Cracks starting to show?

[Paelos]

World pvp doesn't work because there's no such thing as a fair war in games or life.

[Fordel]

Blizzard has NEVER gotten PvP right in WoW, not that this is an excuse, but it is hardly news.

[kildorn]

*grumble* could start by trying to game match by average ilevel of gear, and having an internal timer say "fuck it, not enough" and mismatch to keep the timers from going nuts.

[K9]

That's pretty much how it works now, give or take. In the long run people prefer faster queues to aggressively balanced matches.

[Vision]

http://www.masterofwarcraft.net/2010/06/world-of-warcraft-trip-down-memory-lane.html

I found this nostalgic.

[Chimpy]

He was flat out wrong on some stuff.

But there were some good old 'fun' things in there like dying if you didn't pop up from Feign Death after 6 minutes.

He also totally missed the biggest thing they fixed pretty quickly: Raid instance portals were all inside of normal instances. (MC was in BRD, BWL was going to be in UBRS, Naxx through Strath dead)

[Selby]

Raid instance portals were all inside of normal instances. (MC was in BRD, BWL was going to be in UBRS, Naxx through Strath dead)

All of those still exist and you can travel through them except the one in Strath undead side (blocked by a gate).

But yeah, I remember alot of those various aspects of the game at release and looking back how many of them were... "interesting" to say the least.

[Rendakor]

That's what that portal at the end of UD Strath goes to? Never knew that.

[Selby]

It's mentioned a couple of times in the quests\lore if you read it.  I think the reason they changed it was because of the attunement requirements for Naxx...

[Chimpy]

Actually, the reason they put the weird teleport thing outside was the 5 man cap on Stratholme. You can't run a 40 man raid through an instance with only a 5 person cap.

I think the one to BWL was turned off as well.

The original change to the whole mechanic was when they added the lava-dive after MC attunement (which you actually didn't need to enter MC through BRD, just to use the lava portal) which saved about a half hour of clearing/running through BRD. Imagine wiping and having to corpse run to BRD, and then run all the way to the MC portal after a wipe O.o

[SurfD]

Actually, the reason they put the weird teleport thing outside was the 5 man cap on Stratholme. You can't run a 40 man raid through an instance with only a 5 person cap.

I think the one to BWL was turned off as well.

The original change to the whole mechanic was when they added the lava-dive after MC attunement (which you actually didn't need to enter MC through BRD, just to use the lava portal) which saved about a half hour of clearing/running through BRD. Imagine wiping and having to corpse run to BRD, and then run all the way to the MC portal after a wipe O.o

Pretty sure the Naxx portal inside Strath never actually went "live". It was there, and everyone pretty much knew where it was supposed to go, they just never turned it on, because Naxx launched with the outside portal pavillion already in place.

As to MC, there was never a time where you would have had to corpse run all the way through BRD to get to MC if you wiped, becaue the Attunement went in roughly the same time as the "Tagging a raid boss puts the entire instance in combat" mechanic went in.  Before that, you never "full wiped" because there was always at least one OOC rezzer standing by to rez people who died, and after it, you had enough people attuned that those who weren't just waited for a rez or a summon.

[K9]

The portal at the end of the canals in Stormwind remains unexplained though.

[SurfD]

The portal at the end of the canals in Stormwind remains unexplained though.

Isnt that the place that is believed to be the "stormwind housing district" which started all the speculation that WoW was going to eventually have player housing?  It has been around since vanilla I believe, and nothing was ever done with it.

[DraconianOne]

That nostalgia site showed a pic of an attempt at player housing from back in alpha/beta (?) - I think that's where the rumour came from.

[Sheepherder]

The portal at the end of the canals in Stormwind remains unexplained though.

There's nothing behind there to indicate what it was meant to be.

[Malakili]

http://www.masterofwarcraft.net/2010/06/world-of-warcraft-trip-down-memory-lane.html

I found this nostalgic.

I sort of forget that all of that was never experienced by most players.  It even feels recent enough to me that its not even really "nostalgic"  I think I'm getting old.

[Abelian75]

I sort of forget that all of that was never experienced by most players.  It even feels recent enough to me that its not even really "nostalgic"  I think I'm getting old.

I think what makes me feel especially old is that that "list" makes little clear distinction between funky things that happened in early alpha and funky things that happened throughout ALL of vanilla WoW, as though both are effectively so ancient as to never have really happened to anyone currently playing.

Example of two adjacent comments:

Spell schools used to have a skill system similar to todays weapon skills. "Your skill in Fire has increased to 93" (Ah, what a silly little pre-release feature)
Wands couldn't auto-shoot so you had to click it each time you wanted to hit. (Ah, what a silly little... wait, no, this pissed me off for what feels like years, and I still remember the uproar from hunters who wanted to be the only ones with "auto-shot.")

[Chimpy]

Pretty sure the Naxx portal inside Strath never actually went "live". It was there, and everyone pretty much knew where it was supposed to go, they just never turned it on, because Naxx launched with the outside portal pavillion already in place.

As to MC, there was never a time where you would have had to corpse run all the way through BRD to get to MC if you wiped, becaue the Attunement went in roughly the same time as the "Tagging a raid boss puts the entire instance in combat" mechanic went in.  Before that, you never "full wiped" because there was always at least one OOC rezzer standing by to rez people who died, and after it, you had enough people attuned that those who weren't just waited for a rez or a summon.

The outside pavilion was put in place because they had already made Stratholme 5 man max.

As to the "never full wipe" yeah, there was NEVER possibly a chance that a raid wiped on trash, like the stupid imp cave, or a fearing core hound respawning in the middle of their raid or anything. Just because you COULD ooc rez doesn't mean everyone always had one in every possible case. 

[RhyssaFireheart]

Just poking my head in to comment on a few things re: housing.  I can't believe WoW still hasn't implemented something like this for players yet, but then again, I think I play EQ2 just for the housing sometimes.  It's not the most exciting implementation of housing ever, I'm sure, but the devs have been fairly consistent with adding some improvements (e.g. - the added outdoors ares to certain housing in the main cities mentioned upthread).  There is a huge interest in decorating to the point that people will pay large amounts of ingame plat to have a good decorator come to their server if need be just to decorate.  As Dren says - digital crack, all the way.  

On the flip side, adding guild halls pretty much made the main cities even bigger ghost towns than they were previously.  If WoW devs are concerned about that aspect of housing, they have a reason.  Not that the EQ2 cities were hubs are random folks chatting all the time, but right now there is no reason to goto any main city if your guild is large enough to have the amenities.  However, I can still recall the sheer amount of chatspam in Ironforge when I played.  There were tons of people all just standing around creating lag and talking in city chat - it never felt like  a city, more like an uncoordinated mob to me.

I miss the AC way of doing housing, especially when new houses were added and the game was to find out where they were placed without getting killed (I was on DT) and managing to save a community if you and a bunch of friends wanted to live near each other.  Housing was kind of hidden out in the wilds sometimes, near great hunting spots or convenient cities (better before they changed the buy/sell rates of loot in the cities to be the same), or just away from everything else in a pretty location.  You had to actually work to pay for housing upkeep and not just dump rent into the system for X amount of time and go on your way (I can currently pre-pay my EQ2 rents for like 12 weeks at a time now).

Blarg, sorry, this got long and probably really off-topic.  Sorry.

[Yegolev]

http://www.masterofwarcraft.net/2010/06/world-of-warcraft-trip-down-memory-lane.html

I found this nostalgic.

Hell, that's what the game looked like when I played it.  I suppose female trolls look different now.

[Lantyssa]

Dey be hawt, mon!  (As long as you pick the one good face.)

[lesion]

The short time when Forsaken were undead was amazing. I spent an entire session just sitting at the bottom of a lake ganking anyone who went swimming.

Also polymorph drowning, which I guess isn't possible anymore?

[K9]

Not with diminishing returns on CC

[Ingmar]

It takes a lot longer to drown now, too.

[SurfD]

The best part about Polymorph drowning was that Sheep sank like rocks.  So if you managed to find someone floating in deep water, they were usually screwed, because all it took was one polymorph to send them right to the bottom.

[proudft]

Well, wet wool is heavy!

[Fordel]

You people and your non-druid classes!

[kildorn]

You people and your non-druid classes!

Lest we forget Baroness Anastari and her lovely mind control/teleport: Moonglade for druids.

[Fordel]

That was pretty awesome yea.

[Vision]

The newness over-rode any of the bad UI designs or broken game mechanics that a lot of people look back and complain about now. I miss IF being too big, lagging into the crevice in the center and taking 5 minutes to get out.

Did you down Hogger yet? I got this sweet ass green mace from him. Totally want to replace it with the blue one that drops in Dead Mines though.

[Sjofn]

(As long as you pick the one good face.)

I HATE that face. She doesn't look hot, she looks stoned, and not in a haha trolls am i rite way.

I always pick one of the angry faces and feel annoyed my tusks can't be bigger. 

[Ratman_tf]

I always pick one of the angry faces and feel annoyed my tusks can't be bigger. 

Tusk envy.

[Sjofn]

It's totally true!

So they seem to have lifted the level cap on raising secondary skills, which is sweet during this Thanksgiving holiday, my level 8 hunter already has a 300-ish cooking skill.    I haven't checked if they did the same to regular professions yet, I'm on a laptop right now and I hate playing on one of these damn things.

[Kageru]

Just poking my head in to comment on a few things re: housing.  I can't believe WoW still hasn't implemented something like this for players yet, but then again, I think I play EQ2 just for the housing sometimes.  

Discussed already, doesn't add any useful game-play, does detract from shared social districts -> not implemented. And I tend to agree with that call.

[Malakili]

Just poking my head in to comment on a few things re: housing.  I can't believe WoW still hasn't implemented something like this for players yet, but then again, I think I play EQ2 just for the housing sometimes.  

Discussed already, doesn't add any useful game-play, does detract from shared social districts -> not implemented. And I tend to agree with that call.

Or to put it another way, the "I must have housing or I won't play your game" market is just too small for them to care about, otherwise its just a bunch of people saying "that'd be nice, but I'll play anyway."