Just wondering...Follow

Am I the only one who would like vanilla-wow servers to be introduced?

oh geez - do we even have to go into this "he's also very helpful which you of'course don't know anything about" thing? I mean seriously, I've been reading these forums for as long as I can remember, and I remember being helped by anobix - I do know who he is.

I must say though, that even though you totally misunderstood me (really thought I was explicit enough (you even qouted it yourself), but ok, my bad) I liked the way you turned the "cutiepie" thing around ;)

But seriously, the "generic-non-mage"-question you are talking about origins from me playing a mage (mostly, but also a feral/resto druid (depending on weekday - lol) and from some of the troubles I've felt as a mage since TBC launched. Let me ask a second time, would this be explantion enough for you to maybe give me some reasons why you would be against such servers? It's not like you would be forced to play on them :S

I think we need to move on from pre-TBC WoW. There is no point in putting out servers that is classic WoW. Even if they did do that, it would be really unpopular and would likely get a few senior executives cut.

1) This is not a game that is hosted over BNet, WoW is a constantly evolving world. There were a lot of class fixes and changes that makes the classes what they are today right at this moment. Take them all out and we get the old flaws back.

2) 40 man raids is a burden. On paper it looks nice, more people more interaction right?

In reality, 40 ppl meant more chance of getting deadweight and deadweight got by because more people took the extra load. You could get 10 people hanging on the coat tails of 30.

Now shrink the number to 25 and suddenly a sub-par dpser/healer gets found out really quick. Add in all the stuff you need to do in a boss fight, losing one person really hits the raid hard. 25 mans are harder than 40 mans are.

Social interaction?
Its a blast, the raid is more close knit and coordination is better.

WoW is better for getting rid of 40 mans, 25 mans also meant that more people got to enjoy high end pve content that the devs and designers spent so much time to make.

Back in the day, only a really really small amount of people got to see the insides of AQ40, and dare I say Naxx?
Now in my server alone at least 10 guilds (over both sides) are working on content inside T5 raids and beyond. I do not miss 40 mans, my guildies who done them do not miss them. I am quite sure even DnT folks do not really miss them.
If you do, power to you but Blizzard is not going back to the old model that so many people hated. Hosting a seperate set of servers to go back in time is definately not an option either.

3) PvP that was pre-TBC is lolpvp, the rank associated with it was a testement of how much time one had on their hands and not a true measurement of skill.

Ask anyone who is a pvper now and they would tell you that arena was and is the best thing that ever happened to them. I guess the 45k that Pandemic just won for themselves after winning 2 stirring best of 5 series against Mobforce really helped this cause. Arena is almost as good as a E-sport. Give it a few more tournements and it will really take off.

If the "balance" you talk about involves people wearing T3 wiping the floor in BGs then you just do not understand the meaning of the word. Do not use it in that context again. With arena, gear nullifies gear and skill/built dominates. One can recognize the difference in being outskilled or outgeared.

I see that you are saying that SSC/TK are pretty boring minus Vashj and Kael but when I look at your gear I am going to assume that you haven't raided much past Gruuls/Kara and I checked your guild who hasn't downed more than Loot Reaver and the Loot Below. Do you know how the other fights are through a different source or experienced learning them? Sorry I don't mean to make this an attack, just I don't like it when an entire raid instance is called boring/trivalized when you have only seen (or downed) 2/10 of the bosses between the two.

Edited, Dec 3rd 2007 9:13pm by Anobix

Hosting pre-2.0 servers only would not be feasable, economically, for Blizzard. Coming from a coding background, if you think about this game as just a piece of software, you would basically fork the software at the 2.0 point and then maintain both a 1.x version and a 2.x version (soon to be a 3.x version). If you've ever looked at the way companies do business, you would see that they generally maintain only patch-stream of a product going at any time.

This would be similar to saying that Windows XP needs to have a SP1 release that is supported and a pre-SP1 release that is also developed on. It would basically double the support/maintenance costs at Blizzard.

That is why I think it wouldn't happen. I cannot say that I loved or hated the 40 man raids as I dinged 60 just a month before TBC came out, and my guild at that time stopped raiding to wait for the launch. They were at the spider boss in Naxx at the time, I think.

I don't look at it as welfare epics, I look at it as a means to not need to raid the same place for 3 months to finally see the Mage helm drop, where in the current iteration it became much easier to separate loot and make people feel like they have a chance at getting something. It also helps that when there are 25 people there they need to work better in unison and that there is a larger chance for each of them to get loot (which should keep more people around). My old guild (pre-bc) only raided MC/AQ20/ZG we went back post-bc and did a bit of AQ40 with about 20 people, was okay, but not outstanding. I just like the way that progression works in the new world as opposed to the old. There aren't are not as many strict gear checks, which I believe is a positive and a negative.

Rule 3'd and 4'd



I did all of the old endgame content before TBC came out, and I don't want to go back. Getting 40 people together to do anything was horrendous, and you had to have a high tolerance for stupidity that people just cannot get away with now.

The old honor system was utter crap; the new one isn't much better, but the old one just... sucked. PvP Balance is considerably better now than it used to be.

True on that count but the BG honor program is meant to be grind now. It was meant to be a ladder pre-TBC, it turned out to be a grind and a ladder at the same time. Mind you if the ladder was measuring both sides it would not be so bad but the ladder only measured one side. You are not competeting with Ally or Horde to climb the ladder. You are doing it with Joe Schmoe the Tauren warrior on your server. Remember the arenas are meant to be the meaningful form of pvp now not BGs, I say again that its a grind. Call it welfare or lolezmode or whatever you like, Blizz made the call. 85% of the players liked it, end of story.

Almost all the High Warlords and Grand Marshals (the rank 14s) do not want to do it all over again. This was the case when you wanted competitive pvp toons, each toon had to go through the grind to R14. Most if not all would say that its a matter of how much time you had and not how much skill you had. Devs had went on record to say that they made a mistake making the honor system into a grind *** ladder.
We do kinda have a another problem with Challenger, Rival and Gladiator ranks but thats another story.

BG dailies have done more than enough to dispell "the grind AV till you have enough honor then go grind the marks" situation. You also more or less get around the same amount of honor from the other BGs. The only thing AV has going for it is the amount of time spent in it. Looking at honor/hr alone, AV will still win. Honor/game is about the same now as long as you stay till the end.

Resilience and ratings is the new PvP. The days of 1 shots are over. There was a time when warriors can 3-4shot everything in their path, but those days are about over too if you had enough resilience. PvP mages can have 10k hp now, with iceblock becoming trainable mages will be more sturdy with or without icespec. I still expect it to the predominant spec for Mages doing PvP though.

5v5s, 3v3s and 2v2s are balanced against class composition not individual classes. 5v5s has its issues and tweaks are being made to make individual classes more competitive. Hunters getting mortal shot, dispell arcane shot and deadzone reduction was a direct measure to address the issues that hunters faced. They had a even bigger problem than mages do. Mana wars is an important part of arenas now, Pandemic won several of their games by winning their mana wars when they took on Mob:Turtleforce. The fact that outside organizers are looking at 3v3 more is a major wakeup call to Blizz. They will be more changes to the format and the balances surrounding the format.

I am proud that I managed to dodge my guild's attempts to make me take T1 throughout MC :D

Blue +dmg gear + Zul'Gurub loot ftw.


To make this post somewhat on topic:

No.

Good point, why is it that you can't do this ... it's all just a matter of self-control. Get yourself and a bunch of your friends to 60 and do old content till it comes out of your ears, thay way you can make it as hard on yourself as you want.

I never raided pre-tbc, I have only heard of how much an absolute nightmare it was trying to get 40 people together, and working together. My current guild-mates are all MC / AQ40 / BWL "Vets" ... they've been there, done it all (at least most of it) ... and firmly maintain that it sucked. The result of which is that our guild charter specifies quite clearly that if we never do 25 mans, it's perfectly cool ... we'll do 10 mans together and have fun doing it .. if we never progress, but continue having a blast ... then we're succeeding, and I'm perfectly happy with that.

As for the old honor system ... I've owned far too many players in BG's with "Grand Marshall" above their heads to know with absolute certainty that they got that title simply cos they were able to put enormous amounts of time in, not because they are skilled PvPers (yes, I suck, and I can still beat them !)

You want to do well in Arenas today ... you have to be able to PvP properly. No, I'm not talking about getting the gear as a measure, cos everybody can get that .. I'm talking about making it to the top of the rankings ... Putting in time more than anybody else doesn't guarentee that ranking ... it used to, not any more. To me, that's an improvement.

So ... "Are you the only one who would like Vanilla Wow Servers" ... probably not, but you are so much in the minority, your collective subscriptions for the next year would probably not cover the capital outlay required to run a seperate infrastructure to give you what you want.

Now ... let me ask THIS question ... Am I the only one that sees a market for a perma-death server ;->

Male Gnome mages are doomed to ridicule no matter what we wear.

;-;

Now you're splitting hairs ... gaining XP doesn't mean you hve to upgrade your skills and talents ...

What is it exactly that you're after ... experience old world content, or simply trying to get your own way ... because you can still do both without having a server dedicated to an old version of the software !!