Well worth trying WoW Hardcore by the way. Permadeath changes everything:
- People know they need to get help from others. There's less bad behavior.
- You can't cheese anything, like running in to a camp to grab the quest item, letting yourself get killed, and then resurrecting.
- You find it acceptable to do side quest things like making potions and other useful stuff.
- The levels below 60 are no longer a speedrun with barely anyone else to be seen. People die all the time, and they restart all the time, so the lower levels have a lot of life. On non-hardcore, getting to 60 is inevitable.
- You have to prepare properly. Not only bringing all the consumables you'll need for raiding, also knowing what the boss is gonna do.
- Because the game is old, you get older players with old people issues like having kids. It's much more sympathetic towards life getting in your way.
- You feel an actual adrenaline rush when things go wrong. You might have 8 days played on a character who could die if you don't get out of a sticky situation. People are constantly reporting heightened heart rates. If you play non-hardcore, it's just "meh I'll run back".
Reading through this discussion, I’m reminded of how World of Warcraft has evolved to cater to such a diverse player base. Originally, it was a game where everyone started at the same level, facing similar challenges. Over time, though, that’s changed, and now players have multiple options on how they wish to engage with the game. One aspect that has grown immensely is the pursuit of WoW Hardcore Gold.
This is a fascinating element of the game, where dedicated players push the boundaries of their abilities, accumulating resources that are crucial for success in the toughest parts of the game. Hardcore gold farming requires commitment, skill, and time—things that not every player has in abundance. For many, accumulating this gold is a way to unlock high-end gear, support raiding endeavors, or fund their adventures in Mythic+ dungeons.
What stands out to me is how this niche has sparked a new economic layer within the game. Hardcore players are investing huge amounts of time into gathering resources, and their gold becomes a sought-after commodity. This creates a different dynamic for players who want to skip the grind but still desire top-tier rewards. It’s not simply about completing quests or leveling; it’s about mastering the toughest aspects of WoW’s economy.
The question is, how will this continue to evolve in the future? Will the demand for WoW Hardcore Gold (https://wowvendor.com/shop/wow-gold/product/hardcore-gold/) keep pushing players to go deeper into these challenges, or will other methods of progression emerge to balance things out? I’d love to hear how others feel about the impact of this shift in WoW’s economy.
Let me save you some time: it's not. Hardcore WoW is strictly a streamer mode.
Hardcore WoW is really an exercise not in skill but in not getting bored/complacent and taking unnecessary risks. Plus you have the constant threat of dying to network conditions or just the game crashing, both of which happenn. You may also have to deal with griefers. They've clamped down on a lot of this now (eg probably all mobs are leashed at this point) but it can still happen.
If anything, it's a test of knowledge of the game, like knowing how things path, know the safe areas (in the outside world and in dungeons) to reset things when things go badly, etc. Learning these in hardcore would be a painful lesson.
The only people playing this have been playing the game for literally decades and they know all this.
OnlyFangs can be entertaining content. Watch as you please but hardcore is just not for you, most likely.
Totally agree with all of these points. I will roll a new toon on an era HC server every now and again when I'm bored with current games, just because it does feel like a new experience for me every time. Trying to figure out the safest routes, best quests to grab, non-death skips to get to easier leveling experiences (my favorite is one that gets you to darkshore by way of menethil harbor), etc.
>- You have to prepare properly. Not only bringing all the consumables you'll need for raiding, also knowing what the boss is gonna do.
But that is, regrettably, also the case for retail. You are expected to spoil the dungeons and raids for yourself by reading up on everything the bosses will do, before you first enter. Nobody has the patience to go in blind and figure out their own strategies.
And you're also expected to use addons that will tell you exactly what to do and when.
That's what made me lose interest in the game. You're not the player. The addons are. You are doing the one thing they can't: Press the buttons for them. You're the input device. I hate this so much.
For modern WoW, even in dungeons (M+), if you can’t follow a perfectly executed “script”, nobody is interested in grouping with you. You don’t really need a stack of addons but an encyclopedic knowledge of maps, mechanics, strats, affixes, etc and the current meta is the norm and expected.
It feels barely related to D&D tabletop sessions or classic fantasy anything and more like a group Mario 64 speedrun or something.
Is that even a new phenomenon? The notion of a MMORPG "raid" as a highly orchestrated event was already well-established 15-20 years ago (recall the infamous "Onyxia Wipe" recording, for instance). It may have even predated World of Warcraft; older MMOs like EverQuest had similar dynamics.
Raiding in original WoW covered a wide spectrum. There were a tiny handful of hardcore cutting edge raiders, some who wanted to be those cutting edge raiders but weren’t (that Onyxia video), super chill raiders who were 2+ major raids behind and mostly used raiding as an excuse to goof around in Ventrilo, and everywhere in between. My guild fell in the last of those categories and it was fun.
While being “serious” became more popular in raiding over time, prior to M+ that mentality never came to dungeons. Up until its addition those were more of a go in with whatever ragtag crew you could gather together and have fun kind of thing, which has sadly has mostly been supplanted by solo content in modern WoW. There’s little content that requires a group and is low-stakes enough for the social or fantasy aspects to take precedence over the competitive ones.
No modern addon lets you play the game for you, except maybe Hekili which displays your optimal damage rotation (but even that's a massive crutch). Addons such as DBM and WeakAuras all provide information that can be learnt manually with skill/experience (and some top players use minimal addons), but by design can't control player actions. It's more about reducing cognitive load.
The main difficulty with modern WoW is not standing in the fire that kills you in less time than human reaction speed, and using defensive abilities if you're taking damage that can't be avoided.
I'd push back slightly on the idea that top players use minimal addons. During every RWF push, almost every top team has a dedicated resource solely for the purpose of making custom WeakAuras for different parts of each boss fight. During the last cycle, I think I saw Max call for no less than two or three dozen breaks just so folks could make sure their WAs were in sync and on the right version.
Granted I'm cherry-picking RWF where people are severely under-geared at first, but I think it does offer a relevant microcosmic example of the state of addons in retail WoW. They're more or less required for the competitive side of most "hard" content these days, even for the most coordinated of groups.
(EDIT: I wanted to add that in no way do I consider this "playing the game for you". It still took the aforementioned teams like 2 weeks to clear Nerub-ar Palace, and the largest chunk of that time wasn't even on the last boss, it was on Kyveza)
Mythic raiding/RWF/literally the best of the best is a massive outlier. Blizzard themself didn't seem happy about Liquid actually having to develop custom WeakAuras for that.
Oh I totally agree that I think its not great for the game in terms of balance. As a dev, I do enjoy being able to make my own custom addons, especially as a healer. But I think a push towards less addons in the game will help its casual accessibility big time.
This is an issue even in Mythic+ where missing a single kick means you likely wipe your group and if its a pug they probably all leave the key afterwards (the latter is a separate community issue, but exists nonetheless). If Blizz in the future is forced to assume that most players dont have kick addons that tell them which party member has a kick up and a timer/alert to tell you when to kick the caster mob, then theyre also forced into improving the UI to help the players know that information without external assistance. Or even better improve the mechanics writ large so that arcane knowledge is less zero-sum when you dont have it.
Not a chance in hell you can clear mythic simply pressing buttons based on add-ons. There’s a huge learning curve and skill requirement until you’re overgeared. Otherwise you’d see PUGs getting CE when most can’t reliably clear heroic until late in the patch.
Mythic is probably as hard or harder now than it’s ever been. (Minus unkillable tuning of course). They’ve removed complexity that made things “difficult” in an unsatisfying way and we have lower ping now, but “add-ons do it all for you” is a silly take.
Not recommended for a first timer!! I played with some friends, made it to the ragnarok fight, thought, “hmm does that lava kill you on touch or only do fast damage over time?” Asked friends and they all said they remembered it being fast dots. Tippy toe goes in, and there goes 20 hours :(
"Meaningful" is going to be very different from person to person. Even $10 would be discouraging to so, so many people, while some people on here wouldn't balk even at three or even four digits.
But the TIME you lose on a high-level character, that stings for EVERYONE. I don't think you need to raise the stakes even further. Like, why, what are you even gaining? The goal of the mode has already been met.
I think I’ll stick with Path of Exile. Not a fan of the Blizzard scene these days, lots of toxicity. Some say PoE is toxic but at least you aren’t forced to interact with anyone there like in WoW. Playing hardcore to avoid toxicity isn’t a selling point and sounds like a futile cope to me.
This is the future of entertainment, it just isn't evenly distributed yet.
People like this are going to have access to Hollywood-grade AI that they can run from their home PC using open source models soon.
Every theater kid or improviser will immediately be able to become an orc or space trooper.
The pipe dream of becoming a Hollywood actor had to go through the Instagram/TikTok/Twitch phase, but it's about to come full circle.
Creators will own their own audiences and stories rather than having to fight for a spot at the top of the Disney pyramid. They won't be subservient to Disney producers, brand guidelines, or controls.
Studios only existed because (1) distribution was hard and (2) financial capital, human capital, and logistics were steep barriers. Neither is true anymore. The indie creator studio can thrive.
The future is going to be awesome. Steam/Bandcamp for TV, film, fantasy and science fiction.
Replace Hollywood/Disney with Twitch and nothing is different.
You still need to get lucky to be famous on Twitch (or Youtube) for your distribution channel and have enough influence that whatever you make, people will care about it.
Also they don't own their audience in this case, Twitch does.
> They won't be subservient to Disney producers, brand guidelines, or controls.
Although given that we're talking about content set inside World of Warcraft, if this ever actually started making Disney-level money then you can bet your bottom dollar that Blizzard will come seeking their pound of flesh (and don't bother arguing that this would be foolish and self-destructive, this is Blizzard we're talking about).
> and don't bother arguing that this would be foolish and self-destructive, this is Blizzard we're talking about
for some context, some of Blizzard's previous self destructive antics:
Starcraft 2: refused to let existing Korean SC1 leagues/orgs play SC2. leagues (vast majority of esports audience) simply stayed on SC1 rather than submit
Overwatch: terminated license for all third party OW tournaments, so they could launch official Overwatch League (which then failed)
WC3 reforged: so unreliable (kept dropping games in progress, ruining everyone) that everyone just gave up
Sounds like we are about to get a bunch of AI slop garbage. Every time I watch streaming now I appreciate the studio system more and how it at least attempted to create something of quality. So much now is like reading a novel that didn’t have an editor.
It's a tool. The people you see using it now are the early adopters and the hustlers.
You'll see the young artists picking it up soon. I know several awards winning VFX industry folks that love playing with it, but they're afraid to tell their colleagues.
Joel Haver's use of EbSynth [1] is probably an indication of how this will be used successfully at first. Strong sketch comedy and improv performers using AI to elevate their visual presentation. From there it'll grow.
> love playing with it, but they're afraid to tell their colleagues
Obviously. Because if it was trained on previous VFX artist work and now puts VFX artists out of work it's a bit icky to talk about with fellow artists. But also because if they use it then more likely you are out first. Eventually they are out too, when studios/platforms/owners realize they can just use the tool directy and skip the middleman, but until then it's a charade where everyone pretends it's not happening and all is fine while house burns down.
It also lowers the bar for new entrants. Probably the same thing will happen like everything else: we’ll end up with a few really good things, vast majority will not be worth our time, and discoverability of the new good things will be really bad.
It's exactly the opposite. People are drawn to the top .01% of content creators and ignore the rest. The distribution on it is as bad as it always was.
Making creation cheap just means that the control goes to whoever can bring in eyeballs. So it might not be a studio not making you be able to create your vision, but an algorithm deciding that they want to boost someone else and not you.
See the situation in modern indie videogames: Today a small team does what used to take a huge team a couple of decades ago, but you still have projects that have so much budget you cannot touch them with a small team, and difficulties getting good, small games to find audiences, as they need to deal with a different set of gatekeepers. You'll need some influencer, a blogger, or some social network algo, which can be gamed, to give you exposure. Success without paying is not impossible, but the easy route is through paying. And how much will people pay? More than you want.
Even in a world without physical scarcity, if you want eyeballs and clout, scarcity will still exist because real fame and success is limited. And based on who are the most popular organic-ish influencers, you might not like the kind of person who wins.
To be honest, record labels are doing a fantastic job still impoverishing artists even in the age of Bandcamp. I don’t doubt that Disney/ABC will plow some venture capital into a machinima venture, too, in the same way that the the Big Three have/had stakes in Spotify.
My partner does: he’s in the DIY punk scene and Had a distributor but no label, but actually makes small but consistent money off merch he screenprints himself. Especially since the margins are around 50% (and pay-what-you-can too.) Joining multiple bands to rent out a venue is very cost-effective too.
The Bandcamp is there for people who don’t want a Spotify-mediated experience.
>The future is going to be awesome. Steam/Bandcamp for TV, film, fantasy and science fiction.
I'm not sure how awesome this future is when you reference Steam, a service where we own nothing. Then Bandcamp which has been a positive force originally, but bought up by the worst kinds of companies more than once recently.
Steam is amazing because Valve are benevolent dictators. It’s easy to forget that we don’t actually have any rights. I’m afraid of what happens when Gabe leaves.
I think this optimism is extremely misplaced, as I think things are likely to get substantially less evenly distributed. It seems more likely we'll have a future where indies more successfully drown each other out in a sea of noise, while major studios continue to enjoy massive moats of content and marketing.
On the content front, studios have benefited massively by selling sure bets in a sea of noise: of the top 10 box office films of 2024, there isn't a single original IP, every single film is either an adaptation or sequel to prior work made long ago. [1]. I view this as part of a broader "flight towards quality" pattern in the internet age - even if there's tons of great content online (orders of magnitude more), the viewing public still ultimately values both studio curation and IP familiarity. This goes beyond the films themselves: the studio IP rights moat includes the access to famous big-name actors that fill seats, the IP rights to use their likeness, and access to their personal platforms to push the film, all of which these studios control. Even if indies can generate "a person" or "a movie", the inability to legally generate "specific people that the public knows and likes without their permission" or "specific movies set in universes they know and care about" represents moat that isn't leaving studio's hands in a world of widespread AI.
Separate from IP rights, it also assumes a hyper-specific model of how AI specialization and use will look if it's widely available. For example, even assuming AI that can generate anything you ask for, it's likely that people will continue valuing significant sound, music, and visual post-processing to augment end-state AI generations to better match and personalize a final vision differentiated from the models themselves. This means labor costs, which indies at scale would continue to lack access to. This also assumes a model of the world where AI becomes a reducer of specialization, which isn't guaranteed: even assuming superhuman production capabilities by AI, such that there is no longer any individual human input on some aspect of the film, someone has to point the superhuman AI in productive directions that map to somewhere good in the quality spectrum, and it's likely that there will be significant differentiation in human skill at this task across different domains, as one can think of the superhuman AI as a tool being consumed by a skilled collaborator, even if the AI is doing most of the work. In the event that this is the case, studios can and will continue having much bigger labor budgets to continue to differentiate themselves on quality compared to indies trying to DIY this process.
And lastly, marketing is still king. About half of a modern big-budget picture's budget gets spent on the marketing today, only the other half goes towards making the actual film. Even if state-of-the-art Hollywood grade AI means anyone can produce a shot-for-shot reproduction of any current Hollywood film, ultimately, people need to find the content in order to watch it, and even in a world with widely available AI, it's the indie's marketing budget of ~$0 dollars, versus the major studio's marketing budget of $50,000,000-$200,000,000. I would happily continue betting against indies winning this fight, especially when the low end of this market, which is already oversaturated and hard to meaningfully stand out in, is drowned out in an order of magnitude more noise from low-end AI creators flooding the space with slop.
ah yes, GTA RP, that broke one marriage (moonmoon) and one ten years old relationship (nmplol).
It did give us chad nmplol and three arcs of the most shameless farming on the platform since mizkif's good ol' days. If people here knew how much money you can make by just flirting on stream
There was some love triangle drama between a GTA RP streamer and Chandler Riggs (Carl from The Walking Dead) that eventually ended in Chandler never returning to RP again. IIRC someone stole someone's girl, don't remember who but it caused a lot of bad blood.
Yeah, I wouldn't attribute GTA RP to the nmplol break up. If anything, that came down to he wanted children and she didn't. Also, Malena's mother is (last I heard) seriously ill with cancer and that has a way of putting things in perspective.
Nick has a long history of saying weird things to women that some will call creepy but others will just call "PogO farming".
I know very little about the Moonmoon situation but wasn't he planning on meeting up with his online GF (while having a RL wife) at TwitchCon?
Clearing MC like that sounds impossible. Even if everyone was familiar with it by practicing on non hardcore servers they won't have the gear they need. Are people even clearing Scholo/Strat/UBS on hardcore servers?
Probably died hundreds to thousands of times in MC. The easier runs later were possible because we were gearing up every week and then eventually had tier 2
You've had several replies talking about how Molten Core will be cleared easily by modern WoW players, and as someone who plays retail WoW (and has been playing continuously since Burning Crusade) I'll vouch for that take. Molten Core's mechanics are trivially easy compared to the things retail players are up against even in simple dungeons.
That said, the type of player who plays WoW now has also changed since the original raiders entered Molten Core so many years ago. People still raid for fun, but like many things in modern society¹, you're also there to raid "efficiently."
This documentary that I watched recently called "Why it's rude to suck at World of Warcraft" is worth the watch. It talks about how raiding has changed from a fun thing that people used to do in vanilla WoW, where a guild of 40 people would put up with the weird gnome in the guild who wouldn't wear boots, to a hyper competitive pseudo-esport where players stopped tolerating that gnome player over a decade ago.
¹ trying not to sound too preachy, I personally love the "get good and keep improving yourself" aspect about WoW, and it's why I push in the game's rated arena brackets each season.
Thats not my experience at all. I wasn't on a particularly competitive server, but on ours my guild got the second horde Nef kill. Raids were full with 40 people, 3+ hours/six nights a week and there were requirements for attendance and you would be kicked if you didn't meet them. Never dealt with a "wierd guy who didn't wear boots". You literally had to write applications and do interviews to join guilds.
Molten Core was eventually easily clearable back then, so much so it was the hardest to get attendance for the <1 night it took. But I still think that had a lot more about being geared
Oh your comment really takes me back! I forgot how seriously guilds used to take the applications and interviews thing, including my own. Some still do a facsimile of what it used to be, but mostly it's all centered around the applicant's performance on publicly available logs at www.warcraftlogs.com now. It's a simple process for raiding guilds to look up applicants, see how they've performed, and then decide whether or not they want them on their raid team.
Anyway, I didn't mean to suggest that all guilds used to have a weird bootless gnome-type raider back in vanilla. There were plenty of "hardcore" guilds around back then. What I meant was that there were a lot more of the bootless gnome-type players raiding back then, and they were tolerated by a lot more guilds and players in general because "that's just Jim, it's how he likes to play!"
As the documentary points out, the bootless gnome player has died out entirely outside of non-roleplay servers, because the playerbase as a whole decided that they want efficiency, speed and performance to be their #1 priority. That priority manifests itself everywhere in modern WoW.
I watched the YT video. The bootless Gnome was in MC within a month of WOW launching, which kind of completely changes my perspective on it. Maybe I'm viewing it with nostalgia but that actually sounds hardcore.
Playing with modern Add-ons seems like the biggest difference. The gear requirements don't matter when you are playing with an aim-bot.
Also on the Add-on front. 20 years ago it felt like it was going down the path we see in tech where maximizing metrics become thing in themselves. I was a Druid healer and there was definitely pressure to spam for the readouts vs. the actual goal of making raid succeed and not letting the MT/OT whoever die.
That video is incredibly good. The same trouble with the meta One True Path existed all the way back in vanilla. Our guild was objectively faster clearing dungeons by departing from widely-disseminated strats (by, e.g., selectively kiting / evasion-tanking, and using hybrid characters as intended). That maybe wasn't "best" in top-tier play, but it absolutely was in situations where everyone wasn't geared to the max. (And, you know, we had loads more fun figuring out our own optimized path than we would have copying someone else's.)
WoW broke for me when cross-realm play was introduced. Prior to that, you gained a reputation on your server, so poor behavior was kept (somewhat) in check, and "randoms" you grouped with were therefore a) more willing to listen and follow alternative approaches, and b) worth teaching, because you knew you were likely to see them again. Complete anonymity removed the social contracts that made the game special.
> WoW broke for me when cross-realm play was introduced. Prior to that, you gained a reputation on your server, so poor behavior was kept (somewhat) in check, and "randoms" you grouped with were therefore a) more willing to listen and follow alternative approaches, and b) worth teaching, because you knew you were likely to see them again. Complete anonymity removed the social contracts that made the game special.
I was just talking with my wife this morning about how different dungeons are now compared to back then, and how we'd be unlikely to wind up together if it were to happen today in modern WoW. She and I met while playing WoW back in Wrath; she played a paladin tank and was looking for a healer to heal a dungeon with her and her friends. I played a resto shaman at the time and decided to join them. We all ended up chatting so much that we added each other to our friend lists and started running dungeons together regularly. One thing lead to another and now we're happily married — 15 years later and still playing the game together.
I've been leveling some alts via dungeons recently, and the sense of community you get when you're in dungeons is completely gone. People do not talk to each other at all, there is zero communication. They are in and out of there as quickly as possible, no time for talking, no time for "hello."
The same is doubly true for LFR. 25 people in a raid and nobody talks to each other. If you're not at the boss by the time everyone else is, they're not waiting for you and they're going to pull. If you caused a wipe, you're going to get kicked from the group and replaced. They're just there to get loot for their alts and queue for the next wing of the raid.
That's such a shame. I think I had as many friends outside my guild as I did inside, back in the day. I had a macro which buffed + whispered folks, and I spammed it at everyone I ran across; I'd join a PUG and people would say "it's you!".
There was one guy I'd group up with every Wednesday to run East Strat (this was early on, when it was a challenge for most PUGs) - he was a hunter (<Preyofwar>, if you're out there, it's been a long time, buddy) and I was a druid, so when we got a tank I healed, and when we got a healer I tanked; and, you know, hunters were intended to be group leaders, and mark + make the pulls - and for a while we made it a Thing; people would message us when they saw us come online.
This one time we grabbed a woman who mainly crafted - she'd sit outside the auction house handing out low-level bags to noobs - and had barely run dungeons before; it took some convincing to persuade her to come, and she didn't really know what she was doing (I think she was a resto shaman?). Halfway through, the assholes we'd picked up outside the instance started giving her grief in the chat - she'd wiped us at least a couple of times in a row - and she started apologizing and offering to go, and we said "no fucking way" and kicked them, and then called in favors with our guildmates to get some better-geared and more-experienced folks to help us carry her the rest of the way.
That's the sort of thing I loved about early WoW. We took the gamey side seriously - like, that guy and I really prided ourselves on how quickly we could run a group through the dungeon, and optimized the hell out of our pulls - but it was set up to remind you there was a human on the other side of the keyboard, too.
It's the best time I've had (or ever expect to have) with any video game, ever, and I'll never ever go back.
Replying to myself, because whenever I think about early-WoW I get nostalgic, and it's on my mind for a while. Our guild strictly prohibited posting DPS or healing logs in raid or guild chat (though linking them in class-specific threads was fine). This was excellent, because it kept us from making targets out of those metrics, or making apples-oranges comparisons, and kept our focus on completing instances efficiently.
In one of my favorite fights the mages and I worked out a cool trick that I never saw in any strategy guide. Do you remember the banquet fight in Karazan? One of the bosses had pretty good spell resistance, and we suggested saving it for last. By that point in the fight I'd be helping the melee toons get it down, so my mana would be basically full at the end. The mages would totally stop casting on that boss, and aim to be at about half mana when combat stopped.
The instant we finished the mob off, the mages and I would run out the door, and I'd head up to the top of the stairs. With precise timing from a particular angle I could pull two groups of trash mobs in the next room, and make sure that they got to the stairs at the same time so they'd all get caught in my AoE. Between that spell, HoTs, and Thorns, druids could get phenomenal threat on grouped mobs. They'd hit me for a few seconds until they were sticky enough that the mages could AoE them down without getting touched. Then we'd sit down and drink/bandage, and laugh and point at the group if they'd taken too long looting.
Because no one particularly cared about their individual stats we saved everyone three or four minutes of waiting for those pulls. We were anything but an elite guild, on a bog-standard non-competitive server, but it was deeply satisfying to discover those small moments that contributed to everyone's success.
Classic has essentially been "solved." The main barrier back in 2004 was not difficulty, but knowledge, organization, and tooling. Modern "retail" WoW is orders-of-magnitude more difficult to offset those improvements.
Guilds have enough resources and player skill to greatly limit the possiblity of unexpected chaos.
On the other hand, MC is the most "solved" out of all the raids at this point though in terms of mechanics. The most experienced folks can low-man it with 10-20 people using mediocre gear (as long as they have some fire res). And its something that casuals can pug these days as well, I've hopped into a pug myself on an era realm with mostly blues as a resto shaman and was fine.
I tend to agree though that for "content" reasons this sounds impossible, someone will wipe the raid just for the laughs.
It's important to remember that perception of difficulty was different then, which is why classic can seem pretty dull to a modern player. If you know very little about the game, have mediocre tools and varying skills within the group, poor coordination, it'll be much harder. Mechanically it's nothing too interesting, it was just very involved time wise, and consequently much more immersive long-term.
People conjure various reasons for why things are different now, but routinely omit the changes in class talents and gearing.
At launch there was zero spell damage or healing on raid gear as a stat. You might find some green of shadow wrath but items like Robe of volatile power simply did not exist yet.
Warriors, the current top damage class, had a talent rework at BWL release which introduced their main damaging ability at nearly half the effectiveness of where it eventually end up.
Throw in world buff scheduling and the game is very different from how it played at launch.
I was playing back then in 2006, you absolutely could. I don't remember any 10-man groups at that time, but people were absolutely doing this with mage-heavy comps with 20 people. And then after Stormcraft Sandbox when all the private servers began to explode in popularity, you had the ability to run back every encounter as much as you wished to speed up the learning curve, test/learn new strats, etc.
I've watched a few OnlyFangs streamers and didn't see any roleplaying. I thought it was just a normal Hardcore guild.
Edit: Watching Sodapoppin right now and it's nothing like NoPixel or how the article makes it sound like. He's just playing the game as he always does and is not "in character" when speaking with the other guild members. Is the RP only happening in special events? I've watched a lot of GTA RP and the improvisational drama permeates everything the players do and they never go out of character.
it really has been incredible to watch. the whole main crew behind this really are genius.
i always wondered why someone didn’t do a long term role play with a big group and WoW. no pixel does it sooooo well with gta5, WoW always seemed like the perfect fantasy genre setting for it.
but omg if you’re a completionist, you can really dump a crazy amount of time into keeping up with the lore since it unfolds in real time over so many streamers.
ten years ago i would have enjoyed learning about this a lot more; today all i can think about is that blizzard has the ability to shut the whole thing down by asserting their "rights" over streaming footage of a game. (whether they will or not is a separate issue; the fact that they can means that the streamers are basically sharecropping, which sours things for me.)
I'm actually surprised this other tidbit of Twitch news didn't make it to HN; PirateSoftware's record for longest "hype train"[0] was broken by vedal987 and his AI Vtuber creation, Neuro-sama, on January 1st. He amassed tens of thousands of subscriptions, with PirateSoftware hoping to win the title back on April 1st[1] (which, in my opinion, is a weird proclamation considering it's directly asking your fans to give you a lot of money).
[0] Essentially, how many subscriptions/bits are bought by the community within a relatively short time-frame.
> with PirateSoftware hoping to win the title back on April 1st[1] (which, in my opinion, is a weird proclamation considering it's directly asking your fans to give you a lot of money
he wants to make money, that’s not really an odd proclamation
Eh, it's patronage. Can't really be that mad at people giving money to folks they find entertaining where the content is given away freely even to people who don't pay.
There's so many sketchy business models, hard to be mad at one that's completely devoid of coercion and people enthusiastically participate in
When giving money to the content creator is the game mechanic that allows the cc to "win", it becomes something else imho.
There is "I tell stories and here's a hat you can put some pennies in" and there's "I'm in a contest, the one with the most money in their hat wins". I feel like there is some abuse of human traits to extract money going on here.
But I agree, there's many wat more sketchy MOs around. In a way I have to respect this one, they make it work with so few moving parts.
My gut feeling watching PirateSoftware says to me that something is wrong with this dude. Of course, he was a hacker for the government, worked at Blizzard hat made all the smart decisions, source is him.
Every time he's saying something obvious (basic computer science concepts) and people are pretending he's the ubergod of knowledge.
The dumb person's genius, I feel like. Something says to me there is much pretending involved.
I suppose! Honestly, I wish it worked like Humble Bundle wherein you have a sliding scale on who gets your money; the platform (Twitch/Amazon), the streamer, and the charity. I'm personally subscribed to PirateSoftware and GDQ because I don't want to see ads and hope a few of my bucks make it to them.
Currently it's hard to know[0] how much you're giving the content creator versus Twitch/Amazon.
They are hyping giving Amazon and the streamer money (exceptions for the trusted charity streams). Like when the cable shopping channel hosts would go crazy about how many foot spas they have sold in the last 5 mins.
Except the host is some flashing message above the chat box showing what hype train "level" has been reached.
Imagine $FOOTBALL_TEAM fans vs $OTHER_FOOTBALL_TEAM fans, except instead of their fervor being a minor factor setting the general mood in the arena, it’s the actual competition
I find it oddly satisfying that 'classic' or 'vanilla' WoW is still so valued. I really enjoyed playing it. It is the high bar in my book for balance/humor/gameplay/story.
I briefly looked at the mechanics of making an 'infinite' world server with some fellow players, something where the story line evolved but in a way that allowed new players to join and kept existing players engaged. Never allowing the 'gear+talents' overmatch that eventually befell WoW. That is a surprisingly interesting 'problem' to work on, not just from a game play perspective but from an evolutionary systems perspective.
To give an example, in our musings we only "spawn" base level mobs, but people can play the game for free if they are willing to play a mob rather than a hero. If their character survives long enough it uplevels to a silver elite, and then again to a gold elite. At gold status the player has the option of recruiting other mobs to aide it and give them 'tasks' (like protect his other mob, or give your loot to me, Etc). Eventually leading to a player designed dungeon encounter which hero players can play and get XP for as well.
Once Blizzard released the Burning Crusade characters wearing gear for those levels and at level 70 could 5 or 10 man what had been raids in WoW vanilla. And then by the end of Cataclysm you could solo Molten Core with most character types.
As a result you ended up in a world where 90% of the content was laughably easy, and rather discontinuous with respect to the original story lines. It became this weird easy sauce thing where you raced from level 1 to whatever the bottom level was of the current expansion, and then you worked your way up from there. But things you could get later could often be applied earlier (runes, enchantments, etc) making your gear massively overpowered which was "great" for leveling if you just wanted to get from 1 to whatever.
At one of the Blizcons the devs even said it was easier to do that then to try to create content that was engaging and that everyone could enjoy.
I'll be the first to admit that this was felt more by people who had been through the whole game than those who joined later, which is why I think folks playing through vanilla for the first time are so amazed by it.
Well we didn't have the resources to start our own game studio and Blizzard wasn't interested in developing it. The group felt that if we built it with the same game mechanics we'd be at risk of getting sued into oblivion.
