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Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

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Re: Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

#91

Post by zanny »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #26

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…

I regularly play private servers with friends for the nostalga. They will have 10+ times the XP and gold rates so you don't grind pretty much at all, and it is nice having persistent characters that you can come back to after a while that are not tiers of content behind and obsolete.

I think Blizzard is on a path to at least making level 60 the free to play level cap of the game soon, though. It just makes way too much sense not to. I know I'd have to problem running the old 40 and 20 man raids with pugs (because the way the game mechanics have changed, those raids are now trivial with even half the number of people it took in 2006) for fun. That actually sounds like fun. The current game sounds like the most auspicious waste of time sink, which is why I got off that merry-go-round in Wrath of the Lich King around the time where they stopped doing tiered progression at all and made every patch effectively a game reset.

Re: Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

#92

Post by zanny »

leemac wrote: post #55
RexM wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

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.

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.

Re: Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

#93

Post by zanny »

burke wrote: post #6

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.

WoW at the least is far too large to ever die. There are private servers for every version of the game except WoD, and that is hopefully for legal reasons - of course I'm not a lawyer and the law here is a fucking mess especially if you live outside the US, but there has to be an abandonware case for every version of the game that is not currently available on Blizzards servers.

A decade from now there will still be WoW private servers, and there will still be the opencore-esque projects providing the server infrastructure to run private instances of it. Albeit I wish the private server community shared source more, but I'm not really involved in it so more power to them for putting in the scripting effort to make all the mobs work again.

Re: Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

#94

Post by zanny »

outworlder wrote: post #79

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 s…

Levels are an amazing skinner box. You want power, they are literally a numeric increment of power, and the way most of these games work you consistently gain them in regular fashion to reinforce the response to play more to get more levels. It is why a game like WoW ended up being magnitudes more successful than Ultima Online, fundamental enjoyability besides, and it is why mobile games are literally Hitler and some can make boats of cash.

Re: Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

#95

Post by ajkjk »

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

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.

Re: Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

#96

Post by zanny »

bearlikelion wrote: post #30

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 mileston…

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.

Re: Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

#97

Post by zanny »

zorked wrote: post #60
ecdavis wrote: post #42

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 w…

I believe these days WoW merges underpopulated zones so those ~20 players per zone are across a bunch of servers while ~50 players in a zone may be all in one server.

It was much worse two years ago before they started having unpopulated zones merge between servers. It was extremely common, especially on low population realms, to find entire chunks of continents unpopulated at all, and that would be on a server with five thousand people on it - they were just all in capital cities or instances.

Re: Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

#98

Post by [deleted] »

abakker wrote: post #41
FlannelPancake wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 explorat…

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…

[deleted]

Re: Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

#99

Post by Liquix »

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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