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You've had several replies talking about how Molten Core will be cleared easily by modern WoW players, and as someone who plays retail WoW (and has been playing

You've had several replies talking about how Molten Core will be cleared easily by modern WoW players, and as someone who plays retail WoW (and has been playing continuously since Burning Crusade) I'll vouch for that take. Molten Core's mechanics are trivially easy compared to the things retail players are up against even in simple dungeons. That said, the type of player who plays WoW now has also changed since the original raiders entered Molten Core so many years ago. People still raid for fun, but like many things in modern society¹, you're also there to raid "efficiently." This documentary that I watched recently called "Why it's rude to suck at World of Warcraft" is worth the watch. It talks about how raiding has changed from a fun thing that people used to do in vanilla WoW, where a guild of 40 people would put up with the weird gnome in the guild who wouldn't wear boots, to a hyper competitive pseudo-esport where players stopped tolerating that gnome player over a decade ago. https://youtu.be/BKP1I7IocYU https://youtu.be/BKP1I7IocYU ¹ trying not to sound too preachy, I personally love the "get good and keep improving yourself" aspect about WoW, and it's why I push in the game's rated arena brackets each season.

rKarpinski 2y ago
Thats not my experience at all. I wasn't on a particularly competitive server, but on ours my guild got the second horde Nef kill. Raids were full with 40 people, 3+ hours/six nights a week and there were requirements for attendance and you would be kicked if you didn't meet them. Never dealt with a "wierd guy who didn't wear boots". You literally had to write applications and do interviews to join guilds. Molten Core was eventually easily clearable back then, so much so it was the hardest to get attendance for the <1 night it took. But I still think that had a lot more about being geared
- nozzlegear 2y ago
  Oh your comment really takes me back! I forgot how seriously guilds used to take the applications and interviews thing, including my own. Some still do a facsimile of what it used to be, but mostly it's all centered around the applicant's performance on publicly available logs at www.warcraftlogs.com now. It's a simple process for raiding guilds to look up applicants, see how they've performed, and then decide whether or not they want them on their raid team. Anyway, I didn't mean to suggest that all guilds used to have a weird bootless gnome-type raider back in vanilla. There were plenty of "hardcore" guilds around back then. What I meant was that there were a lot more of the bootless gnome-type players raiding back then, and they were tolerated by a lot more guilds and players in general because "that's just Jim, it's how he likes to play!" As the documentary points out, the bootless gnome player has died out entirely outside of non-roleplay servers, because the playerbase as a whole decided that they want efficiency, speed and performance to be their #1 priority. That priority manifests itself everywhere in modern WoW.
  - rKarpinski 2y ago
    I watched the YT video. The bootless Gnome was in MC within a month of WOW launching, which kind of completely changes my perspective on it. Maybe I'm viewing it with nostalgia but that actually sounds hardcore. Playing with modern Add-ons seems like the biggest difference. The gear requirements don't matter when you are playing with an aim-bot. Also on the Add-on front. 20 years ago it felt like it was going down the path we see in tech where maximizing metrics become thing in themselves. I was a Druid healer and there was definitely pressure to spam for the readouts vs. the actual goal of making raid succeed and not letting the MT/OT whoever die.
animal531 2y ago
Another reason is that the internet has become a lot better since way back then. As a non-US based player, back then we were still using modem and/or ISDN connections that would both drop quite frequently and had terrible latency.
eszed 2y ago
That video is incredibly good. The same trouble with the meta One True Path existed all the way back in vanilla. Our guild was objectively faster clearing dungeons by departing from widely-disseminated strats (by, e.g., selectively kiting / evasion-tanking, and using hybrid characters as intended). That maybe wasn't "best" in top-tier play, but it absolutely was in situations where everyone wasn't geared to the max. (And, you know, we had loads more fun figuring out our own optimized path than we would have copying someone else's.) WoW broke for me when cross-realm play was introduced. Prior to that, you gained a reputation on your server, so poor behavior was kept (somewhat) in check, and "randoms" you grouped with were therefore a) more willing to listen and follow alternative approaches, and b) worth teaching, because you knew you were likely to see them again. Complete anonymity removed the social contracts that made the game special.
- nozzlegear 2y ago
  > WoW broke for me when cross-realm play was introduced. Prior to that, you gained a reputation on your server, so poor behavior was kept (somewhat) in check, and "randoms" you grouped with were therefore a) more willing to listen and follow alternative approaches, and b) worth teaching, because you knew you were likely to see them again. Complete anonymity removed the social contracts that made the game special. I was just talking with my wife this morning about how different dungeons are now compared to back then, and how we'd be unlikely to wind up together if it were to happen today in modern WoW. She and I met while playing WoW back in Wrath; she played a paladin tank and was looking for a healer to heal a dungeon with her and her friends. I played a resto shaman at the time and decided to join them. We all ended up chatting so much that we added each other to our friend lists and started running dungeons together regularly. One thing lead to another and now we're happily married — 15 years later and still playing the game together. I've been leveling some alts via dungeons recently, and the sense of community you get when you're in dungeons is completely gone. People do not talk to each other at all, there is zero communication. They are in and out of there as quickly as possible, no time for talking, no time for "hello." The same is doubly true for LFR. 25 people in a raid and nobody talks to each other. If you're not at the boss by the time everyone else is, they're not waiting for you and they're going to pull. If you caused a wipe, you're going to get kicked from the group and replaced. They're just there to get loot for their alts and queue for the next wing of the raid.

rKarpinski 2y ago

Thats not my experience at all. I wasn't on a particularly competitive server, but on ours my guild got the second horde Nef kill. Raids were full with 40 people, 3+ hours/six nights a week and there were requirements for attendance and you would be kicked if you didn't meet them. Never dealt with a "wierd guy who didn't wear boots". You literally had to write applications and do interviews to join guilds. Molten Core was eventually easily clearable back then, so much so it was the hardest to get attendance for the <1 night it took. But I still think that had a lot more about being geared

nozzlegear 2y ago
Oh your comment really takes me back! I forgot how seriously guilds used to take the applications and interviews thing, including my own. Some still do a facsimile of what it used to be, but mostly it's all centered around the applicant's performance on publicly available logs at www.warcraftlogs.com now. It's a simple process for raiding guilds to look up applicants, see how they've performed, and then decide whether or not they want them on their raid team. Anyway, I didn't mean to suggest that all guilds used to have a weird bootless gnome-type raider back in vanilla. There were plenty of "hardcore" guilds around back then. What I meant was that there were a lot more of the bootless gnome-type players raiding back then, and they were tolerated by a lot more guilds and players in general because "that's just Jim, it's how he likes to play!" As the documentary points out, the bootless gnome player has died out entirely outside of non-roleplay servers, because the playerbase as a whole decided that they want efficiency, speed and performance to be their #1 priority. That priority manifests itself everywhere in modern WoW.
- rKarpinski 2y ago
  I watched the YT video. The bootless Gnome was in MC within a month of WOW launching, which kind of completely changes my perspective on it. Maybe I'm viewing it with nostalgia but that actually sounds hardcore. Playing with modern Add-ons seems like the biggest difference. The gear requirements don't matter when you are playing with an aim-bot. Also on the Add-on front. 20 years ago it felt like it was going down the path we see in tech where maximizing metrics become thing in themselves. I was a Druid healer and there was definitely pressure to spam for the readouts vs. the actual goal of making raid succeed and not letting the MT/OT whoever die.

animal531 2y ago

Another reason is that the internet has become a lot better since way back then. As a non-US based player, back then we were still using modem and/or ISDN connections that would both drop quite frequently and had terrible latency.

eszed 2y ago

That video is incredibly good. The same trouble with the meta One True Path existed all the way back in vanilla. Our guild was objectively faster clearing dungeons by departing from widely-disseminated strats (by, e.g., selectively kiting / evasion-tanking, and using hybrid characters as intended). That maybe wasn't "best" in top-tier play, but it absolutely was in situations where everyone wasn't geared to the max. (And, you know, we had loads more fun figuring out our own optimized path than we would have copying someone else's.) WoW broke for me when cross-realm play was introduced. Prior to that, you gained a reputation on your server, so poor behavior was kept (somewhat) in check, and "randoms" you grouped with were therefore a) more willing to listen and follow alternative approaches, and b) worth teaching, because you knew you were likely to see them again. Complete anonymity removed the social contracts that made the game special.

nozzlegear 2y ago
> WoW broke for me when cross-realm play was introduced. Prior to that, you gained a reputation on your server, so poor behavior was kept (somewhat) in check, and "randoms" you grouped with were therefore a) more willing to listen and follow alternative approaches, and b) worth teaching, because you knew you were likely to see them again. Complete anonymity removed the social contracts that made the game special. I was just talking with my wife this morning about how different dungeons are now compared to back then, and how we'd be unlikely to wind up together if it were to happen today in modern WoW. She and I met while playing WoW back in Wrath; she played a paladin tank and was looking for a healer to heal a dungeon with her and her friends. I played a resto shaman at the time and decided to join them. We all ended up chatting so much that we added each other to our friend lists and started running dungeons together regularly. One thing lead to another and now we're happily married — 15 years later and still playing the game together. I've been leveling some alts via dungeons recently, and the sense of community you get when you're in dungeons is completely gone. People do not talk to each other at all, there is zero communication. They are in and out of there as quickly as possible, no time for talking, no time for "hello." The same is doubly true for LFR. 25 people in a raid and nobody talks to each other. If you're not at the boss by the time everyone else is, they're not waiting for you and they're going to pull. If you caused a wipe, you're going to get kicked from the group and replaced. They're just there to get loot for their alts and queue for the next wing of the raid.