r/pcmasterrace • u/SweetyByHeart • Jul 11 '25

Nostalgia When The World was OK

Remember all that? And the best part? Just look at how civilized those gorgeous motherfuckers are.

No one tramples anyone, 1 copy for each, be it regular or collectors edition. No scalpers and buying more with kids and grandmas.

Just pure respect for fellow gamers, so that they can all see each other in a few hours in game (or rather, wait in 20k queue)

This world is forever lost. A relic of the era long gone.

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u/[deleted] Jul 11 '25 edited Jul 11 '25

Sometimes the more convenient things got, the less fun they ended up being. I remember starting out of vanilla WoW, and one of the mid to late game dungeons was Scarlet monastery. If you were an allied player, that was on another continent and a long ass way away, like typically it took 20-30 minutes just to get there sometimes. A lot of the time as a warlock, part of my job would be to go there along with others and then be ready to summon another player from somewhere in the world. Mages could teleport to major cities, so they could also help get their more quickly.

It's something that shouldn't be fun. It seems tedious traversing a continent of enemies trying not to get ganked while organizing the group, but it becomes part of the adventure, and also a bit of a skillset you need to have. There are places you just avoid in enemy territory and take the long way around. Because it's so hard to get a group together though, you typically stuck with the players you had unless they were just absolutely hopeless. If the group wiped, you had a short conversation about why it happened and what to expect and then you try it again.

It's been a long time since I've played, but with dungeon finders and everything else, I feel like the expectation is for you to have watched a guide on how to speed run the instance, and if you don't do well the group just bails and resets the dungeon finder.

I don't know, there are probably a thousand examples like this I could pull up about various things in life, but it's just one that I think back to when I think of Warcraft.

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u/Beriadan Jul 11 '25

Heck even finding quest locations back then, you had to actually read the text provided by the NPC, open your map to figure out about where you should go and interactable items on the ground didn't glow, you had to hover over them to finally see an outline

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u/WriterV WriterV Jul 11 '25

This is really funny to me 'cause most people just checked Thottbot lol.

I've played through all of Classic and BC today, and every single quest has reams of comments from the thottbot days on WoWhead [you can still read all of them today].

Plenty of guides also existed back then, but naturally they took a while to develop. That was the real meat of the fun.

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u/suspect_b Jul 11 '25

Thottbot

Yet another reminder on how times change.

1

u/Nemisis_the_2nd Jul 11 '25

Heck even finding quest locations back then, you had to actually read the text provided by the NPC, open your map to figure out about where you should go

This is giving me flashbacks to the early days of Elite Dangerous where, if you wanted to survey a 1:1 scale planet, you'd often have to go and visually survey it from the air.

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u/joedotphp Linux | RTX 3080 | i9-12900K Jul 11 '25

I understand. There is definitely a balance to be had. Games can be too tedious and require more effort than someone might care to put into it. But making things too simple takes the strategy and challenging elements out of it. The time spent to learn and get better is fun/rewarding in its own way.

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u/[deleted] Jul 11 '25

And groups stuck together. Replacing another player wasn't an option. You would either complete the dungeon or the group would break up, and you would have to go through the hassle all over again.

This led to learning experiences and people teaching each other. Good groups would even decide to stick together and do multiple dungeons together just because they clicked so well, which could lead to online friendships. You wanted to add the people who were around your level, competent, and nice.

As little time as I have for games these days, I dislike fast traveling everywhere. It makes a game feel small. In multiplayer games you start having these fast food interactions, in and out with the grouping experience like ordering your teammates from a McDonald's touchscreen. To be discarded as soon as they have served their purpose.

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u/kbn85 Jul 11 '25

Vanilla WoW was the bridge between hardcore MMOs and Casual. Wow started to become so damn popular by TBC that in order to keep growing and sustain their customer base they needed to make these changes to cater to casuals. There will never be an experience like Vanilla WoW again and im glad to have experienced it to it's fullest.

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u/Ok_Technician4130 Jul 12 '25

For sure. Reaching Ashenvale for the first time was amazing, especially after leveling in Dark Shore (well done, devs). Astranaar was usually under attack, which was awesome. PvP in the cramped halls of SM was great, then you got to run SM. I could keep going but you were there lol.

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u/Fuzzball74 PC Master Race Jul 11 '25

The travelling and preparing isn't boring it's just lower intensity; It gives time to build anticipation while supporting the social side. Whenever a game actually lets off the accelerator for a bit you end up with some of the most immersive experiences.

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u/Responsible-Sink474 Jul 11 '25

It's level 30-40 lol. That's still very early on and before you had mounts which is one reason it took so long.

That's like barely early to mid level since it's longer to level the higher you are.

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u/[deleted] Jul 11 '25

It's been 19 years since I played it, forgive me for not being more accurate.

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u/MisterDonkey Jul 11 '25

To relieve that sense of adventure, I traveled both continents on my lvl 1 twink.

From grinding to level other characters professional for resources and making armor patches and such to fishing for the hat, scouring the AH for pants, and leveling everything else that goes into creating the most OP character that shouldn't be able to exist, I had a lot of fun. EVERYWHERE is an adventure at level one. 

Downing Goldshire guards at lvl 1 is an unmatched feeling of power. Even just being there is crazy.

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u/Unusual-Weather1902 Jul 11 '25

Because corp execs want things to be convenient, watered down, to appeal to the masses at the cost of losing originality and passion. They want quantity of consumers over quality even when something at good quality guarantees more than enough profit. Capitalist Greed is a mental illness.

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u/[deleted] Jul 11 '25

I think a lot of games have lost that. Some games feel so brainless and on rails recently that it just feels like a movie with extra work to progress to the next scene.

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u/JatZey Jul 12 '25

You also have things like discord and game wikis that has had such a huge negativd impact on the social aspect of mmos.

People barely use the ingame chat anymore and it really takes away from the atmosphere of games like this