I was lucky enough to play WoW when it first released. Nothing will ever come close to the experience of Vanilla & the first two expansions. There were no aggregate sites with all the info/strats/drops/… it was pure discovery.
I remember doing Onyxia for the first time with randoms and getting our asses whooped like you wouldn’t believe. Then someone told me that Molten Core would soon be released and contain TEN of these bosses back-to-back. While we could scarcely fathom bringing one down.
Suffice to say, our first foray into MC (again with randoms) was… painful. Got our asses whooped again, this time by the trash mobs there.
Ahh, memories…
Yeah it was wild. There were so so many things to discover, just wandering around. I remember getting stuck in the sewers of undercity once. My finest moment 😁.
Lies, there were no randos for any 40m raids, only some zg, later maybe aq20. Winning anything, looting anything was too low chance, compared to so big repair costs and highly chance of just wasting time.
Also limit of 8 debuffs on a boss, bye bye afli warlocks.
Lol there were definitely rando mc raids at the beginning. They weren’t very successful mind you, but people did get some purples from trash which were insanely better than any other gear at that point. Eventually they got enough people geared and trained to do the first few bosses. Reaching Raggy was, at that point, only possible for dedicated raid guilds.
Ah, trash mobs, fair, these were there.
And this is why mmos have remained a stagnant, boring festering pile for multiple decades…
I would say it’s WoW style MMOs that are. Other options can be interesting.
Foxhole and at some point Anvil Empires for example are very different.
Maybe YOUR mom has.
Edit: Oh, mmos, my bad, OP. No offense intended.
Yeah I heard EverQuest got bought and re-onlined but I’ve heard it’s not great and iirc they tried to add micro transactions.
I just wanna kill space frogs inside the moon like it’s 2005.
It’s too bad there are no private servers like Turtle, Ascension, or Epoch. It would really suck to be able to play an enhanced version of classic wow for free.
I just started playing on Turtle WoW a few days ago and never had as much fun in WoW before. Just amazing classic+ experience and a really nice community. Also free, is pretty nice.
Turtle WoW is just amazing. This is how you release new content without power creep or losing meaning from the existing content. I never enjoyed WoW more than with Turtle.
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If I could choose not to start WoW again, I would avoid it like a plague.
I wouldn’t call it adiction per-se, but my problem with WoW is that even though I hate what Blizzard is doing, the extreme loss of quality both in game (recent example - they released a patch where one of the main feature are class campaigns, and 8/12 questlines didn’t work and had major 100% repro blockers, like requiring items that do not exist) and in Customer Support, and how it’s more and more obvious that they just want to milk the playerbase of their money without any kind of effort, I still keep playing. It’s not love-hate relationship, I actively dislike Blizzard.
But, it’s one of the only games my partner is playing and that we can play together, and I also have a lot of friends in the guild I’ve been playing for the past two years with. I mostly just log in for a dungeon or two with her, or a regular raid night with my guild, which I enjoy.
If I stopped playing, I’d give up a lot of friends and also an activity with my partner that we’re mostly used to. She doesn’t really play other games. So far, it’s still worth it, but I’m really conflicted every time I have to give Blizzard more money, since I’m basically held hostage.
I highly recommend looking for a free server, i.e Turtle WoW (assuming it won’t get shut down, they are getting sued IIRC), because those people are actually making an effort to make a game they love better. Blizzard is just exploiting people like me, and their nostalgia, without any regard for the game. It’s a shame Morhaim lost the battle against capitalism and was driven out, and it’s extremely aparent on the quality of the game and direction Blizzard is going.
Just to be clear - the game in itself is pretty all right and fun to play, what I have issue with is the way how extremely obvious is that Blizzard does not give a fuck, produces low-quality slop without any semblance of QA, and just plain exploits the playerbase. It could’ve been so much better with the resources they have, but they chose not to, and just cut corners more and more. And I highly despise that. Patches are broken, there’s reskinned content that’s heavily time-gated, and it just screams “low effort”.
Do yourself a favor and don’t think about giving Blizzard money.
+1 to shitty customer support, it’s what made me quit and never ce back. I got 4 months of free sub from a giveaway but I didn’t have the latest expansion so I sent them a msg asking if they could freeze for a month so I can get paid and buy the exp. They said they can’t freeze but if I don’t play a single day of those 30 days they could refund it. So I waited.
Month later I ask them for the refund and they say they can’t do it, what the previous rep said was wrong, it’s so stupid I said I would just quit for good.
It’s the same over at Hearthstone, the effect being I just play less and less and spend less money.
Not really defending them here but it’s worth noting that the buggy campaign wasn’t the main game. It was in Legion: Remix which is an event where you make a new “time runner” character and play it through the Legion expansion at like 10x speed and power. I found it to be extremely boring and haven’t played much of either in a few months
True, but the point was mostly that in this case, it’s extremely apparent that there were 0 QA checks before they released it or they simply don’t care. As someone who worked in QA, I can imagine them missing a lot of bugs that are happening on Remix or the main game, because they could require some obscure combination of finished past quests and an account state that can be hard/impossible to properly test for all cases, while also having millions of players, so some may encounter it.
But in the case of a major class campaign quest being impossible with 100% repro rate, because it needs items that are not even in the Remix, that’s inexcusable. It’s also easy to fix, and should be marked as critical because it’s a progress blocker. The only conclusion is that they either didn’t know about it, or just don’t care becuase they know that the community will just suck it up. It shows extreme disrespect for the players. Hell, when Remix released, you couldn’t even finish the first quest and if you tried re-logging, it didn’t let you login. It was extremely broken to the point of being unplayable for the first two days.
I’ve had similar experiences even in retail. Just getting through the main campaign of last patch required re-logging to unstuck a quest 4 times (which I specifically counted), not to mention the desyncs.
I could understand something like this if it was a developer that doesn’t have the resources, but Blizzard has and had in the past, but they decided to reduce quality just so they can increase their (already astronomical) profits.
I was always a guild wars fan, in part because there’s no subscription fee.
Guild Wars 2 is still going. They do expansions every so often, but it’s been almost nothing but horizontal growth. No new level caps or gear tiers. Just stuff like “as a necromancer, you can summon spirits to fight for you instead of getting a death powered scythe” trade offs.
I just can’t be bothered to grind through levels in an MMO anymore. I recently thought play LOTRO again, by level 15 I couldn’t be bothered with collecting 12 boar foreskins for the 25th time just to unlock more quests doing the same fucking thing. To make it worse, no one is playing helms deep, the 1 bit of level scaled content IIRC.
ESO was different by level scaling eveverything so you can play with anyone for almost anything and it works pretty well. But their cash shop puts me off.
I also don’t have much patience for “it gets fun later I promise!”.
Guild wars 2 will scale people down for earlier levels, but the majority of content is aimed at the level cap (which hasn’t changed since launch ten years ago).
I don’t know how long it would take a new player to hit the cap. With friends, I think you could get to the cap via crafting in like 30 minutes if they spot you the resources.
I am absolutely loving the expansion that was just released. Just like the one released last year, it has excellent “hangout maps” where I can just roam around and enjoy the ambience, complete random events, and find the occasional collection/achievement item. The music is gorgeous and the scenery immersive.
I haven’t tried all the new subclasses yet, but I’m having fun with the ones I have tried.
Nice! I got the new expansion but haven’t gone far in it yet. I played around with ritualist (my favorite from gw1) but reaper might still be my true love.
But I love that it’ll all just be there when I get around to it, and I can still have fun doing old content. The wizard tower convergence is a recurring favorite of mine.
I do love that convergence. It’s got the right level of challenge where you can’t just coast through it, but failures are rare. I like how they added the weekly rewards to convergences. It keeps them populated.
I mostly play engineer, and similarly it’s difficult for me to give up my beloved holosmith for the new subclass.
I was wary of the new yearly expansion format, but so far all 3 have been excellent.
The community servers in the angle: “Let me introduce myself”
City of Heroes though
Keep an eye on Fellowship. It’s in EA and if you liked M+ from wow then you’ll probably like Fellowship as well.
