This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
My first WoW experience was Horde. I created an orc hunter, did the training area and got to the Crossroads in the Barrens. As I was figuring out what traders and so on were available, a bunch of high level alliance characters turned up and started laying into the guards. Word went out and high level Horde characters began arriving from Orgrimmar by wyvern. Ended up with about 20 or more characters on each side. It was epic!
and a monthly payment to continue doing it
I played during the trial period once. I usually love games with fun gameplay loops that have a bit of grind, but I couldn't get into WoW. It just didn't feel fun. It felt like a job. I'm still not sure how it became the largest MMO ever made.
It might help to think of it less like a video game and more like a million person bowling league.
People would log in to hang out. To chat. To bullshit.
Sometimes, to level up or to raid or to pvp. Sometimes, people would log in and play for a few hours just...going around helping other people with stuff. Some people take their characters to the starter zones, handing out bags and some nice gear upgrades and advice to new players.
And that doesn't even take into account the RP servers, where people would have like guild meetings in game, or legit life events like a wedding in game. Funerals when a guild mate dies? Of course!
That is how it became the biggest MMO ever.
And the game has largely strayed from those roots, which is why so many WoW players go for the Classic version, rather than play the new expansions.
Compares to gatcha
Hmmm
Yeah but while killing the boars another guy comes round and helps you kill some quicker and then you team up and go around helping anyone else you come across
it's less about the moment to moment gameplay and more about the vibes and ambiance tbh. Players love zones like Barrens and Nagrand even though a good chunk of both zones' quests are just hunting animals because the vibes of those zones are immaculate.
You're not wrong about Alliance zones feeling more fleshed out.. but over the last two decades of playing vanilla WoW on and off, every single time that I've rolled an Alliance character and tried my best to commit, I would eventually see a primitive ass Horde outpost with hanging feathers and dreamcatchers, with some bulky spiked Orc and a noble Tauren standing there.. and I would feel such an immense feeling of homesickness unlike anything I've ever felt in another game, and I would immediately delete that character and start over in Durotar.
Something about fighting for the honor of the Horde and the glory of the Warchief out there in an inhospitable land, with the inspirational swell of horns and indigenous drums just puts me in it. Like, really puts me in it.
Leveling up with company was fun. Especially when you had an ass-puller like me in the party, running for your lives from all the boars in the area, because he got a new AoE spell.
I remember trying wow in their 10 hour demo being like “I’m just killing spiders when does this get fun?”
Then a friend told me “it takes 20 hours to get to the fun bit”. I then uninstalled and never looked back.
I remember leaving the dwarf starter zone for the first time. Passed some NPC dwarfs, got chased by a mob that was way too powerful for me and barely survived. When I was done running, and was safe, I looked around and saw the entrance to IronForge.
That's when I knew the game was for me
It doesn't take 20 hours to get to the fun but, it just wasn't for you.
Yeah def not.
There is fun in changing zones sightseeing and getting really powerful abilities, running in raids. But if the hook for the core kill loop doesn't catch, you're going to have a bad time.
Yeah probably not.
Which is good for me as it saved me $15/month.
So what? The grind is the fun bit to you?
I never actually said one way or the other if I like it or not.
Now that's just not true.
Repeatable quests weren't added until much later. You had to collect all sorts of organs with shitty drop rates from a variety of animals in different zones.
It was actually barely worth doing quests in the original game, because most of the XP was on the kills rather than quest hand-ins, and the rewards were mostly crap.
I think a lot depends on why you play a game. I liked WoW and other open-world games for the vast lands I can explore. I don't give a rats ass about combat or progression. I do just enough to stay alive and spend most of my time socializing and exploring.
Me, a refined person, playing Guild Wars instead.
Well, in Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2, you also have reasons to collect lots of the same stuff to do stuff.
The difference is that you don't have to collect 10 boar asses in boar ass forest for a specific boar ass quest, but instead you may want to craft a legendary bone weapon, so you need to gather bones, and you can go anywhere in the world that drops the bones, or that gives gold you can use to buy the bones from other players, or that grants a special map currency that you can use tyo buy boxes of bones from a map currency vendor, all while doing whatever you feel like doing, progressing your bone gathering in a wide variety of ways.
My first PC game was WoW. I didn't know how to use keyboards back then, and so, I was killed by boars 5 minutes into the game.
Fun times.
I'm old, so my first MMO was Everquest. I only did "hunt-and-peck" style typing using my index fingers prior to this. Within a month I was a skilled typist out of necessity.
Everquest also taught me that I have to keep very clear of WoW because I realize that if I ever started chasing that dragon, I'd wind up homeless.
I'm so old my first MMO was ICQ
It was more because it was a virtual chatroom and community in an age where such things were not widespread
Also, I think this undersells how good the game looked.
Yes, you were hunting boar livers but you were doing it in this beautiful tropical jungle beside a giant waterfall. And then you'd peak behind the waterfall, discover a mermaid who was at the gate of a giant dungeon themed like a water park. And you completely forgot about the quest to go play in the water park for a couple of hours.
I'd say the bigger problem with WoW was the gradient of zones. You'd be hunting zebra-taurs on the high planes. And then you'd walk through a mountain pass, see a dinosaur, get all excited, and aggro a creature +30 your level.
Wow was fantastic when it came out. I never had the money to pay for a subscription so I played on pirate servers. I never got to the endless grind stages, but I adored exploring the early zones with all the original classes. The world looked great, the magic felt real and the fantasy was engrossing. I don't think I ever made it passed lvl 35 on any characters, but thoroughly enjoyed getting there, sometimes with friends and sometimes alone.
why do real chores when virtual chores
"Honey, can you go out and powerwash the side of the house this weekend?"
"Awww, c'mon... I was planning on playing Powerwash Simulator this weekend! 😩"
Now I kind of feel guilty for enjoying Crime Scene Cleaner. At least in my defense, my house is not covered in blood.
I've been playing Hitman: World of Assassination all weekend.
Not sure if that's better than the alternative.
A real power washer can run out of water or power unless you tether it to outlets. Meanwhile in the simulator, you can parkour onto the roof with an infinite water tank.
Now, games have aggressive monetization through battle passes and gotcha mechanics! Truly we have improved.