I’m not by any means an active poster or even player but I’d just like to share my two cents on why I believe TBC classic (and any future attempts at reviving it or ERA such as SoM) was a mistake and how following the model of OSRS would have provided a far more sustainable and most importantly enjoyable experience.
Instead of regurgitating legacy content, Blizzard should have followed proven and successful models and created new, unique content true to the Classic experience after the P6 release.
Sure - it technically would not be the same game players enjoyed 15 years ago, but I think the general consensus is that nobody wanted to be stuck in P6 forever. Instead of killing Classic ERA and eventually TBC when WotLK releases you could have created a completely new experience with the love and care of both the Classic community and devs.
Polling new content, class re-works, general improvements. Perhaps new original content that makes Enh/Ret viable for that particular encounter - you see what I’m suggesting. As time and the game develops using community driven feedback for updates, we could have had a sustainable game model for years to come.
As I said, I don’t really have any influence here - I just figure they’ve missed a trick.
How can you “poll” new content, exactly, unless you re-use existing assets to make stuff (and even then, you’d still need ppl to program stuff in)? And how could you expect them to do this for Classic, TBC and WotLK? How could this be even remotely justifiable from an economic perspective?
The early versions of wow are following a proven and successful model, probably even the most successful model ever seen in a MMO. What is “killing it” is Blizzard’s lack of care for their product. That will not most likely not change with season of mastery, nor would it have changed with “new” content.
Season of mastery is a result of Blizzard sending out polls… A large portion of classic players don’t want class re-works, and many of Blizzard’s “improvements” in TBC have been a disaster.
Blizzard have been making changes to the game based on player feedback for over 16 years now, what makes you think that it would all be great if only they changed this or that about how they recieve the feedback?
I’ve never seen a poll based on original content that stays true to the Classic experience. I personally believe that if after P6 released and then original content was created solely for Classic (no TBC, no Wrath etc) we would not be seeing the current issues we’re experiencing in ERA and TBC right now.
What issues exactly do you think it would that remove? Bots? Hackers? People transferring to a few select servers? Blizzard going months without addressing bugs?
Of course, I’m living in an optimistic reality - it would require co-operation from the devs. Unfortunately as I understand this POV is not realistic. I’m merely sharing a sentiment for what I believe could have been if the stars had aligned as such.
After all, we all love WoW and would love to see it thrive.
Unfortunately the people who love WoW have thousands, and probably significantly more, of different preferences. Ask the devs to mash them all together and you end up with what has happened to retail over the past 15+ years.
The problem with new content is that 100 Classic players would give 101 different answers on what that content should be.
And due to power creep and other factors it would be pretty much TBC design (classes, level 70, itemization etc.) with expansion worth of content (so few zones, few raids, some dungeons etc.)
Classic is good when it’s fresh and starts to die off around AQ. Then if you add expansion on top of it then people will return for expansion launch and it will start dying off when raidlogging remains.
Plus you assume the content that would be created would be the content you would want to play - and there is no guarantee that such expansion would be that.
The reason that didn’t happen is the entire reason Classic came about.
People do not trust Blizzard anymore to make top of the line, revolutionary games that is why players begged for Classic in the first place because they enjoy the games they used to make and the whole “no changes” movement at the time backs up how players felt.
Had they decided to make Classic+ and adding new content I don’t feel the hype would have been the same as the target audience for Classic was players who used to play or had grown tired of what retail had become and would have seen it as a mere retail clone in Vanilla clothing.
I’m not gonna shame you because you said you’re not a frequent poster but these kind of threads are done to death. Once every few days or weeks someone will come and ask addon to Vanilla/Classic and claim TBC and (almost certainly to come) Wotlk is a mistake.
I’ll summarize most of the logical replies to those threads:
do you honestly trust the current devs, a team that contains none of the original dev of Vanilla, to make content that feels as if it belongs in Classic? I don’t. SL and Classic/TBCC, are night and day.
What new content will satisfy all of the playerbase? That’s the thing with these Classic+ ideas, everyone has their own vision what see as the ideal classic addon experience. A new raid? Again see my previous point, it would never ever feel like a classic raid. Karazhan tuned to lvl60 (also a popular request), why just go tbc? etc etc.
Whatever they make or add, more than 50% of the playerbase will not be satisfied or even angry. Just look at Season of Mastery, and these are small changes compared to Classic +.
People have been asking for Legacy content like Classic and even TBC for years. When Classic just came out the forums were flooded with ‘TBC when?’ threads. At that point blizz can’t do anything other than just re-release every popular expansion, probably up until WoTLK.