Why did I feel like wow was such an immersive MMORPG in the past? (2006 ish)
From an Alliance player perspective, I would go to fight some mobs, and by fight I mean literally putting some real effort, and then go back to Goldshire Inn to recover my strength and clear my thoughts, where tons and tons of other players would do the same.
Everywhere I would run to collect some herbs or kill a mob there were other players too, doing the same.
Now, the game feels so hallow…and easy and yet, every single end-game line we follow is something we must grind - legendary/m+ etc (I hate m+, the timer brings toxicity imo)
What should I do?
Thanks!
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Sounds like rp stuff that u can do now too
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the problem with this would be:
a) it doesn’t feel the same
b) I need to play on a RP server in order to get that feeling
c) the playerbase has decreased, I may not find an RP guild who do that…
Idk, I just feel so sad thinking I can never get those original wow feelings back 
makes me cry
oh and edit: nowadays players seem to be in a rush every time, and a lot of them are mean for no reason
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No one can. Id like to get back to tbc and get my first mount etc. I mean i can do it on classiq mode now but the feelings and emotions wont be so good as when i was younger 
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I think I need a psychiatrist, no joke…I feel so sad thinking about how amazing wow used to be and that I can never feel that anymore
I used to feel like wow was my 2nd life where I could escape the problems from the real world…now it feels like a chore
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That’s nostalgia that creates that “rose tinted glasses” feeling. I often think about my favourite games from the late 90s and early 2000s, but if I try to play them today it’s just not the same thing anymore.
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yes, exactly!
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Nostalgia, most likely.
You were 16 years younger. You likely had less responsibilities on you in general, you were more inclined to think it was ok and acceptable to get home and spend 8 hours in a game, then go to bed. Now you get home, have other things to do, get a little sliver of WoW, then have other things to do, and you can’t stay up too late anyway.
At least, if you’re anything like the rest of us long haulers, there’s a good chance this is at least a bit like you 
I would never say the game is easy. The solo world content most likely won’t be a struggle - although arriving in ZM at 220 ilvl might well be punishing for a while. The moment you step into dungeons or raids, the challenge goes up a lot, and it will keep scaling with you. There is endless difficulty available in M+. If you don’t enjoy it… well, there’s not a lot to say. It is a dungeon, like any other. Go with friends to avoid toxicity. WoW was always a poor experience without a social group, and always will be.
As to why there’s no players gathering; I honestly think Blizzard have cut back on resource supply too much. It’s genuinely painful to gather a stack of herbs, even with a druid in flight form, because it takes too long. This left the way open for botting and token purchases to cover consumables, and that’s become an increasingly common way to play.
Regarding end game; what are you grinding? Because I’m grinding nothing. The legendary needs only gold, a commodity that falls on us by the ton if we actually do the activities that generate it and Cosmic Flux. The latter rains in ZM and the raid, if you are playing the game at all, you have plenty. I would have accepted grinds as fair criticism against 9.0 or 9.1, but 9.2’s endgame grinds are very short, and largely optional.
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Because the social design was fundamentally very different. Classic managed to replicate certain things, but the servers were too large, the amount of guides dictating actions due to pserver culture infesting it, the complete lack of battlegroups (it was just one giant battlegroup in Classic), and so on.
The servers were around 4 times larger than the highest number people would speculate Vanilla servers were set to as max capacity. Not to mention the sharding.
It goes on and on.
Simply put, the unconscious ability to form an identity in a virtual community worked very differently back then, compared to how it worked in Classic. Because of all the things mentioned. In other words, the “feeling” of community in Classic was never designed to work as it did in Vanilla.
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Thank you for your reply! Let’s get things in order:
- Yes, I barely have time now but when I catch 4-5 free hours to play wow, it doesn’t feel the same
- I’ve been in ZM but the map is so small compared to wow outer world (all the maps)…I might sound like a douche here, but I wish we hade more maps to have fun in, not just ZM (and the other SL zones are dark themes, no green nor snow…)
- I hate wow tokens!! they ruined wow imo…along with boost selling advertisments
- Idk…every end-game stuff we do feels like a chore, idk why - I might be wrong
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To add to what Bewarê said, very little feels new and interesting by the time its released because its either been datamined to hell or PTR testing has revealed a lot. Even if you’re not watching YouTube or Twitch you can guarantee that the information will be discussed in your circle in game eventually.
Chore based gameplay that takes up valuable time feels unrewarding even if it does equate to a level of additional power because eventually it becomes an unused system that doesn’t work with the following expansion (hopefully changing with Dragonflight but time will tell).
There is a huge emphasis on timed content or smashing through content at an extreme pace that ends up burning people out and/or causing complaints that there is no longer any content to do.
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The map being too small is a very fair complaint! I do not understand why each patch within an expansion shrinks us down smaller and smaller. It isn’t a World of Warcraft, it is a Zone of Warcraft.
Hopefully one day the devs will learn to make a new zone, but also have the faction in it have business in other places…
I tend to agree that the token has done nothing good for the game. I bought a couple over the past 4-5 years when gold was short, but now I just play the game idly and have nearly 3 million. You don’t need tokens, you just need to be smart about your professions and what you are prepared to buy vs prepared to gather. Personally I have a bunch of alts at 60 who mostly do the mission table for 5 mins per day. I buy absolutely nothing from the AH.
If all endgame activities feel like chores, trying not to sound harsh, but you may have just had enough of the game. Personally, I love raiding, and I’ve learned to enjoy M+. I don’t get a lot out of the solo content, such that I’ve run ZM on 2 characters and kind of fizzled with the third. I put the time I would have spent in Korthia into non-WoW activities for the most part.
But it doesn’t really matter, I don’t particularly need to go to ZM to play the game. I can send mats around to make legendaries up to T5, and that’s good enough for alts.
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I mean… timed content is generally popular. It sets the standard for personal performance, and it really cuts down on the old “brb 5 mins” we used to get from pug tanks. If you can’t commit to the duration of the run, don’t waste other people’s time.
Re pushing through content at a high pace… no? We were literally fed a bit of story every week with every patch of Shadowlands. The devs have intentionally throttled us from charging through it in one sitting. If there is pressure to clear normal, heroic, and get to mythic asap - that is players. The game didn’t make that happen. 9.2 has decreased interaction between PvE and PvP so there isn’t even as much of a “but I need this to be good in arenas” feeling.
My guild mostly aims at heroic raids. Almost all of us are comfortable in the 15-18 key range, many of us are overgeared, but we take our time and we don’t get angry or bench anyone. We will make our first foray into mythic this weekend. There is no external time pressure. This will be a long patch.
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Yeah, I was just comparing it to Classic, but those are some good points you’ve brought up about why retail is a mess as well. A way to summarize it would be that it’s more of a lobby-based game now, when in the past it was more socially organic and adventure-based. But at the same time, I doubt it’d be a successful game if they’d go back to their roots with no CRZ, no sharding, and very small battlegroups, because humans are creatures of habit (especially gamers) and the vast majority of the gamers of today are used to this kind of game design.
The only viable way forward that I can see is putting in more variations in challenges, random events where you can suddenly compete against others in a small scale at random places in the different “worlds” in WoW (each expansion is basically its own world after all…), and scale down both raiding and PvP.
And I say that as a pretty hardcore PvPer in terms of time invested.
The current game design feeds into the ecosystem of organized boosting way too much, in both PvE and PvP.
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you were younger - and it was new, and mysterious - now you are older and most of the mystery has vanished
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This is so true.
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The nostalgia comments are wack.
Classic WoW was a huge success and showed that it wasn´t just about nostalgia. Even with massive servers and layers you still could build communities on individual realms. You would think people would have stopped with the nostalgia comments by now after being proven wrong.
Why was past wow so immersive?
- Lack of bloat
Once TBC started, and even worse once WoW reached cataclysm you had players spread over 4 different continents, made the world feel empty. Classic WoW lacked this bloat.
- Healthy servers
WoW classic had healthy servers, the game was growing so new servers were constantly added, even when TBC was launched, it launched with entirely new servers.
- No cross realm zones
Layers in Classic WoW were honestly a genius addition and enabled a realm to be big while still retaining server identity to a certain degree.
Instead retail WoW went for complete cross realm zones, so your server only matters for auction house and guilds. Completely kills the entire world and makes it not matter at all knowing that there are basically 40-50 different versions of the same zone with players from everywhere.
- Shadowlands is yuck
It´s impossible to immerse your self in something completely out of touch with the World of Warcraft. It honestly feels like morale was low at Blizz after all the internal scandals, and the devs were just kind of allowed to work at anything they wanted as a sort of pseudo-compensation. With Shadowlands they could go wild. Sadly it sucked.
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Immersion comes at the cost of quality of life. The reason why it felt so immersive is that you had to be careful and to plan your actions. Travel was a real consideration, as you couldn’t just fly everywhere. Mounts weren’t that fast as well. But also the world was dangerous - you pull 2-3 extra mobs and you’re dead. Now you just run past everything, pulling an entire army while completely invincible to them.
There are no easy immersive games. Because an easy game doesn’t command my attention so it cannot immerse me. Easy here literally means how much attention the game commands.
In Bloodborne for example, you very quickly learn you need to focus and pay attention to the world, because enemies can take quick care of you. So you put all your attention into the game. And it grabs you.
Now WoW is 2nd monitor content while I am watching Asmongold and playing Granblue Fantasy while also playing WoW. The game doesn’t require attention. It is background noise to my podcasts.
Then of course you have the quality of life - you can go anywhere from anywhere at any time. You can fly, you don’t have to read texts as everything is pointed out to you on the map. It glows on your screen.
90% of the game does not require attention anymore. This is why it’s not immersive.
For a game to immerse, it must command your attention. And for me at least, this is done through the game punishing me for not paying any attention.
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imo wow has suffered from far too much bloat. New islands, alternative time lines, alternative universes etc.
Classic Wow is big enough where you didnt have to add new zones or continents. You could easily add just conflict and reason to visit existing zones and change these to develop story. Thats half of wows problem nothing apart from the latest patch content feels relevant.
They need to stop adding zones and iterate on whats there. Look at more 'living story’to act as a hook for players.
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i feel your pain,tough in dragonflight that felling will be partially returned to us because since theres no more external systems we will have more time to focus on our character the world itself and our talent tree,appart from that i wish blizzard can make questing a bit more rewarding and difficult (example of classic with low drop rates for quest items and each mob is a fight that can result in death) that would make people gank together to kill mobs etc instead of this toxic solo do everything fast that is retail nowadays.
i remember making the questline of warrior in classic and the joy of getting that badass two handed axe (whirlwind ) now quests give you 56 cypher gear a day that we instantly sell to vendor without even look at it.
world is discusting nodaways the game is only played inside instances and people only go to zereth mortis because they need not because they want,the music the atmosphere everything is like mcdonalds now fast and plastic.
tough in dragonflight the zones look very good with tundras and northrend/mop feeling lets see what happens.
dragonflight is the last drop for me.
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