Yesterday, one of my recently-graduated teens came into my office and ended up talking my ear off for a good hour or so about her and her friends’ adventures through World of Warcraft — which mostly consisted of managing a high-level raiding guild and “gearing people up” ad infinitum. It was great to hear and remember that WoW, like all MMOs, is still a very social experience to some, helping new and old friends to bond through a common adventure.
Yet my eyes began to glaze over around minute 45 as she talked about having the best dps out of any hunter on her server and what dungeons they were progressing through and whatnot. I wasn’t really a participant in the conversation, I was the recipient of a verbal wall of text that served to remind me of why I left the game, and how there’s really nothing left there for me.
Granted, there are the friends I made there, and who could possibly still be playing. And as much as I miss their company, I just couldn’t do it any more. With Wrath of the Lich King only occupying perhaps a month of my interest before burning me out for the final time, I doubt that any future news from Blizzcon or whatever will get me stirred up.
It honestly makes me a bit sad and wistful for the “good old days”. Despite how unfriendly I might be to WoW right now, I had really great memories from that game, and those haven’t gone away. What has left the building is the game I grew to love — whatever exists on Blizzard’s servers these days is an echo of what I knew, but distorted, manipulated and changed.
Blizzard has all but come out and told everyone that the 1-60 content — classic or “Vanilla” WoW — is an obsolete abomination to them, and they simply don’t want you to experience it. Seriously, a game company that makes gobs of money for providing enough content to keep folks hooked for extended lengths of time is actually trying to get gamers to play less of their title, because they’re ashamed of what it used to be and much happier with all the newer bells and whistles of the expansion packs.
So far in the past year or so, they’ve made the following changes to assist players in bypassing the old world:
- Sped up the leveling curve, by as much as 30%
- Offered an even faster leveling curve if you played with a friend through the recruit-a-friend program
- Lowered the level you could get your initial mount by 10
- Let players roll level 55 Death Knights if you already had at least one character that high
- Offered special overpowered weapons and items that could be passed down from your high-level characters to your low-level alts
- Elite mobs in many locales were turned into normal ones
- And most recently, lowered the level at which you can purchase a mount, lowered mount prices and upped mount speeds.
- Oh, and they added more portals and zepplins and magic ponies that fly through the air and deposit you into any MMO you please.
The message? Run run run, as fast as you can until you get to Outland, then just jog through that content until you get to Northrend, at which point you’ll totally slow down and enjoy the scenery and not digest all the content over the space of a long weekend, right?
Now, as an ex-player, why should I care? It’s not that I’m taking my appointed turn at the punching bag, swinging at the biggest target in the room. It’s because nobody likes it when a cherished memory is cheapened, especially by the creator. I hated it when Lucas did the whole “Greedo shoots first” Star Wars revisions, and I’m not too fond of Blizzard saying that the World of Warcraft that I fell for is completely second-rate and not worth the time of day.
The old WoW has become a post-apocalyptic wasteland: barren of life, terrain that must be covered as quickly as possible to get to habitable areas, a faint memory of what it once was. Leveling in WoW was never hard, but there was a time when hitting 60 was an actual accomplishment worthy of a hearty “GRATS!” by guildies, instead of a “meh” milestone today. We’ve gone from easy mode to infant mode, and I wonder why Blizz doesn’t just once and for all scrap classic WoW and start all players as level 55, each with their own “Death Knight” intro experience.
Nostalgia tends to cloud the mind, of course, and it doesn’t mean that some of their newer additions aren’t welcome. But they have this sort of attitude that Old = Useless, while other games that honestly try to spruce up their older content and encourage people to fall in love with leveling an alt all over again. LOTRO is investing a chunk of time into revamping their 10-25 content, City of Heroes just introduced player-created content, and yet Blizzard’s standard answer for whenever someone asked them why they don’t go back and add/polish/tweak the old world is that it simply isn’t worth it. It’s not where a bulk of their players are. Flying mounts are added with Burning Crusade, and Blizz refuses to rework the old world to allow their use. It’s looking back, people, and we must always be moving forward, forward!
About the only enticement that Blizzard has given to get people back into vanilla WoW is through the use of achievements, but having a level 80 speed-run through Scarlet Monestary isn’t quite the same as an intrepid band of level 35’s creeping their way through the library. It makes me sad to consider that no new player to WoW will have anything remotely similar to the experience that I did — instead of dipping their toes into a gentle pond of exploration and advanture, they’ll be thrown into a raging current that’ll seek to sweep them past the scenery as fast as decorum allows. And maybe a bit faster.
Now, I’m not saying that the old world is “better” in any way, but this is a pretty shoddy way to treat the game that got you where you are. Would it really make a dent in their subscriber numbers or resources to at least tip their hat to vanilla WoW by releasing an “Old World Only” server? Why not use this newfound knowledge of better quests and technology by upgrading some of the more blah parts of Azeroth?
Bio Break 
Blizzard is just using WOW now as a CASH COW to fund its future projects. If you look at original WOW and then at the last two expansions, you see that new added content gets significantly less and less.
Maybe they are afraid that new players will look at Azeroth and say WTF look at all this content versus Burning Crusades and WOTLK. Azeroth has almost 2x the content of BC and 3-4 times that of WOTLK
I wish the best to all my friends still playing WOW. I for one will never go back.
This rush to the ever smaller endgame, leaving a trail of more and more obsolete content behind is just showing that the perpetual progressquest style of EQ DIKUMUDs is failed MMO design. We need to get away from this scheme.
I honestly could not agree with you more. I too have some great memories of pre-TBC WoW, but the thought of going back to it in it’s current state makes my skin crawl. It’s not the WoW I used to know and love 😦
Mu officemate at work is still playing WoW…. so it’s kind of awkward listening to him give me morning debriefings on his current progress, his DPS, his TPS, his guild’s struggles, the boss encounters, etc. As the days go by I’m less and less able to mount an interested response…..
I just think this is the same issue that faces a lot of other DIKU type games. Want to guess how many other low level players me and Arb saw around when we tested the waters in EQ2 recently?
I do suspect that the kindest thing they can possibly do for newbies now is to make it as easy as possible for them to catch up to the rest of the player base. Plus bear in mind, it’s quite likely that the majority of players with new alts are actually old players returning who also have seen the zones before. I agree that fast levelling can be a curse as well as a blessing but it’s better than being stuck in the Trollshaws doldrums forever.
And I would love it is Blizzard revamped the old world via phasing for the next expansion. That would get people back. I don’t think there will be any more Lone Lands style revamps because they’ve already revamped at least one old zone.
That is very well said Syp. You put into words something that I’ve felt several times with various MMOs. Each time I see some news come out about WoW it talks about how the game is now easier or faster. I’m always perplexed by it.
I played prior to BC and I really enjoyed that content! It really gave me the traditional EQ feel of a large world with a lot of places to go. I wasn’t locked behind a floating carrot that lead me to the next place. BC wasn’t bad but it was far more linear. I bought Wrath but it honestly sits in my closet unopened.
One of the greatest charms of EQ1 was that the developers would go back and rework old zones to return players to them.
I suppose it comes down to the corporate culture. To me it seems like Blizzard’s WoW staff should be a lot larger. Simply due to the “economy of scale” they should be able to turn out an expansion each year and a ton of content in between. Lately though it seems like they do about as much as any other MMO that has 10.5 million less subscribers.
Too much money is being funneled away from the game that generates it. That is, however, a tangent. At any rate, great article! I hope more games take the EQ route instead of the WoW one.
Great post, great blog.
/lurk
/agree
I will always look back fondly on what the pre-expansion days.
The same way I look back fondly on my pre-NGE SWG days where we had to make up our own content. That was back when taking tours of peoples houses was a server event and we would organize PvP raids on the forums to make sure we had people to fight with. Ahhhhhh I miss it.
Yeah, one thing that always bothered me is how it seems Blizzard doesn’t really care (so to speak) — I guess it’s the difference between that “popular” girl who gets asked out by a dozen different guys, versus the shyer girl over in the other corner. The “popular” girl isn’t really going to feel the need to even be nice, so long as people keep falling over themselves to buy her dinner.
What is odd about reading this for me is that minus changing a couple things and the name of the game it sounds exactly like me talking about the original Everquest.
Never played WOW myself, but I wonder if every game would benefit from having high-level content hidden away in the lower-level areas of the game?
I remember playing WAR with my lv20 Chosen and exploring the edges of the map in Nordland (Tier 1). I ended up swimming West of Salzenmund and finding a small lagoon / recess in the cliff face that housed a cave you had to jump up to (think it only was accessible if you had a mount?). Inside were some lv40 baddies so I quickly ran away to safety, but vowed to come back if I ever got close to lv40 (which I never did).
Anyways, thought that was pretty cool and something I hope to see more of in future MMOs. And it sort of makes sense too… from my D&D nerd-it-up years, I remember that most of the underground-dwelling monsters tended to be more frightning and dangerous.
Fantasy MMOs should change it up so that you don’t have to move to new lands (never to return to the starting zones), but so that you move *downwards* into the earth (or perhaps upwards in to the mountains?) where the challenges / difficulties increase. Changing zones / lands should just be a change of scenery / language / architecture / culture / monster breeds / etc., with the exception of some very old and evil places where it makes sense for monsters to be uber (e.g. Mordor in LOTRO, Land of the Dead in WAR, etc.).
Great post, Syp.
I had typed up a huge comment, but eh, it’s too wordy. I will say that yes, although I’m working on my 3rd-4th alts in WoW, I agree with you.
I wish they would update some of the old world areas, similar to what they did with Dustwallow Marsh.
However I am VERY appreciative of the faster XP gain. As much as I adore the old world, as long as it minimizes the time I have to spend in STV, I am happy. And the achievement system is my favorite new addition, since it encourages going back to play that old content.
I did have to laugh a while back though. I know a guy who, every time we talk, drones on about his guild’s progression, what his defense is, his DPS/TPS, his new epic gear, etc. Then when I mention that I’m working towards a certain achievement, his reaction is, “I’m sorry, but I think people who go for achievements in WoW have no life.”
…
At this point, I would love for them to make a DK starting experience for EVERY class. It creates a good lore-base (can have a druid one for druids, mage for mages) and can be a great story-telling tool to set the background of the point of your class in the first place.
Only, don’t start at 55 and dump them into dead BC lands, start at 65 and dump players into the new shiny content of Northrend (which is also dead for levelling, sadly. I’m back in game at level 76 and I rarely see anyone else questing).
Do away with the old lands, or bring them up to speed. I’m guessing its much easier to just do away.
I still have memories of almost a year in beta until I quit a little after BC came out.
I remember playing a Shadow Priest before it was a socially acceptable spec to play.
I remember the 3 day long AV’s along with the shredders, Ivus, and I can’t remember the other spawn. I remember the huge battles at Snowfall. I remember when there were 5 million npc’s in AV.
I remember my guild Warlords of PvP, and all 5 of us were the top titled Pvpers before the honor farmers came on Dragonmaw. I still remember how hated we were, and how we were considered the Horde A team, and rarely lost WSG, and AB when it first came out. I still remember Pkpkay getting his name changed because everyone hated losing to us. I still remember Lights, Zizek, Kurei, and Eyeball. We were deadly with 3 shadow priests, and 2 pom pyro mages.
I think Chuck Norris probably still lives in the Barrens. I still remember when Warlocks could summon people inside the tram. I remember the raids on Stormwind. I still remember the huge battles from TM to SS before Battlegrounds.
I remember when Fear was useful in PvP before trinkets.
I could keep going on and on. I have alot of great memories of WoW, but have no urge to ever go back. I hated the game before I left, and I am truly having fun these days in Warhammer.
For a few years, I was one of the most rabid WoW fangirls out there. I’ve been to Blizzcon, done the guild meetup thing and have four 80s, and three 70-somethings. I loved the lore. But I can’t play it anymore, exactly for the reasons you mentioned. I’ll occasionally log in to chat with friends, but that’s it. I loved the old world content!
It’s so sad to go to Winterspring and EPL now. It’s even sadder to go to Shatt. Blizz is seeing their retention numbers drop, and they’re trying to make everything easier, on the mistaken impression that it’s the difficulty level that’s driving people away, when it’s really the exact opposite. The depth isn’t there anymore. People can jam through all 80s levels and grasp nothing of the story behind the game.
Here, Syp. This should cheer you up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVwYKtgFYCc&NR=1
“whatever exists on Blizzard’s servers these days is an echo of what I knew, but distorted, manipulated and changed.”
i couldn´t have said it better, exactly how i feel about my game time in WoW.
Glad that i left though.
I had never played WOW until last month. I started out in DAOC and played just over 6 years (with a couple breaks) and then WAR from launch until May.
The only reason I switched to WOW was because my WAR guild did. My impression as a “newbie” is that it’s a colourful, cute world with some of quirky elements and the levelling isn’t slow (but 80 levels!?!), yet I’m having a hard time seeing any longevity in my interest. It just seems rather bland.
I’m a player that hates levelling and likes the RVR element the most but that clearly doesn’t seem to be the big focus of the game and I’m pretty sure I’ll be pretty bored once I hit 80, if not before.
I’d go back to DAOC in a minute if enough people still played.
Excellent post Syp. Just the other day one of my old UO cronies and I were discussing how one of the thins we missed most about UO was so much of the world stayed relevant, we’d still go places like the Wrong and Deceit dungeons even after years of playing.
Where as in WoW the vast majority of the land mass is a “go once for XP, never again” affair, then in the end game you farm one place a ridiculous amount until you’re sick of it and have the gear for the next bit. Which you’ll then spend X months farming… and repeat.
I’m hoping WAR’s vanilla tier 4 doesn’t go the same way as they add more expansions. Variety is the spice and all that.
I believe that the entire experience in a MMORPG, from level 1 to 100, should be fun and enjoyable. Blizzard have obviously decided to just try and get people through the old content quickly but personally I prefer it if they still treated low level players as a proper player base and gave them as much as content and attention as high level players.
I reckon if WoW introduced a mentoring system like in EQ2 they would have a lot more low level players grouping and having fun rather than trying to just power through the content quickly.
I feel like I’m about to wade into shark infested waters.
I. Like. WoW. There, I’ve said it. 😉
While I can agree that a WoW Classic server might be nice, would people actually play on it like they did when there was no other choice but to play classic WoW, because it’s all that existed? I’ve given it a little thought and my answer is no, people wouldn’t play on it other than for initial novelty of it. Are there any examples of a classic server setups similar to whats been suggested, something that shows it could be a success?
I’ve never gotten the idea that Blizz considers old world content to be an abomination. I get the sense that you miss the early days of WoW where everything was new to everybody. And everything was a challenge because it was being experienced for the first time, by everybody. Unfortunately, you can never go back. People have experienced this content, know what it’s about, have documented and commented on it to death.
Where do you get the idea that Blizzard is ashamed of it’s old world content? Because Blizzard has made it easier to get through it? I leveled 2 different characters for 1 to 80 post WotLK. I did it in a about a month. Getting from 1-70 I think was 3 or 4 days played. As an experienced player I flew through the low level content with no interest in seeing it again. I’ve also turned 2 people (in the last month,) brand new to mmos, on to WoW. One liked it and one didn’t. Both however took/take a very long time to gain levels. The point, experienced players can fly through the content while newbies… don’t.
And the biggest complaint, by far from both of those brand new players? “I hate running, it’s so slow.” So blizz alleviates the pain by making more flight paths and giving mounts sooner/cheaper. You use that as evidence that Blizzard is ashamed of old world content and to disparage the game by saying it cheapens your experience. Should your parents or grand parents begrudge you for getting to use a calculator or computer in school? Unlike Peter Pan and like real life, the game has to grow (up) in order to survive.
The MM in MMO stands for Massively Multiplayer. I take this to mean social with lots of people. Unfortunately simple reality is there are few to no people at low levels any more. It stands to reason that if your game is about playing with other people, you want to get new players playing with other people.
I love the Death Knight intro and it’d be great to have something like that for all classes. At the same time I hate that Death Knights start at level 55. There seems to be a significant number of terrible Death Knights (the player not the class.) I attribute this to DK’s starting at such a high level and being OP until they are closer to 80.
Making people level from 1-80 give the players the opportunity learn how to play their class. What works and what doesn’t.
Part of me agrees with you, the newer players will not have the same respect or appreciation for the old world content that we did and it’s kind of sad. But at the same time I’ll never have the same respect or appreciation that some did for the invention of the wheel, running water, or airplanes. Is that sad too?
Blizzard hasn’t shut off old world content, it’s still there and very playable. Maybe Blizzard could allow you to turn off XP gain, so you and your mates could get to a certain level and run all the old world content you want without ever out growing it.
@Bootleg:
No shark-bites here. I still play and enjoy WoW, even with the changes. We recently had a brand-new-to-WoW person join our WoW guild, and we’ve been able to get her up to level 70 in about a month and a half. If the XP nerfs hadn’t been there, it would have been a LOT longer, and probably not as much fun for her. Nobody wants to be the odd person out while other folks are doing stuff at level cap.
I do however wish that they would somehow update or work old-world content back into the scene. The old world dragons are a great example… level 60 content stowed away in lowbie zones. Being a lowbie and seeing a mass of level 60s on mounts riding thru Duskwood towards Twilight Vale to kill that dragon was always an impressive sight.
I can understand to a degree why they’ve made the changes. New players will never be able to experience the game as we did, even if Blizzard did leave it intact. Even if they wanted to put together a SM group, they’d have a real hard time finding enough other players in the level range to do it.
Instead Blizz allows them to just level up quicker through all the solo content, because that’s what the old world is now.
Yes it is sad, but its also an issue that is going to plague any MMO that is 4 or 5 years old, especially as they keep raising the level cap. If they don’t do something, new players would get too frustrated trying to get to 80 and probably never make it, and people wouldn’t be rolling alts so frequently.
A server with classic WoW enabled would be really cool though, EQ did something similar with their progression servers.
While I have to agree with you 100%, it’s still *the* game to play for me.
All your points are valid and I’m also feeling them, but it doesn’t change the fact I still have more fun there than in LotRO or WAR.
Plus, if you’ve tried to “replay” the game by choosing all different classes, you’re more than happy to skip most of the old content.
I actually don’t like the levelling that much after I’ve seen the zone on the first character. Sitting at 80,80,76,74 here I’m all for short content to get to 80 and do what I have fun in – heroics and raids.
@ Bootleg – One of the standing principles we have here at Bio Break is that if you’re playing a game and liking it, we are okay with that. In fact, it’s a great thing if you are! You can play whatever you please, and I won’t ridicule you for it. Here, I share my opinions and viewpoints, but they aren’t meant to be universal judgments upon these games.
That said, I’ll stick to my guns and say that WoW really has lost a lot of what made it special. I don’t think it should go back to how it used to be, I’m not against progress, but they have made a lot of severely questionable design decisions in the expansions, and they most certainly are embarrassed with their old world content. Everything they’ve said in the past couple years has that tone of “Ohh… we’re so, so sorry new players have to level through all that crap, but once you get to Outland, then the REAL game begins!”
Something I didn’t touch on but I wanted to was how mount speed, specifically, cheapens the world. In WoW’s first year, one of the devs was handling a question about why flight paths took so long — why they didn’t have, for instance, instant portals everywhere to transit folks between zones. The answer stuck with me, because it makes sense: they wanted players to see the world and retain a sense of its scope. Yeah, that 7-minute flight was nothing more than glorified eye candy that gets old the umpteenth time you do it, but in having it, you never lost the perspective that the continents were quite expansive and that you were a small person traveling in a big world.
Ironically, this is now what they’re racing away from. In having mounts earlier, faster mounts and more instant portals, the sense of world has become, indeed, “small”. They’ve exponentially increased players’ leveling and travel speed to where the pace of the game is so much faster and makes everything so much smaller and more trivial because of it. Running, as annoying as it may be, serves an important purpose in these games.
Don’t believe me? Look at more modern MMOs that have instant flight (WAR), loads of instant portals, and highly instanced zones. One of the biggest complaints coming from all of that is that players no longer feel as though they’re part of a world, but instead are traversing from isolated zone to isolated zone with no sense of connectiveness, expansion and wonder. It’s all a mass transit system designed to get folks to the thick of the action while cutting out RPG trivialities like travel and exploration — which, again, cheapen the game.
Syp, the point about mounts is a great one. The jump from 100% ground mount to a 280% flying mount totally trivialized even the BC content. It was something that sounded so great in theory, but the effect was tremendous. Everything from killing your way to a named mob, to resource gathering was cheapened and hastened.
I guess I’m odd though, most of my guild before I left the game said their 2 favorite things post-vanilla were Flying Mounts and Dailies, both of which I loathe and cited as reasons for walking away.
@syp
You stick to your guns, I’ll stick to mine. 🙂
I haven’t seen or ever gotten the impression that Blizzard has been unhappy with or embarrassed by the OWC. I’ve seen them openly recognize some design mistakes. But nothing in the general sense of yeah, a big chunk of our game is kinda just crap, sorry. I’ve essentially seen them recognize that there’s nobody to play with in big chunk of the game, and they’re sorry for that.
To give a little better perspective on myself. I’m not a WoW fanboi. I’ve desperately tried to find something, anything else to play. But I keep coming back to WoW because I do enjoy it, much more than anything else currently.
Rather than fully explain myself, I’ll sum it up by saying I think ports are bad for the game when other travel options exist. I believe automated travel (flight paths) is better than ports but not much better due to “in flight, afk.” Direct control travel, even fast flight, is good. In fact when it comes to direct control travel, I think WoW nailed it and is improving the experience by giving mounts at 20.
I hope not to offend… IMHO WAR is a mess and disaster on almost all levels. I’ve never felt more burned and dissatisfied by a game than that one. To Mythic’s credit, they did get some things fantastically right, just not much. I agree with your comments on WAR and that’s all I’m going to say about it. Bitter? Yes, how could you tell. 🙂
Lets look at the one zone Blizzard did revamp for leveling players: Dustwallow Marsh
Since that was added in 2.3 I’ve leveled two characters.
The first was a mage who hit that level range almost right as it was released. The zone was cool, it was different, and even though I was there within a month of releae – – – it was empty. I saw maybe 4 or 5 other people leveling and another 4 or 5 people trying to get a spectral wolf pet on their hunter. Then I was passed the zone and into vanilla WoW – where I saw the same number of people.
The second character I leveled post-2.3 was a Druid. And I didn’t bother doing those quests. Instead, I leveled in STV (for the first time in 3 years) and saw around the same number of people ALSO leveling (and a larger number of high level people ganking).
With the Achievement system I went back to the revamped Marsh and did the quests on my Paladin as I was working towards the Loremaster achievement. And yet – the zone was still empty. Completely deserted.
Next time you’re online, do a /who 25-50 and I have a pretty strong feeling that you will get less than the 49 people cap availalbe on /who.
Why should Blizzard revamp another zone? Or why should they create an all new level 30-40 zone somewhere? There aren’t enough people coming through the game to justify the expense.
I also find it odd that it would be OK if Blizzard were to go back and “update” the old zones with the newer quest types we see in Outland and Northrend, but it’s NOT OK for Blizzard to zoom people through those zones. I would think changing an old zone would be even “harder” on those nostalgia feelings – because at least with the current plan players can go back and enjoy the old game.
“The MM in MMO stands for Massively Multiplayer. I take this to mean social with lots of people. Unfortunately simple reality is there are few to no people at low levels any more. It stands to reason that if your game is about playing with other people, you want to get new players playing with other people.”
…
“Why should Blizzard revamp another zone? Or why should they create an all new level 30-40 zone somewhere? There aren’t enough people coming through the game to justify the expense.”
The family and I just resubbed to City of Heroes. It works well for my wife, who’s currently buried in school and work. After a bit of time with our old mains, we decided to start some new characters.
So far we’ve done probably 90% new content. Radios, safeguards, Hollows, Faultline, Midnighter, etc.
The comments above point to the self-fulfilling nature of what Blizzard has created. WoW is all about the endgame, so its players think it’s all about the endgame. In CoH, new revamps of lower zones are fun. In WoW, nobody cares, because top-level raiding is what it’s all about. That leads to the “leveling = training” mentality.
If that’s what people enjoy, fine for them. My big concern is what this has done to the playerbase for MMOs. I think this attitude did massive damage to WAR – Mythic created a game that was fun at all levels (I actually think it was MORE fun in Tier 2), but a majority of the playerbase didn’t care, they just wanted to get to max level as fast as they could. There’s no appreciation of the journey, because for them there IS no journey.
WoW may have brought a massive influx of players to MMOs, but in the long run I worry that it may also have destroyed the genre. It often feels like the playerbase of WoW, as a whole, can’t even imagine another way to play the game. I actually fear for Old Republic because of this – the idea of stories worth reading, complex interactions, and actual consequences is something completely alien to most WoW players. I desperately hope Bioware sticks to their guns and makes their game, but I fear the example WAR has given us.
I do wish that WoW would implement a way to turn XP gain off, though it is too late for my new main. I played from open beta until early 2006 or so, but very casually (my highest level char was 53, so that is how casual I was). I recently came back in May 2009, and started a new main. My new main is now level 59. I would have liked to pause XP gain at a few points to finish out some quest points and/or instances without trivializing the content. IMHO, that seems like the best compromise between allowing people who need/want to level fast, and letting those so inclined to max out enjoyment of vanilla WoW.
That said, I still hit almost all the instances within the appropriate level range, mostly with PUGs and less than half with a high level getting an achievement. The LFG tool works pretty well to allow lower level toons to keep questing while waiting for 5 like minded people to run an instance, at least on my server. I am still enjoying vanilla WoW (and in fact have yet to buy either expansion). I haven’t decided if I will buy BC, or level one of my alts when my main hits 60, since I am mostly playing WoW during my maternity leave while nursing the baby (it beats surfing, which are the 2 things that keep me busy so I don’t go nuts, but aren’t taxing at 2am after a week of 4 hours of sleep per night).
@ WoWMom:
With patch 3.2, they will be implementing a way to turn XP gain off. While this is meant to level the playing ground for twinks vs. non-twinks in PvP (people who have turned XP gain off will be funneled into their own separate twink BGs), it carries over to PvE as well.
With the announcement of that new mechanic, I wouldn’t be suprised to see 1 or 2 realms get designated as “unofficial” classic servers, where folks interested in old-world instances can congregate. While it won’t be a true classic server, it’s definitely a step in that direction.
Hahah….Doing some bored random searches at work and I come across this post.
It’s been a while since your last post….but I still remember those good times as well. I won’t be coming back to WOW anytime soon since they screwed over old school PVPers….but it was fun while it lasted! I remember rolling over all the “A” teams in WSG/AB and eventually having alliance teams quit as soon as they saw us. Haha…good times good times.
Wonder how others are doing…Sunwukong, Demos, Lights, Zizek, ninetailfox, and many others I can’t remember atm….
I personally miss the TBC perioid of WoW, vanilla wasnt all that great imo