World of Warcraft Launched Seventeen Years Ago Today on November 23, 2004

Posted 2021/11/23 at 3:15 PM by Paryah

General

Title

Year

Level Cap

World of Warcraft

2004

The Burning Crusade

2007

Wrath of the Lich King

2008

Cataclysm

2010

Mists of Pandaria

2012

Warlords of Draenor

2014

100

Legion

2016

110

Battle for Azeroth

2018

120

Shadowlands

2020

US nowCharactersMountsTechnologyWowpedia

The average computer a player was using in 2004 to log in:

Many were still using a 4:3 CRT monitor (LCD existed but was not popular yet) and a desktop computer to play. Most laptops didn't have enough power to run the game smoothly.
Processor speeds were 2.0 - 3.4 Ghz
Memory: 1 - 4 Gigabytes of RAM
3D cards had 256 or 512 megabytes ram
People were using Windows XP, but some were still using Windows 2000 or earlier
The game had to be installed via CD/DVDRom drive. The game was on 4 CDs (5 for the "Game of the Year" edition) which needed to be installed, and then patching had to happen. You could not download the initial game, and initial patch downloads could take an hour or more.
Some players played via dialup modem, and this made their characters jump around as they walked when viewed by other players

World of Warcraft: Classic

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Comments

Comment by iloverexxar

The game was truly magical back then. In fact playing on a square ^&*!ty monitor made it seem even more immersive, ashenvale felt like an actual forest that went on for miles. I used to run home from school just to log on and live in this huge open world and hear the little sound when your school mates log in, almost all of my friends always came online and we would all explore and do things together. I used to skip school when the green dragons were up, everything felt so mysterious and interesting, not like now where all mobs are a joke. The only part I regret is I became an elitist raider and most of my friends quit. WoW was amazing until AQ40 came out, after that it was just oh raid every single day and farm potions between.

Comment by Lostartes

What I miss is the way better customer service back then. You actually had GM responding INGAME within an hour (most times). Not like today where you get a generic answer to look it up on wohead after 1-2 days

I remember that. There was one time where the FP Master in the Exodar just....disappeared. I opened a ticket, went onto a horde toon, then got contacted by a GM who, I kid you not, took their horde toon and went running all through out the city trying to find it and getting attacked all the while. He told me he would hand the problem to an ally playing co-worker to try and do a deeper investigation. Was so funny.

Comment by pinelakias2

My 2004 responsibilities: do homework.
My 2021 responsibilities: do my work, study newer frameworks, go to the gym, cook, help my girl with shopping, pay the bills, go for drinks with some friends.
Thank you Wowhead. You reminded me what life was back in 04.
Anybody got a time machine or somethin?

Comment by Jowar

Got any idea how much the riding skills & mounts would cost by today's standards? Would be very nice to put things into perspective!

I seem to remember 100g for OG L40 Riding & 1000g for OG Epic Riding - also factor in that Riding Skill was one of the few things that had no rep discount.
The Mounts, for reference were 1g & 10g, respectively... but I *think* those were rep. discounted and you could buy them immediately you 'dinged' the appropriate Level.
However, you needed Faction Exalted to even BUY a Mount that wasn't from your 'native' Faction, even if you were L40.

Riding cost 10 gold, the simple mount 90 gold and epic riding cost 100 gold, the epic mount 900 gold, until they switched the prices in patch 1.12 to make mount collecting cheaper. You did get a discount with reputation. By today's standard, I would put the prices at 45000 gold for normal and 450000 gold for epic riding, but that's just my estimate.

Comment by hodrain

lol

Comment by hodrain

I'm not sure what you mean... but also i'm sure that sentence is porly done due to double negative and unnedded dots. yet it can be improved easily just removing the repetitive part or mention instead that there was no underwater mounts too.

And up to today i would still found weird that they went from 120 to 60, i would reduce it to 90, but well whatever

THE IRONY IS KILLING ME HERE

Also

Shut up. You knew the context of the formatting and the connotation behind it, still commented, and still failed miserably.

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