Ubergeneral3 posted...
after playing SoD and then leveling in the new updated zones, holy crap does everything feel so much better. I don't want to go back to SoD. It takes too long to do anything. Say what you want about the epicness of the old world, all the difficulty in vanilla comes from things being inconvenient and time consuming.
not sure how much you've played the game, but this is a complaint i've heard a lot over the years and i think it really misses the point of what makes an MMO compelling
when the modern WoW developers sanded down all the rough edges from the leveling experience, it had a number of bad effects.
for example, removing group quests reduces cooperation and teamwork. that kind of thing reverberates to other aspects of the game, like bad vibes communicating across a tuning fork. if people don't have group quests, they never dip their toe into the social aspects of the game. they start playing the MMO as a single-player experience. then you get to the point where you can just hit a queue button and auto-find a group, which is even worse.
the cumulative effect of all these things eventually erodes away other really important aspects of the game. the health of guilds in modern retail is really, really bad, precisely because the game is too fucking convenient and there are no rough edges to incentivize guilding.