Blizzard announced "Classic" World of Warcraft

[Lacrymas]

They are making the core gameplay worse, not really "dumbing the game down", but it also depends on what you mean by that. The additions of the legendaries and RNG on top of RNG is making it worse. If you are raiding Mythic it's immeasurably more brutal than vanilla ever was and the aforementioned issues only apply to the highest level of play. That's the problem, though, most people only go to LFG and LFR and then complain it's "too easy" and there's "no socializing". Well, duh, you are playing on baby mode. Yes, I agree there should be only 1 difficulty, as brutal as it can possibly be, THAT'S what makes clearing it and getting items from it meaningful. People are clearing raids and getting gear without any effort whatsoever in LFR, spoiling the experience because it's always disappointing and subtly ego-destroying to get things you don't deserve and didn't earn. And those are the majority of players, I remember reading that only around 1% of the population cleared mythic raids. PvP/Arena has been outright bad since the end of WotLK, so that's also a factor.

At the end of the day, it's not about "the world" or "muh hard raids", or "muh socialization", or "muh expensive mount" and such. It has always been about the effortless progression and the feeling of being subpar by getting things you shouldn't. The shitty gameplay is also a factor, of course, but, like with all games in general, most players can't really understand the gameplay is bad.

Yes, there are still people who can't clear even Majordomo when AQ is already out, there was this Russian guild on Kronos that still struggled with MC while we were blazing through AQ, but that's fine. That's what people want, to struggle and to overcome. Or find themselves lacking. The problems of vanilla are only apparent when you are on top of it, cleared all content and are playing on the highest possible level.

 

[Wulfstand]

and when you reach the end then what ?

The server will catch up with retail and become a normal retail server. That's the only realistic option. I very much doubt they'll make more content for older expansions. At most, if classic servers overshadow retail, they'll shift their design on retail to more closely match the classic era.

They could implement a sort of ladder-style of doing things, ala Diablo. Once a classic server reaches 1.12, you can either a) stay on it indefinitely, b) switch to an ongoing tbc server that's on whichever patch or c) wait for the new season to start and move to a fresh tbc server.

That's the same thing as starting a vanilla server when the original one transfers to TBC. I guess it prevents them making new servers constantly, so that's one middle-man down and cuts some costs, and can work.

My idea would work for people who don't want to move on to a different expansion. To this day, there are people who only wish to log on and wish to play only Vanilla wow. Or that only want to log on to Mists of Pandaria and do Rated Battlegrounds with their group of friends. You can easily merge older servers that have been left with low population due to many people moving on to different expansions.
It's a very scalable solution, imo.

 

[Lacrymas]

My idea would work for people who don't want to move on to a different expansion.

How is that different than launching a fresh vanilla server when TBC comes out, though? That's the question. I guess you don't have to make your gold and farm for consumables again? While that is true, it's still not guaranteed you'll have enough players when you reroll and try to do MC again. The way I see it, cycling through "seasons", i.e. reverting the server back to 0 once Naxx is sufficiently cleared, only ensures they don't have to launch a new server every couple of years to start vanilla again. I don't know what will happen to the older characters, maybe give the option to transfer to TBC or else you lose them?

 

[Wulfstand]

My idea would work for people who don't want to move on to a different expansion.

How is that different than launching a fresh vanilla server when TBC comes out, though? That's the question. I guess you don't have to make your gold and farm for consumables again? While that is true, it's still not guaranteed you'll have enough players when you reroll and try to do MC again. The way I see it, cycling through "seasons", i.e. reverting the server back to 0 once Naxx is sufficiently cleared, only ensures they don't have to launch a new server every couple of years to start vanilla again. I don't know what will happen to the older characters, maybe give the option to transfer to TBC or else you lose them?

The classic server reaching naxx by the time the new season starts should stay there, stuck on 1.12, and a new server should be made with the same name but for tbc. In that regard, it wouldn't differ much from your idea.
With seasons I think more people would join even on fresh vanilla servers simply because it's timed, if that makes sense. Especially past the first iteration. It'd be just like with private servers. You'll always have more people swarming in on the next fresh release, rather than going back to previously established servers like Warmane or Twinstar.

 

[Lacrymas]

My problem is the "being stuck at 1.12/Naxx forever" thing, it's not sustainable. What do you do when everyone has deserted the game? And they will desert it, probably faster than we can anticipate. Like I said, people are already raid logging when AQ comes out, so the server will be quite dead most of the time when Naxx comes out. The AH will dry up and PvP will happen mostly on battleground weekends. The only people who log in more than once a week for their raid clears are the hardcore raiders who need to cycle through every raid to get the enchants from ZG, materials for T2.5 from AQ20, legendary mats and BiS items (Rejuvenating Gem f.e.) from MC/BWL and such. This is what ultimately kills vanilla for me, the repetition of every raid every week and even sometimes more than that due to 3 day lockouts like ZG.

Since people were complaining about the lack of content in WoD, they'll be in for a big surprise when vanilla comes along. The most active part of vanilla is up to half the life expectancy of BWL, then it kind of starts petering out and culminating in pretty dead servers when AQ comes around. It's up to half the life expectancy of BWL because people haven't gotten their epic mounts yet and/or don't feel financially secure yet, so they are still out farming.

 

[Sjukob]

 

[Metro]

My problem is the "being stuck at 1.12/Naxx forever" thing, it's not sustainable. What do you do when everyone has deserted the game?

That's something they don't have to worry about until at least a year after the server launches.

 

[Lacrymas]

It's a foreseeable problem! Why wouldn't they think about that? What is the allure of a never-ending, stuck at Naxx vanilla?

 

[ColonelTeacup]

I thought the biggest issue was the contrast between vanilla wow and current wow would highlight the massive decline?

it will, that is why the current wow players are so salty.

This might be a slow preparation for the future to discontinue the 'current' wow becuase it is a too big mess, it will be slowly dying and they will be shifting team and resources into the 'classic' wow to make new content.

I wouldn't be surprised if they pulled more time shenanigans and made it so that they restart at vanilla as a new timeline, due to bronze flight fuckery, and then proceed to fuck up every subsequent expansion as it seems all the talented people have left Blizzard long ago.

It's a foreseeable problem! Why wouldn't they think about that? What is the allure of a never-ending, stuck at Naxx vanilla?

Ask the multittudes of players who were playing on private servers, rather than retail wow, for the vanilla experience.

 

[Lacrymas]

Ask the multitudes of players who were playing on private servers, rather than retail wow, for the vanilla experience.

I think you should read more carefully or go back a few pages to see what the discussion is about.

 

[ColonelTeacup]

Unnecessary. Your question had a readily available answer. Vanilla wow would be fine at naxrammas forever because its been proven to work already with private servers. There is a market for this. And your sad deathclaw cannot change this.

 

[Lacrymas]

What quality private server has been at Naxx for more than, at least, a year and still has a healthy, active community? 200-300 people isn't a "healthy, active community" by the by, especially by Blizzard's standards.

 

[ColonelTeacup]

What quality private server has been at Naxx for more than, at least, a year and still has a healthy, active community? 200-300 people isn't a "healthy, active community" by the by, especially by Blizzard's standards.

Nostalrius did, before they killed the server, expecting Blizzard to hire them.

 

[Lacrymas]

Uhm, Nostalrius didn't even get to AQ, let alone Naxx. I think you are confusing some things.

 

[ColonelTeacup]

Uhm, Nostalrius didn't even get to AQ, let alone Naxx. I think you are confusing some things.

And yet, a significant amount of players played it for a significant amount of time without leaving despite it staying in classic indefinitely.

 

[The Village Loon]

I would bet that they will release a Vanilla:EE kind of product in 2018 or 2019. Not pure vanilla, but something of a fork of the current code, remaking a "new vanilla" with engine enhancements, support for current add-ons, the new char models, AOE looting, etc. The new dev team they are hiring for the project will be tasked to achieve this.

If it turns out to be a success they will surely start making progression servers. With a working vanilla server up and running and having the TBC and WOTLK assets ready it is a no brainer. Some people want TBC, some WOTLK, some MOP. And the subs were at their highest during WOTLK. I'd handle it so that after some time TBC servers would open and the vanilla players would have the option to freely server transfer to a TBC server. Same for WOTLK, and so on. This way those who want to perpetually play on vanilla have the option to do so, and those who want to relive the progression can do so. And new people can start on vanilla and do the progression.

After the announcement of WoW:Classic I started contacting old guilds and friends to see what they thought about it. Feelings were pretty positive in general, but one player demographic was really, really, almost militantly against it. The completionist nolifers. I'd assume a majority of the people against vanilla on the MMO-C forums belong to this group of players.

I guess it's hard to take when you've wasted 14 years of your life grinding stupid shit, collecting vanity pets, gathering useless achievements, and then a bunch of players say "fuck this" and leave to play a version of the game that has none of it. The completionists won't go to vanilla, reset their "progression", and validate their daily grinding was a waste of their lives. Sad and funny. Oh wait, this is Blizzard. They will surely put a carrot on WoW:Classic so even they will have to play it. Just give out the black battle tank again with the title account wide and there you go, you have the completionists playing too.

 

[ColonelTeacup]

I would bet that they will release a Vanilla:EE kind of product in 2018 or 2019. Not pure vanilla, but something of a fork of the current code, remaking a "new vanilla" with engine enhancements, support for current add-ons, the new char models, AOE looting, etc. The new dev team they are hiring for the project will be tasked to achieve this.

If it turns out to be a success they will surely start making progression servers. With a working vanilla server up and running and having the TBC and WOTLK assets ready it is a no brainer. Some people want TBC, some WOTLK, some MOP. And the subs were at their highest during WOTLK. I'd handle it so that after some time TBC servers would open and the vanilla players would have the option to freely server transfer to a TBC server. Same for WOTLK, and so on. This way those who want to perpetually play on vanilla have the option to do so, and those who want to relive the progression can do so. And new people can start on vanilla and do the progression.

After the announcement of WoW:Classic I started contacting old guilds and friends to see what they thought about it. Feelings were pretty positive in general, but one player demographic was really, really, almost militantly against it. The completionist nolifers. I'd assume a majority of the people against vanilla on the MMO-C forums belong to this group of players.

I guess it's hard to take when you've wasted 14 years of your life grinding stupid shit, collecting vanity pets, gathering useless achievements, and then a bunch of players say "fuck this" and leave to play a version of the game that has none of it. The completionists won't go to vanilla, reset their "progression", and validate their daily grinding was a waste of their lives. Sad and funny. Oh wait, this is Blizzard. They will surely put a carrot on WoW:Classic so even they will have to play it. Just give out the black battle tank again with the title account wide and there you go, you have the completionists playing too.

Then the completionists have forgotten the point of playing Wow. It was about meeting people and bonding over a shared game that you've both invested time in and had the games goals and subjects as common ground to discuss things. Wow was always a medium for people to meet others and play either with, or against each other and build a community among yourselves. It's why it declined so terribly when wotlk released its dungeon finder.

 

[Lacrymas]

If you haven't built up a "community" for the entirety of vanilla, TBC and half of WotLK and LFG destroyed what "community" there was, I don't think it was LFG's fault. What LFG did was make the world feel segmented and kind of "session-based", nothing else. The easy heroics weren't LFG's fault.

 

[ColonelTeacup]

LFG destroyed the reliance that players had for each other on the server. For the price of conveniance, all comradery and networking that was done during Classic and TBC was undone because you could simply just que up for a group on LFG. Before its inclusion, players needed to learn who was on their server, who the best healers were, who the backstabbers were, who the best and worst tanks were, the best dps, the best CCers. People would get reputations for their actions, good or bad. LFG destroyed this as it removed the need for people to interact with each other on server. It was the same thing when they added cross server battlegrounds. Before then, you learned who were the best pvpers, the best at healing, the best at ambushes, who could take on several people at once, who was an easy kill, you'd make grudges with other guilds for picking on certain players too much, et cetera. Cross server mechanics remove the community that builds among players on a server when they are forced to live amongst each other and either rely, or compete against one another.

 

[Lacrymas]

You could still group with people from your own server, how hard is that? It is the players who chose this convenience over any sort of abstract "community building". I feel like LFG "destroyed the community" only for bad players who couldn't get into good guilds/raiding/high arena rating in general. It's funny how "strong community building" disintegrated in the face of a simple convenience like LFG. I'm not defending LFG, quite the contrary, it made the content feel segmented and self-contained, but I also know it's the least of WoW's post-TBC problems.

LFG was always, always, aimed at bad players who couldn't "build up a community" around themselves because good players didn't want to group with them. If you were regularly using LFG instead of going with guild-mates you weren't one of the "talked about good players" in the "strong community" of pre-LFG. Even then, the heroics were so ridiculously easy that why would you waste your guild-mates' time by bugging them about it? You only had to go once a day for your Emblems of Frost and that's it, not spam LFG. Without being a good player and knowing many of these, you couldn't seriously progress in anything, be it arena or PvE (only <1% of guilds cleared heroic LK25 when it was current content), so what LFG did was provide "content" for baddies. Funny how WotLK was the most popular expansion even with the "destroyed community".

Bad players "ruined WoW" by being bad, forcing Blizzard to cater to them. Every single change from the "classic era" was with the intention to cater to the vast majority of players who couldn't raid/PvP themselves out of a paper towel. Blizzard weren't naive, nor were they incompetent buffoons (most of the time) and they knew exactly what they were doing at the time, otherwise WoW wouldn't have climbed to 12M subscribers. Hard and meaningful content wasn't what was bringing people in, easy and accessible content was. The moment they introduced more difficult content in the form of Cata 5-mans people started leaving in droves and complaining how "difficult" they are. Of course, it wasn't just about that, they stumbled over many different aspects of its design, but it was a factor that started the decline. Had people been better and many more people had cleared the most difficult content, then things might have been different, but they aren't because people weren't. Now that Blizzard have run the game into the ground with such ferocity that they are willing to relaunch Classic we'll see how many people will clear the "harder content" that they so crave. AQ was cleared only by 3 or 4 guilds on the entire Kronos server in the first 2 months.

 

[ColonelTeacup]

I don't understand how you are not getting this. The community evaporated because an easier and lazier way to do things was introduced to the community. At best, friends and guildies would group up together if they wanted, but otherwise their was no server cooperation. People did not go outside their immediate circles because there was an easier/quicker option, with little ramifications for failure, which destroyed the community of the game. And it doesn't matter if it was aimed at bad players, it was an easier alternative to finding people on your server and actually meeting people and working together to complete a goal, while creating connections. And no matter how much you try and claim the opposite it is telling that the pve server community died when wotlk introduced its dungeon finder. And now with instanced areas and matchmaking easier than ever, good luck actually meeting people on your server and building connections between other people in different guilds and being a part of a community.

 

[Lacrymas]

I'm not "getting this" because you are WRONG! DUUUUUHHH. What "server cooperation", what "community"? There was no such thing! Or did the quotes around "community" not tip you off? Of course it was easier to find people, that was the point. The problem is that you required finding such people, had you been doing the actual content, which was hard and required cooperation and socializing, you wouldn't have used LFG almost at all! The only community that ever mattered was your guild. WoW wasn't "ruined" by you not knowing who the best healer on your server was, that's so irrelevant it hurts, although you could still check using WoWlogs or whatever the site was called. In my time on Kronos and even retail vanilla/TBC I didn't know any "famous" people on the server, if there were such, but my experience wasn't diminished. I only ever talked to people in my guild and we helped each other with crafting and such, I didn't randomly stumble on people. I also had to make an application to the guild for them to consider me for a raid spot, even though I was one of the best healers in the server, they didn't just randomly invite me because they had heard I was good.

There was also no "struggle" with heroics to build a community around. Had they been difficult enough to not be able to be done by random people, trying to find people who you could do them with would've been a priority and you could create connections. The easy 5-mans did more damage to ruin "the community" than LFG ever did. The gulf between 5 mans and the hardest content was immense, so much so that only <1% of players did the hardest content.

 

[Dawkinsfan69]

IDK I've never really had a problem with LFG tbh. I don't care about making "new best friends" in WoW, and knowing all my guildmate's IRL pets' names or favorite pickle rick quotes or whatever the fuck.

Also trying to co-ordinate when everyone is going to be online so we can raid together like best butt buddies is a mega pain in the ass. LFG makes it so much easier to just log in whenever and run a dungeon if I want. And if I don't feel like playing WoW every fucking tuesday, thursday, fri, sat, and sun from 9pm-1am (most guild raid schedules) guess what, I don't need to and I'll still be able to raid with randoms whenever.

 

[Parabalus]

They could implement a sort of ladder-style of doing things, ala Diablo. Once a classic server reaches 1.12, you can either a) stay on it indefinitely, b) switch to an ongoing tbc server that's on whichever patch or c) wait for the new season to start and move to a fresh tbc server.

That's the same thing as starting a vanilla server when the original one transfers to TBC. I guess it prevents them making new servers constantly, so that's one middle-man down and cuts some costs, and can work.

Something like that, where a vanilla server progresses to TBC, but when 2.0 hits they clone the server so the 1.12 version stays up forever. Would make everyone happy, except their server costs.

 

[Lacrymas]

Something like that, where a vanilla server progresses to TBC, but when 2.0 hits they clone the server so the 1.12 version stays up forever. Would make everyone happy, except their server costs.

Wouldn't it make more sense to revert the vanilla one to pre-MC? The part I don't get is why you would want the vanilla server to stay at Naxx forever. The main problem with this is obvious - the majority of people will stop playing after they get their T3s. Then what? You'll never get an active vanilla server again because the only one is stuck at Naxx forever with no people in it.