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[Rico]

"Kill 10 MAGIC Boars.  We call them magic because they're on this continent and actually drop their quest item.  After you're done with that, let me know, and we'll have you decapitate a cow to infiltrate a group of pirates, working your way up the ranks by doing such tasks as firing cannons at goblins working on giant oil-refineries."

[Norondor]

yeah, in essence, it didn't change the game at all but it's more flavorful and interesting and varied and mature. it's still a cartoony theme park ride and not a fantasy world sim, and i have my own problems with it (most especially having rolled on a PVP server but hey), and maybe i'll go back to FF11 to play it for a while, but it's definitely the best that the game's -- BEARING IN MIND IT IS IN FACT THE SAME GAME -- ever been.

[Norondor]

also my avatar is back \o/

[Bongo Bill]

So they only replaced some of the busywork quests?

[Shinra]

If you'll excuse me, this troll druid and undead hunter are on their way to northrend.

[Norondor]

So they only replaced some of the busywork quests?

... well, actually YES, since some zones just got a brief once-over to make sure all the monsters were the right level and the breadcrumbs matched, but that's not what i meant. I mean, the quests are still to kill 9 wind imps and collect 10 fire bear asses. But the quest text is better-written and often pretty hilarious, they make a lot more use of phasing, vehicles and scripted events to keep things varied and interesting, and the zones themselves have had their layout altered to flow more logically from quest hub to quest hub so there's less running all over god's creation and then back to the same central settlement to turn everything in.

It might not sound like much, and that's partly because i'm honestly not explaining it very well on purpose because the changes are sweeping enough that I can't be bothered explaining them all, but it's really good (if you like that sort of thing)!

[Doom]

Bongo: They removed the vast, vast majority of shitty busy-work quests(get 12 doo-dads that have a 10% drop rate! Walk across this shitty zone 5 times!) and replaced them with stuff that is genuinely... fun.

I got half a level... level 57 at that... doing this:



There's a decent number of "murderize X" quests left, but they're sprinkled between cool shit like riding as shot-gunner on a kodo-caravan: shoot raiders as they ride at you, or hit them with the butt of the gun if they start leaping on and trying to dismount you. Or maybe the time I was told to kill some elementals for their crazy-magic cores, then I ground them into dust I sprinkled on ostriches and raptors to see what happened. Most of them exploded.

[Ziiro]

Been leveling through instancing, as prot. I'm actually enjoying Prot and tanking now. What the fuck.

[Cthulhu-chan]

warrior or paladin?

I mean, both work pretty well, but warrior feels slightly better at the sub-20s  level.

I do miss swipe-for-victory, though.

[Niku]

I think one of my favorite moments so far was a simple one in Eastern Plaguelands.  You essentially make a handful of potions to sabotage a cauldron, and when you go to do so, you're given three options.  Put in a drop, as you're told to do.  Put in a little bit more, to see what happens.  Or throw in all twelve vials at once just for fun.  I put in the drop figuring BETTER DO WHAT'S RIGHT and the text was all "Well, you did what you were supposed to.  Maybe it worked!  You can't tell."  So I got the options again, threw in all twelve, and the cauldron exploded with such violence that I was flung halfway back to the nearby town while the quest complete text popped up.  Sure, I just killed twelve doodads to get the potions like usual, but the payoff was great.

To say nothing of the ending of Hillsbrad's quest chain where [spoiler]you actually get to watch the rising mushroom clouds of you setting off four nuclear bombs in Alliance training encampments and warmachine engineering spots.[/spoiler]

[Cthulhu-chan]

Ha, when it showed me those options, first thing through my mind was "hell yeah they're all going in!"  No regrets.

[Burrito Al Pastor]

So it's the same game, just a lot more streamlined and varied.  If you hated it before, it's not going to change your mind.

Actually, I disagree. I first tried wow back in the open beta for vanilla, and I was aggressively underwhelmed. (I'd never played any other MMOs, so it was lost on me how much better it was than the competition - it still just wasn't that great.) I never would have started if I didn't have a friend who convinced me to slog through the 1-60 leveling with Blizzard's shiny new triple-XP and some Scarlet Monastery grinding.

To this day, I don't particularly believe that vanilla was actually very good on its own merits, but I think Sundered vanilla is fantastic on its own merits.

[Norondor]

To this day, I don't particularly believe that vanilla was actually very good on its own merits

Yeah, it was lousy, one of the worst games. TBC was even worse. I can't believe people literally played that game on purpose.

Wrath is when they got their heads all the way out of Tigole's ass, and Cata seems to be the first part where i can say "this is actually a good game." Actually, it's exactly the same arc as FFXI -- it wasn't until the 2nd expansion that it became playable, and the 3rd before it became worth spending time on.

[Friday]

Vanilla had its charms. And by "charms" I mean "I was a rogue and I could solo GM warriors naked"

[Beat Bandit]

Vanilla had its charms. And by "charms" I mean "I was a rogue and I could solo GM warriors naked"

YUP!

Stages of WoW:

Beta - ridiculously buggy
Vanilla - ridiculously broken
BC - ridiculously boring
WotLK - ridiculously popular
Cata - ridiculous

[Norondor]

I think it accidentally made a lot of people hate the game because of what it ended up not trying to be. There were some really mediocre head-fakes towards being a fantasy world game -- the design of the Blackrock Mountain dungeons, tradeskills as (sometimes) something other than BONUS STATS ON FEET and wishy-washy comments from CMs about player housing and guildhalls. In the end, that was all just crap they hadn't worked out by release, but it was enough that people felt like WoW might be the game that offered EVERYTHING YOU COULD EVER WANT even though, obviously, that is ludicrous and stupid.

My actual problem with it is that the raid design -- which was the only thing they even slightly cared about -- was so bad that i actually just fell asleep playing the game. More than once, even!

[Ziiro]

I'm doing random dungeons to hit 80 today.

I hate everything.

[Doom]

BC - ridiculously boring

I guess I played a different game since I remember stepping into Space Hell and blowing up demons while giant robots stomped around as an omnipresent proof of the very real threat of the demon's masters! Then I went to the coolest swamp, fuck Terrokar forest, Nagrand was cooler than it looked, then HOLY FUCK BLADES EDGE MOUNTAINS(yes it is love/hate to quest but come on, motherfucking Gruul the Dragonslayer) and then two different versions of sci-fi Space Hell. Then Karazhan.

I guess BC is boring after Karazhan??????

[Bal]

I enjoyed TBC until I got to Karazhan and they asked me to make 10+10=25

[Niku]

the fact that I hit 70 and then instantly quit might be why i am confused as to why people don't like TBC.