Blizzard announced "Classic" World of Warcraft

[Trans-Financial-Man]

I hated WoW for what it represented and went back to Star Wars: Galaxies safe in the knowledge that only casual filth would play WoW and real games like SWG would endure whilst WoW would burn out after the casuals got bored.

I backed the wrong fucking horse okay. Twice! I'm still salty about City of Heroes.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I liked Vanilla WoW for what it was, but seeing all these pansy content creators come out of the woodwork to romanticize the shit out of it makes part of me hope it completely dies out within six months and Blizzard becomes a pachinko company.

All classic games share the same problem. Great for the time but flawed and in need of an evolution that never came. In fact, they all devolved from what was a work in progress to begin with.

This is what creates the contradiction here. On one hand, you have something that was good but was in need of a lot of improvements, and then you have everything released after which was actually worse. So you are forced to romanticize and glorify something that was supposed to be a stepping stone to something better and was not perfect or beyond reproach in itself, but you just have no choice on the matter because that's as good as it ever got.

TBC was pretty much an all around improvement upon classic WoW in every way. The fetishization of classic and not TBC makes me think most of these people either never played it or never played it seriously.

 

[J1M]

Whenever I play modern WoW I'm always talking w/ people.. Mythic + keys require communication and people are always either in the in game voice chat or discord.. Same with raids and rated pvp. I even get a lot of banter when just running islands tbh.

I never touch normal/heroic dungeons or LFR though those are hot garbage. Timewalking is fucking miserable too if you're pugging. Last time I pugged a timewalking dungeon we were stuck on the first fucking trash pack for over 10 minutes because the dps wouldn't read chat and interrupt the healer I ended up dropping group mid fight and never timewalking again.

One of the problems with modern wow is that you have to put in dozens of hours to determine the appropriate difficulty level for your enjoyment and the user-base is segmented into much smaller groups of people due to that. Additionally, when designers offload the difficulty choice to players a lot of them aren't going to put up with having to slog though a dozen hours of non-enjoyable play to find something appropriate. It is entirely reasonable to complete some dungeons and assume that there isn't an entirely different form of gameplay hiding in that same space if you configure the options menu correctly.

It also reduces the incentives for that content to simply "a chance at more equipment". Some players are motivated by lore, exploration, etc. Someone motivated to do several Black Rock Depths runs in Vanilla to see progressively more of the dungeon before eventually finishing it is not going to be motivated in the same way to complete Normal, Heroic, Mythic, Mythic+ versions of the dungeon.

Finally, given the decade of precedence that each patch will bring with it a gear catch-up mechanism, fewer players than ever are motivated by equipment upgrades.

 

[Dawkinsfan69]

Whenever I play modern WoW I'm always talking w/ people.. Mythic + keys require communication and people are always either in the in game voice chat or discord.. Same with raids and rated pvp. I even get a lot of banter when just running islands tbh.

I never touch normal/heroic dungeons or LFR though those are hot garbage. Timewalking is fucking miserable too if you're pugging. Last time I pugged a timewalking dungeon we were stuck on the first fucking trash pack for over 10 minutes because the dps wouldn't read chat and interrupt the healer I ended up dropping group mid fight and never timewalking again.

One of the problems with modern wow is that you have to put in dozens of hours to determine the appropriate difficulty level for your enjoyment and the user-base is segmented into much smaller groups of people due to that. Additionally, when designers offload the difficulty choice to players a lot of them aren't going to put up with having to slog though a dozen hours of non-enjoyable play to find something appropriate. It is entirely reasonable to complete some dungeons and assume that there isn't an entirely different form of gameplay hiding in that same space if you configure the options menu correctly.

It also reduces the incentives for that content to simply "a chance at more equipment". Some players are motivated by lore, exploration, etc. Someone motivated to do several Black Rock Depths runs in Vanilla to see progressively more of the dungeon before eventually finishing it is not going to be motivated in the same way to complete Normal, Heroic, Mythic, Mythic+ versions of the dungeon.

Finally, given the decade of precedence that each patch will bring with it a gear catch-up mechanism, fewer players than ever are motivated by equipment upgrades.

Yea I agree with pretty much all of that. It's annoying to have to play what is essentially a 10 hour tutorial (leveling the 10 levels each expansion then grinding some basic gear) before you can get to actual challenging content. Mythic and mythic+ dungeons are nice because they kinda scale difficulty to match your gear level so it isn't long after hitting max level until you can start running those at an appropriate level for your gear. Raids don't do this quite as well but if you ignore LFR they're still tough. Islands are quite fun and different for a while but they get old.

I don't care about gear though so the current system works out well for me. When a new patch releases I'll sub and run every dungeon on a tough mythic+ a few times, run the current raid on normal and maybe a little heroic, then I'll get bored and unsub. Catch-up mechanisms are good for this because I don't actually need to be subbed and grinding throughout the whole expansion. If that were the case I wouldn't play the game at all.

I keep saying that Blizz should remove levels and gear entirely and just scale everything in the game to a few difficulties to accommodate different skill levels but a lot of people who play are addicted to getting +1 stam boots; that's where the 'fun' is for them I guess. So I think blizz tries to appeal to both people like me who won't put up with that crap through quick catch up mechanisms and people who are addicted to repetitive grinding progression by having a resetting progression each patch.

 

[Lyric Suite]

I liked Vanilla WoW for what it was, but seeing all these pansy content creators come out of the woodwork to romanticize the shit out of it makes part of me hope it completely dies out within six months and Blizzard becomes a pachinko company.

All classic games share the same problem. Great for the time but flawed and in need of an evolution that never came. In fact, they all devolved from what was a work in progress to begin with.

This is what creates the contradiction here. On one hand, you have something that was good but was in need of a lot of improvements, and then you have everything released after which was actually worse. So you are forced to romanticize and glorify something that was supposed to be a stepping stone to something better and was not perfect or beyond reproach in itself, but you just have no choice on the matter because that's as good as it ever got.

TBC was pretty much an all around improvement upon classic WoW in every way. The fetishization of classic and not TBC makes me think most of these people either never played it or never played it seriously.

It was an improvement in some ways, but not in others. Or at least it introduced things that would eventually take the game in the wrong direction.

 

[Cromwell]

It was an improvement in some ways, but not in others. Or at least it introduced things that would eventually take the game in the wrong direction.

for all the praise tbc got it brought us dailie quests and tokens for example. It also introduced heroic dungeons with daily lockouts which sucked.

 

[Ninjerk]

Uniformly linear dungeons IIRC? The only respite was forming AoE groups for Shattered Halls.

Also, lmao at their uneven treatment of new class abilities and talent trees. Rogues got CoS and "unpoisoned" blind baseline, mages got invis, spell steal, and an extra nova castable at fucking range (frost only obvs.) while shaman got elemental totems (lol), Earth Shield was nice, and they just fucking broke WF weapon with that wonky ass DW and ICD change.

The base game was solid and on its way somewhere special and TBC could only take it so far away from that, but there is no doubt evidence of massive retardation in several areas of the game.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

TBC sucked.

 

[Xor]

TBC sucked.

Counterpoint: you suck.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

The dungeons in TBC were that shitty hallway design later WoW would become obsessed with, there was only one good raid and that was Karazhan, the PVP was so slow it was like watching I Am Sam, welfare epics were brought into the game, the expansion zones looked like something a clown would throw up, and it introduced flying mounts which would be the nail in the coffin for WPVP.

Also gave the world Draenei which is the worst race in the history of fantasy games. Nothing encompasses everything horrible, bad and corrupt more than those goat legged queers.

 

[DDZ]

But I loved Hellfire Peninsula, Nagrand and ermmm, Netherstorms<>A?

 

[Lacrymas]

Most of the areas in TBC were pretty cool and the questlines not mindless. WoW suffers from the peculiar problem that areas are *mostly* for leveling, making most of the work the designers have to put in disproportionately worthless. It's both the most work and it becoming pointless very fast. Instead of churning out samey expansions one after the other, making them smaller and smaller, they should've thought about that problem.

 

[Dawkinsfan69]

"My family was raided by boars and now I"M PISSED!!! Bring me 200 boar tusks!!!!!!!"

10/10 quest design quest of the century

 

[Lacrymas]

That's vanilla.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

They slipped way too much into that sci-fi zone in TBC.

 

[GrainWetski]

That's vanilla.

And every expansion in WoW.

 

[Lacrymas]

Eh, in Cataclysm they started more frequently doing these ZANY! WACKY! quests about being an undercover agent at the Adams family mansion or helping Ed, Edd and Eddy get jawbreakers.

 

[Angthoron]

Cataclysm was shit. Just saying. Didn't stop me from being server 2nd with rogue legendaries but it was still shit.

 

[Angthoron]

"My family was raided by boars and now I"M PISSED!!! Bring me 200 boar tusks!!!!!!!"

10/10 quest design quest of the century

P.S: 90% of the boars don't have tusks. Also, bring me 10 wolf asses. DID I FORGET TO MENTION OUR WOLVES ARE MOSTLY ASSLESS?

 

[Ninjerk]

and then you remember Dark Iron Legacy

 

[Makabb]

Wow the classic team actualy made a good decision, they will have the content released over time like in real vanilla, it means no battlegrounds at start and only world PvP.


Phase 1 (Classic Launch)

Molten Core

Onyxia

Maraudon

Phase 2

Dire Maul

Azuregos

Kazzak

Phase 3

Blackwing Lair

Darkmoon Faire

Darkmoon deck drops begin

Phase 4

Zul’Gurub

Green Dragons

Phase 5

Ahn’Qiraj War Effort begins

Ahn’Qiraj raids open when the war effort dictates

Dungeon loot reconfiguration: Tier 0.5 Dungeon gear, Relics, drop rates and location changes

Phase 6

Naxxramas

Scourge Invasion

 

[Edija]

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/classic-content-plan/120346
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/classic-content-plan/120346

They haven't decided what PvP will be like yet it seems.

 

[Lacrymas]

This is actually a pretty good plan. Especially since they are going to use items from before they were itemized better. This isn't going to fix raids being too easy since they are going wih 1.12 talents, but they'll be slightly harder without the good items. If they say they are going to buff raids to compensate for the talents, that'd be best.

 

[Makabb]

Best mmo in 2019 will be mmo from 14 years ago, lel.

 

[Zeriel]

Best mmo in 2019 will be mmo from 14 years ago, lel.

There's honestly way better stuff than even classic WoW, its just that not many people play them. Off the top of my head L2 is still really good, it's just that you'll never find a private server with the same ambience and atmosphere and general player culture that existed at launch.