Just out of curiosity Sceptic, why is vanilla WOW shit and compared to what?
TO be perfectly fair I'm not the best person to ask. There has never been an MMO that I actually liked, and the entire concept of deriving fun from an MMO is completely beyond me. I'm fully aware this makes me the worst possible person to throw around these kinds of statements, because what I will end up comparing MMOs to, invariably, will be single player. Not game-to-game, but in terms of how mechanics work.
Let me pick a specific example, because there has been a lot of debate in this thread about PvP and "carebearing" and so on. You're walking around the world as a level 10 or whatever doing your shit, then some level 60 comes out of nowhere, moving at twice your speed, and slaughters you in two hits. You click release, and spend the next 2 minutes ambling back to your corpse, then another half minute waiting for a resurrection timer, all the while thinking "this was a rogue, there's a good chance I'll die again in the next 10 seconds and have to go through all this again, or just log off and go play another game." Every WOW lover (or ex-lover) will rationalize this: of course you got ganked, it's an MMO! There's other people playing! This is another person! Isn't this awesome? The game is penalizing you for dying, it's so much better as a result!
I don't care about this line of reasoning. I'm a single player gamer, and this carries along with it the mindset of: what's my experience like, and am I having fun. I don't care about other people's experiences and fun. And here's the thing: the only way such a thing would happen in a single player game is if the game decided to spawn a high-level enemy in your low-level zone for the express purpose of killing you and making you waste several minutes of your life. Before you start clamoring about SP vs MMO, stop and think about this for a second. And remember: I don't care about the rationalization, I am talking
purely from the point of view of what you experience in both scenarios. I don't care that in one case it's an AI and in the other an actual human being; I can't talk to the human, he can't talk to me, I've no idea who he is, I couldn't care less about it. He could be an AI-controlled bot for all I know and I'd never have any way of knowing the difference. All I know is that the game was specifically designed to penalize me for having a random high-level spawn and kill me for no reason.
Of course there is a reason why the game was designed like this: to waste your time. Everything about the game is designed to waste your time. You grind identical-looking generic quests that follow the same 3 or 4 templates to raise levels. You grind random monsters to do the same. You grind your weapon skills. You grind your professions if you made the mistake of choosing any. You grind dungeons for this or that item. I suppose if you get to the raid level you'd do the same there to get raid gear. You grind reputations.
Everything is a grind. The entire structure of the game is based on grinding - and of course it has to be, because this is the only way you get people to keep playing the same game year after year. There's no way you can include enough meaningful content that
isn't a grind and keep people who play the game hours and hours every single day occupied for so long. So you make everything grindy. And then some people will actually try to convince you this was meaningful gameplay and that it was fun. You'll have a whole bunch of people (scroll back earlier in this thread) who will try and convince you that sitting there for hours doing absolutely nothing while waiting for a dungeon group to fill up was fun, and that this is the kind of gameplay that if put back into the game will have the millions of players that have quit WoW flocking up. Those same people BTW will play on a vanilla server whenever a new one is released, tell you about how much fun they're having getting to level 5 or 10, and then never mention it again because, let's face it, is this really fun? Now that you're no longer a teenager who is wowed (ha ha) by anything, do you really want to spend another God knows how many hundreds of hours leveling up?
I had an interesting discussion about the whole vanilla WOW thing a while back, I think with Grunker (or maybe it was you?). Clearly a lot of the good memories vanilla players have was due to a sense of community that, by all accounts, no longer exists. I can understand specific elements tied to this that people liked about the game, even if they hold zero interest for me personally, and that's not what I will criticize about the game even if I don't like it. But let's face it, whenever people refer to the endless grinding or to waiting an entire evening for a 5 or 10-man group to form just so that they can actually start playing, as "good times", they're either being sarcastic or completely blinded by nostalgia. I have frequently attacked the nostalgia and "good for its time" arguments quite vehemently because I can point to specific elements of old games and say "this is good, this is better than the New Shit, here's why." There's no way anyone could convince me that the grinding and all the pointless time-wasting inherent in WOW design is a good thing. And read some vanilla players' posts, whenever Blizzard does something to reduce the tedious grinding they cry decline. I mean, the reduction doesn't particularly entice me because it doesn't deal with the inherent design, it's just a reduction, but having more grinding was somehow synonymous with incline and challenge?
