Back in the day – and maybe we should shove these posts into the WoW thread — we had talent min-maxing, ask MR robot, the whole Gearscore fiasco, and all that good stuff.
The talent cookie cutter discussion is a big reason they just went to the trimmed down talent trees.
What is amplified now is if you don’t play the meta, or run a group that is min mixed, you are failing at the game and should delete your account /s.
Baghdad Bob had nothing on Abashi.
Which is nothing compared to the analytics and stuff we have today.
I know, because I played both the original and “classic” versions up through (now WOTLK). I understand some of you may remember how things were, I do too, but did you raid in the newly released classic versions? I have done both, and difference between then and now is black/white.
WOTLK is when things started to get “hardcore”, as those tools started to become more mass adopted, plus blizzard started to include different tiers of difficulty on raids, which led to people further optimizing their playing.
Yeah, we are arguing the same point, I think. There was always min-maxing (it’s the human condition, after all).
But yes, it’s gotten worse. The community has gotten worse about it too.
That said, I am still thinking of giving Dragonflight a chance.
I mean, I am sure some min-max tools existed back in the day, but they look like a joke with what people are doing now.
I rant about this, because it has been my life since classic re-launched in 2019. What started as a fun romp with friends through old content with the hopes of actually finishing all of the endgame I missed back in the day (because, again, the tools to play better were much harder back then), forced me to become the min-maxer I despise. Spending off time with the Fight Club ™ discord created DPS simulator spreadsheet swapping out pieces to optimize my DPS. Dealing with angry gamer kids in their early 20’s complaining about warcraftlogs parses and inspecting your gear, and hating the fact that you chose to not roll an orc, but a Tauren, which severely limited your dps in classic. The community in the classic versions straight up sucks now, it is all gamer-boy chuds.
Anyway, I found a much more “laid-back” hardcore group for TBC classic, and things were a lot more fun, and WOTLK continues to be so.
Anyway, my rant is over, and we should get back to the topic of the thread.
I played wow from launch to WotLK. I was main tank for a raid guild, my gf was a healer and my buddy was a mage and our raid leader. We absolutely had optimization mods and data tracking reports. My screen while playing looked like a Bloomberg terminal.
It became more work than fun and telling friends they didn’t have a slot on a raid because their dps or healing efficacy was sub par (everyone in the guild could run these mods and see) was awful and made the game feel like a job.
I guess we aren’t moving back on to the topic of the thread?
Did you play the classic re-releases? And raid in those?
Because, like I have said, the tools that exist now did not exist then (facts), and go to a completely new level of complexity, and, on the whole, are more hardcore. for one, Warcraftlogs.com didn’t exist until WOTLK was out for a while. I think many players would state that the real push towards the hardcore was in Ulduar, and when heroic raid tiers were created.
I think people are conflating my thoughts with, “there were no hardcore players of WoW” which is incorrect. There were sweaty guilds competing for world firsts, server firsts and creating hilarious butt-rock videos of their Ahn Qiraj raids. There absolutely were tools to track dps and mechanics back then.
Those DPS and healing meters are rudimentary when compared to what warcraftlogs has now. You can not only compare your raider’s DPS or HPS with the rest of your healers, but rank them with literal millions of players online. You can see fights as they happen, replayed, you can see what they cast when, how they use their abilities, what consumes they use, the exact second they are used in. Shit is crazy right now, it is like a fucking police state with the tracking that exists.
But back in the day, that was the minority of players, it is just part of the way the game is played now. You are expected to participate in it, you are expected to watch a 2 hour loot guide on youtube. You are expected to know your optimal gear set, consumes, rotations, have weak-auras set up to optimize your rotations and cooldowns etc. You will get a DM from your officers when your parses aren’t purple.
The simple fact is, in 15 years, the technology that exists in addons, websites, and other resources have grown. That is just how it is,
Seems like all this WOW talk should get moved to a different thread so we can get back to the more relevant discussions on how it’s ok for Sony and Nintendo to have top selling exclusives but not Microsoft.
If Sony bought World of Warcraft, it would be O.K.
At first I was opposed to Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard, but when this thread taught me how incompetent Microsoft is, I decided it’s a good thing. After all, since Sony is infallible, perfect, and allowed to have exclusives, the competition needs all the help they can get. To just let Sony win would be anti-consumer.
I still harbor deep dislike of that dude to this very day. Disdainful and dishonest.
Anyway theorycraft was exactly the same in the mid-2000s. We didn’t have the tools, particularly simulation, so it was all done by hand, and most players weren’t really tuned-in to it. Now we do, and they are, and for Classic in particular players could prepare their optimizations for years. So yes, I’m sure it feels very different.
Serious question: are you an idiot?
Sony paid hundreds of millions of dollars for exclusive marketing rights, something that would be immediately devalued if Activision could also turn around and take money for it to go on GamePass. Microsoft does the exact same thing for games they sign marketing deals for.
That wasn’t very nice. Sony would be so disappointed.
(I’m just teasing)
If you haven’t engaged with a Brad Grenz in a while, all it was the laughable claim to ethics that reminded me about his slavish devotion to Sony. Easy to forget when you ignore the console wars for a bit but people are still carrying their torches.
Hold on a second. If Sony paid for exclusive marketing rights, then that’s what they get – exclusive marketing rights. That wouldn’t have prevented Microsoft from paying Activision to make the game $10 (or free) on Xboxes. The reverse is true (presumably) for those games Microsoft has exclusive marketing rights for. What’s the problem? Should Sony get more than exclusive marketing rights after paying for exclusive marketing rights?
I get that releasing on Gamepass diminishes the value of those rights, but if Microsoft could have paid Activision to put COD on Gamepass and that would have been kosher, Microsoft buying Activision and putting COD on Gamepass is definitely kosher. Or is your point that Activision shouldn’t be allowed to sell access to their properties to Microsoft because Sony paid for marketing rights?
Serious question: What, exactly, are you saying that Microsoft is doing that it shouldn’t be allowed to do?
Buying Activision, of course!
You needed the theorycraft to discover how bards had been nerfed every patch.
chefkiss
Were you really? I very much remember that fiasco. How many months (years?) did it take for them to finally recognize it was broken?
Not entirely sure, I quit in the first expansion. I’m sure they fixed it at some point in the past twenty years though.
That kinda buried the lede though, the real problem was that stats didn’t really do much of anything in EQ.