I resubscribed because of Classic, and brought my wife (who hadn’t played that era of WoW) with me. It was a good time, and it was noticeably difficult after playing LOTRO or more modern WoW.
What got me was spending half of my daughter’s naptime trying to get an amulet from crocolisks and realizing that I just didn’t have time for it anymore. Classic’s great, but it was a lot better for me when I had hours a day to play and came over with my entire DAOC guild.
Since I’m not one for doing a lot of grouping aside from duoing with my wife, main line WoW is pretty nice at this point. At least I feel like I’m making some progress with limited playtime, and there’s so much to do aside from leveling.
What do you think about this AOE-dungeon-clearing (‘cleave runs’)? Might there be a bug with warrior’s demo shout (as some imply)?
I remember some people back then who encouraged me as a tank trying a AOE-way of doing stuff. But while it sometimes worked great I can’t remember it being a viable strategy overall. Well, there was YouTube in 2005/6. So I have a hard time accepting that I was so much not knowing when I was carefully pulling mobs.
It’s mainly a all you need in classic is a tank-and-four-mages-doing-everything-in-20-minutes thing. Even Scholomance and Stratholme. Tank still seems to be needed in most cases. At least. But it rubs me the wrong way since if that would have been doable in 2006 would it not have been common knowledge? I can’t remember bombing Stratholme getting out alive… Some people would have made a YouTube-Video doing it, not? Or…the internet makes us all smarter [in some ways…]. Could be. (Not joking).
So the idea is the tank holds aggro with an AOE taunt and the four mages bomb everything with AOE? I really doubt this would work. Who will heal the tank? Is AOE taunt going to reliably keep adds off the mages?
Yep, in warrior’s case, just spamming demo shout; people say the tank (druids can do it as well - though I don’t know the english word for their ‘aoe taunt’) will maintain aggro just fine as long as there are lots of mobs involved. I don’t have the details, it’s a streamer’s/youtubers’s thing and people seem to mimic it with success. Maybe three mages, one priest and one tank would be the more appropriate description of the common setup. AOE seems to extremely powerful - much more than I can remember (because there was always some kind of aggro-problem). But they say they have new math and if you pull enough mobs it works out just fine. Others say there’s something wrong with way tank’s aoe taunt is calculated. Question for me is: Could it be that we were all so much not knowing or is there a bug? I really can’t remember AOEing dungeons was common sense.
WoWs launch coincided with broadband internet, which was the barrier to entry for a lot of people. I played EQ on dialup, as did everyone else. WoW was in the right place, at the right time, and it was a good game. MMOs were something that the majority of people didn’t even know existed in 1999. It’s also by Blizzard, which can’t be underestimated. Blizzard was huge at the time, and there was a ton of hype around WoW. Your assertion that the game getting easier is what drew people in is specious at best. To that note, as they continued to make their game easier, their subs plummeted so…
The thing that keeps people playing MMOs, are friends and social relationships. WoW, and every other MMO have gone out of their way to destroy that, to their detriment.
Suggesting that any game can continue to grow 8, 10, 15 years after its launch is not supported by any facts. Everyone, including Blizzard, knew that WoW would start to shrink.
I think my assertion that the reason people flocked to WoW was because it was more player friendly is more supported by evidence than yours that it was just because of broadband, and that it was solely because Blizzard continue to make it more player friendly that it began to lose subscribers.
There are other hard core MMOs out there. I worked at CCP. EVE Online is the hardest-core MMO there is, and people are not flocking to it. Everquest I and II are still available and are on life support. Everquest’s original lead designer released Vanguard in 2007 and it flopped. And his newest effort, Pantheon, is focusing on its Battle Royale mode while in development.
Meanwhile, SWTOR and MEO, both quite player friendly, are still puttering away.
And there are a number of Korean MMOs that are quite a bit more punishing than WoW, but have totally failed to catch on in the West.
I think you’re letting your personal opinions cloud your judgement about the market.
I think it was a perfect storm. Kinda like how an album comes out at just the right time and becomes a hit.
The Blizzard name, broadband, ease of use, and didn’t need an amazing PC to play started the snowball running. I was doing freelance writing about MMOs around the time WoW hit, and it was amazing. Games like EverQuest started the dialogue. EverCrack was decently known within the gaming cycles, and DAoC also started the shift away from the hardcore mechanics. Also, EQ was out for 6 years before WoW. It was a popular game for the early 2000s. It’s the reason a lot of MMOs were pitched and started to come out.
WoW appealed to a lot of people. It had hardcore content and Blizzard hired EQ raiders to design better raids. It was also casual-friendly. You could just log on, level and experience the world. There was something for everyone. You didn’t need to group to have fun in the game.
Blizzard marketed the hell out of it. It ran on a lot of bottom-end computers. Once people started talking about it, more people started playing it. Then webshows like The Guild caught on.
It is hard to say if making it more player friendly cost them as much as keeping it harder would. I still mess around in a lot of MMOs even though I am not writing about them. In WoW, I can still log on and goof around. While I enjoy LoTRO, SWTOR and GW2, WoW is still my favorite.
Right now Classic is the hot success, but let’s see what it’s like 3 months from now, and after the next WoW expansion comes out.
It was sarcasm, but I’m not sure why. I fully acknowledge that hard-core games are having a moment. But none are huge. There’s definitely a group of gamers who love that sort of thing, but it is nowhere near the size of Call of Duty/Overwatch/Battlefront etc.
I would also argue that Classic WoW is not “hard” in the sense of Dark Souls. It’s tedious, for sure. Things take a long time to accomplish, but there’s very little that’s actually hard about it once you understand how the game works.
I don’t know who or what your addressing, but I agree with you. There is definitely a group of people who will love Classic, and more power to them.
I was disputing Ultrazen’s suggestion that the early success of WoW Classic de facto proves that gamers actually want hard-core MMOs.
For sure there are some, but it’s not close to the majority. Let’s see how Classic is doing in a couple months to confirm, though. If it’s performing how I expect, it will be down to the hardest core players. Still successful by Blizzard’s standards, since they had a small team working on it, but perhaps 10-20% the population of WoW Retail.
I think Classic will prove more sticky for casuals who return and use it as a “third place” or social platform through casual adventuring and not hardcore progression raiding.
My impressions of WoW classic earlygame after getting to level 20:
I have never played WoW before, my addiction was LOTRO. Yet, LOTRO stole enough from vanilla WoW that I am still getting nostalgia playing through this.
At first I was heavily sceptical of this game and was thinking of abandoning it by level 10. The combat being boring was my largest complaint.
Yet, playing more made me realise how much I miss classicly designed MMOs. The fact that this is ‘new’, so that there are alot of players still around the newbie zones, gives it a great atmosphere.
The two dunegons I have tried have been great.
I have learnt that LFG tools aren’t as fun as spamming LFM in trade channels and then negotiating with people who are thinking of joining.
You know for what it is worth I have had a great time in dungeons. Deadmines, stockades, etc. I am surprised at how fun they are. I have met a lotta nice people. Yes it is hard, and tanks suck. But heals are good and individual class mechanics are fun leveling.
Just FYI I like the time I have spent in classic. Plus these Wanderers over here are pretty damn nice.
