we weren't on a strict 6 or 7 nights per week schedule. If you committed 2 or 3 nights per week (which is what I did), then you were considered a regular and you got given DKP (dragon kill points) based on your attendance. That would go on T1 and T2 gear, so that by the end of 2006, I was almost full-T2. Except for the chest piece (warlock), because Nefarious NEVER EVER EVER EVER dropped the warlock chest piece, you damn l'il bugger. Sure he didn't hesitate to drop the shamen piece (sometimes shamen x 2) on a few occasions for an Alliance guild that had no shamen lol.