My thoughts about WOTLK Classic as a fresh, first timer

WoW Classic Cataclysm Classic Discussion
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Hi! I wanted to make this post to start a conversation and also to state my opinion on my “experience” as a first timer on world of warcraft classic.

I have NO wow history except playing it in 2013 on a trial account to level 20 when i was 12. Also to level 45 on a feral druid 1-2 years later to play with a friend. I’ve always had an interest on World of Warcraft, due to raids seeming so cool to participate in and the idea of performing, competing against others and gearing up really piqued my interest.

Never got into it because I’d rather play Metin2 or Knight Online because they were fun (and free) and I wouldn’t pay for a game MONTHLY just to have access to playing it. Seemed like a waste, I wish it stayed like that.

Anyways, now I’m a lil more grown up, making some money meaning I could support my hobbies. I bought shadowlands (first time playing wow officially) and the endgame really put me off. I’ve known that Classic existed, tried TBC, didn’t like it so I quit.

So you get the idea of my situation and what kind of a player I am or what I expect from a game like this.

So, now to get to the part where majority of the people that are reading this cares about: What I observed and experienced as a fresh, first time player?

1- The Community (questing with people, guilds etc)

QUESTING

I started playing on Thekal due to it being a fresh server. Seen and interacted with many people leveling up, well, not that much in the first week due to me getting MASS REPORTED and getting a 1 week communication ban for chatting up with people in /4 in the 5th hour of the server opening up. When everyone was doing the same. Good start. Peak social aspect. No swear words or a case of being “toxic” against others.

Made a ticket, was responded to after the ban duration ended basically. Cool, I don’t mind it. Happens.

Ran some dungeons, used the LFG tool. Just whispering people to get into the group and only thing that was said in the groups were people asking for summons or they’ll need a minute or two. Nothing else. I’d much RATHER have RDF, the traveling for world tours was hell and I was burnt out from it in 2 days.

GUILDS

Other than that, I’ve been into few guilds. We’ve made a guild with like 10 people that i chatted up with in /4 , quickly disbanded. Was good tho, nice chatting for a day or two to get through leveling.

2nd guild I’ve gotten into was VERY racist and toxic. Googled how to leave a guild, /gquitted almost instanly after the first hard R, very epic.

3rd guild was nice, did naxx, wiped like 15 times on the razuvious guy. Good times, had fun. Just what i was looking for unironically, chatting up on discord, a banter here and there, guild leader saying step on the slimes after patchwerk then laughing when someone steps on it. It’s dead now, raided for 2 weeks now no one seems to be wanting to raid again. Nobody’s online, can’t even raid without pugging AND pugging takes too long, we’ve looked for a tank and a warlock for 2 hours then it got cancelled because we couldn’t find anyone yesterday peak server time…

Now I’m thinking of transferring to a more populated server, because It’s just dead at this point. I’ve tried to make an alt but questing takes too long and there seems to be no active dungeon groups even in peak times.

2- Gearing up and other things

The gearing up phase for me was honestly decent. Got no complaints at all, I’m currently at 4k gearscore thanks to being lucky sometimes.

I’ve never raided but there are so much information on raiding at this point that you can get into it very easily if you can find a guild or pug.

Professions are good, I’m running JC and Engineering. Maxing them out was a hassle, takes too much time and gold in my opinion. I’ve tried out mining, It’s like hell.

Finding groups are still nightmare fuel especially if you’re creating them. Many people seem to raidlog now but I can’t blame them since It’s not worth the time to run dungeons or create alts. The game in my eyes holds very low re-play value, especially with reps, world tours etc. I have no interest in PVP so I can’t speak on that.

Conclusion:

The game is decent overall but if you want to play this game, you really should have alot of free time. Atleast that’s what I think. People exist but there is no chatting with randoms or spending time together because why would there be when you can do other things irl. I’ve been reading alot of things on reddit, youtube etc. The old MMO “social aspect” won’t ever happen again and people really should let old things stay in the past. Only time you’re interacting with other players is when trading with them or explaining things to them so you can actually complete the raid or dungeon.

It’d be much more enjoyable if Blizzard decided to modernize the game to fit the current age. Only time I’ve had genuine fun was indeed interacting with players, but it was on a discord call while raiding. Game excels on that point but it depends on the people you’re rocking with too. It’s like trying to find a diamond in the rough and why would the players put up with that like me just to have some kind of serotonin release while playing the damn game.

Blizzard definetly needs to change some things for the game to be worth more and it’s the perfect time to do this since WOTLK is fresh as of right now and I’d like to see that.

Thanks for reading this clusterf*** of a wall of text. I’d like to see your opinions in the comments, I’ve wrote this unplanned over a couple of minutes and it’s the first time I’ve done something like this and I’d like to think it’s for the better of the game.

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Stay with us in Thekal, mon!

It will be great again soon now people can finally come here and join friends.

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It’d be much more enjoyable if Blizzard decided to modernize the game to fit the current age

That game already exists - Shadowlands. It’s thoroughly modern, and is full of modern conveniences.

The point of Classic is that it’s a snapshot of a game that used to exist 12 years ago, so it doesn’t need to be ‘modernised’, it is what it is.

But let’s imagine you got your wish. What kind of features did you want? How do you want it to be modernised?

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Just ninja loot it all and ur good. Kappa

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Well, I have never thought about the “fixes” to the problems I’ve experienced as it’s not my job to fix them nor I can fix them.

But lets imagine i got my wish like you said, I would like:

1- A MUCH better tool for creating lobbies and better solutions for communicating with people. For example I’ve read many posts in here that talks about the things I’ve mentioned and what they did to combat it was requiring gearscore, achievement, checking their raid logs etc. While the first 2 can be done in game, why not make it easier and implement it in a single window? Why would anyone go to 3rd party services to check it out right?

2- Better leveling and alt support, I quite like the idea of 50% the experience buff staying during 1-68 leveling, with an option to turn it off like the pre-patch. Makes it much more copeable for me and many others.

etc. etc…

But the thing is, like you said, these convenience features already exist in the more updated version of the game, but you and I know damn well the retail doesn’t come close to (for me, atleast) classic.

The whole solution just comes down to just add some of the features from retail to classic to make the time more enjoyable and I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t implement it.

The idea of classic is really good, why not make it better with retail-like solutions (for the things I’ve pointed out) to make it more friendly towards everyone? Just my two cents.

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I’d certainly not be adverse to suggestion number 1, in fact I’d consider that a very positive change. It doesn’t affect gameplay (save indirectly), doesn’t affect the game world (save indirectly) and it’s one of those rare-but-genuine cases where ‘streamlining’ is actually beneficial.

Totally opposed to experience boosts of all kind, save those that already exist such as the Wintergrasp 5%XP boost for killing mobs. I can grudgingly live with heirlooms, even though I loathe them and would never use them (in fact if I had my way they’d be wiped out!) - but they were part of the original game.

But 50% buffs to facilitate speed-levelling? No thank you. I’d never support this, even as an optional system, though I’m aware that plenty of others out there who dislike levelling and view the game as a ‘raiding game and nothing but’ feel differently.

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Yes.
10char

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Depends on your goals. I can play maybe an hour on some week days, and maybe 6 hours at weekends, and that’s it. I’m working or have other RL commitments the rest of the time.

But I still enjoy the game because I’m a casual scrub who enjoys levelling and considers end game activities as optional extras. At best I can attend one raid night per-week on a Saturday, and that’s it.

Otherwise I can play for 30 minutes and not feel like it’s time wasted.

If someone’s goal is: “world firsts, min/max, meta, BIS, raid, raid, raid, eat, sleep, breath, live and die raiding” then they definitely need to have a lot of free time.

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Because

  1. The things you’d like to change are not the same things as I would like to change.
  2. Blizzard : they improve one thing - halfways - and break three more in the process.
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Well also other games have a lot more diminishing returns for spending more hours on it, while you can spend hundred hours levelling a character and it might end up not even being your main, so the next character you spend a hundred hours on is enjoyed a lot more.

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Interesting read, and yes, I agree that the social aspect that occured during the original vanilla/tbc/wrath was due to it being the first large social online game. It was a totally new experience but not necessarily unique to wow. And you can find it in a lot of games nowadays. Therefore, with peoples reduced attentionspan and time a modernization is required.

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Play with a group of friends.

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I dont think having a second job farming rep/azerite/corruption/w.e shadowlands newest currency was. is exactly modern convenience

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That’s just one small end game aspect of retail.

You can queue for all dungeons and raids, there’s super-fast speed levelling with dead-easy mobs that die if you so much as look at them, level boosts, no travel is required as everything you need it a few yards from where you are, no need to go back to trainers to level skills and spells as they’re given instantly. Gold pretty much falls from the sky, no class quests, no need to level professions and all your mounts are shared across every character so you have instant riding on all your alts.

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I’d love to get into more detail as your post is interesting and covers important points. But the TL;DR i have is:

  1. Thekal is not representative of the Classic Community; its a new servers and people can’t transfer there. that VAST majority of Classic players who’ve been playing for 1-3 years will be on other servers, playing with their guild/friends. What you’ve experienced is more like a private server launch where there tons of early hype, and a level of toxicity that’s not normal in classic as people chase “pre-bis”. If you didn’t organise before launch then you will likely be behind the curve and pugging 90% of the time.
  2. Addons have gotten “too good”. They replace the need for using voice comms or actually discussing mechanics. You can zerg a raid or dungeon for the first time just by watching Deadly Boss Mods or one of the many, incredible, Weak Aura packs for each dungeon/raid. You will have experienced this on Shadowlands too - Blizzard are fighting a losing battle to make fights more difficult as players continually use addons to subvert communication and automatically co-ordinate players without need for planning.

Banning addons entirely is a very real discussion that needs to be tabled for the health of the game, which we can agree isn’t in a great place for retail specifically.

I appreciate what you said about “modernizing” wow… but i think the opposite is true. Simplifying the interface and making players and their guilds and communities the main focus is the way to bring back the MMO experience you speak about - devolving the game if you will. Many of us are having that MMO experience, we’re considered casual though - which is hilarious because “hardcore” means doing easy content as fast and possible and then logging off. Casuals play the game because we enjoy it, and we still complete all the content. We just take 30 minutes longer in the raid than the hardcore, but we don’t burn out. Our guild has 15 members who’ve been here since Vanilla classic. And we don’t use Loot Council, so being in the guild longer doesn’t mean preferential treatment. Loot council is one of the biggest failings in Classic and it comes from private servers, where in 6-9 months your character is deleted and every starts again.

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this is a very deep and true statement that i fully subscribe to. its like watching ppl with apps and online guids dash through a museum, competing for “1st out the door” and you just ask yourself … “why?” :stuck_out_tongue:

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Iam not sure about banning addons, but i like the idea about simplifying the interface.
and then give us the new Ui customization so we can rearrange the UI as we see fit.

The social aspect that a tricky thing, they have tried with the new LFG tool that have given mix experience, i think that if we could evolve the guild system more.

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Can do that anyway with addons.

Bartender 4, to name but one, allows any aspect of the interface to be moved, resized, changed, removed entirely, decluttered and a whole lot more.

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We talked about banning addons :slight_smile:

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Addons fundamentally change the game. They instruct individuals, on an at-need-basis, on the actions they need to carry out for optimal DPS, encounter mechanics, and positional issues.

Arena Banned the use of all addons except “Move Anything” in PVP tournaments and it made the game significantly more interesting and emphasised team and play co-ordination over whoever had the best addon set.

Blizzard already have addons in their crosshairs. They are as close to cheating as you can get without literally having something else play the game for you.