FlannelPancake

Eh, as the article points out it's pretty unlikely you encountered that last layer of copy protection from a ROM.

Lol, you're projecting something fierce here.

Like:

> Organic play and indeed, fun, is lost on you

Really? That's the only explanation here? Not that I might be right about Wow?

You're clearly upset about something else. Let me know when you're ready to have a real conversation.

Pre-AQ, he's absolutely right that the place was a dead zone and no 60 would bother spending any time there.

Silithus was really only busy for those 6 months between patch 1.9 and 1.11. Well, probably a bit longer than that I guess since original Naxx was such a shitshow. At most 10 months, though.

> saying that they "don't encourage fun"

You missed the second part of that clause, which is pretty critical context.

> So unless you're really into just having fun - which the game mostly does not encourage in lieu of running dungeons and getting gear and etc

PvP most certainly falls under that umbrella in italics. Getting to grand marshal back in the day involved sinking copious amounts of time into battlegrounds in order to get a special title and some special gear. There was/is most definitely a carrot on a stick for PvP as well.

In contrast, players have never been incentivized to explore much. Maybe you get a title nowadays, but it's not going to be anything cool like 'Dreadful Gladiator'. There's no special sword for exploring every sector of Azeroth.

EDIT: Further thoughts

> if they don't explicitly give you a token for having fun with your friends, saying that they "don't encourage fun" is pretty false.

Why do you think it's false? It's implicit discouragement. In the thinly-veiled skinner box that is WoW, gear and tokens and titles are positive reinforcement.

It's not a huge leap of logic to say that positive reinforcement tends to discourage behavior that doesn't lead to the reward.

I think you're clearly correct about the game beginning at max level, but I don't think heirlooms or exp boosts changed anything. Even in vanilla, there were accepted "do this to level as quickly as possible" routes. No one really hung around silithus pre-AQ, with the small exception of people who chose to level there (and there were much better zones to do that).

WoW and mmos in general just don't encourage exploration very much. It doesn't contribute to making your avatar any better. So unless you're really into just having fun - which the game mostly does not encourage in lieu of running dungeons and getting gear and etc, a lot of these zones have just ALWAYS been abandoned, save for some event bringing people to them.

The reason the population is 15-20 in these zones as opposed to 60+ is because there are better ways to level nowadays, not that anyone cared to visit these zones in the first place and heirlooms ruined that.

That being said, I realize you're not blaming this entirely on heirlooms and exp boosts, I just wanted to clarify on that specific part of what you said.

Eh?

> 'downtown' isn't a terribly attractive area.

> midtown

Midtown is not downtown: Hence the name midtown - it's about midway between downtown and uptown.

Most people would consider the villages as the start of downtown.