News Nostalrius team meets with Bilzzard's top guys to bring WoW legacy servers to life

Dogbert666 · 9 Jun 2016

Private server volunteers meet with Blizzard's top brass to make legacy servers a reality.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2016/06/09/nostalrius-meet-world-of-warcraft-team-bliz/1

DriftCarl · 11 Jun 2016

To be honest, I might play again if we could experience a bit of old style WoW.

I doubt I would play for long, but just to do some really hard 40 man raids again would be nice

Weekly_Estimate · 11 Jun 2016

I miss the AV battles we use to have for days on end!

t5kcannon · 12 Jun 2016

DriftCarl said:

To be honest, I might play again if we could experience a bit of old style WoW.

I doubt I would play for long, but just to do some really hard 40 man raids again would be nice
Click to expand...

I'd definitely play again if Blizzard opened a classic server. Classic was not really about raiding, but more about community, developing professions, exploring and questing. Back then doing things took more time, and it was time well-spent as the world had a wonderful quality. Seems to me the modern WoD WoW is a different game to Classic, with a different appeal. Quite a bit of what made Classic good has been lost. It would be great if Blizzard opened a Classic server, and allowed players to experience that memorable iteration of WoW.

IamJudd · 12 Jun 2016

Agree... Although I don't have the time, I'd rather play classic than legion...

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Harlequin · 12 Jun 2016

I remember classic WoW.

I remember because there was not much to do at 60, Blizzard drew out the leveling process by filling it full of tedious “busy work” that was designed to be time consuming but without the advantage of being more fun or interesting or even having better rewards. They did this by doing things like sending you running (literally) all the way across the world to talk to someone, only to have them send you back again. To further this goal, travel was intentionally made slower than hell. You didn’t get your first mount until level 40 and even then it was the slow one. People think it’s “too easy” that we get our mounts earlier and cheaper now? Well, I’ll counter that my gaming experience was not enhanced, nor did I become a better player, from the “challenge” of running the full length of Azeroth on foot.

I remember having to sit at the computer through long taxi trips because you had to reboard the bat at every flight stop, which was aggravated by long, inefficient travel paths that often circled back on themselves or took long detours.

I remember if you talked a friend into joining the game to play with you, well, you better make a new toon to play with him because it’s going to be months and months before he catches up with your main… if he doesn’t get burnt out trying to do so and quit before then. And boy, you better hope you like that class you’re leveling as much as you did when you made it, because if you have any semblance of a life, it’s unlikely you’ll have the time or energy to reroll after you’ve hit the level cap.

I remember doing long quest chains or completing arduous journeys only to be rewarded with a [white] item or something absurd like a +spirit 2h axe. Some slots, like trinkets and necklaces, were just very hard to find in general. I began raiding, as a rogue, with the +dodge Alterac Valley pvp trinket and the damage absorption one from Araj the Summoner because little out there was better.

I remember the amount of crap you had to carry back then. Everyone’s bag space was filled up by reagents, specialty tools and class-unique items, not to mention materials needed for professions. Of course, many common items only stacked in tiny quantities, if at all. Many of your bag slots were also permanent inhabited by other crucial items like keys. Forget even carrying fun items like pets or more than one mount. And professions? I remember items that gave you bonus to +skinning but were not skinning knives, so you had to carry both, and mining picks that you could not mine with. I remember when you had to keep every level of enchanting rod. Of course, you probably never used those low-level enchants anyway because the profession UI didn’t used to have a search feature to find them even if you wanted to.

I remember missing entire dungeons leveling up, or else having to wait until everything was grey or green so three of us could underman the place, because it was next to impossible to find groups with the laughable LFG chat. Additionally, if you weren’t part of the first pack of people to hit 60, it was really hard to even find people to do “end game” dungeons as well; after so many 45 minute Baron runs, attunement chains, fire resist farming, or just from running them a million times because there wasn’t much else to do, everyone would rather eat glass than visit those places again to help you.

And I remember when running a single dungeon a full evening’s commitment, and even then you often didn’t finish. I remember that it took a significant portion of time to traverse the map to get to their locations because summoning stones didn’t exist, and once there you could expect to spend four or five hours inside, much of that time spent being lost or mindlessly killing (or rekilling after they respawned) packs of trash. Worse yet, we had to run some of them (like BRD) many, many times to get the gear and attunements we needed before we could even think about doing cooler things.

I remember the ungodly long run back to Blackrock Mountain after a wipe. Ask yourself, is it challenging to waste a quarter of your raid time because the run back after a wipe takes ten minutes, or is maybe just frustrating for no good reason? Blackrock wasn’t the only offender; I remember dozens of other places where the nearest graveyard, flightpath, inn or mailbox was obnoxiously far away for no apparent reason. You spent more time being inconvenienced by little things than actually playing the parts of the game that were fun.

I remember raiding was the only way to better yourself at 60, and unless you found a (large!) guild to do that with, it was farming twilight’s hammer in Silithus or grinding undead in Eastern Plaguelands to do, and that was pretty much it. Practically every epic in the game was only available through devoted raiding. There were no crafted or reputation based ones that a dedicated person could work towards on their own with effort. If you didn’t have time to raid or know enough people, you might as well just cancel your subscription once you hit 60. There were few solo activities, no dailies, no achievements, no titles, no cool rewards to unlock.

And for every person I hear pine for classic raiding, I remember a dozen people who swore if they ever saw lava again it would be too soon. People frequently described Molten Core with the same adjectives they might use to talk about a kick to the groin. I remember raids being a logistical nightmare to wrangle 40 people, although this was partly made easier by the fact that half of them only had to be “warm bodies” and there wasn’t really any need to contribute more than that. Difficulty was often related to abhorrent resistance gear checks, aggro problems from white damage, or the aforementioned logistic struggles, rather than impressive and challenging strategies requiring teamwork and skilled execution.

I remember armor pieces, including class sets, being itemised as if they let a monkey pull random stats out of a hat. Holy paladin wearing agility or a warrior with spirit? Of course. You wore armor with stats that were useless to you, because that’s all there was. Dungeon sets had +armor bonuses, whether you were a tank or a healer or a mage, and nothing was oriented towards a particular spec or playstyle or role.

I remember most classes only had one spec they could play on for PvE and many of those being just one trick ponies. If you were a shaman, you were resto and it was just because your raid needed you to drop mana tide for the real healers. Rogues were combat, warriors were tanks, and druids could do a wide variety of things poorly. Shadow priest? Ret paladin? You’re joking, right? Of course, the revelation that the class you picked may be laughably bad would often only be discovered after you’ve already invested months of work into getting it to the level cap. Surprise!

I remember when talent trees were littered with stupid talents like rogue’s (original) throwing specialization or parry for hunters, or were totally schizophrenic like shaman’s enhancement tree where you would take absurd talents to improve your shield block because it was, ironically, a prerequisite to the tier that taught you to use two handed weapons. Even if a particular talent tree had avoided containing useless talents, there was no guarantee it would be a balanced and playable spec choice.

I remember when there were no mage tables, soulwells, or summoning portals, and we brought those classes so they could spend the first thirty minutes of our raid just making water and cookies or summoning people one by one.

I remember when HoTs didn’t stack and only one person in the raid could use them. I remember when they increased the boss debuff limit from 8 to 16, but people had to be careful what they put on the boss lest it push off something more important. I remember being a rogue who used sharpening stones instead of poisons for that reason. I remember five minute paladin blessings. I remember when hunters couldn’t trap in combat and feign death killed them if they did it for too long. I remember when group buffs and max rank spells could only be learned from raid-drop books.

I remember before Guild banks and linked auction houses. I remember nicknames like “Lagrimmar” and being nearly incapable of playing in those cities on even the newest machine due to the horrible crowding and resulting server latency.

I remember being so poor at 60 because there were no dailies to balance out my gold loss from raiding repair bills. I had no epic horse because the only way to get one was to spend my precious little time in-game grinding mob after mob after mob for coins or playing ebay on the auction house just to get enough money to buy it.

I remember waiting hours and hours to get a single battleground match – if I was lucky enough to get one at all; I also remember sometimes logging off after hours of playing and never seeing the match pop.

I remember each faction arguing – justifiably — that the other had an edge in PvE and/or PvP because they didn’t even have access to the same classes, buffs and abilities, including staple buffs like Kings, Might and Wisdom.

I remember when you had to install addons to get many things that are base functionality now, like more than one action bar, auto-loot, scrolling combat text, and all the other great addon features that WoW took and made standard, including snazzier things like voice chat, threat management, instance maps, and gear-set management. I remember the original chat window and auction house interface. I remember before you could shift-click links of quests and items into chat and before you could track quests on the side of your screen. I remember the time before target-of-target. I remember when they added the “dressing room” and the ability to buyback things you’d accidentally sold.
Click to expand...

rose tinted goggles if you thought vanilla was the best

t5kcannon · 12 Jun 2016

Harlequin said:

rose tinted goggles if you thought vanilla was the best
Click to expand...

Sorry, but it not about which expansion you think is best. In fact, which expansion you think is best is a totally different point. The point is that the Classic game has a significant following and (like it or not) some players do want to play that version. It's a little like trying to determine which Pink Floyd album is really the best one: Preferences vary so that it really does come down to personal taste. But imagine if there was no way to enjoy your most loved Floyd album, because they wanted you to only listen to the latest one? That's a nasty thought. Sadly this is the case in regard to WoW. There is no way for players who want to play the Classic game to enjoy it. So they resort to private servers, which are a less than ideal option. Giving players the option to play Classic is something I do hope will be offered.

noizdaemon666 · 13 Jun 2016

Who is Bill and why is he so hard?

Check the article title

nimbu · 13 Jun 2016

I doubt it will work as much as I would love to see old school 40 MC raids.

Vanilla player mindsets are extremely different to Blizzards current userbase. No one is really going to be prepared to put in the graft required to make such raids work.

Though Shaman +2H with triple WF makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5d-Gvx6-FI)

Harlequin · 13 Jun 2016

raggy fight using pre raid gear? lol - you needed to mule runs into BRD for thorium brotherhood rep , to get the tank FR gear for raggy!

mi1ez · 15 Jun 2016

BILZZARD!

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News Nostalrius team meets with Bilzzard's top guys to bring WoW legacy servers to life

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