I miss the old days of WoW, back when (Sorry for non-wow players) MC, BWL, ZG and AQ were the badass things to master. That's right, old world WoW. Now, it's all these instances that take like, an hour, if that. Remember when it was hard to find groups, and harder to keep them, and even harder to finish an instance before getting sick of people? I actually miss those days. The game was a challenge. It made the rewards more rewarding. Back in the day when if you had more than 1 mount, people shat themselves. Back when Reputation grinding was needed for progression. As in, needed rep to beat areas, not just to get crap.
Long Chain quests to gain access to areas / Bosses. MC anyone? Getting Keyed for Onyxia? BWL? How pissed were you when those instances were just handed to people once they got Burning Crusade? Then all those epics, which actually felt epic, were replaced by greens. Nowadays, if you're not walking around in all purples, you're a noob. They made WoW way too easy.
Even the new stuff is not that hard. I mean, back in the day, you HAD to mana-manage. You HAD to have pullers. You HAD to have people who knew how to play their class. If you made one wrong pull, one accidental double pull, odds are your group was dead. But if you look at the majority of instances in WotLK, EVEN HEROICS, groups are spread so far apart, you'd have to TRY to make a bad pull. The first area in AQ20. Wasn't that a fun set of pulls? I was a hunter in those days, and it took timing.
What makes me really sad is that people can just PUG end-game stuff. Yes. End-game PUGing. When an end-game instance is able to be pugged, that's when things have taken a turn for the worse. Even the difficulty of Onyxia, a re-released single boss instance from Old-world, has been toned down to cater to the masses. 'But wait, they do have a 25-man Ony!' 25 Man Ony, at first glance, would seem harder than 40 man. Less people means harder, right? Wrong. The instance is just as hard as 10 man, which is so much easier than the old 40 man.
40 people in an instance. It's almost crazy. That's what we used to do, for you people who hopped in WoW post-BC. It took orginization. It took leadership. It took effort. There was a NEED to be in a guild. There was a NEED for officers and ranks in guilds. There was a NEED for the DKP system. 25-mans killed guild raiding, IMHO.
It's not just the difficulty of the instances that's making me quit either. Remember the days of Warlock summons? Back before the whole 'Meeting Stones' thing, which then became 'Summoning Stones'.
I've been talking about PvE most of the time, because that's the stuff I know most, but now I want to talk about PVP. Remember when the Honor System JUST came out? It was fantastic. It made it required to gain skill in your classes. You could show off ranks. If you made it high enough in the ranks to earn some Epic Gear, people knew you by name and reputation. They would line up to get in battleground Queues with you, just to feel the power. PvP between servers killed that. It killed the lines to get in BG's though, I'll give them that. And the Arena system was a nice addition, but the ranks should have stayed.
Mounts were expensive, flight paths were long, Summons were Warlocks only, dungeons were hard, classes took skill, PvP was within the server, Honor was earned and not just handed to you, and guilds were required for End-game. Good bye World of Warcraft. Rather, good bye to what it used to be.
No comments:
Post a Comment