Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

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.

  Tyria is not as robust as Azeroth.

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.

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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Mr Smite - Deadmines

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

His videos are both tranquil and surreal.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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?)

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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