You’ll find plenty of players in Goldshire on Argent Dawn if you want to chill after working up a sweat killing some mobs. I think they call it ‘Netflix and chill’ nowadays.
Cause it was good and although high fantasy not too far stretched.
Now its all pirates of the Caribbean (BFA) and guardians of the galaxy (SL) trying to be cool for the kids… problem is… most of the player base are over 25/30… we don’t find that stuff as fun as we did 20 year ago.
I miss being an idiot thinking you would get banned by dying to fatigue.
You actually get banned by doing that.
It’s because people think WoW is a loot goblin and the games plays exactly like this.
You were young and thought you were immortal… Therefore time sinks spent grinding RNG badger spleens and delivering studded leather jockstraps from Darnassus to Ironforge, were not an easily quantifiable investment in the Multiversal space-time continuum?
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because people didn’t know how to key bind and wow addons xD this is me on my paladin back in 2009.
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Both highly successful movies…metaphor mixing, you are.
Pirates v Dinosaurs, in space!.. you’re welcome, and I only want 3% of gross on global toy licensing.
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They are two very different games. I am burnt out of retail and playing Classic again, which is now easier thanks to TBC. I confess I am not brilliant at this era, never was, but as a Hunter it is quite relaxing. So simply put… play Classic for that experience. Retail is a different one.
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SL zones feel dead except druids hoovering up materials ( me included) but that’s about it.
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Pretty much this. Time has passed, but it isn’t the game that you miss.
It’s your feelings for how it felt at that time, at that point of your life.
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Most of this is due to how bad we as players were. We knew nothing about rotations, BIS gear (or even vaguely appropriate gear), about MinMax talent builds, which buffs we could get.
I remember tanking a dungeon as a low level Orc Warrior in 2005. I had a 2 hander sword at the time. When I logged into that character in Legion to level for class mount it was level 30 (where it was parked in 2005) wearing a cloth hood as that was the first hat he received.
I had a friend who wouldn’t wear a cloak because he thought they looked stupid (even though there was an option to hide cloaks back then which I told him about).
Of course some of the mechanic back then made things trickier, running out of mana after 3 spells or slower regen requiring food and drink.
These days the only quest rewards are suitable armour. Specs are 90% baked in now. Talents are pretty obvious and even the worse talent choice doesn’t hinder you that much (a few % maybe).
As for the Immersion, most of that was because online games were new and this was the first time we were running around a 3D world with real people.
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Been playing since day one. its never been that immersive. it was just more fun to play.
I find Classic infuriating xD
I never last at it before I end up back in Retail 
I will ofc go do my tour of Classic Wrath when it hits but I don’t really expect it to be any different.
Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing with people preferring one or the other and I have several friends who are having a great time playing it. It’s just not doing it for me.
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Find friends or join a community and this becomes a non issue.
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It has nothing to do with nostalgia or any other nonsense you see people post here. Immersion is mostly created by incovinience and exclusivity which is exactly two things what has been Blizzard removing since WOTLK to make game more acessible but at same time less imerssive and overall less of rpg game. Point in mmorpg is to strike balance between immersion and gameplay which was achieved in classic like wow while retail favours gameplay so lot of incoviniences were taken away.
tbc classic was okay at first but
i was not fond of spamming lfg for dungeons alot
did some elite quests with a group(3 man) darkhan drathir
and the one which rewards the rune of guard captain trink
and plenty of dungeon groups to hit level 68
but when i returned to SMV to do quests
noone was there and i saw no players at shattrath/orgrimmar
it used to be full of people on stonespine
stonespain they used to call it for some reason
are there no horde guilds on that server who care to clear SWP and to play wrath classic after?
This is a long and complicated topic and not one I fully understand, but I think that, if we want to understand it, we have to understand the whole game. Here’s some reasons I can think of in no particular order:
- There is good reason to back to an inn - it gives you an experience boost when next you log in. Although that system still exists, it ignores XP rewards, and because the game now heavily encourages XP rewards over mob kill rewards, and because you level far faster and therefore don’t get to enjoy it for days to come, this experience boost is hardly even noticed - so no reason to go “home and rest”.
- The town effect means you meet the same people often. The town effect comes about as a result of the game having 3,000-10,000 players online at any given time, so more than you can ever know, yet a world that matches that player number and therefore never grows so large you won’t see the same person again. Of course the modern game undoes this with CRZ.
- Because of the static level of the world, someone in your range will likely be near you, and not only that, he/she might even be seen again at higher level because you both move in the same direction for the same reason. Once again, the modern game undoes this with level scaling.
- Game didn’t “require you to get going” - it was entirely OK to do nothing because there was no fear of missing out except for raid lockouts, so taking a chillpill and sitting in an inn is perfectly reasonable. That is, of course, no longer the case at all, although 9.2 represents an improvement.
- Combat is slower paced and you spend a lot of time waiting on drinks so you chat a lot more, and you chat under a character name exclusively. This means others see you through your character, and that means other players affirm your identity as the character and that hugely increases immersion.
- You generally travel a lot from place to place during levelling. You are never in the hellscape of constantly jogging around the same tiny area full of dailies or grinding mobs - you’re always moving forwards or just travelling - and because you are so tiny compared to everything around you everything feels huge and humbling - it strikes you with awe. And, whenever you travel, you get the chance to socialise a bit. Or get a coffee and relax. Before you know it, the whole day is gone.
- There is a genuine and massive lack of open world challenges in the modern game. I can literally defeat all the 5-man quests in any Shadowlands zone on my own while it is current and many times without being hit. In vanilla, just pulling a camp of gnolls can be seriously dangerous business.
There’s probably more, but I assure you this is not something you’re imagining.
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Go play classic and you will understand why, it was a game made out of passionate people and not 9-5ers, the retail design is a hollow cell with no substance, everything in the game Is fleeting and nothing holds value, you do something and in the back of your mind you know that is a total waste of time and that it will go away in a few months when the next patch hits live, on top of that they have removed the MMO and RPG parts from an MMO-RPG if you replace all players with bots 95% of the player base will not notice it because everyone does his own thing like its single-player game and when you get a new drop you just equip it because its higher item level without even looking at it and you feel zero deference on your character’s power. another thing is how dead and unrewarding the open world is, we used to see a rare or a treasure chest and we went crazy out of excitement but now we get bombarded by 100000 chests/rares/quests every 2 meters and they literally drop nothing of value some grey items that you sell to the vendor for 10g zero reward time traps all over the place, another example look how Oribos is designed you cant jump into the Maw from the first floor, you cant fly, when you want to go to another zone you are forced to fly into a black screen instead of getting a loading screen. And let’s not talk about wow token getting forced in our mouths with how the legendaries are designed to be crafted. I could go on and on and never stop. Wow holds you a hostage instead of giving you a good reason to stay. the game has changed, not us. I hope Dragon expansion and Microsoft will change things around because the state of the game is unbearable.
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This needs some paragraphing but, fundamentally, it gets pretty much spot on even if there is more to be said.