Classic before 2019 and classic after 2019

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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So i’m talking about classic wow on non official servers.

The players just stayed on those realms for years and were happy to just lvl up another toon and do it all again. Go through raid cycle.

Make a new class they haven’t dinged to 60 and so forth.
They were happy to stay in What would be the equivalent of " era" today.
That meant there was always a healthy flow of lowbie toons , to do dungeons and group content with every time. Same with materials and boe items.

So how come that mentality never stuck with 99% of the classic wow crowd on official servers ?
It’s hard to find group below 60 in Era and Anniversary.
I mean I’m seeing people wanting fresh again ! on Anniversary.
Why do you want fresh again ?

What’s so wrong just playing another class in classic and just experience that pov ?
Another thing is community is strong , the guilds are good and then you’re all ready to waste it just for a " fresh experience"

I’ve seen so many really good guilds die on Classic

I just want to know why do you want to play Warrior for the 12th time on a fresh server constantly. Where is the fun in that ?

Wouldn’t it just be more fun to play with the same people but you all cycle through new toons.

I’m just scratching my head at the community ? Next thing why does the classic vanilla population always die off when AQ shows up. Then you’re asking for fresh again. How about stick around and see AQ for a change ?r

I’m just confused how everyone is so ready to just drop everything
Drop their server , guild , community.
I’m also confused why you all want a " retail" experience in classic.

Just go play retail. Clearly convenience , rush through content is what you like. You want end content only , power and be able to solo everything. You don’t like leveling. You don’t like community and you don’t like playing with others. Then classic isn’t for you. Retail provides all of that.

Players want to keep duel spec. They want to keep instant mail. I’ve read some want achievements to classic. Others want faster mount speeds or even flying mounts added.
Like how much do you want to dilute classic into retail people ? Why can’t you just stay put and just play with your guilds and experience new toons. Why the constant need and feeling to move on to " next thing"

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Now everybody’s going to tell me I’m a Classic Andy:
Because on those other servers, only people really wanting the Vanilla experience - with some small changes - were hanging out. Whereas when the Blizz Classic server opened, the Retail players and streamers arrived here, bringing with them the ZugZug mentality of said part of WoW.
You see those other servers still alive.
It’s a dilemma.
I’d like the Classic Andies to all come to the Era servers, but Blizz’s erratical addition and removing of “QoL” issues and strange changes only for the select few, or just because, is almost driving me to those other servers as well - This is something I never dreamed I’d even consider.

I remember playing Classic during Blizz con 2018. That was a dream come true. Vanilla as it was, nice players as you describe them. Something happened between there and launch. Blizz somehow nerfed/upped some settings too and the “hype” spread.

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What appealed to players going back to Classic and you can still watch videos in 2019 building up to it’s launch.

Players were done with seasonality.
They want a living a world.
They didn’t want to invest time / effort just to see it be scrapped 6 months or a year later.

Coughs " season of discovery … had seasons , it’s going to have it servers shut down in a year"

Anniversary feels like seasons again as everyone is talking and hyping up tbc and not even mentioning naxx.

We had a classic + after era. Lasted a year only.

Isn’t that exactly what the players didn’t want ? Now they do ?

I just don’t think the classic population want classic at all. They just want a retail experience without mythic +

In the pre 2019 classic era , servers.
The world was alive , the community was alive. Players were fine not having seasonality.
They had somewhere permanent to reside.
Exactly what post 2019 launch players wanted.

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Generalizations galore, but yes. Where did they come from?
I for one still want Classic.

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I want TBC because of arena.

Maybe add some new stuff to classic like badges from dungeons etc could make it more alive.

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I’m 19 years in these forums now.

The community nowadays is split into many different groups of interest.

Those players, who commit to the game long term, want to take part in the social experience of a guild and will form a reliable player base to build on, are just a small minority.

The vast majority looks upon this as a service they pay for and the other players as an expedient. For many of those players, you simpy could replace team mates by ai controlled npcs. They wouldn’t really care.

Once they are done with whatever their interests are, they’re basically gone until the next iteration.

But this is not specific to the game. You can observe this everywhere. Looking back I’ve seen this in RL for the first time in the early 1980s.

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I’m aware I’ve recently posted on the classic forum my frustration with the community.

I won’t copy and paste everything I said.

But you why did people want classic ? They were done with seasonality in retail.
They missed the social interactions with other players. They want a world in world of warcraft.

You log onto classic anniversary , mop classic … both are absolute opposites of everything in the paragraph above.
I see it on the forums daily so called Classic players want to " retail" classic , bit by bit. Scrape by scrape. It’s eroding the whole point of there being era servers.

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Oh, there still is that part of the community, which likes Vanilla as it is. But they are a small minority. Most of them can probably still be found on era.

But they are mostly no-changers obviously. And that collides with all those people thinking about changes to make the game more suitable to them personally.

I mean, that’s the mindset. It’s a service and I want it tailored to me since I’m paying for it. No? Look at the recent developments in the Mount Everest industry. If you add Xenon to the gas mix, you’re able to skip the months of acclimatisation. Mount Everest in 5 days is the headline. Just a little premium of € 150k.

It’s a service.

You need a boost? Gold? Loot? A title? Just pay for it with real money and you’re done. And Blizzard? Just look at what they’ve been doing.

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<3

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I can only share my own experience, but in short it goes like this:
I tried wow back in beta, because I was a War3 and SC fan. Rolled a dwarf hunter on EU release and made it only to lvl 47 or so, I found levelling too unfun and tedious, and unsubbed. Then half a year later I was stuck at a PC for various reasons and tried rolling a mage on a newly opened RP-PvP realm. It was marginally more tolerable, possibly because the mage is a hero class of vanilla and doesn’t have stupid artificial difficulty like quiver slot and ammo and food discerning pets that you can’t teach new skills without learning how to on the internet. Then somebody invited me to a UBRS raid and later that week MC. And suddenly I realized there’s a fun team game behind this idiotic two month long grind. Why? Why hide this gem behind barely tolerable repetitive gameplay.
Anyway, ended up raiding semi-casually all the way to 4.2 firelands, but by then the game was basically a 3rd person bullet hell quick time simulator that didn’t resemble the MC and BWL raids that were much more my lane skill and coordination-wise.

I came back to classic specifically to kill Cthun, Kel’Thuzad, Kael, Vashj, Kil’Jaedan and Arthas HC, something I failed to do in retail. It was difficult, the game is horribly dated, but I grit my teeth and levelled all the way to 60 on another mage, joined a decent guild and achieved all my goals. By the time Cata rolled around last year I thought I may finally be done with this bane of my childhoods social life and achievement.

But then I saw Anniversary news by mare chance, with some badly needed qol like dual spec and human-friendly ranking, and thought “aww hack, why not”, it’s going to TBC (which is imo the best of the classic three anyway) in a year and a bit. So I levelled a mage one more time. Or rather suffered through it one more time and here I am, r14, something I didn’t even dream of doing in retail or classic.
And frankly, I wouldn’t mind killing all TBC bosses on release week. I did kill them all in classic eventually, but after several weeks of progress, which felt kinda meh.

I’d never even entertain going to the monstrosity that is Era or hardcore, they seem antithetical to what vanilla was: an ever evolving game where you weren’t punished severely for deaths unlike previous mmos, and where any class or spec could be completely reworked next week. New expansion overturning everything.

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I started playing WoW in early 2006. Previously, I was playing D2 HC. I tried D3 SC for a couple of hours on my first day. It was ok to learn some basics, but it just didn’t feel right.

Then I started playing hc mode and that was it.

The first WoW experience was absolutely weird. It felt totally wrong, that you couldn’t die and really lose something. So after a week or so I took a break.

A couple of weeks later I started another try on a mage. From scratch. On a RP realm. I met interesting people, we formed a guild and they needed a healer. So I changed to priest and since we needed a healer, I leveled as a holy priest. Idiotic, but hey, I didn’t know any better back then. But I’m thorough, informed me on the internet, on these forums and of course I ended up in the holy priest thread on elitist jerks.

I didn’t mind the grind. That was just part of the package and being in groups was always fun. Doing crazy stuff was fun too. Leveling was a journey and we didn’t care for speed.

And I liked the casual rp.

When I hit 60, I found out that playing a holy priest was hell. The requests for dungeon healers never ever stopped. Not even in the middle of the night. And most of them simply didn’t accept a no.

One weekend I got a whisper for UBRS. No one in the guild had been there yet. They didn’t mind my inexperience. They needed a healer. So I got into my first raid. It turned out to be a role playing guild and the raid was ic. My first raid ever was ic. Holy…

Fast forwad… I joined a progress guild in WotLK but never really liked the direction, in which the gameplay went. So in late 2010 I decided to leave my ingame friends and switched to EVE Online. After the first week in EVE Online I felt like coming home.

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Private servers were regularly shut down, making them essentially seasonal.

Actual Classic is much better at lower levels.
No blame to be had, it was a first attempt by the team on how to put together the game. They had a lot of ideals, like playing in groups, forcing it with elites, dungeons, rare finds, all that.

Thing is, the game is borderline dysfunctional. Even dungeon pre-quests are not viable if you are not a damage dealer. I just abandoned the Bael’gar chain after getting it 1% done in 35 minutes as a resto druid. But I remember entering WPL and hitting that wall of “too many players farming the easy stuff, nothing to kill, progress blocked”. Also, my main is 54. Playing in groups, dungeons is slow. Consequently, Classic has no raids for me.

It would be so much easier to just create a new toon and experience the very polished, very viable Elwynn Forest again. A bit boring now but that’s what I did back then.

To many, fresh is like crack but realistically, especially for 40+ people, Classic is just not a game worth playing beyond level 30-40. There are a few systems that can help it - the group finder works well, arguably teleport points are needed as well, roughly half of “game” time is just waiting and running around. Obviously, not talking about low level stuff (albeit relative popularity of Deadmines and Stockades clearly prove the point) but stuff like Zul’Farrak, Maraudon. I didn’t buy dual spec (too expensive and too late) but the spec-switch system of retail and GW2 would be also quite useful.

Similarly, I will have a weird experience during BC. I plan to play my druid healer, but also level a draenei paladin. Obviously that takes (too much) time from level 1, so I merely do it so that I’m 60+ by WLK. The point? The levelling system is dysfunctional and blocks access to the actual content. Was it voiced? Yes. Did it change? Yes.

There is no need to change Classic WoW iterations but it’s easy to understand that they are flawed.

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Hear hear!

I understand classic is a museum. Let it be so. But it’s like replaying old c&c red alert in 240p DOS version with one mouse button control instead of the 2020 remaster which is the same game, but in every way better. Yeah it totally blew my 11 year old mind back in 97, but looking back at it now, it’s intolerably dated.

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Consider history.

Blizzard released Cataclysm in 2010, thus completely scrapping the original game, and bringing in the retail era which was an entirely different game.

Thousands begged for classic servers as they just wanted to play the original game without all of the ultra-streamlining, QoL and dumbing down.

Blizzard steadfastly refused.

Meanwhile sub numbers rapidly dropped.

People migrated to the new batch of vanilla private servers that were beginning to increasingly gain traction during that period, Nostalrius being the most famous.

The private server players, who now numbered in their thousands, denied any progressive content, and confined to static content ran Molten Core night after night after night until they had it down to such mechanical perfection that it could be cleared in no time. They moved to BWL and similarly mastered it, and followed with AQ40 until eventually they had become adept speedrunners executing each raid with clockwork perfection.

Denied an in-game challenge they sought challenge among themselves, competing for fastest clears, highest DPS - this the culture of meta/min/max/parsing began to increasingly take over the Classic mindset.

Blizzard finally open Classic Realms.

The Private Server players migrated en-mass, bringing their deeply embedded culture of meta/min/max parsing with them.

The curious Retail players also came, bringing their culture of super-instant, QoL, convenience and instant gratification with them that they had learned from retail.

The two factions combined.

The new culture of boosting and GDKP became the new meta as these players wanted the same super-fast, zero effort instant gratification and instant access they’d come to enjoy on Retail, but also wanted to be part of the meta/min/max/parsing culture.

The culture spread far and wide.

And here we are today.

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minmax culture ruined classic wow, not blizzards fault. What is their fault however is the AV rush meta. A bit too late to kill it off now as most people quit who want to pvp.

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I am afraid this is 100 % spot on :dart:

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What’s minmax culture? I started to play in 2008 and I absolutely followed guides. I even remember the name of the person who created a spreadsheet: Landslide of Elitist Jerks. I put there my stats, it calculated weights, I put those weights into addon, I used wowhead to find upgrades. Everyone did that. I drinked flasks and ate food and it was required for raids. I never saw WoW without minmax culture, it was always there.

May be people were more tolerant back then? I don’t know.

I put fault on Blizzard. Every change they did, made the game worse. Double spec, instant mail, 1.12 class balance, overpowered uncommon items from 1.12 patch, layers, chronoboons, free R14. All those things made vanilla worse in the end. It’s a perfect example of “you think you do, but you don’t”. They should have implemented vanilla faithfully, not improve on it.

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Hard to describe what I mean because it’s a culmination of things.

For instance, having to join Discord to raid vanilla raids kills the immersion for me. I don’t even do that in retail. I’ve done Mythic raid pugs without voice, and we killed the first 3-4 bosses of Nerubar Palace. Classic raids are a joke, but the community thinks they are pro players.

Worldbuff meta sucks. I’ve been kicked from ZG pug for not having PVE gear on my Paladin because I used my rank 14 gear to heal with Lawbringer offpieces.

Boosting sucks, nobody is leveling normally anymore. I also don’t like chronoboons, dual spec. The mail thing I don’t mind.

I’m currently leveling on ERA, maybe it will be more authentic vanilla experience.

I can add more stuff but I can’t think of it right now. The community will look at this post and think omg what a noob this guy is, go join a casual raiding guild with people who drink beer and wipe 24/7. But I’m not a noob player. I have 2400 rating in PVP in retail, you can check me.

I play vanilla to chill, not to tryhard.

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I guess it takes a certain mindset to raid in Classic, given how long levelling is, focus and dedication is the name of the game. Especially the umpteenth time.

You could indeed try and find a more relaxed guild - I don’t find this sweat attitude in dungeon runs at all.

The most sweat I’ve seen was a fun guy with at least 10 buffs enjoying that he could just go on a rampage in Scarlet Monastery with the other 3.5 people as decoration. The 0.5 of myself as a healer was needed. He was really having fun, some jokes but also the way he moved around.

I had the same experience with levelling dungeons in BC and WLK recently.

When I was raiding with a pro guild in 2009-2010, we were expected to show up, bring consumables and stuff, but the frame was that we only raid two hours, so let’s make the most of it. That was the goal and value, so the rule was just serving it.

I suppose you see more of it in Classic because most WoW players aren’t bored in life but either this is their main thing (sadly, sort of) or they only have limited time for WoW beside their actual responsibilities. Communication is key, though.

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The very first MC a joined in 2005 required you to join Ventrillo voice chat. And then later TeamSpeak became more popular. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever seen a guild raid without voice chat. I always found people not willing to join voice extremely suspicious, to the point I think it is a valid reason to remove them.
It gives this vibe of “I’m not actually with you guys, I’m just the royalty you peasants are carrying, so shut up and do your work, I don’t need to hear your peasant speech”

I absolutely refuse to believe this. No ZG pug would kick a pala healer in full epic gear, let alone r14. It was an excuse to get a guildie in or you were acting weird like not wanting to join voice for example.