Greentext

"Honey, can you go out and powerwash the side of the house this weekend?"

"Awww, c'mon... I was planning on playing Powerwash Simulator this weekend! 😩"

Real chores give us no sense of pride and accomplishment

That, and nobody had documented how everything worked yet. And, there wasn't a good way to communicate outside the game. And there was no group finder, etc. so the only way to work together was to chat.

In-game chat was essential to playing the game. It was essential to understanding the game. And it was somewhat self-policing, because if you got a bad reputation on your realm from chat, it would be harder to find groups.

These days most chat happens outside the game. Nobody chats in-game to understand the game. Nobody needs the community features of the game to do quests, group content, even raids. Realms are meaningless because most content is cross-realm, so you can't get a bad reputation if you're an asshole because you never see the same people again.

I don't think there's a way to go back to 2004. But, it still seems like Blizzard shot themselves in the foot multiple times when it comes to community features.

Also, I think this undersells how good the game looked.

Yes, you were hunting boar livers but you were doing it in this beautiful tropical jungle beside a giant waterfall. And then you'd peak behind the waterfall, discover a mermaid who was at the gate of a giant dungeon themed like a water park. And you completely forgot about the quest to go play in the water park for a couple of hours.

I'd say the bigger problem with WoW was the gradient of zones. You'd be hunting zebra-taurs on the high planes. And then you'd walk through a mountain pass, see a dinosaur, get all excited, and aggro a creature +30 your level.

In 2004 (the launch year) the original WoW was an amazing time I lost and entire year of professional growth and productivity to. When the first expansion (Burning Crusade) came out, I was equally excited as as the original launch, but after seeing Green gear fall of simple mobs that was better than the epic Purple gear I spent weeks getting in 40 person raids, I could instantly forecast how the entire rest of the game would be forever: and endless grind with your hard won efforts simply trivialized in the first month of the next expansion. I stopped playing WoW about a month after, went back to school instead, and finished the college degree I had started 8 years earlier. Quitting WoW lead to my actions which launched my career to new heights.

I credit WoW with teaching me an incredible life lesson in my 20s to never get drawn into something like that again.

I played for a while on the Warmane private server. High population, very active, and completely free.

Is Barons chat still and endless spam of people asking for the location of Mankrik's wife?

You're not wrong about Alliance zones feeling more fleshed out.. but over the last two decades of playing vanilla WoW on and off, every single time that I've rolled an Alliance character and tried my best to commit, I would eventually see a primitive ass Horde outpost with hanging feathers and dreamcatchers, with some bulky spiked Orc and a noble Tauren standing there.. and I would feel such an immense feeling of homesickness unlike anything I've ever felt in another game, and I would immediately delete that character and start over in Durotar.

Something about fighting for the honor of the Horde and the glory of the Warchief out there in an inhospitable land, with the inspirational swell of horns and indigenous drums just puts me in it. Like, really puts me in it.

It doesn't take 20 hours to get to the fun but, it just wasn't for you.

I remember leaving the dwarf starter zone for the first time. Passed some NPC dwarfs, got chased by a mob that was way too powerful for me and barely survived. When I was done running, and was safe, I looked around and saw the entrance to IronForge.

That's when I knew the game was for me

Well, in Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2, you also have reasons to collect lots of the same stuff to do stuff.

The difference is that you don't have to collect 10 boar asses in boar ass forest for a specific boar ass quest, but instead you may want to craft a legendary bone weapon, so you need to gather bones, and you can go anywhere in the world that drops the bones, or that gives gold you can use to buy the bones from other players, or that grants a special map currency that you can use tyo buy boxes of bones from a map currency vendor, all while doing whatever you feel like doing, progressing your bone gathering in a wide variety of ways.