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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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ce 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 gathering on the season of discovery rp server in stormwind with people basically having a good time while the countdown to the 2024 was underway the thing is i never hear about people doing goofy things or making their own challenges for old content in retail wow that doesn t mean it s not there but outside of a few things such as that pandaren who makes it to the level cap by picking flowers in the pandaren starting zone all you hear about in retail wow is about what s going on in the current expansion what is keeping retail wow players from following in their classic brethren s footsteps nothing really this loops back to the title of this post while i progressed through retail s elwynn forest i kept wondering why the retail community doesn t consider this content to be valuable is it purely conditioning or is it a follow the leader mentality that keeps people from doing things if there isn t a reward attached without achievements or transmog is there no interest i m uncertain you can say this about other older mmos i ve been on swtor and lotro the old lotro servers not the new ones and judging by the activity in both mmos the intro zones remain very active with new toons if you told lotro players that ered luin or the shire isn t valuable to lotro any more i m pretty sure there d be a riot but in retail wow there d likely be a lot of agreement with the sentiment that elwynn forest is no longer valuable to the game i don t know the answer to make old content more valuable beyond the carrot approach that blizzard already has tried it could be that all of the people who see the old content as intrinsically valuable have migrated off of retail wow and onto classic wow and those remaining in retail don t see the value in old content beyond the metagame rewards that blizzard offers if anybody has ideas i m all for it because there s all this content that is basically unused and it certainly seems like the people most likely to utilize it don t even play this version of the game any more oh and one more thing i discovered that collecting herbs gives you more xp than fighting enemies at level now i know why that pandaren thought leveling via gathering herbs was a good idea because the priest wasn t doing much of anything mind you and sent me in his stead for example milly osworth s initial quest text for extinguishing hope starts with times like these make me long for when the defias were still around the cataclysm has opened a pathway from the burning steppes and now blackrock orcs pour into northshire valley from wowhead because i forgot to take a screencap you would have had to have known about the defias or at least be familiar with them to truly understand milly s comment and if you were paying attention to the quest text you d likely have pulled up the map to try to figure out what milly was talking about but of course a new player will have burning steppes as a big ol blank space once you found it because you haven t revealed the map yet the quest text could have easily been tweaked to make it more understandable to a completely new player removing some specifics that old players knew and just emphasizing the criticality i ve played hardcore wow classic i know and if you survive that then the defias pillagers in westfall are waiting for you assuming people didn t think you were one of several well known shit stirrers on the gladden us server and dogpile on you for causing trouble posted by redbeard at 6 00 am 4 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels lotro retail wow older posts home subscribe to posts atom pages home about parallel context about redbeard contact us azeroth after dark a parallel context companion site mmo podcasts blizzard watch diablo 4 lord of hatred and other junk we have to talk about 1 day ago podcasts massively overpowered massively op podcast episode 563 in the name of the windrose 1 week ago twisted nether blogcast moving to youtube episodes 346 348 4 months ago 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