Did you actually play "Vanilla" WoW?

[bchurch]

This question always comes to mind when I see people complaining about this game. Do people not realize how much this game has in common with wow before it was watered down with all of its expansions?

While WoW had a good amount of quests, many of them werent worth while and still there were many dead zones between questing. Does anyone remember the low to mid 30's? The 50-60 stretch with the lack of content? 1-60 took about 12-14 days played for most people I know.. hell I think I was one of the fastest with around 12 days played out of my friends.

And now coincidentally, it takes roughly that many hours played (~300) to reach the same cap in AION but people like to cry about it. I think a large part of this problem is that we're just so spoiled with WoW's leveling, my latest character reaching 80 with hardly over 4 days played.

Over the course of 3 years that Vanilla spanned we were given what.. 4 raids and ~6 outdoor fights? And has anyone else noticed the pvp system is nearly identical to the mindless grind that was the pvp system back then?

What it comes down to is, do you remember the feeling of reaching 60? It used to be an accomplishment on its own. I remember looking at people and thinking "Man, I wish I could have those epics."

TL;DR -
People love to bash AION by comparing it to WoW, but really they have had so much in common its stupid. EXP from quests increase is on its way. More content is bound to come. Have hope, and stop trying to sway others because you find the game unenjoyable.

Just my thoughts on the game thus far.

[Nemonia]

I played vanilla and the first beta of WoW, personally I like Aion a lot more as it reminds me of EverQuest.

[Leonne]

this dont belong in this forum but yes


and it was not even close to how good some people said it was

also there was no grind for levels, and end-game had a lot of things to keep you interested. It was nood extremely fun but i was enough fun to become what it is today

[Goliathon]

I had three 60s. The great thing was that even on the same faction each one could take an almost entirely different path to 60.

The original PvP honor system was awesome. BGs when it was just WSG, AB, and old school epic AV were fantastic. You knew and hated people from your enemy faction. The rivalry was intense.

Vanilla WoW was great. They took a wrong turn with some of the expansions and updates that flushed that game down the crapper. I was hoping Aion would deliver a similiar but better experience but sadly it currently does not.

[Ivanbin]

he said "the word"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Mendolus]

I played vanilla Warcraft starting in the fall of '05 until around the beginning of '08 when I finally quit playing full time. I gave TBC two different tries at serious play, but both times I burned out after only 4-5 months.

As far as vanilla Warcraft is concerned, there is really no comparison. Vanilla Warcraft was easily the most exciting period in my gaming life, as it was the first time I was really involved in a true MMO and it was such a golden age for the game as a whole.

In vanilla Warcraft, people stood for things, gear meant something and was a sort of status symbol, and there were conflicts over progression and goodhearted competition between the top endgame guilds. Now it is a nameless see of no-name guilds who have all cleared the content in the game, and all act like they are now entitled to wave their epeens around and treat everyone else like second class citizens. I still remember in vanilla Warcraft when people with the best gear were by and by personable and would actually go out of their way to help others out. Now you ask for a run from anyone with a single purple, and they /spit on you and call you a nub.

I was once purpled out on more than one character and occasion myself as well, but as long as I was in a good mood and asked in a courteous manner, I would usually go on runs, or help with stuff that would not directly benefit me.

As far as Aion is concerned, thus far I see no evidence that the ambiance and player base mimic vanilla Warcraft in any way, BUT the grind and the content issues, and the lack of diverse gear itemization is similar to vanilla Warcraft when I started playing it. In the fall of '05, the best you could do were dungeon blues (most of the crafting stuff at all but the endgame were just questing quality) or raiding gear (world drops at the time were fairly rare and an epic world drop was unheard of except by hearsay and rumor). Getting the best PvP gear was an arduous and sometimes ridiculous process which basically required you camp the BGs every night for 5-6 hours for weeks on end (more like months actually) to get rank. But it also meant that people like Pat (Tauren Warrior on Arthas) were some of the most famous individuals in the game at that time because they had the full PvP set, the best one you could get. No one else (that I ever saw milling around in the major cities) on the server had the full set for the longest time as Pat dominated our server's rankings for months.

For instance, when I was running Scholomance for my Dreadmist Mask in the spring of '06, I had to run it +50 times to get it to drop for me. This is not a joke, I ran it so many times that towards the end I would /kneel in front of the boss during every run before we pulled, and randomly switch between cursing the Blizzard developers or praying to the boss to drop the f$*%ing helm already or I would go insane. In the process, I saw the Headmaster's Charge staff drop not once but twice. This staff at the time had a drop rate of somewhere around 0.00001% and I saw it twice. When I got the staff, there were only a couple of people on Horde side that had it on the entire server, and the game had been out more than a year. Nowadays you ask someone to run an instance more than a handful of times and your item does not drop and they act like you're ruining their life because the gear didn't fall out of the sky into your lap and everything else in the game does (tokens anyone?).

You do not see that kind of stuff in Warcraft today, they upped the drop rate on the staff and other items like it to above 0.001% so now you even see tanks and melee wearing it just to mock the fact that it dropped so often that no one in their group rolled on it so they nabbed it for fun.

Aion seems somewhere in the middle of this, I get plenty of green drops constantly, but I have yet to get a single blue drop from LVL1-20. Maybe I just have not played enough or there are so few blue drops below 20 that I haven't seen them yet, but it does remind me of vanilla Warcraft in that respect.

[Gryffes]

The whining scrubs are those who ran pug zul gurub at the end of vanilla and thought TBC was too hard.

effem.

[krystar]

Ultima Online, vanilla WoW and most of TBC (pre 2.4) were the most fun I've had in MMO's.

[Irony]

Vanilla WoW, but unfortunately I got to level 40 on my first character and BC came out

[Paladuck]

I played WoW from launch day till right before its first anniversary.

The highest I hit was 55 on my Paladin and there were no good quests to do and it was incredibly difficult to level (yes, this was before they became OPed for like 2 years)

The difference is, Blizzard is a company responsive to the community and they constantly try to better their product. The handicap with Aion is that our comments have to be somehow relayed to the devs in Korea, who are already taking in input from their massive Korean playerbase.

I guess what I'm wondering is, do the Korean players have the same issues as we do? Are our complaints unique?

[EmeraldArcana]

Originally Posted by Paladuck

I guess what I'm wondering is, do the Korean players have the same issues as we do? Are our complaints unique?

It's a good question that deserves its own thread in my opinion.

[Innui]

Played WoW vanilla>TBC>WOTLK but played DAOC for 4 years prior to it.

Also played DDO on release, WAR, dabbled in EVE, stuck out AOC for 73 painful eyegouging levels, LOTRO for about a year total on and off.

Amongst MMO's, EVE is the only one that's been original out of that bunch imo, fantasy MMO's share a lot in common.

All that matters is the blend and how it works out, personally I'd settle for DAOC style RVR (with attendant lvl based mechanics) in 3d (wtb functional melee aerial combat!) and perhaps with the DAOC foundations housing/sales merchant/broker system. Yeah, we had to find the house with the merchant selling the item we wanted!

Some of DDO's nice dungeon fluff, WAR's approach to just jumping right into the PvP game but I think EVE style sandbox play belongs in EVE sadly

LOTRO did some pretty epic stories and quests, so did AoC, for 20 levels.

All in all, comparing one game directly with another is always doomed, squeege your MMO gamer 3rd eye, see the genre more clearly!

Actually, I've had fun in all of them, in one way or another, to varying degrees and for different reasons ^^

[Mendolus]

Originally Posted by Gryffes

The whining scrubs are those who ran pug zul gurub at the end of vanilla and thought TBC was too hard.

effem.

Once you got more than half the regulars with mostly purple, TBC became a joke and a snoozefest, any chicken*@% could complete Karazhan once they had the gear to actually survive the crit rate on the bosses. Insane crit rate does not make a challenging game no more than the hover-bike level in the original Battletoads did. It's twitch, and twitch is not skill, it's called twitch for a reason.

[Eshestun]

Originally Posted by Mendolus

As far as Aion is concerned, thus far I see no evidence that the ambiance and player base mimic vanilla Warcraft in any way, BUT the grind and the content issues, and the lack of diverse gear itemization is similar to vanilla Warcraft when I started playing it. In the fall of '05, the best you could do were dungeon blues (most of the crafting stuff at all but the endgame were just questing quality) or raiding gear (world drops at the time were fairly rare and an epic world drop was unheard of except by hearsay and rumor). Getting the best PvP gear was an arduous and sometimes ridiculous process which basically required you camp the BGs every night for 5-6 hours for weeks on end (more like months actually) to get rank. But it also meant that people like Pat (Tauren Warrior on Arthas) were some of the most famous individuals in the game at that time because they had the full PvP set, the best one you could get. No one else (that I ever saw milling around in the major cities) on the server had the full set for the longest time as Pat dominated our server's rankings for months.

Heya, what was your name on Arthas?

<-- Esh, troll shaman from Pyre/Proven/Aurora

[Innui]

Originally Posted by Paladuck

I played WoW from launch day till right before its first anniversary.

The highest I hit was 55 on my Paladin and there were no good quests to do and it was incredibly difficult to level (yes, this was before they became OPed for like 2 years)

The difference is, Blizzard is a company responsive to the community and they constantly try to better their product. The handicap with Aion is that our comments have to be somehow relayed to the devs in Korea, who are already taking in input from their massive Korean playerbase.

I guess what I'm wondering is, do the Korean players have the same issues as we do? Are our complaints unique?

Actually I'd compare them (blizzard) more to the cards handed out in pre-screenings, largest majority earns most cash and all that.

NCsoft should have done more and still have a long way to go, they were all geared up for getting it out then sat on their hands.

Aion has promise but so did many other MMO's at the bottom of the pile, time will tell...