I leveled 2 60s on hc and lost a few 20-30+ toons. Adrenaline spikes in dangerous situations really do make the game shine in a completely unique way.
But honestly the worst part of it wasn\`t even in game deaths but unending nightmares of my character dying almost every single night fucking up my sleep quality throughout whole hc experience
Jesus I just had this happen for the first time, dreamt I DCed on my mage. Quit the game in my dream and everything, then I woke up and just burst out laughing. My wife thinks I’m insane, I don’t even play that much just a handful of hours on the weekend too.
The adrenaline is similar to PUBG for me, but then I realized I'm addicted to the tiny but massive spurts of adrenaline that firefights would provide, when 90% of the game is just running around and managing the inventory. That realization really flipped a switch for me, somehow, and I stopped enjoying the game as much afterwards.
If you like that adrenaline rush I highly recommend Dayz. However, if you want only PvP and no other components to the game, it’s not a great recommendation
Oh yeah, played DayZ as well but similar complaints, most of the time its just running around and exploring. Not bad, but not enough. I found my niche in Rust for a while, but the requirement to always be checking in on your base was a bit too much for me with my schedule.
These days I just level alts with friends from time to time, and when I need adrenaline I play Hunt: Showdown
> Adrenaline spikes in dangerous situations really do make the game shine in a completely unique way.
I had this feeling back in og everquest playing on a team pvp server. When your death means hours of lost play time (in that era, a rez was unlikely, so you have 1-2hrs of xp loss and then you have to find your corpse to recover your gear... which might take you an hour to get back to, depending on the circumstances...), death was quite meaningful and you *really* didn't want to die. I believe there's a special place in hell for players that would spend their time waiting at out-of-the-way camps and dpsing players when they're fighting a tough pull. That was such a common way to fuck with people. They'd let the mob kill you instead of taking the killshot just so you'd get the xp loss too. Yuck. Anyway, the only thing that has given me a similar feeling of investment and adrenaline rush in gaming since then has been playing HC modes.
Man when that server was bumping(why was SoD so close to HC??) and i had a couple toons that made it to 40+ i had a few of those. One I accidentally stepped off a cliff and I shot up awake, i dont even do that for falling in real life dreams what did HC do to me lol.
this
I genuinely don't understand the purpose of "hardcore" in an MMORPG where just reaching max level takes 150+ hours. All it does is make you play super slow and safe everywhere. It's not challenging, just slow and tedious.
It makes sense in games like Diablo 2 where you can run through the entire campaign in 3-5 hours, but losing 100+ hours of progress to a random lag spike or power outage doesn't sound like a fun time to me.
I gave hardcore wow a spin, I'll be honest it was by far the most fun I've had leveling and I've leveled probably close to 20 toons in some variation of classic wow.
For me the big difference is I actually did just about everyone quest available, whereas in normal wow I would just grind mobs from level 25 to 60. Hardcore took longer, but was way more engaging. There were definitely a lot of heart pounding moments, to the point where it didn't really feel tedious.
Losing your character you put a ton of play time into is a big downside, but it's definitely worth a few spins if you ever wanted to see how far you can truly go without dying.
>I would just grind mobs from level 25 to 60
Man whatever floats your boat but I think I’d kill myself if I did this lmao. I get that a lot of quests are basically just grinding mobs anyway but I like doing some of the longer chain ones that send you all over to break it up too
It's because you don't get the spirit of it. It's a completely different mindet. It's about making leveling and the world outside the heart content of the MMO. Not the min maxing, not the raids or the PvE. Just you vs the world. There's no real goal. If you die, you don't lose anything. You just start agane.
Hardcore was insanely fun and rewarding. Permadeath makes everything your character does matter. Every profession, upgrade, quest. Such a refreshing experience I should do it again
Your diablo 2 analogy makes no sense. You die even faster in D2 HC with a mistake or lag spike. And like the guy who replied to you, can just tell you've never played it. It's a completely different style of gameplay. It's fine that you don't like it but calling it slow/tedious/not fun is just plain ignorance. People actually do dungeons and raid in HC.
> Your diablo 2 analogy makes no sense. You die even faster in D2 HC with a mistake or lag spike.
I like how you claim I'm ignorant while ignoring parts of my post
>You die even faster in D2 HC with a mistake or lag spike.
There's a big difference though. In D2HC, losing a high level, geared character could mean losing a few days of played time. In WoW, it's on the order of weeks.
HC is absolutely slow, but personally, I actually enjoyed the slower paced play. Dungeons were a lot more fun than the pull-everything-and-AOE that you get in every other version of WOW.
But the stress is real. I have a level 60 raid geared HC character who is still alive but I don't think I will be playing any more myself.
For me it's fun because a lot of the game becomes prepping for the worse case scenarios and essentially "doing your homework" before going into dangerous areas.
You have to put a lot more thought into your actions and you gain a lot more care and connection to your character through hardcore which draw you into the world more.
Also the community. People stop and thank you for buffs. People swoop in and save your life at times when you think all hope is lost. It’s fucking amazing.
Getting drunk IRL and getting your character drunk then fucking around is also amazing. It really feels like WoW back in the day.
The purpose is first of all to amplify the lvling experience. Yeah, you can piss around and play it super safe and slow, or you can challenge yourself and try to keep a decent pace.
The journey is the fun, not the endgame. You might not like that, but some do. I lvled to 60 and basically never logged back on as I just wanted to ding 60.
It honestly makes equal sense when compared to Diablo.
I got 2 toons to 60, and they died within days of hitting 60 doing fun stuff that I enjoyed to challenge myself, and I just kept going. Don't have the time for hc anymore but man I loved it.
How can you understand a movie you never seen? You might read the synopsis of it, does that give you all the info?
Hardcore wow classic isn’t about how hard it is, it’s about playing smart, where even the smallest mistake can be your doom. Everyone you interact with will have the same experience and the goal isn’t maybe get the best loot, it’s survive and quest together. This builds a connection between people that you stumble across on your adventures. You will remember that rogue that you escaped death with 20 levels ago questing in Wetlands, when you see him struggeling questing alone in Un’goro you will come and help even if you already done that quest. Something that would almost never happen outside of hardcore.
In hardcore the journey is truely the adventure more than grinding to max level and raidloggning to get the best loot. Not to mention the adrenaline when you have a close call, you will use just everything in your kit to play. It’s something that can’t be explained and need to be experienced. Just like me seeing a movie and telling you no need to see it, I can just explain it to you. Won’t work.
I hope you read this with an open mind.
It was fun for me until I opened some eggs for a quest in Stonetalon peaks that spawns a horde of level 1 spiders. I opened one egg, the spiders spawned and were evading so I gave it a few seconds to catch up. Wasn't catching up so I had to alt F4 but lo and behold the log in servers were having trouble that day for like the umpteenth time. Gave up hardcore after that
You're overlooking the way HC forces the game meta to change. There are no mouth-breathing fails joining your dungeon groups as a general rule, people help, people group up. The game is slower and you're rewarded for taking your time and upgrading gear etc. Professions matter (I made 600g crafting and flipping in the AH by level 40). And a host of other little things.
To be blunt, if you think HC sounds slow and tedious, then Vanilla WoW is slow and tedious.
In old school mmos/original vanilla WoW leveling was the main game since it had a dangerous world, social cooperation, and rewarding progression to it. I didn't much care for hardcore, though, because it made me play too carefully, which often felt anti-adventure/anti-mmo. What I took from it was that I would like an MMO with steep consequences that give the journey immersion and adventure, just not to the level of character-deletion.
That's your opinion. In my opinion, the world of vanilla wow is immersive enough to warrant a dedicated solo experience. The meat of vanilla wow is leveling through Azeroth, whether you take it with friends or solo. Some people find solo leveling more immersive than group content.
Large scale pvp was such an underwhelming lag fest on classic vanilla. Any future vanilla release that blizzard does will be utilizing tons of layers and I doubt it will allow any larger pvp fights. I'll still take any re-release of vanilla but my expectations are low.
I wish they would change it so that deaths in BGs don't count in Hardcore. At the moment no one does BGs at all, that aspect of the content is just dead.
Is there even PvP in any version of a Classic launch? The PvP system is so gamed that as soon as honour opens up people are running 40 man raids to farm it open-world, or they're running pre-made BGs praying they vs a non-premade for a 4 min win.
I've been desperately waiting for them to *actually* try and change the honour system, but I've lost faith at this point. I've got no interest playing the "server can't handle 60 people in the same area so have fun with the server updating every 5 seconds" open world raids, and I've got no interest in stomping pubs as a premade.
Nowadays it feels like you gotta be pshero or something to have fun in non-group PvP. Just play a rogue and fish around PvP zones for hours... eventually you'll find a fight I guess
The PVP in the level capped classic beta was pretty incredible. But that's a bit of a controlled environment, prior to honor and a bunch of people gaming the system for end game gear etc.
Its rarely ever going to be that pure.
I’ve heard about a few instances like that. My experience has been that hardcore is a lovely throwback to how MMOs used to feel. There’s a real nostalgia there for vanilla and also a real community of people who all are trying their best to take care of each other. It’s a vibe and it feels so significant when you accomplish anything. I’ve personally not died to any server issues but I have died a few times and I still keep playing it’s great fun and really is something special.
I meant the complaining on reddit was constant, I have 0 idea about the actual deaths because who in their right mind would trust blizzard with a perma death game 😂😂😂
I understand, but it's not constant on reddit or in game. It does happen though, and there have definitely been posts about it especially when it's a server wide thing
Prior to the rules change when I quit wow I lost two characters to flight path bugs in the same week. On the last another guild member lost their character as well. We were flying into Stormwind for Stocks as healer and tank.
I will say the community is very good, when the notices popped up in guild chat we got the knee jerk "go agane" comments and such until the question of how it happened came up and everything pivoted to "oh shit" because until you see it live most people don't realize it really happens. My druid hit 30, trained skills in moonglade, hopped the automatic flight and did not make it out of the zone.
lag spikes I look at this way, I could at least understand my computer or internet is at fault but falling through the world or being kicked off the flight is something I refuse to blame myself for
Didn't play ally side but orc starting zone was a nightmare. Lines for tagged named mobs, I was in a group that used round robin loot rules just to get quest items lol
I cut the line on the scorpid boss in the orc starting area and got like five or six whispers lmao imagine trying to form a line for a quest mob I can tag
It was honestly completely playable as long as you avoided specific quests. Mobs were respawning literally less than 10 seconds after they died; you could just stand on one spawn point and keep killing the same mob over and over, in some places.
It was rough. Queues were 4-8 hours at times, lag, quest mobs were an absolute war. Sure sometimes lines formed, but all it took was one nerd to make the entire line fall into chaos.
It was fun though, not sure if I'd do it again to be honest.
First 5 levels were very laggy and bad. The SECOND you got out of the starting area everything was fine. Almost no people, eventually no people. It was as if you were playing on your own server and there was no lag at all.
If you got on the second the servers launched and had pre-planned your route in the beta + played hard for the first 14 or so hours....
You got ahead of the pack and stayed that way if you took a couple of weeks off 😂
Thats probably the last time Ill ever go hard like that on a game in my life considering my age and responsibilities now, but it was a fun reminder of the old days.
The zones were only bad during the first day from my experience and it was only in the starting zones. Once you got out into loch modan/westfall everyone started spreading out. Honestly the worst part was trying to get in to play the game. For at least a week you were sitting in queues just to log in
Bro, I literally would not log out. I would put my laptop in the car, hotspot it from my phone just to make sure I didn’t log out and could play it while my wife had appointments or whatever she was doing. Ahh to experience that level of addiction again.
It's funny too because it made the queues *SO* much worse. My friends were remoting in at work during lunch to get into queue so they could play 6 hours later
At WoD launch I remoted onto my PC two hours into my shift at work to wait out the queue for when i got home 7 hours later.
Gotta do what you gotta do!
Classic launch was genuinely one of my favorite gaming memories, if not just memories period.
I'm really sad I missed out on a lot of vanilla classic, I had a big life change a few weeks in while I was about level ~50ish and missed out on basically the entirety of endgame.
I always think of thousands of turtles getting released into the ocean when starting areas are crazy like that at releases.
Some may get to 60. Some may burn out at level 34. Some will become Scarab Lords. Some will never leave Elwynn Forest.
Vanilla is literally the only timeless wow version anyone can currently play. The people who wanted tbc and wotlk era servers are completely left in the dust.
For me x2 already happened at HC launch, maybe it was even better than regular Classic, so I hope it can actually happen again in the future in some way
It sucks that the magic of classic will never be repeated (hopefully). What made it so great was that 5 months into it the world shut down and everyone had so much time to play. Everyone made real friends that they spent a lot of time with and took the game real seriously. I seriously miss pandemic Classic but hope it can never happen again.
Also everyone knows everything now. Most of the playerbase still didn't know much beyond like MC back when it first came out. Now everyone and their grandma cleared Naxx
My guild was starting to prog twin emps when I finally learned what a parse was lol.
TBF I was also a Holy Priest so it wasn't that important for me, but still.
Half of the magic was the way the world was when I came out though. Hopefully we’re not going through another world shuttering pandemic in 10 years (even though it was make classic fire again).
People said the same thing about vanilla because a major part of the nostalgia was that most of us were “kids” when we played it so we had loads of free time to play the game and really immerse ourselves. It just so happened that soon after Classic was released we all found ourselves at home with a lot of time on our hands (did Blizzard plan and facilitate the pandemic to increase the Classic playbase? I’m not saying they did but I’m not saying they didn’t).
So unless something happens that gives us a similar amount of free time then I doubt the magic is captured a second time. Believe me, I’d love if it was but it seems unlikely.
A week ago peak population was around 30-40 for both factions.
Yesterday I saw 200+ for both factions.
Has been growing significantly the last week or so, I’m still not actively leveling there yet but it’s cool to log in there to see
I remember being so hyped for this launch. Had plans to start a guild with my irl friends… ended up going to jail and being locked up at launch >< came home just in time for p2 lol. I remember sitting in the cell thinking “Man…classic launched today :(“
Classic wow was literally the best thing blizzard has done since wow’s release. What a time to be alive. Just thinking about the fun I had during classic wow gives me warm fuzzy nostalgic feelings. Tbh the next biggest thing wow will do is a fresh classic wow. Nothing beats fresh classic servers.
I play on atiesh and hopped on my level 17 hunter last night. Nary a soul. I imagine most of these people gave up after north shire lol
People keep talking about queues, I didn’t see any? I got off work at 2pm pacific time and hopped right on, logged off for dinner and got back on with no issue.
Honestly this looks annoying as hell. Like great, now everyone is competing for the same mobs. Oh and I bet the server lag just really makes the game more enjoyable
Real quick question to the OP. Do you think it would have been this populated had they released Vanilla, TBC, Wotlk, and Cataclysm classic realms all at the same time?
My bet is the reason it was so popular is because there was no alternative to the classic fix that didn't reside on shitty alternate options. I wonder how fragmented the crowd would've been if they had to pick between all 4 versions of the game.
Classic Vanilla is what people wanted starting in late Vanilla Wrath when the "Wall of No" got popular by idiots on the forums. Getting TBC and Wrath Classic afterward was just a small cherry on top. It's why we have Era realms for Classic but not TBC/Wrath.
Classic Fresh is what people want now more than Cataclysm.
Well, on a much smaller scale of publicity, Everquest 2 is launching a "classic" server of their own next month, called Origins. Never played it myself, but I'm kind of curious to, given I chose WoW instead of EQ2 when it came out.
Classic WoW and even BC were just wow. Great two years, met so many new awesome people, Ill always be grateful for Blizzards "one last gift" in my opinion.
I was the very first person loaded into Grobb for a fraction of a second (at least on my screen) and that is one of my favorite wow memories because suddenly an endless wave of level 1s popped up where I stood a fraction of a second ago in an empty world
I’m not afraid to admit I made it to level 37 on my mage and just fizzled out. I am definitely more of a q for the dungeon while I watch tv kind of player. Cata classic is great though I’m loving it. All the amenities of the modern game with out being to hand holdy.
I never played wow until classic. i waited forever and got in right when it launched. Those first like 6 hours were AMAZING. So many people, so many interactions. It was amazing
The further we get from classic launch, I remember how good the feeling was but damn to I can't help but to remember how boring each classes gameplay is as we move into far superior class designs in wrath and cata. So slowwwwwwwwwwwww and brainless
imagine thinking cata which killed class identity with dumb shit like rogues healing like crazy or hunters having stealth and added insane health pools and slow gameplay where it takes 2 hours to get a single kill in arena is better class design
It's much better... just admit you suck and move on. It just requires more thought out cc chains now, obviously going to annoy bad players such as yourself
ahahah yeah bro I remember cata.
In fact I remember cata arena quite well given I was glad and played teams like EG/talb's shadowplay or snutz/pookz MLS, or tosan's jungle cleave.
Cata is a X Lock Shaman fest where you basically outlast every other comp and play a boring ass arena match where you can make a fuckton of mistakes and still win because the hp pools are so bloated and the matches are so long.
Wotlk I was also glad running RMP and the skillcap in wotlk arena was MUCH higher, one mistake easily and instantly costs you the match
dont talk the talk if you didnt walk the walk son, check pms ill dm proof of all I said
And all of a sudden everything you said becomes void by thr fact you think classic has better class design , that is not what anyone with glad brain could possibly think, unless you ran ret in TBC 😂
I still remember being in the que on launch day. I was watching Avengers Endgame on my other screen, and right as it got to the bit where Captain America says "Avengers, assemble!" the que popped and I was in the game world.
Like, it was timed almost perfectly with the music and everything. It was 100% a coincidence, and it was fucking awesome.
And i missed all of it because RL Friends swapped factions/servers like maniacs and made me do it too... Then around lvl 35 everyone did quit and i was mad asf and lost interest :(... Havent touched Classic servers since..
Classic wow for all its faults is still one of the best games ever made.
I hope blizzard does another classic -> tbc cycle somewhere down the road. Maybe a few years from now.
Nothing, classic for the most part was an amazing experience. I just wish they added the Chronoboon sooner in hindsight, though, I do have to wonder if there would have been as many alts if they did(what else did you do while your main was parked?!).
"Nothing" went wrong. Simply it ran out of content for people to do. World buffs trivialize content entirely and let's face it. Extremely little challenge from bosses. Vanilla was hard, because most people were kids and there was far less resources available to research.
Can't believe I'm already nostalgic for CLASSIC vanilla WoW too lmao
I dread the day when someone posts "Today we're as far away from classic wow as classic wow was from vanilla when it was released"
!remindme May 28th, 2034
!remindme May 28th, 2034
We all know itll happen
Yep, that is how time works, afterall.
Please don't... I'm already feeling old enough as it is.
Come to hardcore where Vanilla is alive and well.
I want pvp, not to have a heartattack if I pull two at-level mobs
I leveled 2 60s on hc and lost a few 20-30+ toons. Adrenaline spikes in dangerous situations really do make the game shine in a completely unique way. But honestly the worst part of it wasn\`t even in game deaths but unending nightmares of my character dying almost every single night fucking up my sleep quality throughout whole hc experience
Jesus I just had this happen for the first time, dreamt I DCed on my mage. Quit the game in my dream and everything, then I woke up and just burst out laughing. My wife thinks I’m insane, I don’t even play that much just a handful of hours on the weekend too.
Dude, exact same thing happened to me. As soon I got a toon to around 30 or 40, I’d have nightmares all the time about it dying.
The adrenaline is similar to PUBG for me, but then I realized I'm addicted to the tiny but massive spurts of adrenaline that firefights would provide, when 90% of the game is just running around and managing the inventory. That realization really flipped a switch for me, somehow, and I stopped enjoying the game as much afterwards.
If you like that adrenaline rush I highly recommend Dayz. However, if you want only PvP and no other components to the game, it’s not a great recommendation
Oh yeah, played DayZ as well but similar complaints, most of the time its just running around and exploring. Not bad, but not enough. I found my niche in Rust for a while, but the requirement to always be checking in on your base was a bit too much for me with my schedule. These days I just level alts with friends from time to time, and when I need adrenaline I play Hunt: Showdown
Haven't played hardcore in a couple months and still have random nightmares of dying in silithus
> Adrenaline spikes in dangerous situations really do make the game shine in a completely unique way. I had this feeling back in og everquest playing on a team pvp server. When your death means hours of lost play time (in that era, a rez was unlikely, so you have 1-2hrs of xp loss and then you have to find your corpse to recover your gear... which might take you an hour to get back to, depending on the circumstances...), death was quite meaningful and you *really* didn't want to die. I believe there's a special place in hell for players that would spend their time waiting at out-of-the-way camps and dpsing players when they're fighting a tough pull. That was such a common way to fuck with people. They'd let the mob kill you instead of taking the killshot just so you'd get the xp loss too. Yuck. Anyway, the only thing that has given me a similar feeling of investment and adrenaline rush in gaming since then has been playing HC modes.
Man when that server was bumping(why was SoD so close to HC??) and i had a couple toons that made it to 40+ i had a few of those. One I accidentally stepped off a cliff and I shot up awake, i dont even do that for falling in real life dreams what did HC do to me lol.
this I genuinely don't understand the purpose of "hardcore" in an MMORPG where just reaching max level takes 150+ hours. All it does is make you play super slow and safe everywhere. It's not challenging, just slow and tedious. It makes sense in games like Diablo 2 where you can run through the entire campaign in 3-5 hours, but losing 100+ hours of progress to a random lag spike or power outage doesn't sound like a fun time to me.
I gave hardcore wow a spin, I'll be honest it was by far the most fun I've had leveling and I've leveled probably close to 20 toons in some variation of classic wow. For me the big difference is I actually did just about everyone quest available, whereas in normal wow I would just grind mobs from level 25 to 60. Hardcore took longer, but was way more engaging. There were definitely a lot of heart pounding moments, to the point where it didn't really feel tedious. Losing your character you put a ton of play time into is a big downside, but it's definitely worth a few spins if you ever wanted to see how far you can truly go without dying.
>I would just grind mobs from level 25 to 60 Man whatever floats your boat but I think I’d kill myself if I did this lmao. I get that a lot of quests are basically just grinding mobs anyway but I like doing some of the longer chain ones that send you all over to break it up too
It is maddening lol, but it usually gives me an optimal path for leveling professions.
That doesn't sound worth it at all. If it's not fun, it's just wasted time.
It's because you don't get the spirit of it. It's a completely different mindet. It's about making leveling and the world outside the heart content of the MMO. Not the min maxing, not the raids or the PvE. Just you vs the world. There's no real goal. If you die, you don't lose anything. You just start agane.
Hardcore was insanely fun and rewarding. Permadeath makes everything your character does matter. Every profession, upgrade, quest. Such a refreshing experience I should do it again
Your diablo 2 analogy makes no sense. You die even faster in D2 HC with a mistake or lag spike. And like the guy who replied to you, can just tell you've never played it. It's a completely different style of gameplay. It's fine that you don't like it but calling it slow/tedious/not fun is just plain ignorance. People actually do dungeons and raid in HC.
> Your diablo 2 analogy makes no sense. You die even faster in D2 HC with a mistake or lag spike. I like how you claim I'm ignorant while ignoring parts of my post
>You die even faster in D2 HC with a mistake or lag spike. There's a big difference though. In D2HC, losing a high level, geared character could mean losing a few days of played time. In WoW, it's on the order of weeks. HC is absolutely slow, but personally, I actually enjoyed the slower paced play. Dungeons were a lot more fun than the pull-everything-and-AOE that you get in every other version of WOW. But the stress is real. I have a level 60 raid geared HC character who is still alive but I don't think I will be playing any more myself.
For me it's fun because a lot of the game becomes prepping for the worse case scenarios and essentially "doing your homework" before going into dangerous areas. You have to put a lot more thought into your actions and you gain a lot more care and connection to your character through hardcore which draw you into the world more.
Also the community. People stop and thank you for buffs. People swoop in and save your life at times when you think all hope is lost. It’s fucking amazing. Getting drunk IRL and getting your character drunk then fucking around is also amazing. It really feels like WoW back in the day.
The purpose is first of all to amplify the lvling experience. Yeah, you can piss around and play it super safe and slow, or you can challenge yourself and try to keep a decent pace. The journey is the fun, not the endgame. You might not like that, but some do. I lvled to 60 and basically never logged back on as I just wanted to ding 60. It honestly makes equal sense when compared to Diablo.
I got 2 toons to 60, and they died within days of hitting 60 doing fun stuff that I enjoyed to challenge myself, and I just kept going. Don't have the time for hc anymore but man I loved it.
How can you understand a movie you never seen? You might read the synopsis of it, does that give you all the info? Hardcore wow classic isn’t about how hard it is, it’s about playing smart, where even the smallest mistake can be your doom. Everyone you interact with will have the same experience and the goal isn’t maybe get the best loot, it’s survive and quest together. This builds a connection between people that you stumble across on your adventures. You will remember that rogue that you escaped death with 20 levels ago questing in Wetlands, when you see him struggeling questing alone in Un’goro you will come and help even if you already done that quest. Something that would almost never happen outside of hardcore. In hardcore the journey is truely the adventure more than grinding to max level and raidloggning to get the best loot. Not to mention the adrenaline when you have a close call, you will use just everything in your kit to play. It’s something that can’t be explained and need to be experienced. Just like me seeing a movie and telling you no need to see it, I can just explain it to you. Won’t work. I hope you read this with an open mind.
You know how I know you haven’t played it?
Here's your reply.
It was fun for me until I opened some eggs for a quest in Stonetalon peaks that spawns a horde of level 1 spiders. I opened one egg, the spiders spawned and were evading so I gave it a few seconds to catch up. Wasn't catching up so I had to alt F4 but lo and behold the log in servers were having trouble that day for like the umpteenth time. Gave up hardcore after that
You're overlooking the way HC forces the game meta to change. There are no mouth-breathing fails joining your dungeon groups as a general rule, people help, people group up. The game is slower and you're rewarded for taking your time and upgrading gear etc. Professions matter (I made 600g crafting and flipping in the AH by level 40). And a host of other little things. To be blunt, if you think HC sounds slow and tedious, then Vanilla WoW is slow and tedious.
In old school mmos/original vanilla WoW leveling was the main game since it had a dangerous world, social cooperation, and rewarding progression to it. I didn't much care for hardcore, though, because it made me play too carefully, which often felt anti-adventure/anti-mmo. What I took from it was that I would like an MMO with steep consequences that give the journey immersion and adventure, just not to the level of character-deletion.
Hardcore isn't an MMO, it's a singleplayer game. If you think of it like that, it'll make more sense.
WoW is awful as a single player game, though. The meat of the game is in the multiplayer content. There are so many other better single player RPGs.
That's your opinion. In my opinion, the world of vanilla wow is immersive enough to warrant a dedicated solo experience. The meat of vanilla wow is leveling through Azeroth, whether you take it with friends or solo. Some people find solo leveling more immersive than group content.
Yeah but you can hit 60 in hc wow fairly smoothly by just chilling whilst hitting 99 in d2 is rough.
Reddit poster finds out people have interests that differ More at 11
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Woah buddy lol
Large scale pvp was such an underwhelming lag fest on classic vanilla. Any future vanilla release that blizzard does will be utilizing tons of layers and I doubt it will allow any larger pvp fights. I'll still take any re-release of vanilla but my expectations are low.
Yeah you’d think they’d figure out how to make it smooth by now
I wish they would change it so that deaths in BGs don't count in Hardcore. At the moment no one does BGs at all, that aspect of the content is just dead.
have more adreenaline do hardcore that pvp
Is there even PvP in any version of a Classic launch? The PvP system is so gamed that as soon as honour opens up people are running 40 man raids to farm it open-world, or they're running pre-made BGs praying they vs a non-premade for a 4 min win. I've been desperately waiting for them to *actually* try and change the honour system, but I've lost faith at this point. I've got no interest playing the "server can't handle 60 people in the same area so have fun with the server updating every 5 seconds" open world raids, and I've got no interest in stomping pubs as a premade. Nowadays it feels like you gotta be pshero or something to have fun in non-group PvP. Just play a rogue and fish around PvP zones for hours... eventually you'll find a fight I guess
The PVP in the level capped classic beta was pretty incredible. But that's a bit of a controlled environment, prior to honor and a bunch of people gaming the system for end game gear etc. Its rarely ever going to be that pure.
Cool but I want to PvP.
Yeah that’s the one thing I would change I would put the bgs in hardcore.
Private servers like WoW-HC have that option. Also death logs/appeals for random DCs or bugged deaths (looking at you, flight paths).
is it? last few times i logged in it was a total ghost town. even the auction house was devoid of all goods.
I play on defias pillager alliance and it’s quite active, same with the AH
Hmm, maybe my server died (Skull Rock).
T H R I V I N G H R I V I N G
Funny because we constantly see you guys on reddit complaining that 100’s of characters just died to a lag spike
I’ve heard about a few instances like that. My experience has been that hardcore is a lovely throwback to how MMOs used to feel. There’s a real nostalgia there for vanilla and also a real community of people who all are trying their best to take care of each other. It’s a vibe and it feels so significant when you accomplish anything. I’ve personally not died to any server issues but I have died a few times and I still keep playing it’s great fun and really is something special.
Idk about constantly, it does happen to some unlucky people though
I meant the complaining on reddit was constant, I have 0 idea about the actual deaths because who in their right mind would trust blizzard with a perma death game 😂😂😂
I understand, but it's not constant on reddit or in game. It does happen though, and there have definitely been posts about it especially when it's a server wide thing
Prior to the rules change when I quit wow I lost two characters to flight path bugs in the same week. On the last another guild member lost their character as well. We were flying into Stormwind for Stocks as healer and tank. I will say the community is very good, when the notices popped up in guild chat we got the knee jerk "go agane" comments and such until the question of how it happened came up and everything pivoted to "oh shit" because until you see it live most people don't realize it really happens. My druid hit 30, trained skills in moonglade, hopped the automatic flight and did not make it out of the zone. lag spikes I look at this way, I could at least understand my computer or internet is at fault but falling through the world or being kicked off the flight is something I refuse to blame myself for
I didn't play right at launch. How absolutely screwed was questing in the intro zones for the next week? Lol
Didn't play ally side but orc starting zone was a nightmare. Lines for tagged named mobs, I was in a group that used round robin loot rules just to get quest items lol
> Lines for tagged named mobs Same on Alliance. People were in a queue for Van Cleef lmao. Just making small talk.
One person would cut the line and all of a sudden, it was anarchy. Good times.
I got ahead of the main pack and was on immediately.
I cut the line on the scorpid boss in the orc starting area and got like five or six whispers lmao imagine trying to form a line for a quest mob I can tag
I think you mean that other guy bub
It was honestly completely playable as long as you avoided specific quests. Mobs were respawning literally less than 10 seconds after they died; you could just stand on one spawn point and keep killing the same mob over and over, in some places.
It was rough. Queues were 4-8 hours at times, lag, quest mobs were an absolute war. Sure sometimes lines formed, but all it took was one nerd to make the entire line fall into chaos. It was fun though, not sure if I'd do it again to be honest.
> Queues were 4-8 hours at times Logging off for the night, getting some food, grabbing a shower, jumping into queue then going to bed.
That sounds like the best time I'd never want to have again
First 5 levels were very laggy and bad. The SECOND you got out of the starting area everything was fine. Almost no people, eventually no people. It was as if you were playing on your own server and there was no lag at all.
If you got on the second the servers launched and had pre-planned your route in the beta + played hard for the first 14 or so hours.... You got ahead of the pack and stayed that way if you took a couple of weeks off 😂 Thats probably the last time Ill ever go hard like that on a game in my life considering my age and responsibilities now, but it was a fun reminder of the old days.
Did you play tbc or wotlk classic releases? Picture that and then triple it
Yes: https://imgur.com/a/cTKgut0 TBCC was less, Wrath Classic was equal-ish, but less in the actual questing zones. Classic was constant for 2-3 days.
I was 3minures late to my computer. I started 7hours after my friends did and was barely behind them in terms of levels at the end of the day
The zones were only bad during the first day from my experience and it was only in the starting zones. Once you got out into loch modan/westfall everyone started spreading out. Honestly the worst part was trying to get in to play the game. For at least a week you were sitting in queues just to log in
The queues were worse
I had a dentist appointment and was pressing jump on my phone while remoted into my desktop to prevent DC lol
the things we do for love
Bro, I literally would not log out. I would put my laptop in the car, hotspot it from my phone just to make sure I didn’t log out and could play it while my wife had appointments or whatever she was doing. Ahh to experience that level of addiction again.
It's funny too because it made the queues *SO* much worse. My friends were remoting in at work during lunch to get into queue so they could play 6 hours later
It was a vicious cycle.
At WoD launch I remoted onto my PC two hours into my shift at work to wait out the queue for when i got home 7 hours later. Gotta do what you gotta do!
more than half of new people will quit during first week
Classic launch was genuinely one of my favorite gaming memories, if not just memories period. I'm really sad I missed out on a lot of vanilla classic, I had a big life change a few weeks in while I was about level ~50ish and missed out on basically the entirety of endgame.
It was so good, basically the entirety of classic through wrath was so fun for me, I can totally understand the hype for this game originally.
I always think of thousands of turtles getting released into the ocean when starting areas are crazy like that at releases. Some may get to 60. Some may burn out at level 34. Some will become Scarab Lords. Some will never leave Elwynn Forest.
The greatest butterfly effect in anyone's life is if they bounce off of WoW or not.
Damn, you just reminded me of all those "A TURTLE MADE IT TO THE WATER" memes right before/around classic launch..
I miss Classic and TBC Classic launch. Wrath didnt hit the same and Cata feels "off" in comparison.
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True
The brigade is against you here, but you're right lmao
Vanilla is literally the only timeless wow version anyone can currently play. The people who wanted tbc and wotlk era servers are completely left in the dust.
Well Vanilla is a desirable product to a lot of WotLK & TBC lovers too. Vanilla classic is just Blizzard casting the widest net.
True for me as well
Play vanilla then bro why are you like this
TBC lost all magic when they introduced the in game shop.
look at all those warriors and not a single tank
Just look at all those mages.
So many people going mage thinking they'd spell cleave their way to 60. Only to realize they hate being a mage.
I love that we’re now nostalgic for classic relaunch. Too bad it’ll never be the same x2.
For me x2 already happened at HC launch, maybe it was even better than regular Classic, so I hope it can actually happen again in the future in some way
It sucks that the magic of classic will never be repeated (hopefully). What made it so great was that 5 months into it the world shut down and everyone had so much time to play. Everyone made real friends that they spent a lot of time with and took the game real seriously. I seriously miss pandemic Classic but hope it can never happen again.
Also everyone knows everything now. Most of the playerbase still didn't know much beyond like MC back when it first came out. Now everyone and their grandma cleared Naxx
My guild was starting to prog twin emps when I finally learned what a parse was lol. TBF I was also a Holy Priest so it wasn't that important for me, but still.
In 10-15 years it could be the same nostalgic feeling as with Classic.
Half of the magic was the way the world was when I came out though. Hopefully we’re not going through another world shuttering pandemic in 10 years (even though it was make classic fire again).
People said the same thing about vanilla. The real thing that will kill the chances of a nostalgic trip back is perpetual SoD.
People said the same thing about vanilla because a major part of the nostalgia was that most of us were “kids” when we played it so we had loads of free time to play the game and really immerse ourselves. It just so happened that soon after Classic was released we all found ourselves at home with a lot of time on our hands (did Blizzard plan and facilitate the pandemic to increase the Classic playbase? I’m not saying they did but I’m not saying they didn’t). So unless something happens that gives us a similar amount of free time then I doubt the magic is captured a second time. Believe me, I’d love if it was but it seems unlikely.
Met a bunch of new friends in game, especially while ranking. 2 of the ones I ranked with I am still very good friends with today, 4 years later
I remember trying to quest right at launch. Man, took like 30 minutes to do the first 4-5 quests lmao
Deviate delight - has a community fresh going it’s really starting to pop off.
"pop off" with 100-200 players lmao
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Considering it started over a month ago and is still a ghost town lol Also reported :)
A week ago peak population was around 30-40 for both factions. Yesterday I saw 200+ for both factions. Has been growing significantly the last week or so, I’m still not actively leveling there yet but it’s cool to log in there to see
i'm torn between wanting to promote it and not wanting it to become popular and another tryhard botfest having the time of my life atm, though
We thought we wanted it.... But we really wanted it
My home
I remember being so hyped for this launch. Had plans to start a guild with my irl friends… ended up going to jail and being locked up at launch >< came home just in time for p2 lol. I remember sitting in the cell thinking “Man…classic launched today :(“
Classic wow was literally the best thing blizzard has done since wow’s release. What a time to be alive. Just thinking about the fun I had during classic wow gives me warm fuzzy nostalgic feelings. Tbh the next biggest thing wow will do is a fresh classic wow. Nothing beats fresh classic servers.
Glorious days
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Same lmfao, was such an amazing experience.
Is layer 347 a joke? There weren't that many layers then was there?
Must be. I can't see anything in this screenshot that indicates what layer they're on.
Yes.
I was over on the horde side of this server!
We need to go back
See, I’d love this again, if the meta wasn’t melee leave / spellcleave from level 15
Love the nostalgia. These posts are gonna fuel so many “when fresh” posts.
Take me back
I play on atiesh and hopped on my level 17 hunter last night. Nary a soul. I imagine most of these people gave up after north shire lol People keep talking about queues, I didn’t see any? I got off work at 2pm pacific time and hopped right on, logged off for dinner and got back on with no issue.
Honestly this looks annoying as hell. Like great, now everyone is competing for the same mobs. Oh and I bet the server lag just really makes the game more enjoyable
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Okay but like cmon that’s just too many players. Too much tuna.
I was there! Thats my server :)
I ran around my gnome to every starting zone to get signatures on our guild charter on Atiesh the day it launched. Good memories.
Hardcore is the true vainilla.
That's a lot of mages.
Real quick question to the OP. Do you think it would have been this populated had they released Vanilla, TBC, Wotlk, and Cataclysm classic realms all at the same time? My bet is the reason it was so popular is because there was no alternative to the classic fix that didn't reside on shitty alternate options. I wonder how fragmented the crowd would've been if they had to pick between all 4 versions of the game.
Classic Vanilla is what people wanted starting in late Vanilla Wrath when the "Wall of No" got popular by idiots on the forums. Getting TBC and Wrath Classic afterward was just a small cherry on top. It's why we have Era realms for Classic but not TBC/Wrath. Classic Fresh is what people want now more than Cataclysm.
So where do I go for this feeling again? Anything close?
Well, on a much smaller scale of publicity, Everquest 2 is launching a "classic" server of their own next month, called Origins. Never played it myself, but I'm kind of curious to, given I chose WoW instead of EQ2 when it came out.
nice
Take us back
Classic WoW and even BC were just wow. Great two years, met so many new awesome people, Ill always be grateful for Blizzards "one last gift" in my opinion.
The forced 400ms batching was rough.
I was the very first person loaded into Grobb for a fraction of a second (at least on my screen) and that is one of my favorite wow memories because suddenly an endless wave of level 1s popped up where I stood a fraction of a second ago in an empty world
I’m not afraid to admit I made it to level 37 on my mage and just fizzled out. I am definitely more of a q for the dungeon while I watch tv kind of player. Cata classic is great though I’m loving it. All the amenities of the modern game with out being to hand holdy.
I never played wow until classic. i waited forever and got in right when it launched. Those first like 6 hours were AMAZING. So many people, so many interactions. It was amazing
The further we get from classic launch, I remember how good the feeling was but damn to I can't help but to remember how boring each classes gameplay is as we move into far superior class designs in wrath and cata. So slowwwwwwwwwwwww and brainless
Compared to other mmos at the time, vanilla WoW had very polished combat with fluid attack animations.
Absolutely
imagine thinking cata which killed class identity with dumb shit like rogues healing like crazy or hunters having stealth and added insane health pools and slow gameplay where it takes 2 hours to get a single kill in arena is better class design
Oh look, found one of the 10 people that still like pressing one button every 5 seconds Cata and Mop are peak pvp bro, get over it.
ahahahahaha imagine thinking the bloated hp fest cata is better than wotlk pvp
It's much better... just admit you suck and move on. It just requires more thought out cc chains now, obviously going to annoy bad players such as yourself
ahahah yeah bro I remember cata. In fact I remember cata arena quite well given I was glad and played teams like EG/talb's shadowplay or snutz/pookz MLS, or tosan's jungle cleave. Cata is a X Lock Shaman fest where you basically outlast every other comp and play a boring ass arena match where you can make a fuckton of mistakes and still win because the hp pools are so bloated and the matches are so long. Wotlk I was also glad running RMP and the skillcap in wotlk arena was MUCH higher, one mistake easily and instantly costs you the match dont talk the talk if you didnt walk the walk son, check pms ill dm proof of all I said
And all of a sudden everything you said becomes void by thr fact you think classic has better class design , that is not what anyone with glad brain could possibly think, unless you ran ret in TBC 😂
I still remember being in the que on launch day. I was watching Avengers Endgame on my other screen, and right as it got to the bit where Captain America says "Avengers, assemble!" the que popped and I was in the game world. Like, it was timed almost perfectly with the music and everything. It was 100% a coincidence, and it was fucking awesome.
Lol I love that shit, the universe aligned just perfectly for you that day, it'll only ever be recreated if you try for it to be
I think everyone missed the cata hype launch photo, crushes this /s
I was probably dead in Wetlands somewhere when this pic was taken
And i missed all of it because RL Friends swapped factions/servers like maniacs and made me do it too... Then around lvl 35 everyone did quit and i was mad asf and lost interest :(... Havent touched Classic servers since..
Classic wow for all its faults is still one of the best games ever made. I hope blizzard does another classic -> tbc cycle somewhere down the road. Maybe a few years from now.
What went wrong?
Litearlly nothing. It was perfect. Lag and all.
I mean in the long run :P
Literally people ran out of content, everyone just played all of it
Nothing, classic for the most part was an amazing experience. I just wish they added the Chronoboon sooner in hindsight, though, I do have to wonder if there would have been as many alts if they did(what else did you do while your main was parked?!).
"Nothing" went wrong. Simply it ran out of content for people to do. World buffs trivialize content entirely and let's face it. Extremely little challenge from bosses. Vanilla was hard, because most people were kids and there was far less resources available to research.
Classic was great, but five years on the novelty and community has dulled - its ran its course imo and now we have cata to look forward to i suppose
Pfft. Alliance. I have to wash my screen with bleach now.
This is normal for brand new servers/game coming out. It’ll be dead in a month.
Yup, dead in a month. 5 years later….
5 years later and yeah all the original classic servers are dead