Comparing the past with the present

I can't erase my past experience with WoW. I wish I could, I wish I could come at Classic with absolutely zero knowledge of the game. The big difference from 2004 to 2020 is that everyone knows the best path to take for each and every aspect of the game. I remember when I first started playing I didn't know anything. I played a priest as well and I didn't even know a wand was a thing until I was almost level 40. I struggled to level because I thought "Hey I'm a priest I should be doing holy damage right!?" Had no idea where I was going, what I was doing and there were little to no resources to use other than word of mouth from other adventurers in game. I had almost zero gold to buy my mount because I had been wasting gold on anything you can think of. My point being is that no one is out here making big mistakes out of ignorance in 2020, well unless you simply have never played before and refuse to look at resources.

We all know the direct path to success. BiS lists, farming routes, what talents to buy while leveling, what zones and quests to do. Guides on top of guides on top of guides.

This min/max mindset bleeds into every area of the game. Some servers being much worse than others when it comes to "elite" WoW players.
Although I am playing a very close replica of the game I loved from 2004, the mindset and attitude of the players has completely changed creating an odd experience that is much different than the past.

I sucked balls in Vanilla, I think most people did. I'm not entirely sure what I did with my time back then but I know it wasn't spent progressing in any meaningful way.

I used to join dungeon groups without having a clue what the loot table was, it could be a total waste of 2 hours or give me an upgrade, I just took the chance because I didn't really know how to check. I stacked as much intellect as I could and completely disregarded spell power, my talents were a mess and my UI took up about 90% of the screen. It took me around 15 days to get to 60 and I bought gold to pay for my epic mount.

It was great, wouldn't change a thing!

But you can't replicate that no matter how hard you try.

Fast forward to Classic and I just went in with the rush mentality, now sitting at level 60 with mostly BiS, an epic mount that I farmed in under a week and not much to do.

It's my own fault, levelling alts now. :lol:

I can't erase my past experience with WoW...
...the mindset and attitude of the players has completely changed creating an odd experience that is much different than the past.

I get want your saying and agree.
To me though I try and avoid guides and min/max stuff and just play my class the way i think its meant to play.
I do not use a guide to follow a path for best questing thats for sure but I do look up stuff when i get stumped or just cant figure it out myself.
I even did that back then to with thottbot, with quests.

One thing i am doing that i didnt do back then is looking up a guide, which happens to be on this site, for collecting all the dungeon quests before running the dungeons. https://barrens.chat/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=1628

There will be many that guide hop cause it speeds things up and because they can.
It will never be like 2004 but nostalgia took over at the beginning and now the game play is keeping me around!
I guess since i have been very slow that I havent and might not get burnt out or bored.

Plus like i said I was a priest back then and never played a warlock its different adventure for me!
I only played Priest, Mage, and Rogue in vanilla/TBC/Wrath so playing a warlock and an alt druid it feels really fun for me!

I really don't care that people know how to play the game better now. One of my best buddies in the game is a fire mage, and I ran dungeons with ret and prot paladins. Even through a bunch of level 60 content, some of the most fun people I had met earlier in the game were ret paladins so I'd have one or two ret paladins and a fire mage in my dungeon groups. As we've moved on to raiding, they've since moved to holy and my mage buddy has gone frost. But I didn't care that my ret paladins were doing noticeably worse DPS in dungeons along the way. I'd run PUGs with arms warriors and rogues and mages and they'd go super fast, but my buddies who I met running earlier dungeons would come on and I'd pick them out first and suffer through slower dungeons and slower leveling. And I didn't care either way, was busy having fun with my new buddies.

The original plan was to re-live my Gnome warrior that I played in the original game. I am still playing Pippina, but she's level 19 right now and is an alt I play in my spare time. I ended up choosing Beardozer to be my main character just before the game launched, and it's been loads of fun playing a new class that I have never played before.

Things feel pretty much exactly as I remember them. I don't really play video games anymore. I don't have much recent stuff to compare it to. But I remember spellcasting being clunky, I remember the order at which people pressed buttons not really mattering because everything happened within global cooldowns anyway... so things like two mages sheeping each other, me and a rogue stunning each other at the same time, other spell batching related stuff doesn't phase me in the slightest. It would be more weird if spell casting was more precise. These spell batching things happen and my reaction is 'that's just how this game works' instead of 'this spell batching is bullshit'. I like it.

I originally set out with the plan to not use anything like Questie, but that actually kind of sucked. I relied heavily on thottbot back in the day, and around level 20 gave in and installed questie and was on my way. I would have used Questie back in 2004/2005 if it was around. I'm glad I have it now.

Everybody complained about everything back in the day. That hasn't changed. Not much of an issue here, but in game, on the subreddits, on discord, everybody bitches about everything. That feels like how things were back in the day too.

I remember warriors used to be pretty crap DPS for most of the game. Up until the later parts of the original game, when Fury Warriors got buffed and started tearing people's faces off. I remember the joke back in ~2004? being that blizzard hated melee characters, and only casters were legitimate DPS. Today's blizzard teleported us back to the time when Fury Warriors reign supreme, but I do remember people shitting on DPS warriors for a long time for being sub-par. I'm not sure why people think today's players are different from a few years ago, because people tried to play the best they could back then too... But this ties back into 'everybody complained about everything back then, and they do it now too' point :lol:

Classic is exactly as I remembered the original game, bar some minor implementation details here and there. But when taken as a whole, I'm getting the experience I thought I was going to get and it's been everything I ever wanted it to be. I couldn't be happier about the experience as a whole if I tried.

In many ways, Classic turned out to be what I expected - a lovely game, with a slight feel of the real deal and of the private server approaches but that fell short of my high expectations.

Adventure wise, then I am playing Alliance for the first time ever, and I am playing Paladin for the first time also (besides testing on insta-60 servers, and class research). A lot of new tidbits of lore, a new touch and feel to the story and an overall happiness with saving this adventure for now as it adds a lot to the game satisfaction for me!

In terms of mechanics, graphics and gameplay, then I am quite happy with the result, as going back to an original version would be kinda rough, especially running with contemporary hardware. Coming in from the private server scene, then i am sad to find that the game has grown increasingly easy. Be it late patch tuning of raid content, talents or a more hardcore attitude to gaming in general, i do not know, but I would have liked MC to have been more than a glorified 40 man dungeon.

My biggest beef is community related. First and foremost, I think the mega server approach has made it quite hard to community build, as personal reputation is almost non-factor, and since attitudes has changed a fair bit since back in the day. Not many people seem to be all that community oriented and that can be a bit rough when pouring in a lot of hours of work, into said community.

What I do hope, is that Classic will help shape the MMO scene for the better, because some of the old design approaches really make for better games!

The original plan was to re-live my Gnome warrior that I played in the original game. I am still playing Pippina, but she's level 19 right now and is an alt I play in my spare time. I ended up choosing Beardozer to be my main character just before the game launched, and it's been loads of fun playing a new class that I have never played before

That was my initial thought too!
I was going to go back to my priest as my main but decided to play a class I havent played before!
Now im getting the nostalgia in the world and the fresh play with a class I am still learning!

My biggest beef is community related. First and foremost, I think the mega server approach has made it quite hard to community build, as personal reputation is almost non-factor, and since attitudes has changed a fair bit since back in the day. Not many people seem to be all that community oriented and that can be a bit rough when pouring in a lot of hours of work, into said community.

I've probably lucked out by Fairbanks being outnumbered 2:1 by horde I guess. I don't know the server totals anymore, but Fairbanks was full for a very long time and I think it's still either full or at least high population. Maybe the Horde side of the server has more of a problem with this, but the Alliance side of Fairbanks is very homey. Maybe by virtue of being the smaller faction, our population is closer to the sweet spot for community. I recognize people all the time, I know of all the big guilds, know the guild to guild beefs horde vs alliance... the community as a whole is very healthy. Lots of people raid logging now, but that's expected in this stage of the game anyway.

I've probably lucked out by Fairbanks being outnumbered 2:1 by horde I guess. I don't know the server totals anymore, but Fairbanks was full for a very long time and I think it's still either full or at least high population. Maybe the Horde side of the server has more of a problem with this, but the Alliance side of Fairbanks is very homey. Maybe by virtue of being the smaller faction, our population is closer to the sweet spot for community. I recognize people all the time, I know of all the big guilds, know the guild to guild beefs horde vs alliance... the community as a whole is very healthy. Lots of people raid logging now, but that's expected in this stage of the game anyway.

Yeah I think that might make a massive different; I am on Firemaw, so one of the biggest EU servers and people tend to down out in the crowd; a few people stand out, but yeah - nothing like what was the golden days for me, and what made me love the game (and similar games with strong community feels e.g Anarchy Online & LOTRO).

Was wondering what people think of the game (Classic) since it has been out for 5 almost 6 months now?

Exactly as expected.
Does it feel like you picked up where you left off from 2004/2005/2006, does the game feel the same as it was back then?

Not even close. You can replicate the game, you cannot replicate the experience. A 2020 audience playing a game that is 16 years old, is not the same and it doesnt need to be.
Has there been anything that you thought in the past but is different now playing Classic? Maybe because of your hazy memory or maybe because you have been playing/learning WOW for 15 years now and you know more than before...

Its hard to compare because Classic is different... Its tuned differently than vanilla was. So the content we have seen up to this point is far easier in Classic than it was in vanilla. Being that my most recent experiences were on Private, which was tuned to be more challenging than retail vanilla, there is a huge disparity between my classic experience (easiest version of the game we have ever seen), my vanilla experience (dated and hazy) and my private experience (most challenging version of the game we have seen). My only gripes that currently exist with Classic is the tuning. At the very least, the game should be tuned in a way that we are seeing each content tier at its most challenging and my preferred tuning would be to see a significant increase in the difficulty of the game.

I guess what I was going for when I was saying compare the past with the present part was something you didnt know in vanilla or thought it was true in vanilla but in classic was different. Not because of Blizzard tweaked things and they didnt get it right, just experienced differences. Sorry I didnt have a good example before but I do now. This would be different for people coming from private servers that played recently compared to the vanilla people who haven't played this iteration in over 10+ years.

I was alliance in vanilla and raided and only dabbled with horde in vanilla and didnt raid.
I started the onyxia quest chain and was like I remember going into BRD and doing the jail run to free some guy...escort him and such then I read the quest to go into LBRS and I dont remember this lol.
I looked it up and realized that Alliance and Horde have a different quests to complete the onyxia quest chain.
Looking at the quests for horde I see that we need to kill 3 dragons in the world and as Alliance I never knew what they were there for or if they are part of a quest or something.

I didnt know this.

The more you know.... :mrgreen:

I never thought about what the horde quest line is for Onyxia. I mean I knew they weren't coming to stormwind to talk to Lady Prestor. It's weird thinking how the Onyxia chain seems so centered around the Alliance in general. I wonder what that whole storyline is like on the Horde side.

Classic has been pretty much exactly what I remembered in the original game, even down to the clumsiness of spell casting thanks to the recreation of spell batching. The only real thing that is different from what I remember is there were no bear tanks in the original game. Everyone just knew they sucked, and to be fair they really did until later on in the later patches when they got a lot of talent buffs to bring them up to ok-tier tanks with a side of versatility.

How am I liking Classic so far? It's a hell of a lot better than everything from WoD onward, but not quite as good as Cat/Mists. I didn't get into WoW until patch 4.3, and never bothered with private servers until after Classic was officially announced, so the godawful clusterf**k of a questing experience has given me a whole new appreciation for just how much of an improvement the Shattering was.

I really loved those first few days when there were hundreds of low-level players running around the low-level questing zones, spouting 15-year-old memes and "YOU THINK YOU DO BUT YOU DON'T" in zone chat. But as players spread out more, it became harder to find groups for group quests. Now I'm near the end, where grouping up is easy again because there are tons of level 60 players who will deign to run level 52-58 dungeons with you because their BiS trinket drops from this or that boss. Also, I missed about 3 months because I didn't have money for game time, so despite all the ass I've been hauling lately in order to catch up, I still won't get to see the old-school Molten Core.
I sucked balls in Vanilla, I think most people did. I'm not entirely sure what I did with my time back then but I know it wasn't spent progressing in any meaningful way.

I used to join dungeon groups without having a clue what the loot table was, it could be a total waste of 2 hours or give me an upgrade, I just took the chance because I didn't really know how to check. I stacked as much intellect as I could and completely disregarded spell power, my talents were a mess and my UI took up about 90% of the screen. It took me around 15 days to get to 60

What the hell? That's actually EXTREMELY good. After six weeks, I was only level 43. That's six weeks in the NEW Classic, with WoWhead and addons and everything. After another six weeks (got game time for xmas), I'm at 59.

I think he meant 15 days /played, which is on the slow side of things. I think I got there in 14 days /played. Took about three months.

I didn't play the original vanilla, but have played about as many hours on private server vanilla as I have during retail of later expansions.

I've been familiar with the game, but I've adored the feeling of vanilla feeling like a complete game. Quests requiring visiting multiple zones, crafting requiring mats from multiple zones, even those from prior levels. There's a charm to some of the bare-bones RPG elements that is entirely lacking in the game now. It might be dumb, but I love that armor, for example, is an important stat.

I've not had a lot of time to play and have two level 40-something characters on A and H, so I've not gotten the full experience. But it's been a treat. Yeah, the game in 40 man raiding isn't especially hard, but it's still enjoyable. 5 man and 10 man content is probably my favorite, as you notice your own contribution quite a bit and you bring noticeable benefits to your group. My favorite experience so far was leveling my shaman and I was 1h + shield enhancement, and tanked 3 dungeons, dps'd in two, and healed in two, and played basically a support role in another (healer didn't know what he was doing and I off-healed and off-tanked a lot).

My time in Classic has been more enjoyable than 90% of my time on private server vanilla. It's been a great time.