I wonder how you guys did it in the past ...

[Trick]

Ah, the Olde WoW(tm).
When UBRS was a difficult 15-man raid.

I still remember how uber my guild was when we were able to 10-man UBRS with no purples...

Shaman shoulders were funny looking: http://www.kadaan.com/images/screens...106_195157.jpg

QFT. haha, awesome screenshot.

My Alliance Paladin from back then had not only the Shaman shoulders, but also all of the crafted Shaman regen mail from Silithus. Looked funny as hell, but I could spam Flash of Light all day long with 150 m/5 and 100% mana back from crits.

[Lokked]

Multibocks, I get it. EQ's questing system was ahead of its time and didn't have access to the proper technology to make it work (Natural Language Processing). That technology still isn't developed enough for use in games. Luckily on my bard I did not have to partake in any of that crap until I did my Epic.

Up until recently, Planeshift (Free, open-sourced MMO developed by a community made up of Randoms - http://www.planeshift.it/) used this exact same sort of word-search questing system, until the most recent patch when it was removed, due to user complaints. They used a NLP Engine, but it was community designed and not very good.

A person could go on and on about how tough things used to be in MMOs. EQ for example:
10% of your level's worth of XP loss on death, to the point where you can Delevel.
30min - 1hour Corpse Retrieval runs, gear stays on corpse when you die, gear was everything.
Class imbalance to the extreme. Some classes couldn't solo effectively past lvl 20. Almost no classes could solo anything that gave XP at the higher levels.
No Life-bars, no Target Indicator (if you are taking damage, you are the target), No Numerical Indications on anything.

When you think about the way things are progressing, the question I have is When will developers stop making things easier? How much further along this path can they go?

I think its just like using Game Genie The game was entertaining before, but you pop in the Game Genie, Cheat, and then the game's entertainment value lasts for about 10 more minutes before dieing completely.

[lacitpo]

Maybe I can add to this nostalgiafest

• Playing a Night Elf Hunter, thinking I was unique in planning to be a "damage dealing machine"
• Not knowing I could get a pet until about lvl 25 as a hunter and it taking almost 2 hours to hoof it back to the starting zone to do the quest
• Installing Cosmos UI without any understanding of what addons did and how to use them
• Addons that would walk your character from one zone to another for you
• Addons that could handle conditional statements in combat meaning you could create a single button that was more efficient at DPSing than a human player ever could be as long as you mashed the hell out of it.
• Raiding MC with absolutely no clue what I was doing. Basically just point and shoot with little to no strategy
• Tier 0 and 0.5 gear and working so hard to get it.
• Being so proud when I saved the 1000 gold to buy my epic mount.
• Using feign death and goblin jumper cables to save the raid from a wipe many many times.
• Having to read quest text to figure out where to go to do quests.
• The ability to scale any hill or mountain side in the game via glitches in the textures.

Vanilla wow was the most fun for me, but I think that is the same way you remember things better than they actually were. The game as it stands today is the best it's ever been IMHO. I long to return to the vanilla days when druids, paladins, priests, and shamans had to heal in raids or stay at home, warriors were the only viable endgame tanks and raiding was something you replaced your girlfriend or wife with.

But those days weren't that great. The game was just exciting and new to me and I didn't have a yardstick to measure it with. Now I see the major improvements with every class having 3 viable specs, and the content being more accessible.

[bartholomeo]

* flight from flightmaster to flightmaster, u couldn't fly more 1 flightpath at a time.
* Ubrs was a tough instance. The amount of times we had a group that didn't have the key...
* Endless runs to scholo and strat all night long. 2 - 3 hours for a run were not strange.
* 6 hour AV battles, 1 hour queue's
* The pure joy i had when I finished the paladin epic mount quest. Man that was expensive and tough !
* To this day I have no clue of what my paladin was specced for, I think dps/holy.
* Collection that 0.5/1 tier was months of work. But damn did that judgement set look good.
* More then 1 character ? Really ? I didn't start alts until my paladin had his first epic gear. And that took a long time.
* Questing in Redridge mountains at lvl 14, finding a group for that castle there, and some guy had a friend that would came over to help. That guy was lvl 40, at that time I had no idea of how high the lvl's went
* Getting my first world drop in Ashazara ( what was i doing there anyway )

man, memories.

I still play with a few guys who I met 4 years ago. They have become good friends.

[-silencer-]

Old WoW was a grind..
Back in Open Beta (October '04), those of us from closed beta knew enough of the key quest rewards and instance rewards to level much faster.

Upon release (end of Nov. '04), you were lucky to play for more than a few hours without a World Down message, and if you were on Archimonde, good luck playing at all. Those first 2-3 months were a trying time full of Bliz adding free days to our subscription to make up for lost time with unavailable servers.

Once they smoothed it all out, it was a great game.. except crafting still blew since so few recipes were worth making. The closed & open beta players had a big head start since they had gone through quest lines and knew content.. we played on Alliance Magtheridon, and I remember the first few days. The top players in level/xp were solo grinders, as quest xp was next to worthless. It was all about reducing downtime and always having the next mob nearby. 60 took about 2 weeks of solid grinding back then. Thottbot was by far the best web service, and it hasn't changed much over the years as sites like wowhead have grown. Cosmos was an awesome UI addon suite, but there were a bunch of great addons in the early days too.. like auctioneer, recap, enchantrix, etc.

When I hear players complain about the 60-70 or 70-80 grind.. (or even the current 1-60 non-RAF grind), I laugh. I'd even go so far to say that 1-80 today takes less time /played than 1-60 back in early '05.. and it's surely more entertaining as we can prod through content instead of migrating among the few great grind spots (Tanaris pirates anyone?)

I remember the days when PvP meant gathering up your friends and running towards Org or UC for some world PvP - the only kind that existed. Battlegrounds (and later Arenas) weren't out for months. Resiliance didn't exist. Neither did raids. It was a whole world to explore.. now how can a World of Warcraft 2 be made? Re-use all the lore and begin again on Azeroth with a new system? A new continent with a whole new history? Just please.. make the freaking crafting system more useful right from the beginning next time!

Edit:
And I'll never forget my first epic! Less than a week after launch, as a lowly mid-30's rogue grinding through STV (and killing the few horde high enough to level here in the proecess), I nearly shit myself when the text of a drop was purple! Of course, it was the main hand tanking mace, Ardent Custodian. I was SO tempted to use it, but I was a combat dagger rogue and there were no talent respecs. I sold it to our guild main tank for 50g (which back then was more equivalent to 10k gold today).

[Tasty]

My first group was a priest and 4 mages. This was back when you had to talent spec Arcane Explosion to be instant cast. It took forever to get to level 20 and was a good 6 levels later before I was able to clear Deadmines. But once I got the major learning curves down and the right talents, it went very well after that. I recall running SFK and SM about 70 times to get all the drops to keep them geared identical.

I did very little questing. Once I was able to take down bosses, I just farmed them over and over to get all 5 guys the drops they needed before moving to the next. Once BC came out, they became unreal with the gear upgrades a few quests in. Alas they only got to level 67 or so, Thats when it became clear that it was not a viable PvE group w/o a dedicated tank.

I started with a priest and four mage's too. /represent I remember when I finally got Arcane Explosion and talented it to instant too, was awesome

[Tonuss]

But then i realized that the very early players actually played this way. Bottomline, I'd love to hear/read stuff from the early days. How it was back then, what problems you were facing, etc ... and maybe hear if the evolution to all the things that are available now have taken away some part of the fun.

I think that it depends on where you came from. I started playing WOW with some friends after playing Everquest for a bit over two years. Aside from the ways that EQ punished players directly (death meant exp loss and a very risky corpse recovery), it really was a grind. Quests were sparse compared to WOW. They were harder to find and waaaay harder to complete, and the rewards (in exp, money, and/or gear) were horrible for the effort involved. There was no instancing of content. For the most part, ordinary exp mobs in EQ were the equivalent of elites in WOW-- they had lots of HP and they hit pretty hard. Soloing was only really possible by a few classes, and it was still very slow and boring.

In EQ, getting exp meant finding a group of people, finding an unoccupied corner of a level-appropriate zone, and pulling roaming mobs to the group. One at a time if at all possible, a few at a time if you had a competent crowd-controller. Each kill rewarded you with a microscopic amount of exp (how much exactly? No way to know for sure, the game did not provide numbers for this). Hour upon hour of killing mobs one at a time, and assuming a good group (ie, a good kill rate and no deaths) you wound up with 5-10% of your level. The next day, you'd do it all over again.

Gear was a pain in the ass to obtain. For years there was no real starter gear, and vendors sold crap armor for outrageously high costs. You were lucky to have more than a handful of pieces of gear with stats by the time you were in your 40s or even your 50s. Gearing up meant grinding mobs endlessly in the hopes of seeing a rare spawn which might drop the item you wanted. And since it wasn't instanced content, you were in one of probably several groups trying to grab that spawn. In your 50s there were (non-instanced) raid zones that you could attempt. A competent raid had 40-60 people working together for a few hours in the hopes of maybe a dozen worthwhile drops.

By contrast, WOW was a breeze. Lots of quests, outdoor mobs and quests could be solo'ed. If you had a group, you could clear instanced zones. Gear was easy to obtain via quests, via tradeskills (don't get me started on tradeskills in EQ), via random world drops, even via merchants. To be honest, I don't think I even noticed the level grind until my first character got to 50 or so.

Even now I don't consider it much of a grind, although WOW has spoiled me into being much less patient than I used to be.

[thinus]

Gear was a pain in the ass to obtain. For years there was no real starter gear, and vendors sold crap armor for outrageously high costs. You were lucky to have more than a handful of pieces of gear with stats by the time you were in your 40s or even your 50s. Gearing up meant grinding mobs endlessly in the hopes of seeing a rare spawn which might drop the item you wanted. And since it wasn't instanced content, you were in one of probably several groups trying to grab that spawn. In your 50s there were (non-instanced) raid zones that you could attempt. A competent raid had 40-60 people working together for a few hours in the hopes of maybe a dozen worthwhile drops.

In vanilla EQ they introduced epic items for each class, long quest lines and raid objectives. They also introduced these planes, Plane of Hate, Plane of Fear, etc. The aggro radius of mobs in the planes were huge and there were a lot of mobs. Usually a class that could feign death would zone in first and feign death immediately and scan for mobs. Once it looked relatively safe the whole raid would zone in at once and start killing immediately. Usually it was a race to kill fast enough before you were overwhelmed. And once you zoned in you couldn't zone out. You needed a mage to port you out.

If you wiped you had to get your corpse back as all your gear is on your corpse. This means you had to get someone to clear the plane so you could zone in and you also needed a mage friend to go with you. Corpses lasted a week.