I was lucky enough to play WoW when it first released. Nothing will ever come close to the experience of Vanilla & the first two expansions. There were no aggregate sites with all the info/strats/drops/… it was pure discovery.
I remember doing Onyxia for the first time with randoms and getting our asses whooped like you wouldn’t believe. Then someone told me that Molten Core would soon be released and contain TEN of these bosses back-to-back. While we could scarcely fathom bringing one down.
Suffice to say, our first foray into MC (again with randoms) was… painful. Got our asses whooped again, this time by the trash mobs there.
Ahh, memories…
Yeah it was wild. There were so so many things to discover, just wandering around. I remember getting stuck in the sewers of undercity once. My finest moment 😁.
I remember doing Onyxia for the first time with randoms and getting our asses whooped like you wouldn’t believe.
LEEROOOOOOOY!
Lies, there were no randos for any 40m raids, only some zg, later maybe aq20. Winning anything, looting anything was too low chance, compared to so big repair costs and highly chance of just wasting time.
Also limit of 8 debuffs on a boss, bye bye afli warlocks.
Lol there were definitely rando mc raids at the beginning. They weren’t very successful mind you, but people did get some purples from trash which were insanely better than any other gear at that point. Eventually they got enough people geared and trained to do the first few bosses. Reaching Raggy was, at that point, only possible for dedicated raid guilds.
Ah, trash mobs, fair, these were there.
I just started playing on Turtle WoW a few days ago and never had as much fun in WoW before. Just amazing classic+ experience and a really nice community. Also free, is pretty nice.
Turtle WoW is just amazing. This is how you release new content without power creep or losing meaning from the existing content. I never enjoyed WoW more than with Turtle.
I’ve been loving Turtle Wow too but can’t figure out how they haven’t been sued by Activision/blizzard?
They just were, you can read up on it but from what i understand they actually didn’t want to destroy the data this time but instead have it handed over.
It’s too bad there are no private servers like Turtle, Ascension, or Epoch. It would really suck to be able to play an enhanced version of classic wow for free.
Yep. What an absolute shame that they don’t exist…
And this is why mmos have remained a stagnant, boring festering pile for multiple decades…
Maybe YOUR mom has.
Edit: Oh, mmos, my bad, OP. No offense intended.
I would say it’s WoW style MMOs that are. Other options can be interesting.
Foxhole and at some point Anvil Empires for example are very different.
Yeah I heard EverQuest got bought and re-onlined but I’ve heard it’s not great and iirc they tried to add micro transactions.
I just wanna kill space frogs inside the moon like it’s 2005.
I remember a lot of love for the Guild Wars franchise and for the Star Wars: The Old Republic MMOs.
But as a business model, they’re dinosaurs in every sense of the term. Very expensive to produce and maintain. You really need a critical mass of players to cover the costs. They can’t compete on graphics/gameplay relative to your Looter-Shooters or JRPGs. And once the title launches, you’ve got this vanguard of power-users/whales who demand all your attention while the bulk of your player base burns out before they even get to the endgame. So unlike a seasonal Fortnite or Minecraft, you risk a rapid fall-off in participation unless you can satisfy both the high and low ends of the market.
When there’s one or two big MMOs, they can build these enormous audiences and clean up. When there’s a million of them, they can’t kept people engaged long enough to cover their operating costs.
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I was always a guild wars fan, in part because there’s no subscription fee.
Guild Wars 2 is still going. They do expansions every so often, but it’s been almost nothing but horizontal growth. No new level caps or gear tiers. Just stuff like “as a necromancer, you can summon spirits to fight for you instead of getting a death powered scythe” trade offs.
I am absolutely loving the expansion that was just released. Just like the one released last year, it has excellent “hangout maps” where I can just roam around and enjoy the ambience, complete random events, and find the occasional collection/achievement item. The music is gorgeous and the scenery immersive.
I haven’t tried all the new subclasses yet, but I’m having fun with the ones I have tried.
Nice! I got the new expansion but haven’t gone far in it yet. I played around with ritualist (my favorite from gw1) but reaper might still be my true love.
But I love that it’ll all just be there when I get around to it, and I can still have fun doing old content. The wizard tower convergence is a recurring favorite of mine.
I do love that convergence. It’s got the right level of challenge where you can’t just coast through it, but failures are rare. I like how they added the weekly rewards to convergences. It keeps them populated.
I mostly play engineer, and similarly it’s difficult for me to give up my beloved holosmith for the new subclass.
I was wary of the new yearly expansion format, but so far all 3 have been excellent.
I just can’t be bothered to grind through levels in an MMO anymore. I recently thought play LOTRO again, by level 15 I couldn’t be bothered with collecting 12 boar foreskins for the 25th time just to unlock more quests doing the same fucking thing. To make it worse, no one is playing helms deep, the 1 bit of level scaled content IIRC.
ESO was different by level scaling eveverything so you can play with anyone for almost anything and it works pretty well. But their cash shop puts me off.
I also don’t have much patience for “it gets fun later I promise!”.
Guild wars 2 will scale people down for earlier levels, but the majority of content is aimed at the level cap (which hasn’t changed since launch ten years ago).
I don’t know how long it would take a new player to hit the cap. With friends, I think you could get to the cap via crafting in like 30 minutes if they spot you the resources.
The community servers in the angle: “Let me introduce myself”
City of Heroes though
Keep an eye on Fellowship. It’s in EA and if you liked M+ from wow then you’ll probably like Fellowship as well.
Isn’t half the appeal of MMOs that they’re so much cheaper than doing anything IRL?
Indeed, the good and free ones are value for money. There are a LOT of terrible ones though. I enjoy Josh Strife Hayes’ YouTube channel, which covers most of them.
Is there a solid MMO that’s basic, easy going and just has a good soundtrack, story and ability to play with friends/guilds?
