Classic problems + possible solutions for next instances

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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Hi dudes, today i’d like to discuss about what’s new in this last round of classic Vanilla and how can this experience improve the next expansions.
First, i guess it’s clear to everyone that every round of classic gets more hardcore. People minmax more, lower tier classes tend to be used less while higher tier classes become massively used, raid meta gets “more mandatory”, fullbuff and consumables becomes a standard unless you are casual raiders.
It’s clear that vanilla, from now on, will get more and more swarmed by warriors. Everybody want to topchart right? Speedrunning is now a thing, so you might need that 20ish warriors x raid. This ofc has an impact on economy, as everything related to warriors skyrockets in price, players are aware of the market and many of them wants to get a profit out of that, often a monetary one (that is illegal let’s remember it).
Raiding with full consumables is way more hardcore then it used to be, farming your own consumables is nearly impossible, unless you either invest a load of time into it or cheat with bots, that again is illegal. Beside being illegal, plaguelands and critical farming spots are swarmed by bots, things like black lotuses have always been under monopoly and now, even with the random drop from high herbs, they are in strict check. Winterfalls are grinded 24/7, earth elemental too and so on and it doesn’t look like layers are enough for what players need, especially as anyone can bounce between them and farm *n (number of layers). About this, it is also clear to me (you tell me if you think the same) that players don’t actually want to play the game. Let me explain. Many players aren’t willing to farm things, let’s say they either start botting or take a more…costly approach (this gets market price higher as there is more money put into the system, worth less). Also, many don’t want to actually play a charachter and level it up to 60, so again they either bot or use the costly approach. Players want to raid and loot regularly, basically, and vanilla is not exactly this easy especially for warriors. The majority of Molten Core and Blackwing lair items are trash, the valuable ones are hyper rare (like drakefang talisman) and you might find one in 3 or 4 weeks of raiding if lucky. Imagine the struggle to get 20 onslaught girdle.
So there comes in help the first quality of life improvement of this round of classic: PVP gear! Everyone can get his rank 14 set, stronger then mc and bwl gear by simply grinding 8 minutes Alterac Valley for a month or so, no real pvp involved. Grinding AV is terribly boring at a certain point, so you might see a ton of afkers or botters even in battleground, this because again people don’t want to play the game, they just want the epics. Pvp gear also comes with a bad squish, as nearly nobody will now play 5 men dungeons (unless for righteous orbs or prequests), even with the second quality of life improvement, the dual spec.
Dual spec would be great if there was no free pvp gear, you would find a lot more tanks/healers for dungeons to prepare for first raids or to gear up alts. Instead it is ofc used to have double spec for pvp/pve and nobody would ever get prebis while you can get hyperstrong epics from pvp. Pvp itself is awful, as both Arathi Basin and Warsong Gulch are left to premades or to people already geared up.
Let’s recap, IMO macro problems of this round of classic are 3:
Cost of life too high, way before it used to be Everyone hungers for raid BIS, droprate too low
Pvp gear given for free to everyone cuts off a part of the game
Heard many times saying “Vanilla is hardcore, if you are casual don’t play Vanilla”, i can partially agree with that, but the point is that casuals will play Vanilla nonetheless taking the “easy way”. It’s hard to keep up with banning bots and money traders (and population would drop dramatically if that happens), so people will keep using that instead of farming/playing. What to do about it?
My solution is MAKING IT SIMPLER.
Will this ruin the classic experience? Probably, but it is ruined already and will never get back to how it was.
Possible solution to problem 1 - So, if market gets swarmed by cheap mats, making somehow impossible for people to monopoly things, people wont need bots to farm, 2/3 hrs a week you farm your own herbs/pots/stuffs and you are ready to go. Make things drop more, it’s better having more items then people needs on the market then less. At that point, people will just stop farm. Dinamic respawn of mobs and nodes (in random places, so people wont abuse a gatherer addon), the more you kill/gather the more they respawn, may be a cool solution. In pvp servers, layers may naturally stratify with faction.
Possible solution to problem 2 – Drops go by luck, and that sucks a bit. It may happen that some guilds are lucky and get huge bis while others get weeks of awful loot, some guilds also abuse this by selling valuable items for real money. What about boss tokens? You kill Ragnaross, he drops 3/4/n Ragnaross tokens and the winners can buy a loot from Ragnaross table. With this, people may dress up more charachters happily, without weeks of frustrating no progress.
Possible solution to problem 3 – Pvp is actually the supermarket of tiers, just boring grind, no real skill involved as individual or team (unless full geared player/premade). Rank 14 people swarm AB and WSG making it not approachable to others, if you get full green geared players you automatically lose. What about a fixed gear bg option? You should be given an option to enter battlegrounds (not av) with a fixed gear based on your class. Also, restore the old system while flattening it slightly. Rank 14 should be a huge merit that can be implemented with a “team system” or a “guild system” like arena teams, with stats. This will encourage aggregation.
What do you think?
Let’s talk about smaller things now.
WTF is the gathering failure at 300 skill? Damn that’s stupid, remove it :smiley:
Also WTF is up with people who can gather veins together, when you touch one you could always gather it til the end without anyone interrupting (pvp excluded ofc). Restore ita s it was :smiley:
Make a Warchief’s Blessing buff equivalent for alliance, it’s kinda stupid that people has to abuse mind control and pay 60/80/whatever gold to get it
Scarab lord is the most abused thing in classic, some guilds asked huge real money to boost you and the event is always delayed for people to profit. Things went chaotic this time, might need some workout
Buff/debuff limit remove. That’s nice, keep it!

My 500000 cents :smiley:

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I think your post is reasonable, but too big for most people to read.

You correctly identified some of the current game issues and I agree with that.

However I think that some issues are result of bad changes applied to original vanilla.

Let’s walk it.

First issue is mega-server. It’s not even servers anymore. Split that mega-server into 20 smaller servers. Make runtime cap of 2000 characters, rest go to queue. Throw out layers. Solves a lot of problems. Vanilla was designed with smaller servers in mind.

Second issue is lack of support. Put 1 game master per 100 player. He’ll ban bots in no time. Vanilla was designed with game masters in mind.

Third issue is broken class balance. We’re playing 1.12.1 patch. That’s wrong. Recreate original balance, patch by patch. Warriors will not be as strong.

Fourth issue is PvP changes. Return original grind. Nobody will grind grandmarshal, not 99.9% of current grandmarshals anyway. Also return original AV, not this pathetic shadow of it, it’ll make grind even less efficient and will invigorate WSG and AB.

Fifth issue is Chrono boons. They enable everyone to raid with full buffs, further cementing warrior meta. One would say, that without chrono boons people would log off before raid. That’s a valid issue. However it’s very simple to solve: let buffs expire while being offline. 99.9% of players who’re wearing full world buffs now, will not care about them, as getting full buffs would involve extraordinary guild-wide efforts of organising logistics, summons, protecting raiders from gankers and so on. And without buffs, meta may be will not change, but will slightly reduce the importance.

So that’s my 500 cents how to make vanilla great again, by actually undoing some changes they made to it.

I also think that dual spec, removal of spell batching and instant mail were harmful changes. But those are of lesser importance.

4 Likes
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I like to look at SoD to see how they tested to solve a thew things.
1 They made more specs working for a raid or pvp playing. Yes they need a balance.
2 They aded tarnish coins to bye some gear and resources. Yes it solved most of the booting problem and made it easier to catch up and lastly they made dungeons to be still in place at lvl 60.
3 They made it possible to be R14 and still have a life, famely and work. Yes the rank lost alot of their meening but for me ok.
4 To make world buffs farmebel and you dident have to pop it untill you needed it was great and you diden’t worry that some rage quit a raid if you wiped.

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Not going to lie i read like half of your post. Defintely need a TLDR bit :kissing_heart:
But you keep mentioning “costly approach” and “not wanting to play the game”.
I grind 40 hours a week IRL. I dont want to grind in the game to farm gold/consumables as to me, this isnt playing the game. I dont want to come home from work and work again in a video game. I want to actually play the game and i only get two hours to play on a weekday which i refuse to spend grinding so i use the costly approach. I also buy dungeon boosts in game. I am not a 14 year old kid anymore who has no responsibilities and can play wow 24/7. So i use my exposable income from my IRL grinding to prevent me having to do it in the game (im sure you can work what i mean £££)
R14 - again, i dont have time. I am not commiting myself to grind the same BG for a month straight - actually dont think i could farm the honour frm r13-14 in the time i have to play.

2 Likes
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Why people who can’t commit to the game, prefer to play a version of WoW which was known to require prolonged grinds first and foremost? There’s retail, there’s panda which are much better suited for people with limited time. It is strange to play the vanilla and taking illegal shortcuts to make it look like retail.

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Because retail and MOP are completely different to classic lol
Dude I am 33, engaged, work full time and have to animals to care for as well as friends to see.
So in order to play classic i need to be single, unemployed and still living with my parents to ensure i have the time to farm gold, level alts, get my world buffs and grind R14 lol.

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Play Era and do it all in your own time :wink: Or even Hardcore.
It’s not fair ruining the game for those who like to take their time just because you.

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I am in no way telling people how to play the game the same way im not telling anyone how to play the game.
I do to extant agree that boosting ruins the game for others, i only started paying for boosts because LFG is dead for most dungeons and i aint questing level 1-60. Also to note, in anniversary we are against the clock, phase are short so its been a “keep up or get left behind” situation

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Let’s make it so that powerful items and buffs are in the game, but it is an absolute nightmare to get them and there is a high chance of losing them with bunch of time wasted and 0 reward. I am sure the players will appreciate it and feel great about r14 gear being only for people who can afford to play 14h a day for months and that they have to log in 1h before raid and run all around the world for buffs and pray the person in the sheet on realm discord actually drops ony and zg at agreed time.
In short, let’s make the game as toxic as humanly possible with rife ground for griefing both same faction (don’t drop ony, drop at wrong time, kill the resetting priest) as well as obviously cross faction on PvP (purging, dispells, raid vs raid in the mountain).
The funniest thing is, you actually, unironically think this would improve classic instead of absolutely killing it.

I can only speak for myself, but if anniversary was as you describe, it wouldn’t even cross my mind to resub for it. Even dual spec and humanly available r14 were barely enough to entice me back, instead of just waiting for TBC prepatch.

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There’s nothing toxic about world bosses now. They do not exist for me, it’s simple as that.

There wouldn’t be nothing toxic about R14 for me. I would never attempt it.

There wouldn’t be nothing toxic about world buffs for me. I wouldn’t care about it, unless I happen to get stormwind buff randomly before the raid and happened to keep it. That would be fun bonus, but that’s about it. May be, before some particularly hard boss, we would try, as a guild, to get few buffs in an organised fashion for one attempt. But that’s about it.

And, yes, making world pvp to actually matter would also be nice, I guess. Right now, PvP means nothing, when there’s nothing to lose but few minutes of running from GY. I don’t even care keeping my PvP set in bags.

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That’s because their drops are crap. If they dropped very strong Phase BiS weapons and armor and trinkets, they’d by the most toxic thing in all of Classic.

I admire that you can just ignore things that are unavailable to you. I could do it in Vanilla because I was a wide eyed humble nooblet. Never imagined myself getting PvP gear or full raid epics. That was for the real players, not for nobodies like me.
I can’t be like that anymore, now items existing that are not available to me due to arbitrary reasons like I don’t have 14h a day 6 days a week to grind AB in a premade, wintrading with other premades and stomping pugs is a personal affront. It drives me mad now, like I’d rather not play than be in game with items that are unavailable. Same with buffs, if I was a class that needs Rend, I am 99% sure I’d be unsubbed til prepatch. I’d rather not play than get rend twice a week, or worse yet, play raids without it knowing it exists. :nauseated_face:
With your changes the game would no longer be for me. Then again, I don’t really care about vanilla, this is just a TBC waiting room for me :man_shrugging:

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They drop BiS holy paladin head. Absolutely BiS, much better than anything other in-game.

There are also other very good drops for holy paladin for phase they were added at.

I have no idea about other classes, but I guess, there must be good drops for other classes as well.

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Actionism here is a big issue. I would keep it simple.

  1. Consolidate the Vanilla Era servers. Its been years with the clusterf list. Lets make it simple for people to join the PvP server, the PvE server or the PvPRP one
  2. Revert changes done to the vanilla servers - everything that has been touched including PvP system and chronoboons. AV meta is just bad for the game as well as boons kill wpvp
  3. Add TBC Era, no changes servers and add WotlK Era no changes servers
  4. No cash shop, no tokens, no shenanigans
  5. Combat bots effectively
  6. Zero RMT tolerance. Ban gold sellers and gold buyers
  7. Have a real GM monitor all Era servers -solve disputes, engage with the community
  8. Make some events seasonal (once a year or once every two years: AQ gates event, scourge invasion, Arena seasons, etc.

If this were done Blizzard would have a forever stream of players and income at almost zero cost. Players would swap servers, feel the game has integrity, and Azeroth would be the background and canvas in which the community (the MOST important aspect of the MMORPG) would organically develop.

On top of everything, there would be no risk of losing progress for the casual player. It would mean the end of the rat race, dopamine hits, blizzard’s quarterly reports, AI bots shilling “the new thing” etc.

I know this is a pipedream. I think community satisfaction and loyalty are never a priority for whomever controls Blizzard these days. In any case, I firmly believe this would 100% work and the whole “please Blizzard gimme this/that” would be laid to rest.

2 Likes
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Well, just another reason for me to dislike vanilla I guess.

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Despite the few good points you make with that wall of text, you as well seem to suffer from BiS meta - in vanilla wow, but since that’s a community thing it looks like you simply can’t keep up mate and you are asking a higher force to slow the game for you.
Do you really think that’s reasonable as long as no rules are broken?

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No, you want to change the game other people enjoy to something that suits you.

1 Like