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Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

307 points by Thevet 12y ago

j_s 12y ago
A nice reminder, perhaps. Not much data - more of a screenshot gallery. Unfortunately no real documentation of things like realm population (or comparisons across multiple realms), changes over time (day of week / weekend, holidays, etc.). Yes, "the game designers declined to comment" but I was hoping for something with a little more detail. However, that doesn't appear to be in line with the rest of the content on the site.
minimaxir 12y ago
I recently reactivated my old WoW account and purchased Warlords of Draenor out of curiosity, and ended up getting my Orc Death Knight to the new level cap of 100. This article only scratches the surface on why the old worlds are abandoned. As with most modern MMOs, the endgame begins at max level. In order to help players level faster, Blizzard added a heirlooms mechanic in the second expansion (Wrath of the Lich King) to allow low levels to have above-curve gear while leveling, with a 30% EXP boost. The third expansion (Cataclysm) revamped Azeroth, making new questing much easier and straightforward, and therefore less time is spent in the old world. The fifth expansion adds Dungeon Finder, which is a faster way to level than normal questing. So there is not much incentive to explore until you hit 90 and can go to Draenor. And then once you hit Draenor, you have access to Garrisons, which is a FarmVille-like mechanic which has the easiest financial ROI in the game, making even less of a reason to just explore period. I did not renew my subscription. Guild Wars 2 had a great solution to this; all zones have content, which the player downscales to. Unfortunately, Tyria (the world of Guild Wars 2) is not as robust as Azeroth.
- oconnor0 12y ago
  Tyria is not as robust as Azeroth. What does that mean?
  - kvzivn 12y ago
    That WoW > Guild Wars
    - toxican 12y ago
      More like WoW's world > Guild Wars' world. In terms of gameplay, I definitely prefer GW. In terms of story, world, characters, Wow blows it out of the water. I just struggle to care about anything that's going on in Tyria
  - wlesieutre 12y ago
    Names of settings, GW and Warcraft respectively.
  - minimaxir 12y ago
    There's a side effect to the downscaling of all content in that all content feels the same. Guild Wars 2 has public world events, where large numbers of players (50+) team up against a boss or a mob of enemies. Almost all bosses are HP sponges, so it gets repetitive very very easily. (ArenaNet attempted to make more complex areas, which mostly just added grind.) In terms of world exploration, Guild Wars 2 has a few unique ideas there with Vistas (get to a certain point of the map and get a nice view) or Jumping Puzzles (platforming challenges), the latter of which I am not a fan due to the wonky controls. The core issue why I don't play GW2 anymore is that it gets pretty samey. They did add episodic content for free which is pretty nice, except the plot was completely incomprehensible.
    - digi_owl 12y ago
      Their problem is that so much of the defensive options in game are active ones that avoid or nullify all incoming damage. Mobs don't do that, so instead they are given a massive health pool. This in effect turn every fight into a fight between mob health pool and how many active defenses you brought along. On top of that, anyone can "heal" someone that has gotten defeated and so bring them back into the fight.
- j_s 12y ago
  Apparently there is a class-specific (monk) 50% EXP boost¹ too. Also you can pay $60 for a character boost² to lvl 90. I wind up playing for a few months each time a new expansion is released, sometimes jumping in for a month if something interesting happens. (For example, WoW will be aping Guild Wars auto-scaling in the next patch, experimenting with 'Timewalking' weekends.) ¹ http://www.wowhead.com/spell=130283/enlightenment#comments http://www.wowhead.com/spell=130283/enlightenment#comments ² https://us.battle.net/shop/en/product/world-of-warcraft-service-character-boost https://us.battle.net/shop/en/product/world-of-warcraft-serv...
  - minimaxir 12y ago
    Of note with the 90 level boost, you get one for free when you purchase the expansion, which makes it easy for returning players to skip the content! (I ended up taking my 80 Death Knight through to 90 the hard way so I could see Cata/MoP content)
- Blackthorn 12y ago
  Having played both WoW and Guild Wars 1 (not 2), I think Guild Wars 1 had the best solution of them all -- virtually all the content in the game is "max level" endgame content. They don't use the mechanic of more and better gear as a reward, so content doesn't get obsoleted by that.
  - Someone1234 12y ago
    > They don't use the mechanic of more and better gear as a reward, so content doesn't get obsoleted by that. Interesting. What do they use instead? Most games use either gear or something akin to gear (like ships in Eve).
    - jdjb 12y ago
      Guild Wars focused on your synergy with your party. The content got harder but your character stats didn't improve. You got a few new skills at your disposal (and eventually 1 elite skill) but mostly it was about understanding the game mechanics and how to work as a team better. This also meant that not every mission was necessarily more challenging than the last (in Factions there were some missions that were much harder right after leaving noob island than those deeper in the game play like in the Luxon/Kurzick areas).
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
    - Igglyboo 12y ago
      They use skins. Max level armor/weapons are easily attainable by anyone in GW1 but if you want fancy looking stuff you're going to have to work for it. Makes the game a lot more skill based instead of grind based. Works very well for GW1 PvP.
    - raker 12y ago
      Progression through Guild Wars rewards you with access to new skills. At any given time you can only bring 8 of those skills (and only 1 of them can be elite) with you at any given time. In addition, your character is limited to using skills from 2 classes. Many of the skills have specific interactions or triggers. Some skill specifically counter, defend against, or take advantage of other skills. Mobs have a set of skills (including some mob-only skills). The result is a logic puzzle that may have many solutions, left for the player to figure out. Players have fairly easy access to all skills and max-level equipment in the game. Skills are (almost) never made obsolete by other skills, so you could very well be using the exact same skill you learned early in the game while you fight the final boss. The challenge is finding the combination of skills and gear to best suit your needs at any given task. Comparable to collecting tools to add to your toolbox, a screwdriver can solve new problems for you, but it doesn't make the hammer any less useful.
- Nullabillity 12y ago
  Slight correction: the dungeon finder isn't a new thing, it was added in Wrath, though later than the heirlooms.
  - minimaxir 12y ago
    That's correct. Although looking into it more, it appears the revamps of the old world dungeons which made them much easier and less time consuming didn't happen until later expansions. (E.g Scarlet Monastery and Blackfatom Deeps two expansions later.)
    - mahouse 12y ago
      Most of the revamps were done for Cataclysm. But things were already being nerfed in Wrath -- For example, a Gnomeregan corpse run was of several minutes while an ICC corpse run lasted a few seconds.
- FlannelPancake 12y ago
  I think you're clearly correct about the game beginning at max level, but I don't think heirlooms or exp boosts changed anything. Even in vanilla, there were accepted "do this to level as quickly as possible" routes. No one really hung around silithus pre-AQ, with the small exception of people who chose to level there (and there were much better zones to do that). WoW and mmos in general just don't encourage exploration very much. It doesn't contribute to making your avatar any better. So unless you're really into just having fun - which the game mostly does not encourage in lieu of running dungeons and getting gear and etc, a lot of these zones have just ALWAYS been abandoned, save for some event bringing people to them. The reason the population is 15-20 in these zones as opposed to 60+ is because there are better ways to level nowadays, not that anyone cared to visit these zones in the first place and heirlooms ruined that. That being said, I realize you're not blaming this entirely on heirlooms and exp boosts, I just wanted to clarify on that specific part of what you said.
  - abakker 12y ago
    Good point - Silithus ALWAYS had a low population, because it sucked to get to, and sucked even more to level there. The quests are almost all formulaic, (kill 10 ant monsters, etc.) and there are few plots in any of the quests. Once you hit 60 in the original game, there was plenty to do in _any_ other area that made it worth leaving and never coming back. I did some leveling in all the areas that were available at the time because I liked exploring, but the quests there actively discouraged moving very far from the base, as most of the quests could be completed close by.
    - monk_e_boy 12y ago
      I remember playing it over and over. There were a few characters trying to max out their lvl 60 toons. There was some strange quest line that got added before they bumped the max lvl up to 70 (I seem to remember) so some people wanted the quest items while still at 60.
    - Squarel 12y ago
      I recently did silithus again....it reminded me why I hated it so much in Vanilla. Especially because you had to go there to get your cooking to 300
- jimwalsh 12y ago
  The scaling zones of GW2 were not very popular for those of us that played in the beginning. Traditional MMOs allow your character to gain power. The power gain of your character is a large reason for many of the game systems to exist. To develop a system that takes away all this character power that you've gained felt boarderline 'slap in the face' like. Stripping character power is never a proper solution for an MMO.
  - t0mbstone 12y ago
    The trick is to make the level scaling optional. If I'm level 100, I should be able to go into a level 5 area and kill everything with one hit, but I wouldn't get any XP because it wasn't challenging. However, if my low level friend is playing and they want a buddy to help them with low level content, it would be nice to have the option of scaling my character down to my friend's level where I would be challenged by level 5 content alongside them (and even gain some degree of proportional XP or maybe scaled loot from it)
  - simoncion 12y ago
    GW2's scaling zones were exactly what got my friend group playing the game, and kept them playing. With every other MMORPG we'd played up to that point -and every one of the very few we've played since GW2-, our group would inevitably do one of three things: 1) Never start playing together, as the level gap between the newbies and the more veteran players meant that challenges were either impossible, or impossibly easy. 2) Rarely ever play the game because a) the group wants to avoid 1) and b) it's hard to get five friends spread across four timezones together on the regular. 3) Play the game as often as we want, as we each have "regular" solo characters, and "play-with-the-friend-group" characters, but get far less than the regulation amount of fun out of the group games, as all-too-often there's only like one set of low-level story content, so playing with the group causes to to re-run stuff for like the billionth time anyway. And, really, even with the level scaling, your skills don't go away. Having a character in the party that's five or ten+ levels higher than the zone content makes it substantially easier than a character that's at-zone-level or just a few levels higher. (It remains quite satisfying to drop an offensive golem on some level one goblin and splat it in two hits.)
- digi_owl 12y ago
  Not just that you downscale, but that certain parts of the game, like dailies, actively encourage you to go to low level zones to do stuff. The PVE side of GW2 have a bunch of other issues though.
- ghrifter 12y ago
  >> have access to Garrisons, which is a FarmVille-like mechanic which has the easiest financial ROI in the game This gutted the economy (especially on small-medium servers) and led to me quitting. Raiding was fun, PvP was alright, but when the economy was mustered into farmville-time gating...I gave my favorite MMO up.
- Shivetya 12y ago
  the issue with a guild wars 2 model is that you can never really feel like the hero as no matter how low of zone you go to you are not more powerful. There is something visceral about mowing down opponents who only mere levels ago would strike you down if you were not careful. wow mediates the issue of content going stale by allowing people to mow through, especially older raids to get accomplishments and gear; mostly for transmog of current gear or mounts and pet. This to me is a better solution. The GW2 solution leads to a more annoying world, where everything has to be taken into account and there is no breezing past low level content on your way to more excitement
  - macwarlock 12y ago
    Both styles have their merits, as evidence by WoW beginning to implement a 'timewalker' feature where players will be able to run old content dungeons with properly scaled stats (it will offer rewards useful for max level characters). There's just so much content in the game now, glad to see them making the most of it in a relevant way.
- Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  I think FFXIV has a great solution for it - at various stages in the endgame content you need to revisit all of the areas to perform your MMO regular kill ten rats activities (to level up the ultimate weapons, basically). It also has far less areas (although I think bigger zones), and almost each zone has content for a wide swath of levels. There's also quests (again for the ultimate weapons, mostly) that make max level people redo the older dungeons, and they're often quite helpful for the newer people doing them for the first time - without those players being too powerful (level sync mechanics). TL;DR: WoW needed to do more to encourage people to revisit all existing areas four expansions ago. I tried to get back into it a couple of years ago (WotLK era), and I was just put off by how few people were everywhere - and if there were people, they were ignoring you and just grinding through quests. This contrasted my initial experience with WoW quite a bit - that was either BC or even before that. Lots of people questing, and it was before the dungeon finder so people actually still had to physically form a team of players at the actual location (and spam the chat channels) to get into the dungeons, making it much more of a challenge - and more importantly for an MMO, a social endeavour.
  - nerdy 12y ago
    Except FFXIV hasn't seen nearly the massive expansion that WoW has. Heavensward will give some indications of things to come but I see them following WoW extremely closely, almost methodically. Some examples: - For the longest time in FFXI equipment was golden; not in WoW and not in FFXIV - "Gear Score" / "Average Item Level" - Instanced-only endgame content - Instant travel to every zone for all players who've been there before - All content is beaten before the end of a content cycle - No very high-end content which goes months or !years! without being taken down (Vrtra:~2yrs, AV:~4yrs, PW:~3yrs, etc.) - General fight mechanics and style (don't stand in the poo, tankbusters, buff-type mechanics); not really many new ideas at all - Flying mounts added in first expansion; unavailable in first-version areas, only in expansion areas - Character jumping in a FF-series game! Heresy! FFXIV is a WoW clone in just about every regard, it's just young. That's not necessarily a bad thing but it's quite hard to say there's much of anything being done differently. Regarding FFXIV relics and revisiting zones; relic quests will be nerfed into oblivion with the expansion, just like all previous relic chains were when subsequent content was released. WoW used to make you run around areas and talk to people for legendary weapons too[1], even some of the areas mentioned in this article like Silithus. Then the level cap went up and people had little use for those items anymore. This all boils down to MMOs lowering the entry bar by allowing new players to catch up with the most experienced players at a casual pace. You're never very far behind the bleeding edge, could be caught up in a month or two. Whether or not that's a good thing is opinion and perspective; FFXI required a very substantial commitment to compete in endgame and it definitely bordered on unhealthy obsession for many max-level players. That said, it'd be great to see some seriously difficult/"unbeatable" (preferably open-world) content, even if they use the old zones to make it happen world-boss-style. [1] http://www.wowhead.com/item=19019/thunderfury-blessed-blade-of-the-windseeker http://www.wowhead.com/item=19019/thunderfury-blessed-blade-...
- macspoofing 12y ago
  It's sad that a company introduces mechanics to skip over vast swaths of content because people don't find them fun to play.
avolcano 12y ago
I got into WoW for a couple months just before the launch of the newest expansion, though I fell out of it in favor of a few other games before the expansion came out. Even if you're not into the endgame grind of the modern MMO (turns out, I really wasn't, as much as I tried to be), there's just a ton of fantastic content to explore as you level up a character. It's definitely worth picking up on sale and just maxing out a character to explore the world. I plan on getting the new expansion and leveling through Draenor next time I've got a lull in my games backlog. There's also some great articles about unfinished content in WoW, like this one about a half-implemented zone with lots of lore around it, giving it a particular mystique: http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/05/wow-archivist-the-karazhan-crypt/ http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/05/wow-archivist-the-karazha...
nalidixic 12y ago
"You landlubbers are tougher than I thought. I'll have to improvise!" Mr Smite - Deadmines
burke 12y ago
I played WoW a lot when I was in University. I find it really incredible how much nostalgia I'm feeling looking at these screenshots. I reactivate my account once a year or so just to fly around for a couple hours. I'm glad I can still do this, but it concerns me that this generation of online-only games won't be relivable decades later like the games of my earlier childhood will always be.
- codecondo 12y ago
  A bit sad/cheeky story from me, but still relevant I believe. The time was around TBC, I think right in the middle of its launch, I managed to hack an account back then of some characters, and thought I'd log-in to have a good time. It was my first experience of the game, granted I never did destroy any characters or items, since it was my first time playing the game, but I did spend a reasonable amount of time in-game -- killing mobs, checking out gear of other people, seeing the chat activity, even the character activity in the World (haha, wow, such a rush of feelings), only a few months later when I got my own account to play with, did I realize what this game is and how magnificent it is -- I'm so, so lucky to have had the pleasure of playing during the original TBC when the game was booming with players and such pleasurable soul, one of the best times of playing any video game in my life, hands down. You can't replicate those experiences, because for the most part -- it was the people who were passionate about the game, that made it what it was. I'm sure we all have some stories like this, but I did fucking love this game with my whole heart. From a creative Mage to a passionate Druid.
  - burke 12y ago
    Completely agree. I started playing two days after TBC came out IIRC, and stopped shortly after I hit the level cap in WotLK.
  - HCIdivision17 12y ago
    I think there's a lot of us that get misty-eyed on TBC. There was a lot of opportunity for just funnin' around. I was surprised Halaa wasn't shown in the article; I consider it some of the best landscape and I had a lot of fun there. It was the sort of game where you'd say in Org chat that you were putting on a fireworks show in Halaa, and people would switch to characters in the other faction to keep the Halaa battle ballanced. (And it was nice they were there: my bank alt toon was very low level.)
pyrocat 12y ago
On a related note, WoW has plenty of private shards where you can relive old WoW content. Everquest has one too, Project1999, dedicated to the first two expansions only.
- garbage_stain 12y ago
  P99 rocks! (just sayin')
leemac 12y ago
My WoW experience started with Vanilla. Long hours were spent but I had so much fun. Looking back, I had so much free time and no concept of getting older. MC raids were a blast and getting ganked in STV was a daily occurrence. Today, I'm nearing my thirties and can't seem to get into the game for more than an hour at a time. I'm a very happy homeowner, married and kids are in the plans in the next few years. I have other interests now that take up my time and grinding for drops for hours on end isn't in the cards anymore. I logged in recently and found it so different. Cataclysm was my last true experience with WoW. I played MoP, but only for a few weeks. The magic was lost for me with flying mounts and easier grinds. It's heartbreaking to a degree because I loved this game and really want to get back to it. I suppose those years are long gone, but it's fun to think about.
- rickyc091 12y ago
  Only played during the original WoW days, but from what I heard things are so different now. I remember the days of hardcore 40 man raids, I hear it's not as much as a thing anymore. The game is more catered to the casual gamer. Then again, that makes perfect sense. When I started, I had hours and hours to devote on the game, these days, I can barely find any time to play games.
- RexM 12y ago
  There are private servers that try to be as close to Vanilla as possible, however that does mean that you have to put in the hours to get to level 60. Valkyrie is fairly populated. https://valkyrie-wow.org/ https://valkyrie-wow.org/
  - leemac 12y ago
    Thanks for the link. I dabbled with private servers a bit, but that was when BC came out and still retained some Vanilla feel. Might pop back on one now that Vanilla WoW is so long ago.
    - zanny 12y ago
      As someone who plays a lot on private servers, you might find the nostalgia goggles to be a little tinted if you try playing vanilla or even Burning Crusade. The game mechanics back then were just tremendously backwards to a degree anyone who has played more recent iterations of the game will be frustrated by, unless you really have some hardcore nostalgia going on.
jscottmiller 12y ago
A great series exploring game worlds and other virtual spaces is Andy Kelly's OTHER PLACES: http://www.otherplaces.co.uk/ http://www.otherplaces.co.uk/ His videos are both tranquil and surreal.
pclark 12y ago
I have such fond memories of World of Warcraft when it was in private beta, public beta, launch, and then up to the first expansion. It sounds strange but some of my dearest friends and fondest memories of being a teenager was via World of Warcraft.
spiek 12y ago
I played WoW for a few years, from vanilla to the level 80 cap days (pugging Naxx was an interesting experience). I used to love wandering around the world, finding hidden spots, and exploring the different pieces of Azeroth. Now I'm older and feel way too guilty devoting that amount of time to a game. Incidentally, one of the main pleasures of Minecraft (for me) was the same exploration.
- david-given 12y ago
  Yes, me too; PvP, raids, dungeons etc left me completely cold. I just liked wandering around the map, finding the weird things in the corners, working through the storylines (although a lot of them finished up in dungeons which required more than one person to play, which I was annoyed at). I think I solo'd my way all the way through WoW Classic, and then through a couple of expansions. (The article dumps on the Outlands a lot, but they were some of my favourite content. The designers had just gone nuts. I know someone who painted a scene from the Outlands because it just looked so awesome.) I think I swam all the way around both Classic continents. Took flipping ages. There are some strange things tucked away in corners, though: http://cowlark.com/2009-03-31-south-kalimdor-farm/index.html http://cowlark.com/2009-03-31-south-kalimdor-farm/index.html (Man, WoW looked awful back then. Six years ago!)
ChuckMcM 12y ago
God that was painful :-). I lost a lot of time in WoW, perhaps it was an escape, but I spent hours learning the various nooks and crannies, leveling up over 3 dozen characters of various types to the max level. I had people I never met that I felt were good friends, shared battles and triumphs and failures. Laughed at the sometimes incredibly subtle in game humor, and sometimes not so subtle. Collected odd recipes to cook, outfits to wear, and trophies and achievements. I loved having the 'two ring' which was one better than the One Ring. But as others point out, the 'traditional' way to build an MMO is 'learn skills by levelling up / start playing at max level' The game set a number of challenges for 'max level' characters which depended on gear, group composition, and various strategies to overcome the game mechanics. That is where it failed for me. In WoW while leveling you often needed to join up with groups to run through a local dungeon together. It was fun when you had a good group, annoying when you had children in the group. There were too many ways for 10 - 12 yr old boys to grief people. In an effort to increase its appeal, Blizzard changed it again and again. Skill changes, techniques, complexity was removed, buffs and nerfs to various skills. Lots of change and slowly less and less appeal. All of the components were there to make it better (arenas were a great testing ground for devs to evaluate PvP changes). I stopped playing when Mists shipped. It was just too stupid at that point and the similarity to kung-fu panda to stark. Oddly, if you could provide servers that stopped at one of the expansions (Wrath or maybe even Cataclysm) I would still be spending money with Blizzard, but now not so much. I look at it periodically and see the makings of a durable world/gaming simulation environment. I hope someone picks up the challenge.
- ropman76 12y ago
  Lot of nostalgia and time lost. My wife and I played together before we had kids so we could stay up to 2-3 AM on weekends and 40 man raid Molten Core or Blackwing Lair. We were lucky to find some married people who played and/or some more mature players. We stopped after we had kids (time crunch LOL) but we still keep in touch with some of our guild mates.
  - cm2012 12y ago
    My wife and I play - but we have no friends who do. I am envious!
Skilleen 12y ago
I have played my fair share of MMOs, and the game I spent the most time exploring the world was LOTRO. (lord of the rings online) It has been 5 or so years since I played, so not sure if it is still the same, but back then they had some deeds system where each region had challenges to kill a certain amount of creatures or explore different locations and would reward you with permanent stat boosts. I remember our guild would have nights where we would group up and tackle these challenges together, those are some of my favourite memories in gaming. Sigh, growing up sucks.
- MikeTV 12y ago
  LOTRO also has an equippable item ("Stone of the Tortoise") that prevents a character from gaining EXP. If I had the time to play still I would get this. The low-level content is some of the best in the game, IMO.
bearlikelion 12y ago
I've recently started my first adventures in Azeroth, and its been quite an experience. Being very familiar with the genre I knew what I was getting into, but didn't quite understand the differences of WoW versus Guild Wars, Wild Star, or another MMO. I really enjoyed how they continue to have players level through the expansions, the over joyous feeling of a new loading screen when I reach the next leveling milestone was super rewarding, but quickly became overwhelming. There's SO much content in the game, thousands of quest lines you quickly out level and never see, stories told through quest dialogs I had been skipping over. I passed right by the entire culture of this hand crafted digital world in a rush to raid, and now have no incentive to see what I've missed. I finally got my druid to level 80, and now entering the Cataclysm expansion it quickly shows how much has changed from each iteration of the game. I went from running dungeons over and over in hopes of a single drop, to now being overburdened with item and item, all far superior than my previous expansions hard earned gear (ilvl ~170 to 300+). It feels so forgotten, what I was first looking as like an archived museum of this game's vast history is beginning to feel like its own changes are detrimental to reliving the experience of a veteran as a new player. Seeing complex constructed runes, swirling tornadoes out in the distance, living see creatures in the background, all without content or content worth doing makes the game feel vast and empty. Although its still very enjoyable.
- bovermyer 12y ago
  There are over ten years' worth of stories and content in WoW. There are very few people in the world who can claim to have experienced all of it. One of my favorite "wow, that's random" discoveries in WoW is the Plants vs Zombies minigame by the Dalaran crater in the Eastern Kingdoms.
- zanny 12y ago
  You are well beyond the level you can go back and run the raid content from past expansions by yourself. The Blackrock Mountain raids specifically, saw hundreds of thousands of players run through them in groups of forty for hours every night for over two years. You just cannot get that scale anymore, and games that try (hic, Wildstar) don't see popularity like WoW did. So you don't know empty in WoW until you run up and punch a giant rock monster to death in fifteen seconds that would have taken forty people fifteen minutes of coordinated combat to slay a decade ago.
searine 12y ago
The most fun I had in wow was running a scripted bot to power-level myself. It added a whole level of meta-gaming and risk. It also made me ungodly rich in gold. Then I hit the level cap and stopped playing. Oh well.
patio11 12y ago
Interesting note: every ghost-town of a zone in WoW, and some of them were ghost-towns immediately, cost N fully realized software startups to develop. (Like, mid-single-digit million dollars per zone.) It's one of those things to keep in perspective when folks say "Why did anyone sink $1.2 million into $A_FIELD_I_DON'T_CONNECT_WITH?" I don't know, but that's literally less than it cost to put that mid-30s swamp level in Ogrimmar that nobody ever went to, so don't fret too much about the misallocation of society's resources.
- drewbug 12y ago
  Are they really that expensive to develop?
  - patio11 12y ago
    A WoW zone is, like a webapp, very cheap to build except for the team of professionals that you have to pay to type things into a computer every day for six months.
  - zanny 12y ago
    WoW uses a tremendous amount of recycled assets, and however Blizz is budgeting their dev team allocates them to basically do all the work for years at a time at once before reassigning them to other things. The most explicit example would be in vanilla, where in 2004 they had already created every zone found in the game that would be used up until the Burning Crusade released in 2007. They even had prototypes of a lot of places later added to the game (Outland, from the aformentioned expansion, the Emerald Dream, which is still not in the game, and several other zones). They took those prototypes and reused the assets in various places. They also heavily reuse models. The same animated skeleton is used for everything from giants to bog monsters to undead constructs or how almost every dragon in the game shares the same model with a retextured skin. When they introduce new bosses, they almost always are reskinned old models. Individual zones of WoW are not that expensive to develop - consider how hard it is to produce a static 3d geometry map today, period, and that is effectively the cost, albeit the tooling for WoW is almost twenty years old and assuredly less efficient. They will take the same portcullis used in a thousand other places, maybe swap the color palette, and use it again. They make a few novel set pieces per area usually, but the vast majority of the work is copy paste from assets made years ago.
ecdavis 12y ago
I'm not sure what to make of this. It seems as though there were ~20 players in each of the zones he visited and 91 zones in total. 91 * 20 = 1820. Are player populations much higher than that on WoW servers? I was under the impression there were ~3000 active players per server at any given time. Evenly dispersing players over the world is a pretty big design consideration when it comes to MMOs. When I played WoW I would actively seek out zones with fewer players in order to level up.
- toxican 12y ago
  WoW handles questing/grouping terribly, imo. GW2 (and maybe GW1? Never played it) does auto groups where if you jump in and help someone kill those 20 bandits, you get credit toward your quest for that. Whereas in WoW, if someone hits the bandit first, and you help, they get all of the credit. So there's zero reason why anyone should help anyone at all. And there's also the issue of loot. I can't count how many times I've been in active WoW zones (I'm thinking Westfall, here)and a group of 5 or 6 people are trying to snipe kills off eachother to get that last bore snout or whatever. In GW2, if you helped kill it, you get the exact same loot as anyone else. And to help prevent lazy assholes who do one shot, then sit back and wait, you get varying levels of loot and exp depending on how much you helped. And because of all that, there's just zero incentive to quest in WoW with other people. Maybe you'll have a guildie or friend quest with you, but you're just not interacting with strangers at all. That being said, we have seen Blizz go in that direction in the last two expansion. The daily island was largely dependent on team work (albeit through the archaic manual group forming functionality) and there are a lot of rare mobs in Warlords that share kills/loot with anyone who inflicts damage. So hopefully that'll become the norm going forward.
  - danneu 12y ago
    > And because of all that, there's just zero incentive > to quest in WoW with other people. The issues you outline are all solved by forming a party (thus a relationship) with strangers which is the crux of the game. Auto-forming a party just because two players are attacking the same kobold in the world sounds like the kind of dumbing-down that plagues WoW, like the early death of spontaneous world PvP.
jhwhite 12y ago
So much nostalgia reading that article. Sometimes I miss playing, but I've moved on with my life. I'm now in shape (I became very overweight during my WoW days), my career is moving better, and I've started a family. But sometimes I wish I could play and talk with the people in my old guild.
dbg31415 12y ago
This is nothing new. Even back in the day, the only people playing in certain old zones were people leveling... the goal of the game (for anyone other than the insane loremasters) is to get to max level as quickly as possible so you can raid and PVP. Blizzard is taking steps to allow people to see old dungeons, but they have not yet created incentives to keep people exploring old content. Arguably, it's not a great idea to spread people out... as the game population dwindles it's better to keep the players in the same zones so they feel like they are in a populated world and not a single-player game. Anyway agree there are some really cool parts of the game that ANYONE could see... but they get abandoned. I care more about old dungeons and old raids, but really they've done a good job of allowing players to see that content and farm it for transmog gear and nostalgia.
fishercs 12y ago
Back in the day I used to farm Azshara like it was my job. that place was desolate back then, it's good to see the developers make attempts to make all of the zones useful, the game has just gotten so massive I can see how certain zones would still be under utilized.
joshuaheard 12y ago
I found an old folder with screenshots of multiplayer maps from Team Fortress Classic where I had played many hours with friends. Looking at the pictures, I realized that I had an emotional connection to the virtual places just as if they were real places.
- jamwt 12y ago
  I spent.. a lot.. of my life in dustbowl. I still know dustbowl better than actual houses I've lived in.
throwawayorc 12y ago
Almost two months ago, an unofficial (completely reverse engineered) Vanilla WoW server called Nostalrius launched. I had a blast reliving the time I spent on the original game as a teenager, but had to wrest myself away after sinking a few too many days into it... Last I checked, the server was averaging between 4000-6000 players concurrently, so I had quite the opposite experience from what the author was describing: for the first day or two after launch, it was very difficult to find mobs to kill at all, when you're sharing starting zones with literally hundreds of players! It got better over time, as people grinded at different rates, distributing their numbers more evenly, but even when I quit, it was pretty rare to find a zone without a decent number of players. I recommend anyone with fond memories of Vanilla turned off by newer versions of WoW check it out. Or, maybe I shouldn't, having experienced first hand just how great of a time sink this 10 year old game can still be... https://en.nostalrius.org/ https://en.nostalrius.org/
- david-given 12y ago
  I am astonished that this place isn't drowning under a mile-high pile of lawyers. What does the WoW protocol look like?
- fragmede 12y ago
  Blizzard has a long history of lawsuits to prevent such a thing, starting with bnetd in the 2002. Scapegaming was the target of the first WoW-related lawsuit in 2010 for running their own server, but certainly not the last. Enjoy the fun while it lasts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_Entertainment#World_of_Warcraft_Private_Server_Complications http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_Entertainment#World_of...
  - throwawayorc 12y ago
    Two questions: Where were those servers located, and were they reverse engineered or using leaked server binaries? Nostalrius being based in France, and running zero Blizzard code on their servers, may give them some protection (IANAL).
    - 12y ago
lordnacho 12y ago
I am just so lucky WoW started after I was done with education. In fact I picked it up during a recovery from knee surgery. I figured if I couldn't walk in the real world, I could explore an imaginary one. It's a beautiful place. The thing is, you can't explore it without levelling. And it's also pretty vast, at least the size of zone 2 in London tube terms. So I ended up spending a lot of time there. I got so deep into it I even attended a wedding. I mean where the IRL players got married and their characters and online friends got together. Anyway, there is something about the way it's constructed that gets boring after a few months of playing time. It's as if there's two games: levelling and raiding. Raiding is where your friends are, so levelling is what you have to do to get your friends the Tank/Healer that they need. (Nobody needs DPS). It would be cool if the content just scaled so you could level everywhere, instead of having a predefined optimal quest/zone path. On your third character it does get tedious, because everyone levels by doing solo DPS. Perhaps there is also a smarter mechanic for gold grinding. When I was playing there was always some zone that was optimal for finding the best ores, so I'd just fly a loop of that each morning. Lastly, is it really hard to generate content? I mean of the type "here's a warrior, a druid, and a warlock, find us something to do that can't just be googled". Maybe smarter minds have thought about this than me, but I thought it could be worth a stab.
mahouse 12y ago
I want to cry. If you want to play on those zones, you can resort to a private server with a old expansion. There are very good ones on vanilla where those zones are alive. :-) That list of locations falls very short, too.
IgorPartola 12y ago
I play Minecraft on a small server (semi-vanilla PvE). Some stuff I found can be downright creepy. Here's an example: http://imgur.com/52wZxvp http://imgur.com/52wZxvp. This was a huge structure in the middle of the ocean that I stumbled upon. The giant sign on it said "HAIL TITO" or some such. The inside was really strange too: dark, with random traps and creatures roaming about (all intentional, such as golems). Abandoned Minecraft buildings in general are really interesting, but this takes the cake. After some asking around I did find that the person didn't in fact go crazy, and this was supposed to be a temple of sorts, with traps and treasure. But at the time (3am) it really creeped me out.
chiph 12y ago
I'm back playing again. I have a few lvl 100's, but I decided to start a new character -- this one would have no weapons and no armor -- just a tabard. I wanted to see how far I could get with just my fists. I'm up to 21 so far. I can take out regular mobs that are 3-4 levels below me with few problems. But I do die -- about as often as I did in BC, so about 3 times as often as everyone else does these days. The best part is my repair costs are zero gold. Skywall\Fistsofdeath
- dlubarov 12y ago
  Reminds me of a GW2 player who is playing as a pacifist cat - http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2u6g1w/this_happened_a_few_days_ago_but_i_forgot_to_save/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2u6g1w/this_happ...
outworlder 12y ago
The 'level' thing is something inherited from old RPGs and computer RPGs and reused to death. It is nice for a sense of progression, but ultimately leads to all sorts of issues. Why can a 99 level whatever kill dozens of level 1 charaters effortlessly, by mistake even? Why does it have N times more health? Makes no sense. One of the first successful MMORPG games was Ultima Online, which didn't have any levels. Just skills. And they didn't matter all that much. Equipment did to a degree, but noone was walking around alone with a +9 weapon for fear of losing it. So it was relatively even. It was FUN. All areas mattered, even if they didn't have as much variety as WoW. Monsters didn't give XP, so they were mostly killed for resources. And some tiny skill increase, sometimes.
- cjslep 12y ago
  Honestly, that was what I loved about EvE: no levels. Pick a goal and the skills to get there. Enjoy the journey along the way. Edited to add: There was once the perception that if you weren't an older player you could never catch up with them because of the first-come nature of skills, but that was demolished long ago (for better or worse) by blobbing with Caldari battlecruisers. Sheer numbers will beat anything, and if you are losing it is because your sheer numbers aren't big enough.
  - mattmanser 12y ago
    Last time I played, Eve had levels. If you haven't got X months in battleship skills, you can't fit one to fit with the rest of the gang, so you'd have to fly support. Then the next level is carrier/dreadnoughts. Worst part is there's no way to speed it up.
    - IkmoIkmo 12y ago
      > Worst part is there's no way to speed it up. There was a big pay2win market in the form of buying characters, which was easily possible as you could buy them with in-game money and have them transferred. And you could buy in-game money by buying subscriptions and selling them for in-game money. So there was a huge dollar to isk stream possible, which funded any gear or indeed any character (and thereby levels) you wanted. The other way around of course existed (isk to dollar) but it was harder and not within the TOS. I never did see lots of abuse of rich players and it never felt like a pay to win type of game to me or most people, but that factor definitely existed.
driverdan 12y ago
It's fun to hop onto random Minecraft servers and explore. You find a lot of abandoned buildings, mining tunnels, pets, etc. Some are recognizable as a player's first temp house they built quickly and abandoned to build something better. Some are players that invested a lot of time to build something nice but stopped playing. Each server has its own type of abandoned buildings. Chaos servers, for example, have a lot of ruined buildings covered in lava.
xamuel 12y ago
Back when I was a MUD coder, I implemented a neat 'exploration' mechanic: the game kept track of where the characters had been, and displayed it as '% of world explored', which a lot of players had fun trying to get as high as they could. If one wanted, one could further incentivize exploration by actually tying such a '% of world explored' stat to hack-n-slash gameplay.
ajkjk 12y ago
I played a lot of WoW in vanilla through the second expansion. The world was, I feel, the most explorable in vanilla. The game designers had started but never finished lots of content, and there was lots of randomness and hidden gems that weren't calculated 'content'. Just artistic touches that had been added to the world. After vanilla, it started to feel like everything was very much added 'on purpose', which detracted from the feeling for me. [This is a feeling I have about lots of games, and even software and real-life experiences too. Methodical polish can really make things less endearing.] I have great memories of wandering zones I had no business being in. Especially wandering Alliance zones and cities on my Horde rogue. When achievements for exploring the whole world and doing so many thousands of quests came out with the second expansion, I had them all (Loremaster, Seeker, Explorer, ..). And I probably did 500+ quests beyond Seeker - I would just keep doing every low level quest I could find, just to experience all the random hidden pockets of content. It was a great feeling, and one that I didn't grow up finding IRL. The vanilla world was also... rusty.. in a really charming way. It was pretty easy to crack the holes of the world open and find things that weren't meant to be found - like half finished zones, giant peculiar monoliths, and tidbits of things that had been mentioned in lore here and there but never fully implemented. A famous (at the time) video was "Exploration the Movie' by DopeFish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWMz7-7SGlo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWMz7-7SGlo The soundtrack is really great too. It's electronic / trance-style stuff that I guess isn't very popular (or wasn't where I'm from). But, the first song ('When Things Go Wrong' by Airwave) became my favorite thing to listen to for at least a year or so in high school. When I got my driver's license I would put it (and similar) songs on in the car and drive around my town at night, aimlessly. Those are some memories I'm really fond of.
- ajkjk 12y ago
  (the soundtrack of the youtube video, that is. The takeaway being: that video so helped me romanticize wandering a giant, mesmerizing, alien world that I started wandering the giant, mesmerizing, real world, and enjoying that too. With the help of a soundtrack to set the mood.)
Liquix 12y ago
i shivered with nostalgia thinking about time time i spent exploring and building friendships in azeroth. blizzard created an entire universe, and in some ways it is just as real as this one. very powerful and interesting to think about, thank you for sharing
deleted 12y ago
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ARothfusz 12y ago
Ah, those screen shots made me sad. The main reason I played WoW was for exploring, and I left when the only thing left to explore were dungeon raids with huge numbers of prerequisite "keys" to gather, as if it weren't just hard enough to get that many people together for the raid. I wanted to see the dungeon and would have been happy to leave without any loot (because I lacked the keys or whatever) if that was needed to balance the game mechanics. But I left when there was no more land to explore. And now the lands I knew are ghost towns?
petercooper 12y ago
I bet Second Life is even worse for this, and with even more creepy locales (how many virtual furry-fetish dance clubs have been left abandoned?)
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  Second Life is a cesspit precisely because it is entirely user-generated. I'd imagine abandoned areas simply disappear, though, because you have to pay Linden Labs if you want land.
heidar 12y ago
I recall a poll on reddit where the question was: "If you could relive any experience for the first time again, what would it be?" Playing WoW for the first time was quite high on that list, and I think that would be my answer too.
facepalm 12y ago
That made me sad. It seems to me that because there is no way to have a real impact on the world in most MMORPGs, there really is no point to visit those places.
ryan-allen 12y ago
Ah, I have played this game a lot... I loved exploring all the zones and levelling up. It's not entirely true that all the game happens 'at the end' I think, there are whole arcs that happened with each expansion but that is lost for a brand new player. WoW caters for the lifers, I think. Blizzard can solve the problem, they have the brains and the cash. I wish they'd make a new MMO with all their learnings! They could deprecate WoW and start all again. Every expansion you kind of do that anyway. The thing about all the forgotten content is that at some point in time during some xpac, it was very pertinent and relevant. But now it's still there many xpacs later.
romankolpak 12y ago
What I love about posts like this one is that they usually result in beautiful comment threads full of nostalgia and memories. And probably a couple of renewed game subscriptions, too. :) I had a plenty of exciting real life experiences after I quit WoW back in 2010, but somehow I still look back at my in-game experience with an incredible warm and fuzzy feeling somewhere inside of me.
birdsbolt 12y ago
Temple of Atal'Hakkar was one of my favorite places (7-8 years ago - vanilla) in WoW. I went there a lot of times, tanking was extremely fun. Silithus, Un'Goro Crater and Swamp of Sorrows were my favorite places for levelling. Oh, nostalgia is hitting me hard :D
wellboy 12y ago
To me, WoW taught me a lot for startups, especially PvP, because arena games were simply intelligence vs. intelligence fights. I think there is no other game or competition where such a broad range of skills is required in such a short amount of time (team play, application of knowledge of your character, of all other characters and their skills, use of surroundings, application of knowledge of game mechanics, very fast reactions). That's why it was so much fun chasing the gladiator title, pure application of skill (got it in S3). I've never seen something alike before, just startups I feel have the same kind of "game type". A bit of a shame that the vanilla feeling is gone, I think it would have been important to keep the game hard, so that powerful items are very, very hard to get. It seems like they wanted to make high end content accessible to everyone in order to grow the user base, but it seems like the opposite effect was reached. Reminds me of the startup wisdom, if you want to be everything to everybody, you end up being nothing to no one.
radikalus 12y ago
Reading this brought back a LOT of great memories. I remember exactly how I fell in LOVE with WoW. It was f&f, and all it involved was walking from Stormwind down through Westfall to STV. And, then, opening the map and realizing "Shit, this was less than 1% of this world." That wonder at HOW big and rich a world had been crafted lasted for years. In the first year of release, /played was > 160 days, despite being a leader in a world-first-oriented top PvE guild, 90% of it was world pvp and exploring. And yet it wasn't actually the environment that shaped the experience, but that we all lived in it. In vanilla, the world MATTERED. And in a way that wasn't always 'fun' for everyone. (Red is dead bro) We competed to claim world spawns. We griefed, camped, exploited strange environment mechanics, raided opposing cities and killed world leaders or didn't, set up roaming 5v5s, lagged out in Southshore in 200v200 struggles, denied guilds access to instance zone-ins, cursed when we sometimes got our come-uppance (and we sometimes famously did), and we had meaningful rivalries and camaraderie with other players on our server. We all had stories about nearly every player you'd meet. Actions of single players had potentially huge social impact. That disappeared when we all retreated to instances. (Flying mounts were a similar scale catastrophe in world engagement) We no longer really had communal experiences. I functionally quit WoW at the end of BC. I still played a bit in later seasons and expansions, but just arena selling glad titles primarily, as the magic was gone for me, and not for lack of trying -- I had every possible opportunity and advantage to love the game in the later expansions but never really could. This sounds more negative than I'd like, because I have really no strong bitterness towards WoW. It was a shaping experience for me. I formed great friendships and memories, learned a lot about myself, and a game like WoW has to grow and evolve and a necessity of that is that some won't enjoy the changes.

307 points by Thevet 12y ago

j_s 12y ago

A nice reminder, perhaps. Not much data - more of a screenshot gallery. Unfortunately no real documentation of things like realm population (or comparisons across multiple realms), changes over time (day of week / weekend, holidays, etc.). Yes, "the game designers declined to comment" but I was hoping for something with a little more detail. However, that doesn't appear to be in line with the rest of the content on the site.

minimaxir 12y ago

I recently reactivated my old WoW account and purchased Warlords of Draenor out of curiosity, and ended up getting my Orc Death Knight to the new level cap of 100. This article only scratches the surface on why the old worlds are abandoned. As with most modern MMOs, the endgame begins at max level. In order to help players level faster, Blizzard added a heirlooms mechanic in the second expansion (Wrath of the Lich King) to allow low levels to have above-curve gear while leveling, with a 30% EXP boost. The third expansion (Cataclysm) revamped Azeroth, making new questing much easier and straightforward, and therefore less time is spent in the old world. The fifth expansion adds Dungeon Finder, which is a faster way to level than normal questing. So there is not much incentive to explore until you hit 90 and can go to Draenor. And then once you hit Draenor, you have access to Garrisons, which is a FarmVille-like mechanic which has the easiest financial ROI in the game, making even less of a reason to just explore period. I did not renew my subscription. Guild Wars 2 had a great solution to this; all zones have content, which the player downscales to. Unfortunately, Tyria (the world of Guild Wars 2) is not as robust as Azeroth.

oconnor0 12y ago
Tyria is not as robust as Azeroth. What does that mean?
- kvzivn 12y ago
  That WoW > Guild Wars
  - toxican 12y ago
    More like WoW's world > Guild Wars' world. In terms of gameplay, I definitely prefer GW. In terms of story, world, characters, Wow blows it out of the water. I just struggle to care about anything that's going on in Tyria
- wlesieutre 12y ago
  Names of settings, GW and Warcraft respectively.
- minimaxir 12y ago
  There's a side effect to the downscaling of all content in that all content feels the same. Guild Wars 2 has public world events, where large numbers of players (50+) team up against a boss or a mob of enemies. Almost all bosses are HP sponges, so it gets repetitive very very easily. (ArenaNet attempted to make more complex areas, which mostly just added grind.) In terms of world exploration, Guild Wars 2 has a few unique ideas there with Vistas (get to a certain point of the map and get a nice view) or Jumping Puzzles (platforming challenges), the latter of which I am not a fan due to the wonky controls. The core issue why I don't play GW2 anymore is that it gets pretty samey. They did add episodic content for free which is pretty nice, except the plot was completely incomprehensible.
  - digi_owl 12y ago
    Their problem is that so much of the defensive options in game are active ones that avoid or nullify all incoming damage. Mobs don't do that, so instead they are given a massive health pool. This in effect turn every fight into a fight between mob health pool and how many active defenses you brought along. On top of that, anyone can "heal" someone that has gotten defeated and so bring them back into the fight.
j_s 12y ago
Apparently there is a class-specific (monk) 50% EXP boost¹ too. Also you can pay $60 for a character boost² to lvl 90. I wind up playing for a few months each time a new expansion is released, sometimes jumping in for a month if something interesting happens. (For example, WoW will be aping Guild Wars auto-scaling in the next patch, experimenting with 'Timewalking' weekends.) ¹ http://www.wowhead.com/spell=130283/enlightenment#comments http://www.wowhead.com/spell=130283/enlightenment#comments ² https://us.battle.net/shop/en/product/world-of-warcraft-service-character-boost https://us.battle.net/shop/en/product/world-of-warcraft-serv...
- minimaxir 12y ago
  Of note with the 90 level boost, you get one for free when you purchase the expansion, which makes it easy for returning players to skip the content! (I ended up taking my 80 Death Knight through to 90 the hard way so I could see Cata/MoP content)
Blackthorn 12y ago
Having played both WoW and Guild Wars 1 (not 2), I think Guild Wars 1 had the best solution of them all -- virtually all the content in the game is "max level" endgame content. They don't use the mechanic of more and better gear as a reward, so content doesn't get obsoleted by that.
- Someone1234 12y ago
  > They don't use the mechanic of more and better gear as a reward, so content doesn't get obsoleted by that. Interesting. What do they use instead? Most games use either gear or something akin to gear (like ships in Eve).
  - jdjb 12y ago
    Guild Wars focused on your synergy with your party. The content got harder but your character stats didn't improve. You got a few new skills at your disposal (and eventually 1 elite skill) but mostly it was about understanding the game mechanics and how to work as a team better. This also meant that not every mission was necessarily more challenging than the last (in Factions there were some missions that were much harder right after leaving noob island than those deeper in the game play like in the Luxon/Kurzick areas).
    - deleted 12y ago
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  - Igglyboo 12y ago
    They use skins. Max level armor/weapons are easily attainable by anyone in GW1 but if you want fancy looking stuff you're going to have to work for it. Makes the game a lot more skill based instead of grind based. Works very well for GW1 PvP.
  - raker 12y ago
    Progression through Guild Wars rewards you with access to new skills. At any given time you can only bring 8 of those skills (and only 1 of them can be elite) with you at any given time. In addition, your character is limited to using skills from 2 classes. Many of the skills have specific interactions or triggers. Some skill specifically counter, defend against, or take advantage of other skills. Mobs have a set of skills (including some mob-only skills). The result is a logic puzzle that may have many solutions, left for the player to figure out. Players have fairly easy access to all skills and max-level equipment in the game. Skills are (almost) never made obsolete by other skills, so you could very well be using the exact same skill you learned early in the game while you fight the final boss. The challenge is finding the combination of skills and gear to best suit your needs at any given task. Comparable to collecting tools to add to your toolbox, a screwdriver can solve new problems for you, but it doesn't make the hammer any less useful.
Nullabillity 12y ago
Slight correction: the dungeon finder isn't a new thing, it was added in Wrath, though later than the heirlooms.
- minimaxir 12y ago
  That's correct. Although looking into it more, it appears the revamps of the old world dungeons which made them much easier and less time consuming didn't happen until later expansions. (E.g Scarlet Monastery and Blackfatom Deeps two expansions later.)
  - mahouse 12y ago
    Most of the revamps were done for Cataclysm. But things were already being nerfed in Wrath -- For example, a Gnomeregan corpse run was of several minutes while an ICC corpse run lasted a few seconds.
FlannelPancake 12y ago
I think you're clearly correct about the game beginning at max level, but I don't think heirlooms or exp boosts changed anything. Even in vanilla, there were accepted "do this to level as quickly as possible" routes. No one really hung around silithus pre-AQ, with the small exception of people who chose to level there (and there were much better zones to do that). WoW and mmos in general just don't encourage exploration very much. It doesn't contribute to making your avatar any better. So unless you're really into just having fun - which the game mostly does not encourage in lieu of running dungeons and getting gear and etc, a lot of these zones have just ALWAYS been abandoned, save for some event bringing people to them. The reason the population is 15-20 in these zones as opposed to 60+ is because there are better ways to level nowadays, not that anyone cared to visit these zones in the first place and heirlooms ruined that. That being said, I realize you're not blaming this entirely on heirlooms and exp boosts, I just wanted to clarify on that specific part of what you said.
- abakker 12y ago
  Good point - Silithus ALWAYS had a low population, because it sucked to get to, and sucked even more to level there. The quests are almost all formulaic, (kill 10 ant monsters, etc.) and there are few plots in any of the quests. Once you hit 60 in the original game, there was plenty to do in _any_ other area that made it worth leaving and never coming back. I did some leveling in all the areas that were available at the time because I liked exploring, but the quests there actively discouraged moving very far from the base, as most of the quests could be completed close by.
  - monk_e_boy 12y ago
    I remember playing it over and over. There were a few characters trying to max out their lvl 60 toons. There was some strange quest line that got added before they bumped the max lvl up to 70 (I seem to remember) so some people wanted the quest items while still at 60.
  - Squarel 12y ago
    I recently did silithus again....it reminded me why I hated it so much in Vanilla. Especially because you had to go there to get your cooking to 300
jimwalsh 12y ago
The scaling zones of GW2 were not very popular for those of us that played in the beginning. Traditional MMOs allow your character to gain power. The power gain of your character is a large reason for many of the game systems to exist. To develop a system that takes away all this character power that you've gained felt boarderline 'slap in the face' like. Stripping character power is never a proper solution for an MMO.
- t0mbstone 12y ago
  The trick is to make the level scaling optional. If I'm level 100, I should be able to go into a level 5 area and kill everything with one hit, but I wouldn't get any XP because it wasn't challenging. However, if my low level friend is playing and they want a buddy to help them with low level content, it would be nice to have the option of scaling my character down to my friend's level where I would be challenged by level 5 content alongside them (and even gain some degree of proportional XP or maybe scaled loot from it)
- simoncion 12y ago
  GW2's scaling zones were exactly what got my friend group playing the game, and kept them playing. With every other MMORPG we'd played up to that point -and every one of the very few we've played since GW2-, our group would inevitably do one of three things: 1) Never start playing together, as the level gap between the newbies and the more veteran players meant that challenges were either impossible, or impossibly easy. 2) Rarely ever play the game because a) the group wants to avoid 1) and b) it's hard to get five friends spread across four timezones together on the regular. 3) Play the game as often as we want, as we each have "regular" solo characters, and "play-with-the-friend-group" characters, but get far less than the regulation amount of fun out of the group games, as all-too-often there's only like one set of low-level story content, so playing with the group causes to to re-run stuff for like the billionth time anyway. And, really, even with the level scaling, your skills don't go away. Having a character in the party that's five or ten+ levels higher than the zone content makes it substantially easier than a character that's at-zone-level or just a few levels higher. (It remains quite satisfying to drop an offensive golem on some level one goblin and splat it in two hits.)
digi_owl 12y ago
Not just that you downscale, but that certain parts of the game, like dailies, actively encourage you to go to low level zones to do stuff. The PVE side of GW2 have a bunch of other issues though.
ghrifter 12y ago
>> have access to Garrisons, which is a FarmVille-like mechanic which has the easiest financial ROI in the game This gutted the economy (especially on small-medium servers) and led to me quitting. Raiding was fun, PvP was alright, but when the economy was mustered into farmville-time gating...I gave my favorite MMO up.
Shivetya 12y ago
the issue with a guild wars 2 model is that you can never really feel like the hero as no matter how low of zone you go to you are not more powerful. There is something visceral about mowing down opponents who only mere levels ago would strike you down if you were not careful. wow mediates the issue of content going stale by allowing people to mow through, especially older raids to get accomplishments and gear; mostly for transmog of current gear or mounts and pet. This to me is a better solution. The GW2 solution leads to a more annoying world, where everything has to be taken into account and there is no breezing past low level content on your way to more excitement
- macwarlock 12y ago
  Both styles have their merits, as evidence by WoW beginning to implement a 'timewalker' feature where players will be able to run old content dungeons with properly scaled stats (it will offer rewards useful for max level characters). There's just so much content in the game now, glad to see them making the most of it in a relevant way.
Cthulhu_ 12y ago
I think FFXIV has a great solution for it - at various stages in the endgame content you need to revisit all of the areas to perform your MMO regular kill ten rats activities (to level up the ultimate weapons, basically). It also has far less areas (although I think bigger zones), and almost each zone has content for a wide swath of levels. There's also quests (again for the ultimate weapons, mostly) that make max level people redo the older dungeons, and they're often quite helpful for the newer people doing them for the first time - without those players being too powerful (level sync mechanics). TL;DR: WoW needed to do more to encourage people to revisit all existing areas four expansions ago. I tried to get back into it a couple of years ago (WotLK era), and I was just put off by how few people were everywhere - and if there were people, they were ignoring you and just grinding through quests. This contrasted my initial experience with WoW quite a bit - that was either BC or even before that. Lots of people questing, and it was before the dungeon finder so people actually still had to physically form a team of players at the actual location (and spam the chat channels) to get into the dungeons, making it much more of a challenge - and more importantly for an MMO, a social endeavour.
- nerdy 12y ago
  Except FFXIV hasn't seen nearly the massive expansion that WoW has. Heavensward will give some indications of things to come but I see them following WoW extremely closely, almost methodically. Some examples: - For the longest time in FFXI equipment was golden; not in WoW and not in FFXIV - "Gear Score" / "Average Item Level" - Instanced-only endgame content - Instant travel to every zone for all players who've been there before - All content is beaten before the end of a content cycle - No very high-end content which goes months or !years! without being taken down (Vrtra:~2yrs, AV:~4yrs, PW:~3yrs, etc.) - General fight mechanics and style (don't stand in the poo, tankbusters, buff-type mechanics); not really many new ideas at all - Flying mounts added in first expansion; unavailable in first-version areas, only in expansion areas - Character jumping in a FF-series game! Heresy! FFXIV is a WoW clone in just about every regard, it's just young. That's not necessarily a bad thing but it's quite hard to say there's much of anything being done differently. Regarding FFXIV relics and revisiting zones; relic quests will be nerfed into oblivion with the expansion, just like all previous relic chains were when subsequent content was released. WoW used to make you run around areas and talk to people for legendary weapons too[1], even some of the areas mentioned in this article like Silithus. Then the level cap went up and people had little use for those items anymore. This all boils down to MMOs lowering the entry bar by allowing new players to catch up with the most experienced players at a casual pace. You're never very far behind the bleeding edge, could be caught up in a month or two. Whether or not that's a good thing is opinion and perspective; FFXI required a very substantial commitment to compete in endgame and it definitely bordered on unhealthy obsession for many max-level players. That said, it'd be great to see some seriously difficult/"unbeatable" (preferably open-world) content, even if they use the old zones to make it happen world-boss-style. [1] http://www.wowhead.com/item=19019/thunderfury-blessed-blade-of-the-windseeker http://www.wowhead.com/item=19019/thunderfury-blessed-blade-...
macspoofing 12y ago
It's sad that a company introduces mechanics to skip over vast swaths of content because people don't find them fun to play.

avolcano 12y ago

I got into WoW for a couple months just before the launch of the newest expansion, though I fell out of it in favor of a few other games before the expansion came out. Even if you're not into the endgame grind of the modern MMO (turns out, I really wasn't, as much as I tried to be), there's just a ton of fantastic content to explore as you level up a character. It's definitely worth picking up on sale and just maxing out a character to explore the world. I plan on getting the new expansion and leveling through Draenor next time I've got a lull in my games backlog. There's also some great articles about unfinished content in WoW, like this one about a half-implemented zone with lots of lore around it, giving it a particular mystique: http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/05/wow-archivist-the-karazhan-crypt/ http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/05/wow-archivist-the-karazha...

nalidixic 12y ago

"You landlubbers are tougher than I thought. I'll have to improvise!" Mr Smite - Deadmines

burke 12y ago

I played WoW a lot when I was in University. I find it really incredible how much nostalgia I'm feeling looking at these screenshots. I reactivate my account once a year or so just to fly around for a couple hours. I'm glad I can still do this, but it concerns me that this generation of online-only games won't be relivable decades later like the games of my earlier childhood will always be.

codecondo 12y ago
A bit sad/cheeky story from me, but still relevant I believe. The time was around TBC, I think right in the middle of its launch, I managed to hack an account back then of some characters, and thought I'd log-in to have a good time. It was my first experience of the game, granted I never did destroy any characters or items, since it was my first time playing the game, but I did spend a reasonable amount of time in-game -- killing mobs, checking out gear of other people, seeing the chat activity, even the character activity in the World (haha, wow, such a rush of feelings), only a few months later when I got my own account to play with, did I realize what this game is and how magnificent it is -- I'm so, so lucky to have had the pleasure of playing during the original TBC when the game was booming with players and such pleasurable soul, one of the best times of playing any video game in my life, hands down. You can't replicate those experiences, because for the most part -- it was the people who were passionate about the game, that made it what it was. I'm sure we all have some stories like this, but I did fucking love this game with my whole heart. From a creative Mage to a passionate Druid.
- burke 12y ago
  Completely agree. I started playing two days after TBC came out IIRC, and stopped shortly after I hit the level cap in WotLK.
- HCIdivision17 12y ago
  I think there's a lot of us that get misty-eyed on TBC. There was a lot of opportunity for just funnin' around. I was surprised Halaa wasn't shown in the article; I consider it some of the best landscape and I had a lot of fun there. It was the sort of game where you'd say in Org chat that you were putting on a fireworks show in Halaa, and people would switch to characters in the other faction to keep the Halaa battle ballanced. (And it was nice they were there: my bank alt toon was very low level.)

pyrocat 12y ago

On a related note, WoW has plenty of private shards where you can relive old WoW content. Everquest has one too, Project1999, dedicated to the first two expansions only.

garbage_stain 12y ago
P99 rocks! (just sayin')

leemac 12y ago

My WoW experience started with Vanilla. Long hours were spent but I had so much fun. Looking back, I had so much free time and no concept of getting older. MC raids were a blast and getting ganked in STV was a daily occurrence. Today, I'm nearing my thirties and can't seem to get into the game for more than an hour at a time. I'm a very happy homeowner, married and kids are in the plans in the next few years. I have other interests now that take up my time and grinding for drops for hours on end isn't in the cards anymore. I logged in recently and found it so different. Cataclysm was my last true experience with WoW. I played MoP, but only for a few weeks. The magic was lost for me with flying mounts and easier grinds. It's heartbreaking to a degree because I loved this game and really want to get back to it. I suppose those years are long gone, but it's fun to think about.

rickyc091 12y ago
Only played during the original WoW days, but from what I heard things are so different now. I remember the days of hardcore 40 man raids, I hear it's not as much as a thing anymore. The game is more catered to the casual gamer. Then again, that makes perfect sense. When I started, I had hours and hours to devote on the game, these days, I can barely find any time to play games.
RexM 12y ago
There are private servers that try to be as close to Vanilla as possible, however that does mean that you have to put in the hours to get to level 60. Valkyrie is fairly populated. https://valkyrie-wow.org/ https://valkyrie-wow.org/
- leemac 12y ago
  Thanks for the link. I dabbled with private servers a bit, but that was when BC came out and still retained some Vanilla feel. Might pop back on one now that Vanilla WoW is so long ago.
  - zanny 12y ago
    As someone who plays a lot on private servers, you might find the nostalgia goggles to be a little tinted if you try playing vanilla or even Burning Crusade. The game mechanics back then were just tremendously backwards to a degree anyone who has played more recent iterations of the game will be frustrated by, unless you really have some hardcore nostalgia going on.

jscottmiller 12y ago

A great series exploring game worlds and other virtual spaces is Andy Kelly's OTHER PLACES: http://www.otherplaces.co.uk/ http://www.otherplaces.co.uk/ His videos are both tranquil and surreal.

pclark 12y ago

I have such fond memories of World of Warcraft when it was in private beta, public beta, launch, and then up to the first expansion. It sounds strange but some of my dearest friends and fondest memories of being a teenager was via World of Warcraft.

spiek 12y ago

I played WoW for a few years, from vanilla to the level 80 cap days (pugging Naxx was an interesting experience). I used to love wandering around the world, finding hidden spots, and exploring the different pieces of Azeroth. Now I'm older and feel way too guilty devoting that amount of time to a game. Incidentally, one of the main pleasures of Minecraft (for me) was the same exploration.

david-given 12y ago
Yes, me too; PvP, raids, dungeons etc left me completely cold. I just liked wandering around the map, finding the weird things in the corners, working through the storylines (although a lot of them finished up in dungeons which required more than one person to play, which I was annoyed at). I think I solo'd my way all the way through WoW Classic, and then through a couple of expansions. (The article dumps on the Outlands a lot, but they were some of my favourite content. The designers had just gone nuts. I know someone who painted a scene from the Outlands because it just looked so awesome.) I think I swam all the way around both Classic continents. Took flipping ages. There are some strange things tucked away in corners, though: http://cowlark.com/2009-03-31-south-kalimdor-farm/index.html http://cowlark.com/2009-03-31-south-kalimdor-farm/index.html (Man, WoW looked awful back then. Six years ago!)

ChuckMcM 12y ago

God that was painful :-). I lost a lot of time in WoW, perhaps it was an escape, but I spent hours learning the various nooks and crannies, leveling up over 3 dozen characters of various types to the max level. I had people I never met that I felt were good friends, shared battles and triumphs and failures. Laughed at the sometimes incredibly subtle in game humor, and sometimes not so subtle. Collected odd recipes to cook, outfits to wear, and trophies and achievements. I loved having the 'two ring' which was one better than the One Ring. But as others point out, the 'traditional' way to build an MMO is 'learn skills by levelling up / start playing at max level' The game set a number of challenges for 'max level' characters which depended on gear, group composition, and various strategies to overcome the game mechanics. That is where it failed for me. In WoW while leveling you often needed to join up with groups to run through a local dungeon together. It was fun when you had a good group, annoying when you had children in the group. There were too many ways for 10 - 12 yr old boys to grief people. In an effort to increase its appeal, Blizzard changed it again and again. Skill changes, techniques, complexity was removed, buffs and nerfs to various skills. Lots of change and slowly less and less appeal. All of the components were there to make it better (arenas were a great testing ground for devs to evaluate PvP changes). I stopped playing when Mists shipped. It was just too stupid at that point and the similarity to kung-fu panda to stark. Oddly, if you could provide servers that stopped at one of the expansions (Wrath or maybe even Cataclysm) I would still be spending money with Blizzard, but now not so much. I look at it periodically and see the makings of a durable world/gaming simulation environment. I hope someone picks up the challenge.

ropman76 12y ago
Lot of nostalgia and time lost. My wife and I played together before we had kids so we could stay up to 2-3 AM on weekends and 40 man raid Molten Core or Blackwing Lair. We were lucky to find some married people who played and/or some more mature players. We stopped after we had kids (time crunch LOL) but we still keep in touch with some of our guild mates.
- cm2012 12y ago
  My wife and I play - but we have no friends who do. I am envious!

Skilleen 12y ago

I have played my fair share of MMOs, and the game I spent the most time exploring the world was LOTRO. (lord of the rings online) It has been 5 or so years since I played, so not sure if it is still the same, but back then they had some deeds system where each region had challenges to kill a certain amount of creatures or explore different locations and would reward you with permanent stat boosts. I remember our guild would have nights where we would group up and tackle these challenges together, those are some of my favourite memories in gaming. Sigh, growing up sucks.

MikeTV 12y ago
LOTRO also has an equippable item ("Stone of the Tortoise") that prevents a character from gaining EXP. If I had the time to play still I would get this. The low-level content is some of the best in the game, IMO.

bearlikelion 12y ago

I've recently started my first adventures in Azeroth, and its been quite an experience. Being very familiar with the genre I knew what I was getting into, but didn't quite understand the differences of WoW versus Guild Wars, Wild Star, or another MMO. I really enjoyed how they continue to have players level through the expansions, the over joyous feeling of a new loading screen when I reach the next leveling milestone was super rewarding, but quickly became overwhelming. There's SO much content in the game, thousands of quest lines you quickly out level and never see, stories told through quest dialogs I had been skipping over. I passed right by the entire culture of this hand crafted digital world in a rush to raid, and now have no incentive to see what I've missed. I finally got my druid to level 80, and now entering the Cataclysm expansion it quickly shows how much has changed from each iteration of the game. I went from running dungeons over and over in hopes of a single drop, to now being overburdened with item and item, all far superior than my previous expansions hard earned gear (ilvl ~170 to 300+). It feels so forgotten, what I was first looking as like an archived museum of this game's vast history is beginning to feel like its own changes are detrimental to reliving the experience of a veteran as a new player. Seeing complex constructed runes, swirling tornadoes out in the distance, living see creatures in the background, all without content or content worth doing makes the game feel vast and empty. Although its still very enjoyable.

bovermyer 12y ago
There are over ten years' worth of stories and content in WoW. There are very few people in the world who can claim to have experienced all of it. One of my favorite "wow, that's random" discoveries in WoW is the Plants vs Zombies minigame by the Dalaran crater in the Eastern Kingdoms.
zanny 12y ago
You are well beyond the level you can go back and run the raid content from past expansions by yourself. The Blackrock Mountain raids specifically, saw hundreds of thousands of players run through them in groups of forty for hours every night for over two years. You just cannot get that scale anymore, and games that try (hic, Wildstar) don't see popularity like WoW did. So you don't know empty in WoW until you run up and punch a giant rock monster to death in fifteen seconds that would have taken forty people fifteen minutes of coordinated combat to slay a decade ago.

searine 12y ago

The most fun I had in wow was running a scripted bot to power-level myself. It added a whole level of meta-gaming and risk. It also made me ungodly rich in gold. Then I hit the level cap and stopped playing. Oh well.

patio11 12y ago

Interesting note: every ghost-town of a zone in WoW, and some of them were ghost-towns immediately, cost N fully realized software startups to develop. (Like, mid-single-digit million dollars per zone.) It's one of those things to keep in perspective when folks say "Why did anyone sink $1.2 million into $A_FIELD_I_DON'T_CONNECT_WITH?" I don't know, but that's literally less than it cost to put that mid-30s swamp level in Ogrimmar that nobody ever went to, so don't fret too much about the misallocation of society's resources.

drewbug 12y ago
Are they really that expensive to develop?
- patio11 12y ago
  A WoW zone is, like a webapp, very cheap to build except for the team of professionals that you have to pay to type things into a computer every day for six months.
- zanny 12y ago
  WoW uses a tremendous amount of recycled assets, and however Blizz is budgeting their dev team allocates them to basically do all the work for years at a time at once before reassigning them to other things. The most explicit example would be in vanilla, where in 2004 they had already created every zone found in the game that would be used up until the Burning Crusade released in 2007. They even had prototypes of a lot of places later added to the game (Outland, from the aformentioned expansion, the Emerald Dream, which is still not in the game, and several other zones). They took those prototypes and reused the assets in various places. They also heavily reuse models. The same animated skeleton is used for everything from giants to bog monsters to undead constructs or how almost every dragon in the game shares the same model with a retextured skin. When they introduce new bosses, they almost always are reskinned old models. Individual zones of WoW are not that expensive to develop - consider how hard it is to produce a static 3d geometry map today, period, and that is effectively the cost, albeit the tooling for WoW is almost twenty years old and assuredly less efficient. They will take the same portcullis used in a thousand other places, maybe swap the color palette, and use it again. They make a few novel set pieces per area usually, but the vast majority of the work is copy paste from assets made years ago.

ecdavis 12y ago

I'm not sure what to make of this. It seems as though there were ~20 players in each of the zones he visited and 91 zones in total. 91 * 20 = 1820. Are player populations much higher than that on WoW servers? I was under the impression there were ~3000 active players per server at any given time. Evenly dispersing players over the world is a pretty big design consideration when it comes to MMOs. When I played WoW I would actively seek out zones with fewer players in order to level up.

toxican 12y ago
WoW handles questing/grouping terribly, imo. GW2 (and maybe GW1? Never played it) does auto groups where if you jump in and help someone kill those 20 bandits, you get credit toward your quest for that. Whereas in WoW, if someone hits the bandit first, and you help, they get all of the credit. So there's zero reason why anyone should help anyone at all. And there's also the issue of loot. I can't count how many times I've been in active WoW zones (I'm thinking Westfall, here)and a group of 5 or 6 people are trying to snipe kills off eachother to get that last bore snout or whatever. In GW2, if you helped kill it, you get the exact same loot as anyone else. And to help prevent lazy assholes who do one shot, then sit back and wait, you get varying levels of loot and exp depending on how much you helped. And because of all that, there's just zero incentive to quest in WoW with other people. Maybe you'll have a guildie or friend quest with you, but you're just not interacting with strangers at all. That being said, we have seen Blizz go in that direction in the last two expansion. The daily island was largely dependent on team work (albeit through the archaic manual group forming functionality) and there are a lot of rare mobs in Warlords that share kills/loot with anyone who inflicts damage. So hopefully that'll become the norm going forward.
- danneu 12y ago
  > And because of all that, there's just zero incentive > to quest in WoW with other people. The issues you outline are all solved by forming a party (thus a relationship) with strangers which is the crux of the game. Auto-forming a party just because two players are attacking the same kobold in the world sounds like the kind of dumbing-down that plagues WoW, like the early death of spontaneous world PvP.

jhwhite 12y ago

So much nostalgia reading that article. Sometimes I miss playing, but I've moved on with my life. I'm now in shape (I became very overweight during my WoW days), my career is moving better, and I've started a family. But sometimes I wish I could play and talk with the people in my old guild.

dbg31415 12y ago

This is nothing new. Even back in the day, the only people playing in certain old zones were people leveling... the goal of the game (for anyone other than the insane loremasters) is to get to max level as quickly as possible so you can raid and PVP. Blizzard is taking steps to allow people to see old dungeons, but they have not yet created incentives to keep people exploring old content. Arguably, it's not a great idea to spread people out... as the game population dwindles it's better to keep the players in the same zones so they feel like they are in a populated world and not a single-player game. Anyway agree there are some really cool parts of the game that ANYONE could see... but they get abandoned. I care more about old dungeons and old raids, but really they've done a good job of allowing players to see that content and farm it for transmog gear and nostalgia.

fishercs 12y ago

Back in the day I used to farm Azshara like it was my job. that place was desolate back then, it's good to see the developers make attempts to make all of the zones useful, the game has just gotten so massive I can see how certain zones would still be under utilized.

joshuaheard 12y ago

I found an old folder with screenshots of multiplayer maps from Team Fortress Classic where I had played many hours with friends. Looking at the pictures, I realized that I had an emotional connection to the virtual places just as if they were real places.

jamwt 12y ago
I spent.. a lot.. of my life in dustbowl. I still know dustbowl better than actual houses I've lived in.

throwawayorc 12y ago

Almost two months ago, an unofficial (completely reverse engineered) Vanilla WoW server called Nostalrius launched. I had a blast reliving the time I spent on the original game as a teenager, but had to wrest myself away after sinking a few too many days into it... Last I checked, the server was averaging between 4000-6000 players concurrently, so I had quite the opposite experience from what the author was describing: for the first day or two after launch, it was very difficult to find mobs to kill at all, when you're sharing starting zones with literally hundreds of players! It got better over time, as people grinded at different rates, distributing their numbers more evenly, but even when I quit, it was pretty rare to find a zone without a decent number of players. I recommend anyone with fond memories of Vanilla turned off by newer versions of WoW check it out. Or, maybe I shouldn't, having experienced first hand just how great of a time sink this 10 year old game can still be... https://en.nostalrius.org/ https://en.nostalrius.org/

david-given 12y ago
I am astonished that this place isn't drowning under a mile-high pile of lawyers. What does the WoW protocol look like?
fragmede 12y ago
Blizzard has a long history of lawsuits to prevent such a thing, starting with bnetd in the 2002. Scapegaming was the target of the first WoW-related lawsuit in 2010 for running their own server, but certainly not the last. Enjoy the fun while it lasts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_Entertainment#World_of_Warcraft_Private_Server_Complications http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_Entertainment#World_of...
- throwawayorc 12y ago
  Two questions: Where were those servers located, and were they reverse engineered or using leaked server binaries? Nostalrius being based in France, and running zero Blizzard code on their servers, may give them some protection (IANAL).
  - 12y ago

lordnacho 12y ago

I am just so lucky WoW started after I was done with education. In fact I picked it up during a recovery from knee surgery. I figured if I couldn't walk in the real world, I could explore an imaginary one. It's a beautiful place. The thing is, you can't explore it without levelling. And it's also pretty vast, at least the size of zone 2 in London tube terms. So I ended up spending a lot of time there. I got so deep into it I even attended a wedding. I mean where the IRL players got married and their characters and online friends got together. Anyway, there is something about the way it's constructed that gets boring after a few months of playing time. It's as if there's two games: levelling and raiding. Raiding is where your friends are, so levelling is what you have to do to get your friends the Tank/Healer that they need. (Nobody needs DPS). It would be cool if the content just scaled so you could level everywhere, instead of having a predefined optimal quest/zone path. On your third character it does get tedious, because everyone levels by doing solo DPS. Perhaps there is also a smarter mechanic for gold grinding. When I was playing there was always some zone that was optimal for finding the best ores, so I'd just fly a loop of that each morning. Lastly, is it really hard to generate content? I mean of the type "here's a warrior, a druid, and a warlock, find us something to do that can't just be googled". Maybe smarter minds have thought about this than me, but I thought it could be worth a stab.

mahouse 12y ago

I want to cry. If you want to play on those zones, you can resort to a private server with a old expansion. There are very good ones on vanilla where those zones are alive. :-) That list of locations falls very short, too.

IgorPartola 12y ago

I play Minecraft on a small server (semi-vanilla PvE). Some stuff I found can be downright creepy. Here's an example: http://imgur.com/52wZxvp http://imgur.com/52wZxvp. This was a huge structure in the middle of the ocean that I stumbled upon. The giant sign on it said "HAIL TITO" or some such. The inside was really strange too: dark, with random traps and creatures roaming about (all intentional, such as golems). Abandoned Minecraft buildings in general are really interesting, but this takes the cake. After some asking around I did find that the person didn't in fact go crazy, and this was supposed to be a temple of sorts, with traps and treasure. But at the time (3am) it really creeped me out.

chiph 12y ago

I'm back playing again. I have a few lvl 100's, but I decided to start a new character -- this one would have no weapons and no armor -- just a tabard. I wanted to see how far I could get with just my fists. I'm up to 21 so far. I can take out regular mobs that are 3-4 levels below me with few problems. But I do die -- about as often as I did in BC, so about 3 times as often as everyone else does these days. The best part is my repair costs are zero gold. Skywall\Fistsofdeath

dlubarov 12y ago
Reminds me of a GW2 player who is playing as a pacifist cat - http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2u6g1w/this_happened_a_few_days_ago_but_i_forgot_to_save/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2u6g1w/this_happ...

outworlder 12y ago

The 'level' thing is something inherited from old RPGs and computer RPGs and reused to death. It is nice for a sense of progression, but ultimately leads to all sorts of issues. Why can a 99 level whatever kill dozens of level 1 charaters effortlessly, by mistake even? Why does it have N times more health? Makes no sense. One of the first successful MMORPG games was Ultima Online, which didn't have any levels. Just skills. And they didn't matter all that much. Equipment did to a degree, but noone was walking around alone with a +9 weapon for fear of losing it. So it was relatively even. It was FUN. All areas mattered, even if they didn't have as much variety as WoW. Monsters didn't give XP, so they were mostly killed for resources. And some tiny skill increase, sometimes.

cjslep 12y ago
Honestly, that was what I loved about EvE: no levels. Pick a goal and the skills to get there. Enjoy the journey along the way. Edited to add: There was once the perception that if you weren't an older player you could never catch up with them because of the first-come nature of skills, but that was demolished long ago (for better or worse) by blobbing with Caldari battlecruisers. Sheer numbers will beat anything, and if you are losing it is because your sheer numbers aren't big enough.
- mattmanser 12y ago
  Last time I played, Eve had levels. If you haven't got X months in battleship skills, you can't fit one to fit with the rest of the gang, so you'd have to fly support. Then the next level is carrier/dreadnoughts. Worst part is there's no way to speed it up.
  - IkmoIkmo 12y ago
    > Worst part is there's no way to speed it up. There was a big pay2win market in the form of buying characters, which was easily possible as you could buy them with in-game money and have them transferred. And you could buy in-game money by buying subscriptions and selling them for in-game money. So there was a huge dollar to isk stream possible, which funded any gear or indeed any character (and thereby levels) you wanted. The other way around of course existed (isk to dollar) but it was harder and not within the TOS. I never did see lots of abuse of rich players and it never felt like a pay to win type of game to me or most people, but that factor definitely existed.

driverdan 12y ago

It's fun to hop onto random Minecraft servers and explore. You find a lot of abandoned buildings, mining tunnels, pets, etc. Some are recognizable as a player's first temp house they built quickly and abandoned to build something better. Some are players that invested a lot of time to build something nice but stopped playing. Each server has its own type of abandoned buildings. Chaos servers, for example, have a lot of ruined buildings covered in lava.

xamuel 12y ago

Back when I was a MUD coder, I implemented a neat 'exploration' mechanic: the game kept track of where the characters had been, and displayed it as '% of world explored', which a lot of players had fun trying to get as high as they could. If one wanted, one could further incentivize exploration by actually tying such a '% of world explored' stat to hack-n-slash gameplay.

ajkjk 12y ago

I played a lot of WoW in vanilla through the second expansion. The world was, I feel, the most explorable in vanilla. The game designers had started but never finished lots of content, and there was lots of randomness and hidden gems that weren't calculated 'content'. Just artistic touches that had been added to the world. After vanilla, it started to feel like everything was very much added 'on purpose', which detracted from the feeling for me. [This is a feeling I have about lots of games, and even software and real-life experiences too. Methodical polish can really make things less endearing.] I have great memories of wandering zones I had no business being in. Especially wandering Alliance zones and cities on my Horde rogue. When achievements for exploring the whole world and doing so many thousands of quests came out with the second expansion, I had them all (Loremaster, Seeker, Explorer, ..). And I probably did 500+ quests beyond Seeker - I would just keep doing every low level quest I could find, just to experience all the random hidden pockets of content. It was a great feeling, and one that I didn't grow up finding IRL. The vanilla world was also... rusty.. in a really charming way. It was pretty easy to crack the holes of the world open and find things that weren't meant to be found - like half finished zones, giant peculiar monoliths, and tidbits of things that had been mentioned in lore here and there but never fully implemented. A famous (at the time) video was "Exploration the Movie' by DopeFish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWMz7-7SGlo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWMz7-7SGlo The soundtrack is really great too. It's electronic / trance-style stuff that I guess isn't very popular (or wasn't where I'm from). But, the first song ('When Things Go Wrong' by Airwave) became my favorite thing to listen to for at least a year or so in high school. When I got my driver's license I would put it (and similar) songs on in the car and drive around my town at night, aimlessly. Those are some memories I'm really fond of.

ajkjk 12y ago
(the soundtrack of the youtube video, that is. The takeaway being: that video so helped me romanticize wandering a giant, mesmerizing, alien world that I started wandering the giant, mesmerizing, real world, and enjoying that too. With the help of a soundtrack to set the mood.)

Liquix 12y ago

i shivered with nostalgia thinking about time time i spent exploring and building friendships in azeroth. blizzard created an entire universe, and in some ways it is just as real as this one. very powerful and interesting to think about, thank you for sharing

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ARothfusz 12y ago

Ah, those screen shots made me sad. The main reason I played WoW was for exploring, and I left when the only thing left to explore were dungeon raids with huge numbers of prerequisite "keys" to gather, as if it weren't just hard enough to get that many people together for the raid. I wanted to see the dungeon and would have been happy to leave without any loot (because I lacked the keys or whatever) if that was needed to balance the game mechanics. But I left when there was no more land to explore. And now the lands I knew are ghost towns?

petercooper 12y ago

I bet Second Life is even worse for this, and with even more creepy locales (how many virtual furry-fetish dance clubs have been left abandoned?)

TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
Second Life is a cesspit precisely because it is entirely user-generated. I'd imagine abandoned areas simply disappear, though, because you have to pay Linden Labs if you want land.

heidar 12y ago

I recall a poll on reddit where the question was: "If you could relive any experience for the first time again, what would it be?" Playing WoW for the first time was quite high on that list, and I think that would be my answer too.

facepalm 12y ago

That made me sad. It seems to me that because there is no way to have a real impact on the world in most MMORPGs, there really is no point to visit those places.

ryan-allen 12y ago

Ah, I have played this game a lot... I loved exploring all the zones and levelling up. It's not entirely true that all the game happens 'at the end' I think, there are whole arcs that happened with each expansion but that is lost for a brand new player. WoW caters for the lifers, I think. Blizzard can solve the problem, they have the brains and the cash. I wish they'd make a new MMO with all their learnings! They could deprecate WoW and start all again. Every expansion you kind of do that anyway. The thing about all the forgotten content is that at some point in time during some xpac, it was very pertinent and relevant. But now it's still there many xpacs later.

romankolpak 12y ago

What I love about posts like this one is that they usually result in beautiful comment threads full of nostalgia and memories. And probably a couple of renewed game subscriptions, too. :) I had a plenty of exciting real life experiences after I quit WoW back in 2010, but somehow I still look back at my in-game experience with an incredible warm and fuzzy feeling somewhere inside of me.

birdsbolt 12y ago

Temple of Atal'Hakkar was one of my favorite places (7-8 years ago - vanilla) in WoW. I went there a lot of times, tanking was extremely fun. Silithus, Un'Goro Crater and Swamp of Sorrows were my favorite places for levelling. Oh, nostalgia is hitting me hard :D

wellboy 12y ago

To me, WoW taught me a lot for startups, especially PvP, because arena games were simply intelligence vs. intelligence fights. I think there is no other game or competition where such a broad range of skills is required in such a short amount of time (team play, application of knowledge of your character, of all other characters and their skills, use of surroundings, application of knowledge of game mechanics, very fast reactions). That's why it was so much fun chasing the gladiator title, pure application of skill (got it in S3). I've never seen something alike before, just startups I feel have the same kind of "game type". A bit of a shame that the vanilla feeling is gone, I think it would have been important to keep the game hard, so that powerful items are very, very hard to get. It seems like they wanted to make high end content accessible to everyone in order to grow the user base, but it seems like the opposite effect was reached. Reminds me of the startup wisdom, if you want to be everything to everybody, you end up being nothing to no one.

radikalus 12y ago

Reading this brought back a LOT of great memories. I remember exactly how I fell in LOVE with WoW. It was f&f, and all it involved was walking from Stormwind down through Westfall to STV. And, then, opening the map and realizing "Shit, this was less than 1% of this world." That wonder at HOW big and rich a world had been crafted lasted for years. In the first year of release, /played was > 160 days, despite being a leader in a world-first-oriented top PvE guild, 90% of it was world pvp and exploring. And yet it wasn't actually the environment that shaped the experience, but that we all lived in it. In vanilla, the world MATTERED. And in a way that wasn't always 'fun' for everyone. (Red is dead bro) We competed to claim world spawns. We griefed, camped, exploited strange environment mechanics, raided opposing cities and killed world leaders or didn't, set up roaming 5v5s, lagged out in Southshore in 200v200 struggles, denied guilds access to instance zone-ins, cursed when we sometimes got our come-uppance (and we sometimes famously did), and we had meaningful rivalries and camaraderie with other players on our server. We all had stories about nearly every player you'd meet. Actions of single players had potentially huge social impact. That disappeared when we all retreated to instances. (Flying mounts were a similar scale catastrophe in world engagement) We no longer really had communal experiences. I functionally quit WoW at the end of BC. I still played a bit in later seasons and expansions, but just arena selling glad titles primarily, as the magic was gone for me, and not for lack of trying -- I had every possible opportunity and advantage to love the game in the later expansions but never really could. This sounds more negative than I'd like, because I have really no strong bitterness towards WoW. It was a shaping experience for me. I formed great friendships and memories, learned a lot about myself, and a game like WoW has to grow and evolve and a necessity of that is that some won't enjoy the changes.