Makes me wonder what Vanilla in 2004-2006 was like?

Hey! I’m just curious, how was vanilla REALLY like? Was it a lot of boosting? Gold sellers? LFG addon, quest addon? Or any of the means we have to help ourselves like today? Don’t ask me why, I’m just curious about these things… or what i’m actually curious about is if I would have stood any chance in vanilla :'D

Hello son!
From my experience:
Boosts were made by a high level friend. Never seen WTS boost abomination mentality.

Gold sellers always existed. But in a smaller scale. I suppose so. Because bots are not of mine concern. Never been affected by them.

Quest addon, was thottbot. A lifesaver. Or the beginning of the end. I am not sure.

Everything was better then. Even the weed in Tirisfal Glades.

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No, in 2004-2006 most people were clueless about the game, server populations were tiny compared to today, like only 2000 people. Also, back then the game was different, we’re playing on the end patch of 2006 in Classic.

Classic is what happens when people play the same game for 15 years, don’t forget a lot of the top players were playing on private servers.

It was an amazing time.

*Boosts for the most part were made by high level friends, and was certainly not advertised to the same degree as it is now.

*Mage-boosting was a thing, but much less, and there were much less gold buyers, so people farmed the gold themselves and paid the mage.

*Gold buying was frowned upon and didn’t happen to the same extent as now, and naturally there were less bots. Blizzard also gave much better GM-support, GMs which could show up in the world and talk to you. I suspect gold buyers and bots got banned much more, too.

*Lvl 60s were looked up to with awe and respect, and having several 60s was prestige. People would whisper 60s in raid gear, wanting to look like them.

*Server populations were smaller, but the community was also more tight-knit.

*Leveling was a bigger deal; irl WoW-friends would frequently ask which lvl you were at now and new players entering the game all the time kept the world alive. World PvP was very much alive, with TM vs SS, Ashenvale, STV etc all going strong. Guildies would come and help the low lvls against gankers and soon there would be faction wars with 60s in these zones.

*People were bad at the game and didn’t look to external sources as much (like Thottbot), so people were more experimental and did what looked and felt cool. Physical game manuals were still a thing at this time. Min-maxing became a thing here too, but much less, and using WBs before raids was also much more rare. I think it wasn’t until Naxx that Blizzard designed that raid with WBs in mind.

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no gold sellers? there where literally 50 corpses spelling out the site names in front of stormwind,

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I don’t belive that for a second. The corpses spelling the site urls would be in Ironforge since that was where the customers were :slight_smile: Ironfoge is also where they are in my old screenshots of them doing that.

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It was the greatest time ever people just did things naturally. The reason Classic sucks so much compared to Vanilla is because Blizzard thinks they can get away with not updating an MMO and not funneling player driven behavior to be in line with what it was like in the original game. A lot of people think Blizzard deliberately sabotaged Classic and I tend to agree.

Raids being challenging back then - trivial in Classic.
World buff meta not being as prevalent

Personally I preferred the talents before patch 1.12 which classic is based on, Rogues dominated warriors a lot more, hemorrhage was a far more powerful build.

I also enjoyed the weapons in their un-nerfed states, a lot of items would scale with spell power back in the day, shard of the fallen star trinket from AQ40 could be part of 2shotting people in PVP. Kind of obvious why they nerfed some of that stuff even back then, but they nerfed stuff that really should have remained un-nerfed in classic in my opinion, just for the sake of experimental builds.

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They were challenging because you clicked your spells and had zero clue about the game. People wanted no changes at first am I right? Can somehow Blizzard erase 15 years of players experience so people feel challenged by Classic bosses with 1 mechanic?

I was watching original Ragnaros world first kill on YT. It was from a rogue PoV and he was clicking 2 buttons and even typing in guild chat during a fight. What would you say about this rogue today? Probably worst player in the world. And this player was part of world first Ragnaros kill :wink:

You can’t go back in time. People wanted Classic and they got Classic. Ofc they can’t get the original feeling in a 15yo game. Below average WoW gamer is now much better than best players back then. Guides everywhere for everything, min-maxing everywhere, speedruns, better PCs, better communication via discord etc etc. Blizzard can’t do anything with this.

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People actually enjoyed playing the game instead of mentally ticking boxes.

All it is now is people reading guides on what they should do instead of what they want to do, in the great “fear of missing out” or FOMO, as its called.

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its impossible to describe how vanilla really was like. Imagine stepping into Azeroth at a time where NOBODY knew what was going on. Every piece of item, map, enemy, all of it, was new and unexplored. WoW had instant messaging before it was even a thing (no whatsapp or facebook or all that), there were no wowhead or icyveins or youtube, we had a website that helped you out but it was just to supplement your experience not solve your issues. I had to read every line of a quest so i could figure out where to go and what to look for. We used /4 to find groups and /2 to trade, people were actually social and helpful.

Not gonna lie it is much much easier now, but its also 1000x more toxic and unfriendly. As a kid though it was the greatest experience i could have with a game. It meant something.

Let me just add, i played classic for about a month. What turned me off was that everyone had Thunderfury or Sulfuras or High Warlords gear or something legendary like that. Back in vanilla there were maybe 2-3 people tops to have that. I still remember the first High Warlord i run into at Orgrimmar, he was like a God among peasants. People would literally gather around him to inspect him or to just /say congratulations to him

I want to add more. Having an epic mount was truly special. The farm it took to get the gold needed to buy it was actually an accomplishment. I had a warlock because we didn’t have to buy the mount, we had our own, and it still took my some time to get it lol. Imagine running everywhere, half the game was running back and forth.

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Back in Vanilla Raid Healers and Tanks were often skilled DPS because it would be easier to farm your rep cost that way and you didn’t want to reskill every time. Thats also one of the reasons Raids in Vanilla were harder ^^

This cow speaks the truth.

There are MASSIVE improvements now tho. Disconnects were so frequent it was expected when running instances. Half of groups ended in disband cause of it plus lag now is almost nonexistent in normal gameplay atleast.
Player base is probably 10 years older on average, so you have a more mature audience.
I remember thinking MMOs were defenitely the future of gaming lol

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yeah yeah yeah I have heard it all before. Doesn’t change the fact that raid bossses had their stats nerfed, mechanics were nerfed, respawn timers were nerfed, talents buffed everyone, especially mages getting over 20% damage increase from talent changes alone in 1.12 dungeon loot was made more easily available and everyone abused world buffs to clear the content. You remove all those things and the game would have been far more true to the original version of the game.

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nobody would play it

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Well I had 25 days of playtime before hitting 60 on my first character back then. People were different back then and that’s okay.

But no, I can’t recall boosting as it is today to be a thing. I remember that a level 56 paladin once helped my group out in scarlet monastery though.

i heard some stories from some classic wow guildies which is now 45+ ages. and they were around 30 ish when vanilla times. and they said all mobs and raid bosses armors are nerfed today. back in the days vanilla was harder then classic wow. its not #nochanges… and its not about clueless players. even that days some 30+ aged guilds clearing raids hardcore.

go google " is vanilla hard " u’ll find similar stories about it. ofc people were noob. but the game was also hard. blizzard publish classic wow with fixed armor and talents and items and game is all pve and levelling so ez now.

back in the day u were lost ur all gold to drinks. now some classes not even drink or eat while levelling.

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Oh here we are again, “bosses were hard before nerfs”. Where exactly do you have these hard nerfs mentioned in patch notes? And all raids were nerfed? Because you know, all Classic raids were oneshotted in few hours after release … but I guess its because of how good players are right? Probably much better than pro guilds like Method who are progressing raid for weeks. These sub 1 minute boss kills in first Naxx :smiley:

Yes, they were hard for 2005 players. Thats all.

Edit: I am probably more aggresive than I should be. We clearly hsve different perspectives. Me, playing WoW for last 15 years, used to at least HC raiding every expansion, playing around 2k+ arenas every expansion (and I am considered casual at Retail). I am used to certain difficulty. On Retail difficulty is set so it provides a challenge for experienced players. Bosses have different phases, different abilities in every phade, fights long easily for 5-8 minutes, bosses have abilities which can wipe whole raid if 1 person messes up etc.

If you haven’t played for a long time I agree Classic can be difficult for you in certain areas. But for experienced players it really isn’t. Raids in Classic weren’t tuned for experienced players simple because there were no experienced players :slight_smile: peace.

Bosses were harder before nerfs and talent changes though how can you even deny that? The game would be more difficult if we were in an earlier patch that’s a fact.

And even in this easy frankenstein version of the game I see people wiping on Firemaw in BWL with AQ40/Naxx geared players, imagine how difficult the game would be for these players if we didn’t get this butchered version of the game.

Nostalgia never dies, 2005 for me was way better then now, just because nostalgia, but in reality 2021 is a lot better, no matter of what is going on. :slight_smile:

It was bad compared to what wow became now.0 mechanics, no arenas, bad players overall.