Having played classic for 5 days I decided to make this review of my experience for anyone interested. I stopped playing saturday and I’m currently lvl 35 on my human priest.
#Start Rant
Launch - It was a #$%@storm, as anyone with half a brain knew it would be. Blizzard launches are a meme at this point. I was well aware that the queues would be ridiculous and that the lagg would be immense so I quickly swapped to the low pop servers that showed up 1 hour after launch. Even in a low pop server with layering it was still laggy and there weren’t enough mobs to exit the starting zone fast, by the second day of launch I was around lvl 14 and my low pop server was now high pop and had 2h queues to enter on peak time, since my real-life friends who play with me couldn’t play after work due to the queue, I resorted to make an alt and solo play when they aren’t logged (my alt is now 35 and my main 14 since they have trouble logging in).
I feel bad for the people who took time off work to play this game during launch, but let’s be honest if you still expect Blizzard to do a proper launch, at this point you really deserve what you get. What else if there to say? I find it sad that a multimillion dollar company can’t launch a game better than a couple of guys hosting a private server, I find it sad that the managers who get fat pay-checks thought it was a good idea to start classic with 2 pvp servers. And above all im disappointed in the queue times, I thought the whole point behind layering was to ensure that there would be no queues, I assumed they could just make more layers and accommodate more players. Why even allow people to make characters in full realms if layering wont fix queue times? Why not allow transfers?
So yeah, I guess we are now stuck with both layering and queues.
Questing - Questing is as fun as I remember, areas like wetlands and duskwood make me feel happy about having rolled alliance, I actually enjoy having to travel the world looking for quests as opposed to just having to complete one zone, the only problem I have had with questing is related to the players, its very hard to make friends in the game, most players will group with you in order to kill elites and that’s about it. After the quest is done the group is disbanded and everyone goes their own way, most players i have met have no interest in even communicating or helping others. In duskwood I remember grouping with a 29 priest in order to kill mor’ladim, since he was lvl 35 elite we couldn’t kill him and asked the players right next to us for help, i asked 3 players, 2 didnt reply and the other one said he was “busy killing skeletons”. Eventually we found a 3rd member and killed mor’ladim but the fact that most players refuse to stop their grinding to help you even when they are at viewing distance says a lot about the current state of the community.
Another example was when I was doing RFK and the warrior needed help doing his warrior quest, after the escort quest was finished everyone left the group i was the only player who stuck with him, it took some time but I helped him clear some trash and kill the mob he needed (Roogug).
Yet another example was when I was in gnomeregan and another player starting claiming he was there to “do the dungeon” and not to “do the quests” when the rest of the group was going for the “rescue techbot’s brain” and “data rescue” quest , eventually he left the group despite the fact that it only took around 4 minutes to complete the quests.
All things considered it really makes me wonder why these people even play an MMORPG when they clearly have no interest in interacting with other people or being helpful. As an honorable mention I feel like i must also mention how disgusting the raid groups farming dungeons are, and how pathetic it is that people who raved about classic for so long decide to do nothing other than grind dungeons OMEGALUL.
PvP - I regret having chosen a pvp realm. I was aware that horde racials are overpowered and superior to their alliance counterpart, I was expecting alliance to be outnumbered by the horde, i understand that sometimes you’re just gonna get ganked and camped, sometime you’ll even have to swap zones and grind it on the mobs because you can’t quest. Despite all of this I still rolled on a PvP server because i was at least expecting to have some old fashioned vanilla pvp, where struggling players who get camped eventually group up to form a party or even a raid and fend off the opposing faction in order to finish the quests in the area. Sure, you might waste a whole day to get 1 level, but as long as it was a fun experience who cares?
Sadly I had no such luck, as I walked into Kurzen camp in STV i was ganked by 2 horde players, the 2 alliance players in the area refused to group up with me because they were friends doing a “drop rate quest” (probably the medicine one), as a result i was singled out by the horde, despite this we still kicked their @$$ as they sucked and it was pretty much a 3vs2 at that point. However after the alliance players left (the 2 horde had also given up at that point) a new group of horde showed up and proceeded to camp the area, amazed by seeing so much horde and no alliance in the Kurzen area, I checked the who list to see how many allies were in the area, according to the who list there were at least 50 lvl “30-33” alliance players in STV which brings me to the next point.
Layering - Holy &$@#, who the hell thought it would be a good idea to have layering in classic, I knew this would be awful but somehow its even worse than I thought, just knowing that there might be players i can’t encounter who are facing the same struggle, knowing there are players doing the same quest I am doing that I can’t see. And let’s not even talk about the players killing the same rare mobs 7 times in a row or farming the same rare material several times. There are probably epic fights going on in STV that players will miss because they happen to be in the wrong layer and the same can be said about several other events.
Everyone knows that layering is bad for the game, I’ll just add that considering the record blizzard has shown, I would be surprised if they actually keep their word and eventually remove it from the game.
Community - This is the biggest problem, as mentioned before most people i have encountered so far simply have no interest in actually playing an MMORPG , you might say im gatekeeping but the truth is it makes no sense to yearn for the classic experience and then simply aoe grind mobs while ignoring other players when they ask for help. Maybe I leveled too hard because I was on vacation and the #truegamers are the ones currently lvl 14 who are picking up peaceblooms in Elwyn Forest, maybe the players grinding mobs who don’t reply to me are chinese drones boosting characters, who knows? But so far the experience has been quite negative.
At this point my hype for classic has completely died out (it was never that big tbh), last time I played was on saturday and stopped at lvl 35, leveling in desolace where pvp doesnt seem so bad.
Since i have a sub i’ll probably reach lvl 60 before the end of the month. But to be honest if i could get a refund I would probably just stop playing right now since it feels like I’m paying for an easier and layered version of nostalrius (apparently raids are easier in classic)
I love classic but the game is old and flawed thus the community centered gameplay is the only redeeming aspect, if the community is bad then there is no point on playing it.
Conclusion - Currently i am seeing players ignore other players who are about to die to a pack of mobs, I have even seen players ignore others getting ganked by horde and just keep on running. I’ve been in a group where the party wanted to kick some guy because he was about 1 minute away from the elite quest mob. People are playing as if they are competing for world first despite the race being over a long time ago.
Unless the second wave of levelers has a completely different mind set I don’t see the game succeeding long term, i understand that its old content and that the 2006 experience will never be replicated but i still expected something more enjoyable. I feel like most players wouldn’t help me questing even if i paid them gold and frankly i just don’t understand what those players are aiming for.
# End Rant
P.S. - In case you didn’t understand i actually enjoy the classic game as a whole, it’s mostly the community I have a problem with, I leveled on Nost etc… and I actually think it was a better experience on those private servers. I belive layering splitting players in half and ruining world PvP and the sense of a world community might be the biggest problem with the game right now.
I still hope classic succeeds and that some other companies / Blizzard get inspired to make new proper MMORPG’s with the old-school feel and revive the adventure and rpg elements instead of the arcade style raids where all you do is down bosses with fancy mechanics.
P.P.S - I am aware i might have been unlucky and that other players might have had better luck on meeting nice people, this is a rant about my personal experience and mostly layering.
