I have to agree with that, when the game first came out you had thottbot (now wowhead) that gave you information with another couple of sites that came and went. Even using thottbot was considered cheating by some.
Also, because it’s a remake, not a copy, they have brought in things that weren’t in the original to appease the people who research a game so much they know it inside out.
True, and you will never get the “original” because its too much work for them to do it patch by patch. The easier way is just hit the last patch in a couple of phases and call it a day.
Wotlk comes out tomorrow lets say? No one will ever experience how op Ret was, or Hunter, or Feral, or half the other specs that were nerfed heavily and multiple times thru out the xpac.
And the sad thing is, even if they did it that way people have waaaay too much knowledge now and would as some have previously stated min-max the fun out of the game again.
I agree with much of what you said, but not this part. They actually changed to an unrecognizable level as a company, and not in a good way for the most part. At least in my eyes.
If you think a patch-by-patch experience would change anything about the playerbase’s attitude towards the game, you’re kidding yourself. No matter what patch the game is on, dozens of streamers and theorycrafters on Youtube, Twitch, Discord and various websites would crunch meta info at record speed.
so you are trying to shift the blame to the players like a wolf in disguise?
Only people that should be blamed for the game sinking its the devs and their corporate financial marks and yes the old school blizzard staff no longer there,why?
because they either left to other games,creating their own game or fired , so dont try to shove things under the rug litle wolf in disguise
I spent about 2 hours trying to put together a group for a heroic dungeon the other day, and at the end of those 2 hours, we ended up disbanding the group because we just couldn’t make it happen.
I don’t want horde to have long queues, but the long queues are in large part caused by alliance being a dying faction, so rather than slapping a band aid fix on the queue problem, I’d prefer them to actually try and fix the much larger, underlying problem.
I agree with you. Its a nice sentiment that zalanji makes and there is truth in that game play has changed dramatically, however this does not equate to blizzard still retaining some semblance of its original identity and the two issues are independent of each other.
The fact is private servers navigated the evolving attitudes to the game much more robustly than Activision could.
Sonya Blade: “A hand full of people on a leaky boat are gunna save the word?”
Lord Raiden: “Exactly!”
And can horde recognize at least that hvh kills faction balance even more and here is the better solution for your queue problem? Of course not, because horde players are selfish af
I’ve not said that Blizzard hasn’t changed at all - they did, obviously, but the reason why many of the games’ tenets are failing so hard (faction balance, PvE balance, leveling experience etc.) is because none of these were created for the kind of online environment we have now.
How so, exactly? Because I’ve been playing on various pservers between 2012 and 2017, and I can confidently say that the “Vanilla spirit” was long gone there as well. Perhaps the only difference with current Classic is the overall lack of streamers, relatively speaking, due to the obvious size difference. And that undoubtedly helped positively. But the sense of exploration and “just for fun” gameplay was mostly long gone there too in favor of minmaxing towards a “solved metagame”. Which should be expected from a 15-y old game, especially with the kind of resources we have nowadays.
Back in 2006, it took around 1-2 months to start seeing a few lvl 60. Nowadays, even if WoW was a new game just coming out, in 1-2 months you’d have detailed guides covering every aspect of the game and the metagame would be solved out in a matter of weeks, leaving any further newcomers with all the info they need to pick the superior class/spec/race/faction/itemset/whatever you want.
It’s true that queues are too long and need to be fixed. But it can’t be done with the expense of whole alliance faction. With HvH there are no reasons for new players to roll alliance anymore when horde has all the same things and more.
While HvH fixes one problem it creates many more which all affect mainly alliance.
Both factions deserve faction change as an option. It’s a win-win solution
Like i said theres truth in what you say. Nost, lightshope, feenix, elysium, kronos etc all had much healthier balances and i don’t really care what you say about “vanilla spirit”, no ones talking about that. They had better balance end of story.
“Vanilla spirit” was a player created phenomena.
OG Bizzards goals were a company driven directive to make fantastic games.
Activisions goals do not align with this, ergo, they dont care about the game anymore. Activisions goals are to expand their empire and consume and monetise fun.
Edit: and if you want an example of how pservers robustly tackled balance i would pick 1 of a list the lenght of my arm, which would be enforced faction queues. 55/45.
If we talk about Classic, maybe. But every major TBC pserver out there always had either a significant Horde balance or they had to introduce massive changes into the game to give Alliance some semblance of play. And faction balance is just one part of the issue - they also had massive bugs and poor scripting, on a vastly superior level than TBC Classic. What matters more to you may not be what matters more to others.
I wonder how many subs would Blizzard lose with enforced faction queues? As I said, game integrity is good and all but not to the point of sacrificing sub numbers for it. Not even OG Blizzard would’ve ever considered such a solution for the issue.
Major TBC pservers? Total meme. The only serious one EVER was atlantiss and it faired MUCH better than TBCC for balance.
I played every single one of them, from gummies, to LFG, to corecraft alpha…to playTBC.
No such thing as serious TBC pserver frankly.
Also OG blizzard wouldn’t have been able to market an MMORPG to non interested RPG clowns in 2004 because the audience that plays retail WoW now would have been the same kids that played offline Halo back in the day and thought it was groundbreaking.
So no, it’s not comparable to me still. Yes OG blizz would have cared about subs too, it’s just the audience is not the same and that matters.
So the question is who should prevail? This is called TBC Classic is it not?
Also, are we saying that the future of remakes of classic games are better left in the hands of fans? Because money gets in the way for big companies?
From my Alliance player perspective BGs change is good.
However there is problem with faction balance and even when we start with 51/49 after some time it’s going to end with 100/0, thats just how universe works. Every little change that takes away anything from Alliance is going to speed up the process and devs should always work on flipping over favoured faction so we can bounce left and right to stay in reasonable ratio.
hordes deserve nothing, u got the racials, the pop, and wpvp domination. getting wargames as well is out of the question
Well yeah, I meant “major” in relative terms. But I don’t see how that changes my point.
That’s kinda what I was trying to say. I don’t wanna say every choice Blizzard made was right, but many of the problems stem from the fact that this game wasn’t built for today’s audience. And insults aside, I don’t think this audience sucks or anything - we just have much better access to info than back in 2004, and so you can’t rly build a game anymore based on the lack of information on the players’ side (and WoW is, in many ways, built around this).
Unless fans are fine working at a loss and still capable of delivering a working product, I doubt so. And my past experience with pservers doesn’t make me hopeful at all in this respect.
The problem is that, in a Classic game, they’re quite limited in what they can do, rly. If this was “Retail TBC”, they could just try to rebalance racials or introduce new races or race/class combos or content in general to affect faction balance. And they did. But eventually they had to realize that, no matter how much “flip-flop” they did, it would never work long-term, because it’s the whole PvP server system that’s inherently flawed. Because unlike, say, Wintergrasp and similar opendoor BGs, PvP servers have no real “comeback” mechanism, and once a faction begins pulling ahead of the other, the advantage just snowballs from there.
The only way PvP servers would possibly work is if not only could devs intervene on the aforementioned mechanical aspects but also if players weren’t aware of population ratios or meta and made as much of a random choice as they can possibly do. But again, we don’t live in that world anymore, and WoW’s PvP servers weren’t designed for today’s environment.
Personally I’ve acknowledged your problem multiple times on this forum the last weeks, but I guess it’s easier to notice the alliance players that don’t.
That being said, I am very opposed to HvH BGs as it just ruins faction balance.
And no, I’m not you average alliance player, since 2006 I have almost always played Horde, and only decided on Alliance (to change things up) for vanilla and TBC.
And I have always been used to 40+ min queues horde side, it’s always been a thing, so up to a certain point horde just have to get used to it (but yeah, 1h+ is excessive, I agree).
As Alliance player i agree that no one deserves this ludicrous queue time and that “reroll” is not an answer, though i firmly believe that same faction BG’s is also very VERY bad decision…
Agree, it’s a “fix” that creates a whole ton of other problems.
Blizz needs to try to get the queues shorter, but they need to do so by encouraging alliance play.