World of Warcraft: Current Year

I loved having to recast seals as paladin every time I used judgement......

Well, I never raided BWL so yea, that would be why I don't remember any of that. But how long did all that stuff stay broken? Rathe Council long?

But vanilla WoW had a lot of content and percentage wise, I feel comfortable saying very little of it was broken and the stuff that was usually got fixed in a reasonable amount of time. I'm not saying it didn't have any problems but I wouldn't call it buggy overall.

It doesn't sound like you played vanilla at all, or at least not until much later. Everything in vanilla was either broken or completely imbalanced. AQ is probably the first content in vanilla that wasn't completely fucked upon hitting the servers, though the gate bullshit more than made up for that.

Getting stuck in the kneeling position after looting was my personal favorite.

Downhammer_sl said:

Getting stuck in the kneeling position after looting was my personal favorite.

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For six days.

Conveniently also when the loot finally showed up on screen before disappearing as out of range.

Foggy_sl said:

It doesn't sound like you played vanilla at all, or at least not until much later. Everything in vanilla was either broken or completely imbalanced. AQ is probably the first content in vanilla that wasn't completely fucked upon hitting the servers, though the gate bullshit more than made up for that.

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C'thun was also relatively unkillable for a good, long while, simply because of dumb shit like tentacles spawning in the stomach.

BWL was bugged for, well, weeks at least. We raided BWL for awhile with a gate that wouldn't unlock after Vael - the drakes were untauntable at launch, Broodlord had all sorts of fucked shit with him. We killed him the day after the fix went through, though we had a few 1% wipes on him. What a fucknut that place was. The only thing I remember getting fixed immediately was Razorgore gate horseshit, being able to BoP Razor, and out of combat rezzing on Ebonroc. Those got hotfixed right quick.

AQ gate is still the most bitter taste in my vanilla mouth, and having devs say C'thun wasn't bugged forever after the whole bullshit with farming nature gear in maraudon to soak on Huhuran, twin emps horseshit, C'thun trash. Ugh.

I also remember Ragnaros being an absolute bitch because he was only spawned for an hour and he could bug and you couldn't attack his sons and yada yada. Nef was the only last boss I can remember in vanilla that didn't have something truly asinine that stunted progression artificially. (Not including one boss dungeons like onyxia.)

Vanilla was terribly buggy. If you were just leveling a single character and questing, you probably didn't notice a lot. If you raided and pvp'd, your life was bugs.

Shout out to all your mages having to roll frost because everything in MC took less from fire!

Noteable good moment in wow was one of our locks taking out the entire AH with baron geddon buff on someone's pet. We did similarly with hakkar later.

You guys are pretty much talking only about raids, which were a very small part of vanilla. So yea, as someone who stopped raiding because my guild fell apart trying to kill Razorgore I had a different experience than you guys. I'm not really a Blizzard apologist I just think overall it wasn't all that buggy. Of course I'm also comparing it to the only other MMO I had played at the time, which was EQ, so the bar wasn't very high.

Khane_sl said:

You guys are pretty much talking only about raids, which were a very small part of vanilla. So yea, as someone who stopped raiding because my guild fell apart trying to kill Razorgore I had a different experience than you guys. I'm not really a Blizzard apologist I just think overall it wasn't all that buggy. Of course I'm also comparing it to the only other MMO I had played at the time, which was EQ, so the bar wasn't very high.

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Well, that's the issue. Overall, it WAS very buggy, and it was buggy because all the raids were only internally tested. AQ was the first raid that was able to be externally tested, hence less bugs.

So it's an incorrect statement to say it wasn't buggy, but that was relegated to content only a small portion saw. Which was fortunate.

Still a ton of other bugs though. Like sliding corpses, drunken flightpaths, aggressive pets attacking neutral npcs, hunters being unattackable when FD'd in pvp, weapon enchants being removed when swapping weapons, things like rogue vanish animations being stuck etc.

I could go on and on, but if you're really curious, go to wowwiki and just start scrolling through the patch notes and just see all the shit they had to fix. It's a significant amount.

Foggy_sl said:

Of course not, which is the point. Saying don't gate content just produce more is a nonsensical stance that has no basis in reality. They can only produce a finite amount that is consumed at a rate they can't even come close to matching so some form of gating is required. They have to keep people subbed; it is a business, not a charity.

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The main issue is and has always been this: they do whatever is in their power to make every little bit of content irrelevant in a matter of hours, except the last raid tier of course, which people can do once a week.
I played 50 hours or so before being done with most of WoD "content". After stepping in Highmaul, levelling zones were useless, apexis were fundamentally useless although I did that quest to do something more than sitting in my (fucking) garrison, dungeons were 100% useless, crafting was pointless and mostly useless, treasures were pointless and were pretty much stuff for completionists and factions offered pretty much nothing of value.

The game was inside the garrison and the most challenging thing to do was fishing in the open world to get Nat Pagle as a follower. We got Pepe and a Selfie camera, what we lacked was a single reason to form a group with friends (except maybe to do old MoP raids). No scenarios, which were awesome, no group content at all, unless you want to really be picky and say that the daily for apexis required a group in some places, for 200 more useless crystals, yay?

Tanaan model of adding content is better than nothing, but I prefer group content, extra dungeons WotLK style, anyway Tanaan was in 6.2, when most players had already left.

It's this I always wondered: they spend 90% of their production time to create content that is obsolete in a matter of hours. Keep it relevant for fuck's sake? Hardcore raiders can go DIAF if people doing dungeons and getting relevant loot are rustling their jimmies.

The loot animation bug persisted through a couple expansions if I recall. I also enjoyed the gryphon bug where players would remain mounted on a gryphon after landing at a flight master. It happened to me a couple times but it seemed purely cosmetic; I was stuck on the ground at normal run speed. But I saw at least one player who kept the flying speed and was zooming around all over Westfall at like 500% run speed. There was also the fun glitch of hopping on a flight path while drunk; the gryphon would turn and swerve randomly, flying you straight through walls and the ground. Again just cosmetic, you would land ok at the end, although sometimes it would DC you first. And there were a couple times I was on a flight path and the gryphon decided to just disappear completely, dropping me to my death or a very long swim to shore, depending where it happened.

Then there was a good while when the boats were all fucked. They would leave the dock without moving you with it, leaving you suspended in midair over water, they'd take you to the zone line and then just sit there stuck, they'd zone without you, dumping you in the water a mile away from the coast and in fatigue areas, and my favorite: One boat trip seemed to start just fine, but the loading screen to the other continent took way longer than normal. After a minute or two I got DC'd, and when I logged back on, I was on the boat but unable to move or act, and the boat itself was on land in the middle of Ashenvale.

Another part of Vanilla I think we're forgetting about was the server instability. For the first couple months or so there was emergency maintenance almost every day. There were server queues, horrible lag, server rollbacks so you lost loot you just got, etc. We didn't mind it because EQ was so much fucking worse.

The only one of the bugs you mentioned I ever experienced was the loot animation bug, I never even heard of everything else you listed. Queues weren't a bug, they just obviously didn't plan well enough for release server load.

I guess transferring to a low pop server on day 2 was worthwhile after all.

I'd take release day bugs on raids over what we have now, if that's the tradeoff.

The stuff got ironed out eventually. I think by the time AQ and Naxx came around they really hit their stride. I guess putting Naxx out so close to the next expansion was also a flub by Blizzard too, but at least we can say in Vanilla they never let us wait a year before we got new content.

Ao-_sl said:

I don't understand... there wasn't any character progression outside of raids except for rep grinds and the .1% drops. Wasn't the argument that vanilla was better because it didn't have dailies for alternate progression?
Unless you were doing ERP, I don't understand what you did in vanilla if you didn't raid.

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Are you being sarcastic?

Khane we are two old souls fighting for something no one else believes in.

Long live dailies. Long live false content. Long live daily zones.

Ao-_sl said:

I don't understand... there wasn't any character progression outside of raids except for rep grinds and the .1% drops. Wasn't the argument that vanilla was better because it didn't have dailies for alternate progression?
Unless you were doing ERP, I don't understand what you did in vanilla if you didn't raid.

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The hardcore progress driven guilds/people will always chew up content but for the majority vanilla WoW had challenging content everywhere during the entire leveling process. Everything now is a complete afterthought except for raiding and plays like a speed run through super Mario bros. Of course every time something other than mythic raiding presents any sort of challenge people whine like bitches, get it all nerfed and then complain there's nothing to do. They've gotten so far away from any sort of communal play though that they can't go back to actually needing other competent people around to do non raid play.

So you get solo friendly mindless content all the way around. Doesn't take long to get bored.

Khane_sl said:

I like WoW as a game for the most part. I'm an altoholic and enjoy the leveling aspect of the game quite a bit.

I just really, really, really hate dailies.

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Funny - this is exactly what I tell my buddies when they ask why I still play WoW. I enjoy turning on Netflix and leveling up alts, especially with that Zygor's mod.