
Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft - Thevet
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/forgotten-wonders-of-the-digital-world-world-of-warcraft
======
minimaxir
I recently reactivated my old WoW account and purchased Warlords of Draenor
out of curiosity, and ended up getting my Orc Death Knight to the new level
cap of 100. This article only scratches the surface on _why_ the old worlds
are abandoned.

As with most modern MMOs, the endgame begins at max level. In order to help
players level faster, Blizzard added a heirlooms mechanic in the second
expansion (Wrath of the Lich King) to allow low levels to have above-curve
gear while leveling, with a 30% EXP boost. The third expansion (Cataclysm)
revamped Azeroth, making new questing much easier and straightforward, and
therefore less time is spent in the old world. The fifth expansion adds
Dungeon Finder, which is a faster way to level than normal questing. So there
is not much incentive to explore until you hit 90 and can go to Draenor. And
then once you hit Draenor, you have access to Garrisons, which is a FarmVille-
like mechanic which has the easiest financial ROI in the game, making even
_less_ of a reason to just explore period. I did not renew my subscription.

Guild Wars 2 had a great solution to this; all zones have content, which the
player downscales to. Unfortunately, Tyria (the world of Guild Wars 2) is not
as robust as Azeroth.

~~~
FlannelPancake
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.

~~~
prawks
> unless you're really into just having fun - which the game mostly does not
> encourage

This is the exact reason why, no matter how many times I tried over the years
to play this game with friends, I could never stay attached for longer than a
few hours. There seems to be less and less emphasis put on enjoying the
experience of exploration and being in a space in modern online games, and
more emphasis on rote activities for the sake of progress.

And thus I return to single-player games, which I certainly do not mind. There
is a seemingly never-ending stream of creative ideas coming out of that space.

~~~
Ocerge
This exact reason is why EverQuest grabbed me so much harder than any other
MMO since. Another huge reason is the danger factor. In WoW, there is
effectively no punishment at all if you die, so there's no fear of exploring
new places. In EQ, there are (or at least were) steep penalties if you die in
the wrong place. Ignoring the fact that you lose XP that could amount to hours
of lost progress, you may compound your woes with continued deaths trying to
get the loot that remained with your corpse. The fear-factor had me addicted,
and made accomplishments that much more rewarding.

~~~
mikerichards
What you said and real nighttime in EQ. I remember being alone, a low level,
lost in Karana as night was approaching. I knew if I died that I might not
know where my corpse was for the corpse run, so I had real fear, and was real
cautious.

~~~
swombat
And the final element missing to instil real fear? True PvP, where anyone
might decide to betray you and kill you while you're resting to recover
hitpoints or manna or whatever.

It's only when loss is possible that you can truly gain. It's only when
betrayal is possible that you can truly trust. It's only when your character
can completely fail that you can truly enjoy success.

Each of those are opposite sides of the same coin. A game like Wow (which I
found it very addictive, compulsive even, and did "enjoy" it to some extent)
is ultimately totally empty, because there is no way to gain, to trust, to
win.

Put that stuff back in, and you get a game like Eve.

~~~
mikerichards
The only PvPing I did was on the RvR server over near Freeport, either as a
human or dark elf. That was a blast, since there was no instanced
battlefields.

Maybe one day a MMO will bring back that magic. Alas, nostalgia wasn't enough
to overcome the shortcomings of original EQ with Project99 in 2015.

~~~
swombat
Well, as I mentioned, from what I hear, Eve has that. It may not have orcs and
elves. On the other hand it has big fracking spaceships with huge lasers...

------
ChuckMcM
God that was painful :-). I lost a lot of time in WoW, perhaps it was an
escape, but I spent hours learning the various nooks and crannies, leveling up
over 3 dozen characters of various types to the max level. I had people I
never met that I felt were good friends, shared battles and triumphs and
failures. Laughed at the sometimes incredibly subtle in game humor, and
sometimes not so subtle. Collected odd recipes to cook, outfits to wear, and
trophies and achievements. I loved having the 'two ring' which was one better
than the One Ring.

But as others point out, the 'traditional' way to build an MMO is 'learn
skills by levelling up / start playing at max level' The game set a number of
challenges for 'max level' characters which depended on gear, group
composition, and various strategies to overcome the game mechanics. That is
where it failed for me.

In WoW while leveling you often needed to join up with groups to run through a
local dungeon together. It was fun when you had a good group, annoying when
you had children in the group. There were too many ways for 10 - 12 yr old
boys to grief people.

In an effort to increase its appeal, Blizzard changed it again and again.
Skill changes, techniques, complexity was removed, buffs and nerfs to various
skills. Lots of change and slowly less and less appeal. All of the components
were there to make it better (arenas were a great testing ground for devs to
evaluate PvP changes).

I stopped playing when Mists shipped. It was just too stupid at that point and
the similarity to kung-fu panda to stark. Oddly, if you could provide servers
that stopped at one of the expansions (Wrath or maybe even Cataclysm) I would
still be spending money with Blizzard, but now not so much.

I look at it periodically and see the makings of a durable world/gaming
simulation environment. I hope someone picks up the challenge.

~~~
ropman76
Lot of nostalgia and time lost. My wife and I played together before we had
kids so we could stay up to 2-3 AM on weekends and 40 man raid Molten Core or
Blackwing Lair. We were lucky to find some married people who played and/or
some more mature players. We stopped after we had kids (time crunch LOL) but
we still keep in touch with some of our guild mates.

~~~
barce
Folks mentioned the time lost. Honestly, if you keep journals of your time in
Azeroth, you'll see that they rival any life story. I think the memories
gained far outweigh anything "real." I think there are a few fiction writers
that owe a few plot twists to what's happened in their game play.

------
patio11
Interesting note: every ghost-town of a zone in WoW, and some of them were
ghost-towns immediately, cost N fully realized software startups to develop.
(Like, mid-single-digit million dollars per zone.)

It's one of those things to keep in perspective when folks say "Why did anyone
sink $1.2 million into $A_FIELD_I_DON'T_CONNECT_WITH?" I don't know, but
that's literally less than it cost to put that mid-30s swamp level in Ogrimmar
that nobody ever went to, so don't fret too much about the misallocation of
society's resources.

~~~
drewbug
Are they really that expensive to develop?

~~~
zanny
WoW uses a tremendous amount of recycled assets, and however Blizz is
budgeting their dev team allocates them to basically do all the work for years
at a time at once before reassigning them to other things.

The most explicit example would be in vanilla, where in 2004 they had already
created every zone found in the game that would be used up until the Burning
Crusade released in 2007. They even had prototypes of a lot of places later
added to the game (Outland, from the aformentioned expansion, the Emerald
Dream, which is still not in the game, and several other zones). They took
those prototypes and reused the assets in various places.

They also heavily reuse models. The same animated skeleton is used for
everything from giants to bog monsters to undead constructs or how almost
every dragon in the game shares the same model with a retextured skin. When
they introduce new bosses, they almost always are reskinned old models.

Individual zones of WoW are not that expensive to develop - consider how hard
it is to produce a static 3d geometry map today, period, and that is
effectively the cost, albeit the tooling for WoW is almost twenty years old
and assuredly less efficient. They will take the same portcullis used in a
thousand other places, maybe swap the color palette, and use it again. They
make a few novel set pieces per area usually, but the vast majority of the
work is copy paste from assets made years ago.

~~~
Liquix
is there a place to read more about the development of wow (both history and
current pipeline)? fascinating stuff

------
leemac
My WoW experience started with Vanilla. Long hours were spent but I had so
much fun. Looking back, I had so much free time and no concept of getting
older. MC raids were a blast and getting ganked in STV was a daily occurrence.

Today, I'm nearing my thirties and can't seem to get into the game for more
than an hour at a time. I'm a very happy homeowner, married and kids are in
the plans in the next few years. I have other interests now that take up my
time and grinding for drops for hours on end isn't in the cards anymore.

I logged in recently and found it so different. Cataclysm was my last true
experience with WoW. I played MoP, but only for a few weeks. The magic was
lost for me with flying mounts and easier grinds. It's heartbreaking to a
degree because I loved this game and really want to get back to it. I suppose
those years are long gone, but it's fun to think about.

~~~
RexM
There are private servers that try to be as close to Vanilla as possible,
however that does mean that you have to put in the hours to get to level 60.
Valkyrie is fairly populated. [https://valkyrie-wow.org/](https://valkyrie-
wow.org/)

~~~
leemac
Thanks for the link. I dabbled with private servers a bit, but that was when
BC came out and still retained some Vanilla feel. Might pop back on one now
that Vanilla WoW is so long ago.

~~~
zanny
As someone who plays a lot on private servers, you might find the nostalgia
goggles to be a little tinted if you try playing vanilla or even Burning
Crusade. The game mechanics back then were just tremendously backwards to a
degree anyone who has played more recent iterations of the game will be
frustrated by, unless you _really_ have some hardcore nostalgia going on.

------
throwawayorc
Almost two months ago, an unofficial (completely reverse engineered) Vanilla
WoW server called Nostalrius launched. I had a blast reliving the time I spent
on the original game as a teenager, but had to wrest myself away after sinking
a few too many days into it...

Last I checked, the server was averaging between 4000-6000 players
concurrently, so I had quite the opposite experience from what the author was
describing: for the first day or two after launch, it was very difficult to
find mobs to kill at all, when you're sharing starting zones with literally
hundreds of players! It got better over time, as people grinded at different
rates, distributing their numbers more evenly, but even when I quit, it was
pretty rare to find a zone without a decent number of players.

I recommend anyone with fond memories of Vanilla turned off by newer versions
of WoW check it out. Or, maybe I shouldn't, having experienced first hand just
how great of a time sink this 10 year old game can still be...

[https://en.nostalrius.org/](https://en.nostalrius.org/)

~~~
fragmede
Blizzard has a long history of lawsuits to prevent such a thing, starting with
bnetd in the 2002. Scapegaming was the target of the first WoW-related lawsuit
in 2010 for running their own server, but certainly not the last.

Enjoy the fun while it lasts.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_Entertainment#World_of...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_Entertainment#World_of_Warcraft_Private_Server_Complications)

~~~
throwawayorc
Two questions: Where were those servers located, and were they reverse
engineered or using leaked server binaries?

Nostalrius being based in France, and running zero Blizzard code on their
servers, may give them some protection (IANAL).

~~~
broodbucket
As long as they're not making money they'll fly under the radar just fine.
Every private server that got shut down were taking "donations" in return for
in-game items.

------
burke
I played WoW a lot when I was in University. I find it really incredible how
much nostalgia I'm feeling looking at these screenshots. I reactivate my
account once a year or so just to fly around for a couple hours.

I'm glad I can still do this, but it concerns me that this generation of
online-only games won't be relivable decades later like the games of my
earlier childhood will always be.

~~~
codecondo
A bit sad/cheeky story from me, but still relevant I believe. The time was
around TBC, I think right in the middle of its launch, I managed to hack an
account back then of some characters, and thought I'd log-in to have a good
time. It was my first experience of the game, granted I never did destroy any
characters or items, since it was my first time playing the game, but I did
spend a reasonable amount of time in-game -- killing mobs, checking out gear
of other people, seeing the chat activity, even the character activity in the
World (haha, wow, such a rush of feelings), only a few months later when I got
my own account to play with, did I realize what this game is and how
magnificent it is -- I'm so, so lucky to have had the pleasure of playing
during the original TBC when the game was booming with players and such
pleasurable soul, one of the best times of playing any video game in my life,
hands down.

You can't replicate those experiences, because for the most part -- it was the
people who were passionate about the game, that made it what it was.

I'm sure we all have some stories like this, but I did fucking love this game
with my whole heart. From a creative Mage to a passionate Druid.

~~~
HCIdivision17
I think there's a lot of us that get misty-eyed on TBC. There was a lot of
opportunity for just funnin' around. I was surprised Halaa wasn't shown in the
article; I consider it some of the best landscape and I had a lot of fun
there. It was the sort of game where you'd say in Org chat that you were
putting on a fireworks show in Halaa, and people would switch to characters in
the other faction to keep the Halaa battle ballanced. (And it was nice they
were there: my bank alt toon was very low level.)

------
outworlder
The 'level' thing is something inherited from old RPGs and computer RPGs and
reused to death. It is nice for a sense of progression, but ultimately leads
to all sorts of issues.

Why can a 99 level whatever kill dozens of level 1 charaters effortlessly, by
mistake even? Why does it have N times more health? Makes no sense.

One of the first successful MMORPG games was Ultima Online, which didn't have
any levels. Just skills. And they didn't matter all that much. Equipment did
to a degree, but noone was walking around alone with a +9 weapon for fear of
losing it. So it was relatively even.

It was FUN. All areas mattered, even if they didn't have as much variety as
WoW. Monsters didn't give XP, so they were mostly killed for resources. And
some tiny skill increase, sometimes.

~~~
kemayo
It's worth bearing in mind, of course, that WoW is vastly more popular than UO
ever was -- UO peaked around 250k subscribers, WoW peaked around 12 million
(~48 times the population). This presumably indicates that far more people
found it "fun".

This makes sense to me, since pre-Trammel UO was a griefer paradise, as you
hinted at with your "for fear of using it" comment. :)

~~~
esrauch
I don't know that the peak subscriber comparison is fair, UO was released in
1997 when a far smaller portion of the population had the computer hardware /
internet to even consider it compared to WoW in ~2005.

------
joshuaheard
I found an old folder with screenshots of multiplayer maps from Team Fortress
Classic where I had played many hours with friends. Looking at the pictures, I
realized that I had an emotional connection to the virtual places just as if
they were real places.

~~~
jamwt
I spent.. a lot.. of my life in dustbowl. I still know dustbowl better than
actual houses I've lived in.

------
bearlikelion
I've recently started my first adventures in Azeroth, and its been quite an
experience.

Being very familiar with the genre I knew what I was getting into, but didn't
quite understand the differences of WoW versus Guild Wars, Wild Star, or
another MMO.

I really enjoyed how they continue to have players level through the
expansions, the over joyous feeling of a new loading screen when I reach the
next leveling milestone was super rewarding, but quickly became overwhelming.

There's SO much content in the game, thousands of quest lines you quickly out
level and never see, stories told through quest dialogs I had been skipping
over. I passed right by the entire culture of this hand crafted digital world
in a rush to raid, and now have no incentive to see what I've missed.

I finally got my druid to level 80, and now entering the Cataclysm expansion
it quickly shows how much has changed from each iteration of the game. I went
from running dungeons over and over in hopes of a single drop, to now being
overburdened with item and item, all far superior than my previous expansions
hard earned gear (ilvl ~170 to 300+).

It feels so forgotten, what I was first looking as like an archived museum of
this game's vast history is beginning to feel like its own changes are
detrimental to reliving the experience of a veteran as a new player.

Seeing complex constructed runes, swirling tornadoes out in the distance,
living see creatures in the background, all without content or content worth
doing makes the game feel vast and empty. Although its still very enjoyable.

~~~
zanny
You are well beyond the level you can go back and run the raid content from
past expansions by yourself. The Blackrock Mountain raids specifically, saw
hundreds of thousands of players run through them in groups of forty for hours
every night for over two years. You just cannot get that scale anymore, and
games that try (hic, Wildstar) don't see popularity like WoW did.

So you don't know empty in WoW until you run up and punch a giant rock monster
to death in fifteen seconds that would have taken forty people fifteen minutes
of coordinated combat to slay a decade ago.

~~~
jlees
Yes, one of the more depressing things I did recently was level up a new
character in WoD after having not played since pre-Cataclysm, basically. Going
back and soloing instances that I remember grinding for months and months,
encounters I remember working out for the first time with my guildmates (no
videos or strategy guides!), bonds I made and the sense of achievement we all
had at the end... totally destroyed by a fifteen second punch to the face by
my brand new level 100 character. Though I wanted the gear for nostalgia's
sake, it wasn't worth the heartache.

It felt a little like going back to college a couple of years after
graduating, where a layer of nostalgia wasn't enough to disguise how much I,
and the place itself, had changed. (Because college, like WoW, is a lot more
about the people for me than the physical buildings.)

------
ajkjk
I played a lot of WoW in vanilla through the second expansion. The world was,
I feel, the most explorable in vanilla. The game designers had started but
never finished lots of content, and there was lots of randomness and hidden
gems that weren't calculated 'content'. Just artistic touches that had been
added to the world. After vanilla, it started to feel like everything was very
much added 'on purpose', which detracted from the feeling for me. [This is a
feeling I have about lots of games, and even software and real-life
experiences too. Methodical polish can really make things less endearing.]

I have great memories of wandering zones I had no business being in.
Especially wandering Alliance zones and cities on my Horde rogue. When
achievements for exploring the whole world and doing so many thousands of
quests came out with the second expansion, I had them all (Loremaster, Seeker,
Explorer, ..). And I probably did 500+ quests beyond Seeker - I would just
keep doing every low level quest I could find, just to experience all the
random hidden pockets of content. It was a great feeling, and one that I
didn't grow up finding IRL.

The vanilla world was also... rusty.. in a really charming way. It was pretty
easy to crack the holes of the world open and find things that weren't meant
to be found - like half finished zones, giant peculiar monoliths, and tidbits
of things that had been mentioned in lore here and there but never fully
implemented.

A famous (at the time) video was "Exploration the Movie' by DopeFish:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWMz7-7SGlo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWMz7-7SGlo)

The soundtrack is really great too. It's electronic / trance-style stuff that
I guess isn't very popular (or wasn't where I'm from). But, the first song
('When Things Go Wrong' by Airwave) became my favorite thing to listen to for
at least a year or so in high school. When I got my driver's license I would
put it (and similar) songs on in the car and drive around my town at night,
aimlessly. Those are some memories I'm really fond of.

~~~
ajkjk
(the soundtrack of the youtube video, that is. The takeaway being: that video
so helped me romanticize wandering a giant, mesmerizing, alien world that I
started wandering the giant, mesmerizing, _real_ world, and enjoying that too.
With the help of a soundtrack to set the mood.)

------
pyrocat
On a related note, WoW has plenty of private shards where you can relive old
WoW content. Everquest has one too, Project1999, dedicated to the first two
expansions only.

~~~
garbage_stain
P99 rocks! (just sayin')

------
driverdan
It's fun to hop onto random Minecraft servers and explore. You find a lot of
abandoned buildings, mining tunnels, pets, etc. Some are recognizable as a
player's first temp house they built quickly and abandoned to build something
better. Some are players that invested a lot of time to build something nice
but stopped playing.

Each server has its own type of abandoned buildings. Chaos servers, for
example, have a lot of ruined buildings covered in lava.

------
IgorPartola
I play Minecraft on a small server (semi-vanilla PvE). Some stuff I found can
be downright creepy. Here's an example:
[http://imgur.com/52wZxvp](http://imgur.com/52wZxvp). This was a huge
structure in the middle of the ocean that I stumbled upon. The giant sign on
it said "HAIL TITO" or some such. The inside was really strange too: dark,
with random traps and creatures roaming about (all intentional, such as
golems). Abandoned Minecraft buildings in general are really interesting, but
this takes the cake.

After some asking around I did find that the person didn't in fact go crazy,
and this was supposed to be a temple of sorts, with traps and treasure. But at
the time (3am) it really creeped me out.

------
spiek
I played WoW for a few years, from vanilla to the level 80 cap days (pugging
Naxx was an interesting experience).

I used to love wandering around the world, finding hidden spots, and exploring
the different pieces of Azeroth.

Now I'm older and feel way too guilty devoting that amount of time to a game.

Incidentally, one of the main pleasures of Minecraft (for me) was the same
exploration.

~~~
david-given
Yes, me too; PvP, raids, dungeons etc left me completely cold. I just liked
wandering around the map, finding the weird things in the corners, working
through the storylines (although a lot of them finished up in dungeons which
required more than one person to play, which I was annoyed at). I think I
solo'd my way all the way through WoW Classic, and then through a couple of
expansions. (The article dumps on the Outlands a lot, but they were some of my
favourite content. The designers had just gone nuts. I know someone who
painted a scene from the Outlands because it just looked so awesome.)

I think I swam all the way around both Classic continents. Took flipping ages.
There are some strange things tucked away in corners, though:

[http://cowlark.com/2009-03-31-south-kalimdor-
farm/index.html](http://cowlark.com/2009-03-31-south-kalimdor-farm/index.html)

(Man, WoW looked awful back then. Six years ago!)

------
Skilleen
I have played my fair share of MMOs, and the game I spent the most time
exploring the world was LOTRO. (lord of the rings online) It has been 5 or so
years since I played, so not sure if it is still the same, but back then they
had some deeds system where each region had challenges to kill a certain
amount of creatures or explore different locations and would reward you with
permanent stat boosts. I remember our guild would have nights where we would
group up and tackle these challenges together, those are some of my favourite
memories in gaming. Sigh, growing up sucks.

~~~
MikeTV
LOTRO also has an equippable item ("Stone of the Tortoise") that prevents a
character from gaining EXP. If I had the time to play still I would get this.
The low-level content is some of the best in the game, IMO.

------
lordnacho
I am just so lucky WoW started after I was done with education. In fact I
picked it up during a recovery from knee surgery. I figured if I couldn't walk
in the real world, I could explore an imaginary one.

It's a beautiful place. The thing is, you can't explore it without levelling.
And it's also pretty vast, at least the size of zone 2 in London tube terms.
So I ended up spending a lot of time there.

I got so deep into it I even attended a wedding. I mean where the IRL players
got married and their characters and online friends got together.

Anyway, there is something about the way it's constructed that gets boring
after a few months of playing time. It's as if there's two games: levelling
and raiding. Raiding is where your friends are, so levelling is what you have
to do to get your friends the Tank/Healer that they need. (Nobody needs DPS).

It would be cool if the content just scaled so you could level everywhere,
instead of having a predefined optimal quest/zone path. On your third
character it does get tedious, because everyone levels by doing solo DPS.

Perhaps there is also a smarter mechanic for gold grinding. When I was playing
there was always some zone that was optimal for finding the best ores, so I'd
just fly a loop of that each morning.

Lastly, is it really hard to generate content? I mean of the type "here's a
warrior, a druid, and a warlock, find us something to do that can't just be
googled". Maybe smarter minds have thought about this than me, but I thought
it could be worth a stab.

------
nalidixic
"You landlubbers are tougher than I thought. I'll have to improvise!"

Mr Smite - Deadmines

------
searine
The most fun I had in wow was running a scripted bot to power-level myself.

It added a whole level of meta-gaming and risk. It also made me ungodly rich
in gold.

Then I hit the level cap and stopped playing. Oh well.

------
wellboy
To me, WoW taught me a lot for startups, especially PvP, because arena games
were simply intelligence vs. intelligence fights. I think there is no other
game or competition where such a broad range of skills is required in such a
short amount of time (team play, application of knowledge of your character,
of all other characters and their skills, use of surroundings, application of
knowledge of game mechanics, very fast reactions). That's why it was so much
fun chasing the gladiator title, pure application of skill (got it in S3).
I've never seen something alike before, just startups I feel have the same
kind of "game type".

A bit of a shame that the vanilla feeling is gone, I think it would have been
important to keep the game hard, so that powerful items are very, very hard to
get. It seems like they wanted to make high end content accessible to everyone
in order to grow the user base, but it seems like the opposite effect was
reached. Reminds me of the startup wisdom, if you want to be everything to
everybody, you end up being nothing to no one.

------
avolcano
I got into WoW for a couple months just before the launch of the newest
expansion, though I fell out of it in favor of a few other games before the
expansion came out. Even if you're not into the endgame grind of the modern
MMO (turns out, I really wasn't, as much as I tried to be), there's just a ton
of fantastic content to explore as you level up a character. It's definitely
worth picking up on sale and just maxing out a character to explore the world.
I plan on getting the new expansion and leveling through Draenor next time
I've got a lull in my games backlog.

There's also some great articles about unfinished content in WoW, like this
one about a half-implemented zone with lots of lore around it, giving it a
particular mystique: [http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/05/wow-archivist-the-
karazha...](http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/05/wow-archivist-the-karazhan-
crypt/)

------
dbg31415
This is nothing new. Even back in the day, the only people playing in certain
old zones were people leveling... the goal of the game (for anyone other than
the insane loremasters) is to get to max level as quickly as possible so you
can raid and PVP.

Blizzard is taking steps to allow people to see old dungeons, but they have
not yet created incentives to keep people exploring old content. Arguably,
it's not a great idea to spread people out... as the game population dwindles
it's better to keep the players in the same zones so they feel like they are
in a populated world and not a single-player game.

Anyway agree there are some really cool parts of the game that ANYONE could
see... but they get abandoned. I care more about old dungeons and old raids,
but really they've done a good job of allowing players to see that content and
farm it for transmog gear and nostalgia.

------
jhwhite
So much nostalgia reading that article. Sometimes I miss playing, but I've
moved on with my life. I'm now in shape (I became very overweight during my
WoW days), my career is moving better, and I've started a family. But
sometimes I wish I could play and talk with the people in my old guild.

------
radikalus
Reading this brought back a LOT of great memories.

I remember exactly how I fell in LOVE with WoW. It was f&f, and all it
involved was walking from Stormwind down through Westfall to STV. And, then,
opening the map and realizing "Shit, this was less than 1% of this world."

That wonder at HOW big and rich a world had been crafted lasted for years. In
the first year of release, /played was > 160 days, despite being a leader in a
world-first-oriented top PvE guild, 90% of it was world pvp and exploring.

And yet it wasn't actually the environment that shaped the experience, but
that we all lived in it.

In vanilla, the world MATTERED. And in a way that wasn't always 'fun' for
everyone. (Red is dead bro)

We competed to claim world spawns. We griefed, camped, exploited strange
environment mechanics, raided opposing cities and killed world leaders or
didn't, set up roaming 5v5s, lagged out in Southshore in 200v200 struggles,
denied guilds access to instance zone-ins, cursed when we sometimes got our
come-uppance (and we sometimes famously did), and we had meaningful rivalries
and camaraderie with other players on our server.

We all had stories about nearly every player you'd meet. Actions of single
players had potentially huge social impact.

That disappeared when we all retreated to instances. (Flying mounts were a
similar scale catastrophe in world engagement) We no longer really had
communal experiences.

I functionally quit WoW at the end of BC. I still played a bit in later
seasons and expansions, but just arena selling glad titles primarily, as the
magic was gone for me, and not for lack of trying -- I had every possible
opportunity and advantage to love the game in the later expansions but never
really could.

This sounds more negative than I'd like, because I have really no strong
bitterness towards WoW. It was a shaping experience for me. I formed great
friendships and memories, learned a lot about myself, and a game like WoW has
to grow and evolve and a necessity of that is that some won't enjoy the
changes.

------
ryan-allen
Ah, I have played this game a lot... I loved exploring all the zones and
levelling up. It's not entirely true that all the game happens 'at the end' I
think, there are whole arcs that happened with each expansion but that is lost
for a brand new player. WoW caters for the lifers, I think.

Blizzard can solve the problem, they have the brains and the cash. I wish
they'd make a new MMO with all their learnings! They could deprecate WoW and
start all again. Every expansion you kind of do that anyway.

The thing about all the forgotten content is that at some point in time during
some xpac, it was very pertinent and relevant. But now it's still there many
xpacs later.

------
heidar
I recall a poll on reddit where the question was: "If you could relive any
experience for the first time again, what would it be?" Playing WoW for the
first time was quite high on that list, and I think that would be my answer
too.

------
jscottmiller
A great series exploring game worlds and other virtual spaces is Andy Kelly's
OTHER PLACES: [http://www.otherplaces.co.uk/](http://www.otherplaces.co.uk/)

His videos are both tranquil and surreal.

------
pclark
I have such fond memories of World of Warcraft when it was in private beta,
public beta, launch, and then up to the first expansion.

It sounds strange but some of my dearest friends and fondest memories of being
a teenager was via World of Warcraft.

------
ARothfusz
Ah, those screen shots made me sad. The main reason I played WoW was for
exploring, and I left when the only thing left to explore were dungeon raids
with huge numbers of prerequisite "keys" to gather, as if it weren't just hard
enough to get that many people together for the raid. I wanted to see the
dungeon and would have been happy to leave without any loot (because I lacked
the keys or whatever) if that was needed to balance the game mechanics. But I
left when there was no more land to explore. And now the lands I knew are
ghost towns?

------
mahouse
I want to cry.

If you want to play on those zones, you can resort to a private server with a
old expansion. There are very good ones on vanilla where those zones are
alive. :-)

That list of locations falls very short, too.

------
ecdavis
I'm not sure what to make of this. It seems as though there were ~20 players
in each of the zones he visited and 91 zones in total. 91 * 20 = 1820. Are
player populations much higher than that on WoW servers? I was under the
impression there were ~3000 active players per server at any given time.
Evenly dispersing players over the world is a pretty big design consideration
when it comes to MMOs.

When I played WoW I would actively seek out zones with fewer players in order
to level up.

~~~
toxican
WoW handles questing/grouping terribly, imo. GW2 (and maybe GW1? Never played
it) does auto groups where if you jump in and help someone kill those 20
bandits, you get credit toward your quest for that. Whereas in WoW, if someone
hits the bandit first, and you help, they get all of the credit. So there's
zero reason why anyone should help anyone at all. And there's also the issue
of loot. I can't count how many times I've been in active WoW zones (I'm
thinking Westfall, here)and a group of 5 or 6 people are trying to snipe kills
off eachother to get that last bore snout or whatever. In GW2, if you helped
kill it, you get the exact same loot as anyone else. And to help prevent lazy
assholes who do one shot, then sit back and wait, you get varying levels of
loot and exp depending on how much you helped.

And because of all that, there's just zero incentive to quest in WoW with
other people. Maybe you'll have a guildie or friend quest with you, but you're
just not interacting with strangers at all.

That being said, we have seen Blizz go in that direction in the last two
expansion. The daily island was largely dependent on team work (albeit through
the archaic manual group forming functionality) and there are a lot of rare
mobs in Warlords that share kills/loot with anyone who inflicts damage. So
hopefully that'll become the norm going forward.

~~~
danneu

        > And because of all that, there's just zero incentive
        > to quest in WoW with other people.
    

The issues you outline are all solved by forming a party (thus a relationship)
with strangers which is the crux of the game.

Auto-forming a party just because two players are attacking the same kobold in
the world sounds like the kind of dumbing-down that plagues WoW, like the
early death of spontaneous world PvP.

~~~
toxican
Other people have no reason to group with you though. Everyone is perfectly
content doing their own thing and will often outright decline party invites.
The only place this was ever not the case was on Mist's daily island.

I would hardly call auto-grouping dumbing down. It's a passive thing that
helps put the "Massive Multiplayer" back in MMO, which is something WoW has
been lacking outside of capital cities for years now.

~~~
danneu
They have a reason to group with you for the reasons provided above: quest-
item sharing, XP sharing + party bonus, crush quests faster, round-robin
looting for non-quest drops, etc.

Forming parties is necessary for optimal play and I never had an issue with
forming them. If someone else is in the cave smacking the same quest rats you
are, then it was common to send/receive an unsolicited party invite, then
split the party as you split ways with a `/wave`.

What about the RPG in MMORPG? It's too easy to relinquish all social decisions
from players including the decision to party with someone or not.

But then again, maybe people don't communicate as much in WoW anymore and zone
spontaneity is dead and Blizzard removed the LFG (Looking For Group) channel.
I haven't played since vanilla WoW. I'm sure the game is much different now
that the 1-60 experience isn't part of the game anymore, so we're coming from
different places.

------
chiph
I'm back playing again. I have a few lvl 100's, but I decided to start a new
character -- this one would have no weapons and no armor -- just a tabard. I
wanted to see how far I could get with just my fists. I'm up to 21 so far. I
can take out regular mobs that are 3-4 levels below me with few problems.

But I do die -- about as often as I did in BC, so about 3 times as often as
everyone else does these days. The best part is my repair costs are zero gold.

Skywall\Fistsofdeath

~~~
dlubarov
Reminds me of a GW2 player who is playing as a pacifist cat -
[http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2u6g1w/this_happ...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2u6g1w/this_happened_a_few_days_ago_but_i_forgot_to_save/)

------
xamuel
Back when I was a MUD coder, I implemented a neat 'exploration' mechanic: the
game kept track of where the characters had been, and displayed it as '% of
world explored', which a lot of players had fun trying to get as high as they
could. If one wanted, one could further incentivize exploration by actually
tying such a '% of world explored' stat to hack-n-slash gameplay.

------
petercooper
I bet Second Life is even worse for this, and with even more creepy locales
(how many virtual furry-fetish dance clubs have been left abandoned?)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Second Life is a cesspit precisely because it is entirely user-generated. I'd
imagine abandoned areas simply disappear, though, because you have to pay
Linden Labs if you want land.

------
romankolpak
What I love about posts like this one is that they usually result in beautiful
comment threads full of nostalgia and memories. And probably a couple of
renewed game subscriptions, too. :)

I had a plenty of exciting real life experiences after I quit WoW back in
2010, but somehow I still look back at my in-game experience with an
incredible warm and fuzzy feeling somewhere inside of me.

------
fishercs
Back in the day I used to farm Azshara like it was my job. that place was
desolate back then, it's good to see the developers make attempts to make all
of the zones useful, the game has just gotten so massive I can see how certain
zones would still be under utilized.

------
birdsbolt
Temple of Atal'Hakkar was one of my favorite places (7-8 years ago - vanilla)
in WoW. I went there a lot of times, tanking was extremely fun. Silithus,
Un'Goro Crater and Swamp of Sorrows were my favorite places for levelling.

Oh, nostalgia is hitting me hard :D

------
facepalm
That made me sad. It seems to me that because there is no way to have a real
impact on the world in most MMORPGs, there really is no point to visit those
places.

------
j_s
A nice reminder, perhaps. Not much data - more of a screenshot gallery.

Unfortunately no real documentation of things like realm population (or
comparisons across multiple realms), changes over time (day of week / weekend,
holidays, etc.).

Yes, "the game designers declined to comment" but I was hoping for something
with a little more detail. However, that doesn't appear to be in line with the
rest of the content on the site.

------
Liquix
i shivered with nostalgia thinking about time time i spent exploring and
building friendships in azeroth. blizzard created an entire universe, and in
some ways it is just as real as this one. very powerful and interesting to
think about, thank you for sharing

