I played both Classic and SoM and just wanted to comment on it.
Before I start I want to say I played SoM more because I joined classic late.
I’m glad Blizz did SoM even though it was generally a bad experience because it showed that they cared and tried to make something, and hopefully learned from their mistakes.
Please read especially if you didn’t play SoM 1 and you are interested in SoM 2:
Major changes to the SoM were, harder raids, 1-year game instead of 2-2.5 years, and no world buffs in raids.
I played A LOT, especially in the first half of the year/game but it was insanely hard to keep up with everything.
My group was playing 10hrs+ a day while we were lvling and when we dinged 60 new content was already being released, and people didn’t even start forming proper dungeon groups and we were getting new phases, so a lot of people were surprised at how fast it actually was moving.
Alas, we continue our journey, and we start doing MC here is where THE PROBLEM starts to be really apparent. You needed almost every consume in the game for all of the 40 people in order to do new MC, especially in the early months when people were not geared. To put this in perspective let’s say that on average you would bring roughly 5x more consumes than in org Classic, our bags had few slots of free space because entire bags were filled with consumes. But even this would be fine if the game didn’t move as fast as it did.
We nearly manage 2-3 Rag kills (same as other guilds, tho we were doing better than most) and…BWL is coming out haha, I mean when they announced BWL release servers lost almost half of their population.
Why? Now that ridiculous grind is doubled, I think this is the time when they made the change that you can get like 3 flasks at once when you craft them because otherwise, it would be impossible to raid + People couldn’t get geared is such short amount of time. Anyway, even with the change, the price of flasks was high and you needed 3-4 flasks for MC+ BWL + every other consume. ( the main complaint here is not actually consumes its the pace of the game, people couldn’t get geared and properly adjusted to the raid to make it smooth and the new raid would already be out, consumes were just the tipping point of frustration)
THE GRIND and PACE WERE RIDICULOUS
and it showed, people started complaining, guilds disbanding, and people were leaving, and our GM did research and talked to every guild which disbanded and every player which left our guild. (if blizz takes interest I think I can still find most of the chats with other gms to confirm these things)
And the answer was always the same:
The game is too fast, and too demanding, there was no free time to have fun with friends, or do few bgs for fun or something, it was always the grind for materials and getting ready for a new raid which was always coming too fast, and it burned people put.
Anyway, we somehow make it and do Nef few times anddddddddddd AQ is coming out, this is the breaking point, when they announced AQ, servers lost 90% of its remaining population, and there was totally maybe 3-4? guilds left who were properly raiding, and every guild was struggling with keeping raiding rooster full because people were leaving in droves. And no they didn’t leave because TBC or RETAIL were taking players away, everyone of these people was hyped for SoM and huge fan of classic, it was the pace of the game that burned out everyone.
This is the reason of the this post, I see lot of people who never played SoM or maybe did for a few days or weeks, commenting on SoM 2 and not mentioning these things, if Blizz ever releases SoM 2 and makes it so it lasts 1 year again, it will absolute disaster.
SoMs need to become just fresh classic and that’s it, full game for 2.5 years and not 2 (even in classic they rushed AQ release and i clearly remember people complaining that BWL phase lasted too short)
ONLY change that I saw most people agreeing upon was that world buffs should be removed in raids, since it just made game more toxic due to dispells and death in raids.
And after it ends just let people transfer to era if they want, and then release fresh again.
I think private servers already proved every that this game will never die, and that fresh servers are also key to that, since that’s what they were doing for almost 20 years…
I want to see this game successful that’s why I wrote this “essay”.
Sorry for the long post.
Cheers.