Hacker News Reader

Comment by highace | Hacker News Reader

Here's my prediction: if you didn't play vanilla when it was available, you're gonna hate it. If you did play it, you'll go back for the nostalgia but will stop when you realise how tough the grind was. Those players will be late 20s and beyond now and won't have the time for it.

It'll be interesting to see how many of those calling for this to happen actually stick around.

View on HN

As a former vanilla player (fond memories of 1.14 jumping physics bug), and current busy adult, I'm pretty excited about the idea of an MMO with a level cap. I can't keep up with new expansions every six months, but I can and will find fun things I'm interested in trying in an MMO with locked down talent builds and static endgame.

It won't matter if life gets busy and I can only log in once this week. At least I'm not aiming at a moving target anymore.

Casual gaming.

To be fair, WoW still has a level cap. You can play right now and quite frankly it's a much better game for a "current busy adult". Expansions come out every 2-3 years, not every 6 months.

Also being able to boost to the beginning of the current expansion is a huge time saver. Leveling in late vanilla involved a lot of grinding in empty zones.

I'm probably not going to play. However, given I played vanilla in college, then some on and off BC/lich for my masters, then the latest one over the last year as a software dev with a full time job, vanilla seems like it would fit best if that's where I wanted to sink my time.

Even though there were tons of complaints from casual players during the vanilla period, I had mostly only heard about these complaints when they where directed towards top tier guilds. Grinding with small groups was often fun and wasn't so heavily tied to every goal and data point that tied you back into the 'realm/global' competition. Players seemed more likely to invent their own metrics of ranking other players and Guild members, which to me added a level of variability that in retrospect, should have reduced anxiety for game play.

I'm interested to see how it plays out. There's definitely an 'ideal' balance for an mmo that makes it a success, and I think classic WoW had that nailed down. I don't think it's related to GPU cores or cultural trends, some games are timeless beyond the nostalgia factor, and that's because they achieve that perfect balance of interactivity and reward.

Having guild members that did linear algebra to calculate optimal raid arrangements is one of the examples of opening that creative space, rather than closing it with an excess of status bars and shiny hats. Every MMO suffers from what metrics flag gamer status, but I'm simply interested to see what direction classic WoW goes in, and how that affects the general trend of MMOs out there today.

Agreed, the grind is massive compared to current WoW. Also, you’ll need friends to play vanilla, there’s very few stuff which can be done solo and finding groups is very time consuming. I’ll definitely be checking this out for nostalgia but I don’t expect to reach the level cap. Probably not even 40 which used to be quite a feat already back then.

I leveled to 60 solo before joining a guild. It can be done, it wasn't too hard, and now everything is better documented.

Yeah leveling is possible solo. I forgot to mention I was referring to the endgame content.

Yeah, endgame is a non-starter without a large guild. I still miss doing Molten Core 40 man raids. Such a rush at the time.

Some of us are in the thirties already.

I was in the beta in middle school.

I'm in my 30s now. I won't be playing the game because it was about the people you met, not the places you went to.

There is that screenshot floating around of the last player left in a guild under the screenshot of the full guild back in 2005: https://i.redditmedia.com/m4I50ji3u80G3FjSkFCcSpqb2ZHr-4Rcf0...

Just made myself realize that it will be the same time delta between the first and second picture and between the second picture and next year.

That really reminds me of the Overlord anime / light novels, where the main character ends up alone after having had tons of achievements with his guild. He's the only one still logged in when the game shuts down.

Huh, interesting. Probably someone who experienced that themselves. I'll be reading that, thanks for the suggestion.

To anyone expecting this to be good, don't. It's a 'protagonist gets sucked into another world' type of story and not 'protagonist looks at the meaninglessness of life, both on and offline'.

Hmm, it is an isekai, but I think it's above average from many other that I've read. I'm sorry if my post mislead you into believing it'd be a specific kind of story, that wasn't my intent.

Spending months (literal days worth of time) leveling, and then entire evenings raiding is just not something I have time for now.

On the other hand I have to imagine I would play a lot more efficiently/smarter than when I was 16.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com