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description= Originally a pair of views on gaming, it s now musings by Redbeard on video games (mainly MMOs), board games, RPGs, and other geeky hobbies.;
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sor dm and baron de ropp could have circled their collective wagons and been assholes toward the new blood but they haven t and our hobby is all the better for it the dm was married to one of the players in fact if you re not an adult it goes without saying that parental guidance is strongly suggested my oldest once attended an rpg game session in high school with some acquaintances and all of the guys there tried to hit on her character and by extension her she got really creeped out and that was the end of that posted by redbeard at 6 00 am no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels d d memes music musings romance rpgs videos wow tuesday may 13 2025 what is valuable and who decides it is luke is the dark side stronger yoda no quicker easier more seductive from the empire strikes back okay after being a classic andy for what s likely the millionth time since roughly july 2014 i began to have some second thoughts what if i am not remembering things correctly what if what i like about classic wow has an analogue in retail what if i m letting my dislike of the state of the game over a decade ago color my opinions too much well the tl dr is that i decided to do something about it this screencap is obviously not when she was brand spanking new you d have thought i d have remembered to take an initial screenshot but nope i believe this is called putting my money where my mouth is for the record livona here was created on wyrmrest accord us an rp realm with a high population in the era of shared aka dynamically merged servers this may not mean much from wowrealmpopulation com wyrmrest accord has 10 5k active characters snapshot from wowrealmpopulation com as of may 11 2025 although given the current state and capability of retail wow to create innumerable alts this might represent only 500 individual accounts okay i m kidding but you never know as you can see wyrmrest accord is roughly 33 alliance so not a 50 50 split but decently sized enough that i ought to expect to see some bodies out and about look i m no dummy and wyrmrest accord has been around as an active server since 2009 so it s likely that i shouldn t expect that many people in any starter zone my previous foray into retail with new toons confirmed that but i decided i was going to try this for more than just a few minutes i figured i d go to a zone that i was intimately familiar with and one that hadn t changed since cataclysm elwynn forest it still feels weird entering into goldshire and seeing a flight point there i mean it s a 3 minute run up to stormwind so you re not saving that much time now i knew that the cataclysm changes meant things were different in elwynn as compared to the og vanilla version but i couldn t remember just how jarring things were therefore i decided to approach this as if i were brand new to the game and didn t go to exile s reach or did it once and wanted to start over with the original experience what would make sense what wouldn t how would i feel as i played the game i discovered very early on that i wasn t going to be able to remain objective because i did have opinions and those opinions came to the forefront from practically the 3rd or 4th quest you re kidding me right have you seen how full my health bar is and how little effort it took to revive you i mean look at the comment by the npc that i healed on the battlefield i had hardly even done anything in the game and i was being called a hero for a person who prefers irl to fly under the radar this is somewhat disconcerting i kept expecting someone to pop out from behind the tree in the screencap and say ha fooled you but beyond that what stood out to me the most about the very beginning in northshire abbey was that the quest text there implied you knew things about the pre cataclysm era of world of warcraft a new player won t know that and if you relied too much on what might have been there originally in game you d only confuse a new player further before you point out that a new player might have been expecting to go straight away and play the war within i m not going there i don t think that s likely to be the case a new player to wow probably has the vague idea that the game is old now and they will likely have to start off somewhere else first before they can get to the current expansion they re called expansions for a reason and they don t replace the old game only add to it i did notice that the number of quests in northshire abbey were cut by quite a bit despite all the trainers and other original npcs still present in the game yes there aren t a lot of quests around the abbey to begin with but the speed of completion was still record breaking for me it usually takes me about 20 30 minutes to be off to goldshire in classic era but even with me loitering around a bit i was out of there in about 15 minutes if i d have pushed it i could have been done with northshire abbey in about 6 7 minutes and most of that would have been spent running back and forth from the nearby vineyard so i was off to goldshire and since i was on the way i thought it a good idea to go visit stormwind s bank to drop off some of the initial gear that i already had replaced in vanilla classic if you were lucky you might have gotten a couple of pieces replaced by quest rewards but in retail everything was replaced by the time i reached the lion s pride inn i m not sure what i expected to find in stormwind but looking like classic era servers right in the middle of tbc classic wasn t it i saw the same toon by the same npc over the course of a couple of hours no i wasn t playing straight over those few hours i just did a half an hour here and there over the course of the entire day i had things to do after all i eventually found a few toons around note the naxxramas tier set on that caster beyond the darkmoon faire mage on the right i think it s the discount naxx reskin from wrath of the lich king but i wasn t paying too close attention at the time but they never lasted long and to be fair they were the only people i actually saw in the game up to that point i didn t see a soul in northshire abbey or elwynn forest at first even though i spread my game time over several hours and a couple of days i will come back to that later after leaving stormwind i see they finally repaired the damage caused by deathwing to the entrance i think it was still in a state of disrepair in mists in 2014 i resumed questing in elwynn forest even though i was l6 7 the report to westfall quest was already available if i wanted it i didn t so i continued to accumulate the traditional elwynn quests the maclure and stonefield farms and the nearby fargodeep mine instead of the giant pig named princess being halfway across the zone as in classic wow princess is right in the field beside you as you re talking to the quest giver also unlike classic wow she s not accompanied by two extra members of her entourage which means the fight is actually quite simple despite her size somebody has been feeding that pig miracle gro because she s a lot bigger now than in classic wow what got me was that the turn in text block doesn t look like it had been changed from vanilla wow ma am she s right behind me can t miss her despite that the quests i ran into were largely the same as their vanilla counterpart thankfully you didn t need any knowledge of vanilla wow to understand the context so that worked but there was one big difference between the vanilla wow and retail wow versions of the zone what on earth are you doing out here in vanilla wow the mini boss goldtooth is at the back of the fargodeep mine which makes it a challenge to get to before i hear any complaints about how easy vanilla wow really is from a complexity standpoint i have to point out that typically the fargodeep mine is where a toon will likely die for the first time respawns and the narrow passages make any mine dangerous but to get to goldtooth you have to go all the way to the back oh and you likely have to fight a few adds when you pull goldtooth here being outside the mine and off without any nearby adds he s pretty much a sitting duck even if goldtooth were at the back of the mine i doubt he would have posed much of a challenge hell my health bar didn t go beyond the halfway mark until i decided to test how much of a wrecking ball you are with wow s greatest enemies murlocs i had to actually go back the other night to get this screencap because i was kind of busy when i last went through here like the jingle for doublemint gum murlocs like to double or triple the fun by having multiples attack you in vanilla wow if the mines don t kill you in elwynn the murlocs likely will the retail wow version of the elwynn forest murlocs did not disappoint me as i fought packs of 2 or 3 at once while i didn t die at all that pack of 3 that jumped me before i could eat and regain health very nearly did me in if i were more cautious and if i hadn t had the experience of invincibility up to that point in retail wow i likely wouldn t have pulled that many murlocs so there i stood at l9 after about 90 minutes of actual playing the game although i might be generous on the 90 minute mark as i was screwing around a bit making trips to stormwind to dump stuff into the bank taking screenshots and hunting for other people in the area i did finally find a few people in goldshire love me two times girl one for tomorrow one just for today love me two times i m goin away i caught these on screencap just before they went whoosh up and out of sight oh right i mumbled flying is allowed everywhere that being said i didn t see a single low level toon in elwynn forest at all so what did i think let me describe my experience leveling 8 toons at once in anniversary classic when you do the same quest 6 or more times you find it hard to sit there and read the quest text again really after about the 3rd time doing the same quest i just kind of click through to the end because unless i want a specific screencap or something i know what s happening there have been weeks where i ve been doing the same quests in the same zone on all of the toons and it blurs together after a while now switching to retail wow and intentionally wanting to read the quest text to see what differences there are between retail and vanilla did not help me in fact i felt a stronger pull to simply skip reading the quest text than if i d been playing vanilla why you may ask this i was going to crop it but you know it works fine as is everything i need to know is right on the map and if i don t care to pull that up on screen most of the relevant information is up on both the mini map and the quest tracker on the right i ve never used the questie addon so i can t tell you if it has the same information but this kinda sorta pushes you into going faster than you may want to providing the data to a player without any expectation is one thing but there s an implicit expectation here that the player will utilize the info to progress as quickly as possible the removal and or streamlining of quests in northshire and elwynn wasn t designed to explicitly unclutter the old zones it was to provide the player with an overall improved experience taking goldtooth out of the cave means you don t have to risk anything to go in there and eradicate him you also don t need another body to go in there with you in case you get jumped by 2 or 3 more kobolds the zone becomes more solo friendly and faster to progress through as a result by comparison if you go to elwynn on the anniversary servers or classic era servers you ll always find people asking to group up for hogger in retail there s no need as everything is soloable group content is segregated in a separate area and while you can manually group up the expectation is that you can use the automated processes to handle the group creation and let s talk about the elephant in the room retail wow is old i mean really old like morrowind was the current elder scrolls game in 2004 old and the wyrmrest accord server having opened about 16 years ago means likely 95 or more of the server population is at or near max level still i wasn t expecting there to be nobody in elwynn forest blizzard could have simply turned off access to the zones entirely and nobody would have noticed if this were classic era and the lack of population was the reality for classic era a few months into tbc classic i m sure there was an internal drumbeat within blizzard to simply turn those classic era servers off nobody was playing so why keep them turned on the thing is retail s design provides an outlet for collectors and completionists to go back and poke around and do all the things oh and allow the rare newbie to come along and try their hand at the game i used to rail about how blizzard by reworking the old world for cataclysm inadvertently cut off their own pipeline of new players into the game instead of a natural progression from vanilla tbc wrath cataclysm what ended up happening was cataclysm vanilla old tbc old wrath cataclysm the timeline got screwed up and the game no longer made internal sense unless you had played the game prior to 2010 now i m not so sure that s the case from what i ve played and observed retail wow is relying less on the world and a cohesive story to bring in and keep players and relying more on what has been wow s traditional strength its gameplay whatever you may think of the storytelling in retail wow gameplay can make up for a host of sins wow s gameplay is far smoother in retail than in vanilla the drops come more quickly you know what to do without having to engage your brain and figure it out the feedback loop of quest acquisition and completion is finely tuned and the game world is designed to progress you through it faster hell as a rogue i discovered that stealth meant almost no penalty to my traveling speed at all i was zipping through the fargodeep mine because of course that s what i d do as if i was running through the thing i know how long it would take a vanilla rogue to make it through assuming that a kobold didn t see through my stealth and here in retail i was cruising along as if they weren t even there you could say the game doesn t waste your time because the game doesn t value the time spent in the old content and if blizzard doesn t and the existing player base doesn t why shouldn t you or maybe to turn it around why should you value the old content take away the transmog and the achievements and what do you have without external rewards why go classic wow has that why go question already answered people make their own fun the players came up with hardcore wow classic and made it popular before blizzard jumped on the bandwagon and created official hardcore servers classic fresh became a player driven thing on a classic era rp pvp server before the announcement of the 20th anniversary servers i still recall the new year s eve 2023 gat...
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