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I was there for this. Patches were fairly rare, as every patch required a rather long and annoying downtime. The player base was also split between the official

I was there for this. Patches were fairly rare, as every patch required a rather long and annoying downtime. The player base was also split between the official server and a bunch of private ones (nobody I knew played on the official ones), so they couldn't really do anything server-side (I mean they could, but that wouldn't affect all of the players). There wasn't much of a progress during that week, you needed to be really high up in levels to be able to survive for even a minute after infection. IIRC max level was 70 at the time, and you needed to be in the upper half of the upper half to even be able to react to the infection. In-game deaths was more of an annoyance than a deal-breaker. You'd spawn back as a ghost at the nearest safe town and then have to walk back to your corpse to revive, so basically for the majority of the players that week I'd just die, walk back to the corpse, respawn, and die again far away after interacting with an NPC, as my line of thinking was that the further I am from bigger cities, the odds of an NPC being infected decreased.

feoren 3y ago
> The player base was also split between the official server and a bunch of private ones Weird, I played WoW for a long time and I was never even aware of private servers nor anyone who played on them. I'm almost certain it was against the ToS. When you say the player base was "split", how much of a split are you talking? I can't imagine it was more than 1% of players playing on private servers.
Arrath 3y ago
> The player base was also split between the official server and a bunch of private ones Really? I didn't think private servers came into their own until several years and expansions later. Color me surprised! During my time in vanilla I never heard many whispers of private servers. > IIRC max level was 70 at the time, and you needed to be in the upper half of the upper half to even be able to react to the infection. Still 60, to be pedantic. ZG was added in a patch about halfway through the lifecycle of Vanilla, prior to the release of the first expansion which upped the level cap. That said, it was still a death sentence.

feoren 3y ago

> The player base was also split between the official server and a bunch of private ones Weird, I played WoW for a long time and I was never even aware of private servers nor anyone who played on them. I'm almost certain it was against the ToS. When you say the player base was "split", how much of a split are you talking? I can't imagine it was more than 1% of players playing on private servers.

Arrath 3y ago

> The player base was also split between the official server and a bunch of private ones Really? I didn't think private servers came into their own until several years and expansions later. Color me surprised! During my time in vanilla I never heard many whispers of private servers. > IIRC max level was 70 at the time, and you needed to be in the upper half of the upper half to even be able to react to the infection. Still 60, to be pedantic. ZG was added in a patch about halfway through the lifecycle of Vanilla, prior to the release of the first expansion which upped the level cap. That said, it was still a death sentence.