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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 ac

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 11y 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 11y 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 11y 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
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- thret 11y ago
  Perhaps you only visited after the gate was opened? This zone was very busy on PvP servers, because of the horde v alliance competition to open the gate to AQ first. I thought the AQ raids were quite enjoyable also. When else has a warrior tank needed a frost wand?
  - FlannelPancake 11y ago
    Pre-AQ, he's absolutely right that the place was a dead zone and no 60 would bother spending any time there. Silithus was really only busy for those 6 months between patch 1.9 and 1.11. Well, probably a bit longer than that I guess since original Naxx was such a shitshow. At most 10 months, though.
    - mahouse 11y ago
      Why do you consider the original Naxx to be a shitshow? By the way, it can still be accessed, since it looks like for WoTLK they just copypasted the map around: https://imgur.com/a/uRw4V https://imgur.com/a/uRw4V
prawks 11y ago
> unless you're really into just having fun - which the game mostly does not encourage This is the exact reason why, no matter how many times I tried over the years to play this game with friends, I could never stay attached for longer than a few hours. There seems to be less and less emphasis put on enjoying the experience of exploration and being in a space in modern online games, and more emphasis on rote activities for the sake of progress. And thus I return to single-player games, which I certainly do not mind. There is a seemingly never-ending stream of creative ideas coming out of that space.
- Ocerge 11y ago
  This exact reason is why EverQuest grabbed me so much harder than any other MMO since. Another huge reason is the danger factor. In WoW, there is effectively no punishment at all if you die, so there's no fear of exploring new places. In EQ, there are (or at least were) steep penalties if you die in the wrong place. Ignoring the fact that you lose XP that could amount to hours of lost progress, you may compound your woes with continued deaths trying to get the loot that remained with your corpse. The fear-factor had me addicted, and made accomplishments that much more rewarding.
  - mikerichards 11y ago
    What you said and real nighttime in EQ. I remember being alone, a low level, lost in Karana as night was approaching. I knew if I died that I might not know where my corpse was for the corpse run, so I had real fear, and was real cautious.
    - swombat 11y ago
      And the final element missing to instil real fear? True PvP, where anyone might decide to betray you and kill you while you're resting to recover hitpoints or manna or whatever. It's only when loss is possible that you can truly gain. It's only when betrayal is possible that you can truly trust. It's only when your character can completely fail that you can truly enjoy success. Each of those are opposite sides of the same coin. A game like Wow (which I found it very addictive, compulsive even, and did "enjoy" it to some extent) is ultimately totally empty, because there is no way to gain, to trust, to win. Put that stuff back in, and you get a game like Eve.
morganvachon 11y ago
> not that anyone cared to visit these zones in the first place For me the only exception was Un'Goro Crater. That was by far the most fun I had in the game apart from PvP arenas. Dinosaurs, cool quests inspired by 70s TV shows I watched as a kid, and just the fact that it was such a beautiful rendering of the real Ngorongoro Crater. Of course I stopped playing in 2007, so I'm sure there's tons I've missed out on since. But I really enjoyed the early quests and their unique stories, even the hammy stuff like the Edwin VanCleef/Deadmines quests. Given the level cap is at 100 now, I don't see why Blizzard doesn't open up the game as free-to-play for the first 60 levels (the original game before any expansions) instead of just 20, and you pay to play beyond that. I would definitely pick it back up if they did that.
tedks 11y ago
It's important to note that while MMO's don't explicitly incentivize exploration, some of the memories my friends most enjoyed in WoW were glitching underneath Stormwind, into unimplemented areas in raids, all over the place. MMO's are social games, and even if they don't explicitly give you a token for having fun with your friends, saying that they "don't encourage fun" is pretty false. I mean really, why do you think people get gear? It's so they can play more parts of the game and have more fun. Personally, I can't really defend dungeon running that much because I always liked PvP more -- having human opponents to fight was always more fun for me, and the game certainly encouraged that. Some of my friends will still talk about how they were the top of their server or server group, and have folders of screenshots of them beating other prominent PvPers. I never got very into WoW because by the time it got popular with my friend group in earnest I had switched to Linux and wine only ran WoW at about 20fps. But I had plenty of fun playing it and I barely got into it at all. Saying that the game doesn't encourage it is total bullshit. Finding night elf in Warsong, chasing them down, and watching their health drain from my warlock's curses was some of the most fun I've ever had in a video game. And I got a shiny token for that, too, so there.
- nieve 11y ago
  Having played WoW for years and gotten into just about every corner of the maps, almost all the undeveloped regions, and every Easter Egg area I heard about in Vanilla I have to say it was one of my favorite activities in the game and completely unrewarded. Guild Wars 2 rewards just about everything with XP (crafting, gathering, some achievements), but exploration & map completion also come with tangible rewards and enough XP to level a ton just running around. It's a really nice feeling to track down that last hidden point of interest or vista and have the big announcement pop up. There's a big reward for 100% completion of all maps, but not many people make it there. Basically GW2 is a game that respects your time - waypoint teleports instead of flight paths, no corpse runs, no tagging mobs, per-character (or maybe player?) resource nodes, world events you can just jump into and everyone receives credit based on participation, area quests you don't have to pick up to start getting participation, and a lot you can do at the level cap that's not grinding gear - in fact the best is almost all crafted. I think this has to come down to the game being an initial purchase plus very carefully designed micropayment options instead of a subscription model. The micropayments are pretty much all vanity stuff or conveniences like extra bank slots, there's no gear and the only content options are Living Story episodes you weren't around for. Gold is easy to acquire & swap for the currency. I think Blizzard tried to introduce some of this stuff in Mists of Pandaria, but there's just too big a gap for them to bridge now. Guild Wars 2 is missing world PvP, but has huge World-versus-World three way maps and team-based PvP. I miss Southshore mass insanity as much as anyone, but WvW is better.
saraid216 11y ago
I don't want to turn this into a sales pitch for GW2, but GW2 pretty explicitly rewards you for exploration. Following the quest chain through an area (to the extent that there is one; the chain is slightly orthogonal) only reveals an incomplete picture of the zone. The zone itself explicitly informs you that there are a number of Things Left To Do Here. Collecting all of those is a necessary component to crafting legendary weapons. So there are a couple levels for exploration: if you don't want to do it, then hurrying through the quest chain gives you lots of XP and you can move on. If you're mildly curious, you can go collect the stuff that interests you, without any real damper on your experience if you decline. If you're gung-ho about exploration for its own sake, there are also plenty of hidden bits and pieces everywhere that aren't necessarily collectibles.
norswap 11y ago
I disagree somewhat. At the very beginning of the game (before any expansions came out), leveling was very slow. It might have been an order of magnitude slower (). The consequence is that people took the time spent leveling seriously at the time; since you'd spend so much time doing that. It made sense to run some low-level dungeons to gear up, since you'd get to keep these items a long time. Before the dungeon finder, people mostly skipped leveling dungeons. After, they kept doing them (easy way to gain experience points) but the difficulty had been brought down to accomodate random groups of rushing players. The sheer volume of time you spent leveling made it so that people tried to have fun doing it. Nowadays it's something you have to get through. You can even pay Blizzard to bypass it, the message is clear. () Consider that the leveling record was about 7 days at the time, to go from level 1 to 60. My first lvl 60 character took me north of 16 days. In the latest expansion, some people I know went from lvl 90 to 100 in less than 24 hours, and leveling is supposed to get longer as you increase in levels. I remember the leveling between 50 and 60 during the holidays and each level took me a solid day of ~8 hours.
radikalus 11y ago
Silithus had highly active PvP during those patches leading up to AQ though. Before the pages farm, yeah, nobody ever went there.

abakker 11y 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 11y 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 11y 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
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
thret 11y ago
Perhaps you only visited after the gate was opened? This zone was very busy on PvP servers, because of the horde v alliance competition to open the gate to AQ first. I thought the AQ raids were quite enjoyable also. When else has a warrior tank needed a frost wand?
- FlannelPancake 11y ago
  Pre-AQ, he's absolutely right that the place was a dead zone and no 60 would bother spending any time there. Silithus was really only busy for those 6 months between patch 1.9 and 1.11. Well, probably a bit longer than that I guess since original Naxx was such a shitshow. At most 10 months, though.
  - mahouse 11y ago
    Why do you consider the original Naxx to be a shitshow? By the way, it can still be accessed, since it looks like for WoTLK they just copypasted the map around: https://imgur.com/a/uRw4V https://imgur.com/a/uRw4V

prawks 11y ago

> unless you're really into just having fun - which the game mostly does not encourage This is the exact reason why, no matter how many times I tried over the years to play this game with friends, I could never stay attached for longer than a few hours. There seems to be less and less emphasis put on enjoying the experience of exploration and being in a space in modern online games, and more emphasis on rote activities for the sake of progress. And thus I return to single-player games, which I certainly do not mind. There is a seemingly never-ending stream of creative ideas coming out of that space.

Ocerge 11y ago
This exact reason is why EverQuest grabbed me so much harder than any other MMO since. Another huge reason is the danger factor. In WoW, there is effectively no punishment at all if you die, so there's no fear of exploring new places. In EQ, there are (or at least were) steep penalties if you die in the wrong place. Ignoring the fact that you lose XP that could amount to hours of lost progress, you may compound your woes with continued deaths trying to get the loot that remained with your corpse. The fear-factor had me addicted, and made accomplishments that much more rewarding.
- mikerichards 11y ago
  What you said and real nighttime in EQ. I remember being alone, a low level, lost in Karana as night was approaching. I knew if I died that I might not know where my corpse was for the corpse run, so I had real fear, and was real cautious.
  - swombat 11y ago
    And the final element missing to instil real fear? True PvP, where anyone might decide to betray you and kill you while you're resting to recover hitpoints or manna or whatever. It's only when loss is possible that you can truly gain. It's only when betrayal is possible that you can truly trust. It's only when your character can completely fail that you can truly enjoy success. Each of those are opposite sides of the same coin. A game like Wow (which I found it very addictive, compulsive even, and did "enjoy" it to some extent) is ultimately totally empty, because there is no way to gain, to trust, to win. Put that stuff back in, and you get a game like Eve.

morganvachon 11y ago

> not that anyone cared to visit these zones in the first place For me the only exception was Un'Goro Crater. That was by far the most fun I had in the game apart from PvP arenas. Dinosaurs, cool quests inspired by 70s TV shows I watched as a kid, and just the fact that it was such a beautiful rendering of the real Ngorongoro Crater. Of course I stopped playing in 2007, so I'm sure there's tons I've missed out on since. But I really enjoyed the early quests and their unique stories, even the hammy stuff like the Edwin VanCleef/Deadmines quests. Given the level cap is at 100 now, I don't see why Blizzard doesn't open up the game as free-to-play for the first 60 levels (the original game before any expansions) instead of just 20, and you pay to play beyond that. I would definitely pick it back up if they did that.

tedks 11y ago

It's important to note that while MMO's don't explicitly incentivize exploration, some of the memories my friends most enjoyed in WoW were glitching underneath Stormwind, into unimplemented areas in raids, all over the place. MMO's are social games, and even if they don't explicitly give you a token for having fun with your friends, saying that they "don't encourage fun" is pretty false. I mean really, why do you think people get gear? It's so they can play more parts of the game and have more fun. Personally, I can't really defend dungeon running that much because I always liked PvP more -- having human opponents to fight was always more fun for me, and the game certainly encouraged that. Some of my friends will still talk about how they were the top of their server or server group, and have folders of screenshots of them beating other prominent PvPers. I never got very into WoW because by the time it got popular with my friend group in earnest I had switched to Linux and wine only ran WoW at about 20fps. But I had plenty of fun playing it and I barely got into it at all. Saying that the game doesn't encourage it is total bullshit. Finding night elf in Warsong, chasing them down, and watching their health drain from my warlock's curses was some of the most fun I've ever had in a video game. And I got a shiny token for that, too, so there.

nieve 11y ago
Having played WoW for years and gotten into just about every corner of the maps, almost all the undeveloped regions, and every Easter Egg area I heard about in Vanilla I have to say it was one of my favorite activities in the game and completely unrewarded. Guild Wars 2 rewards just about everything with XP (crafting, gathering, some achievements), but exploration & map completion also come with tangible rewards and enough XP to level a ton just running around. It's a really nice feeling to track down that last hidden point of interest or vista and have the big announcement pop up. There's a big reward for 100% completion of all maps, but not many people make it there. Basically GW2 is a game that respects your time - waypoint teleports instead of flight paths, no corpse runs, no tagging mobs, per-character (or maybe player?) resource nodes, world events you can just jump into and everyone receives credit based on participation, area quests you don't have to pick up to start getting participation, and a lot you can do at the level cap that's not grinding gear - in fact the best is almost all crafted. I think this has to come down to the game being an initial purchase plus very carefully designed micropayment options instead of a subscription model. The micropayments are pretty much all vanity stuff or conveniences like extra bank slots, there's no gear and the only content options are Living Story episodes you weren't around for. Gold is easy to acquire & swap for the currency. I think Blizzard tried to introduce some of this stuff in Mists of Pandaria, but there's just too big a gap for them to bridge now. Guild Wars 2 is missing world PvP, but has huge World-versus-World three way maps and team-based PvP. I miss Southshore mass insanity as much as anyone, but WvW is better.

saraid216 11y ago

I don't want to turn this into a sales pitch for GW2, but GW2 pretty explicitly rewards you for exploration. Following the quest chain through an area (to the extent that there is one; the chain is slightly orthogonal) only reveals an incomplete picture of the zone. The zone itself explicitly informs you that there are a number of Things Left To Do Here. Collecting all of those is a necessary component to crafting legendary weapons. So there are a couple levels for exploration: if you don't want to do it, then hurrying through the quest chain gives you lots of XP and you can move on. If you're mildly curious, you can go collect the stuff that interests you, without any real damper on your experience if you decline. If you're gung-ho about exploration for its own sake, there are also plenty of hidden bits and pieces everywhere that aren't necessarily collectibles.

norswap 11y ago

I disagree somewhat. At the very beginning of the game (before any expansions came out), leveling was very slow. It might have been an order of magnitude slower (). The consequence is that people took the time spent leveling seriously at the time; since you'd spend so much time doing that. It made sense to run some low-level dungeons to gear up, since you'd get to keep these items a long time. Before the dungeon finder, people mostly skipped leveling dungeons. After, they kept doing them (easy way to gain experience points) but the difficulty had been brought down to accomodate random groups of rushing players. The sheer volume of time you spent leveling made it so that people tried to have fun doing it. Nowadays it's something you have to get through. You can even pay Blizzard to bypass it, the message is clear. () Consider that the leveling record was about 7 days at the time, to go from level 1 to 60. My first lvl 60 character took me north of 16 days. In the latest expansion, some people I know went from lvl 90 to 100 in less than 24 hours, and leveling is supposed to get longer as you increase in levels. I remember the leveling between 50 and 60 during the holidays and each level took me a solid day of ~8 hours.

radikalus 11y ago

Silithus had highly active PvP during those patches leading up to AQ though. Before the pages farm, yeah, nobody ever went there.