at least 70-80% in my guild won’t play classic+ nor cata, i’m genuinely happy for all the people who are hyped about it, but without wotlk era servers there is no reason to stay subbed anymore for everyone who is not
i understood the thought behind not bringing TBC era-servers, to “force” people into wotlk, to not split the playerbase - but this time most people won’t let themself get forced into cata, where the retailification begins, i don’t think it’s a smart move by blizzard, neither for the playerbase, nor for their sub-count
re-sub to what, if wotlk will be over? it’s not that hard to understand that there is a large amount of people who only want to play wotlk, and if blizzard doesn’t offer it anymore there is no reason to continue
wotlk is the most popular pserver expansion, cata pservers are rare and way less populated and die really quick very often - people prefer wotlk, it’s really not difficult to understand
It’s been so long so I don’t remember all the reasons, but significant were things like mega-guilds taking away the sense of community, this being compounded by LFR being mandatory to get missing gear pieces that didn’t drop in your main raid, but LFR being mega toxic because nobody seemed to know the mechanics, nobody wanted to take charge and explain and it was just a major sh-show.
Vashjr as a zone was widely hated due to its underwater nature, Hyjal was also not great 1) because people were expecting something else from what they knew of vanilla Hyjal and 2) the quest progression in the zone being extremely linear and boring. I don’t even remember the zone under the maelstrom, but it was exceptionally monotone and because it was circular with the one single questhub in the middle you were constantly sent to go out, back to the middle, out again, back to the middle, etc.
The only zones that I have good memorys from are Uldum and Twlight Highlands. Uldum is a beautiful zone, and Twilight Highlands had interesting progression.
In the beginning heroic dungeons were exceptionally difficult, more difficult than pre-nerf TBC heroics, and very very quickly Blizzard went and nerfed the Heroics into the ground again so that you could sleep on the autowalk and the one single (heal/dps/tank) button and still clear it successfully.
Then a lot of beloved quests from the revamped zones were replaced with newer, linear quests that spell out their story instead of implying the story and letting you figure it out on your own. Beloved zones were destroyed (literally, by the attack from Deathwing) and at the time of writing in Dragonflight still have not had any repairs completed.
Talents were revamped, flight paths and graveyards were added what feels like every 20m.
There’s a bunch of other stuff but I don’t remember it all off the top of my head. (Except druid losing tree form, which was BS and I still resent whoever decided that)
So besides the questing zones (I pretty much always spent as much time in uldum and TH as possible) it’s mostly social stuff which was specific to the time (If not even worse in classic servers nowadays) and tuning stuff that wouldn’t be particularly hard to alter for the better?
I think cataclysm deserves a second shot honestly.
Yeah, I guess. I’m not actively opposed to Cata, I just like what they’re doing with SoD more. I’m sure there’ll be plenty of people who will have fun in Cata.
For me as a fan of the old world and leveling, I greatly disliked the changes to the world and the feeling of the leveling experience. That’s not to say it was objectively bad… But it ruined the experience enough for me personally to quit and not even consider returning until Classic.
That been said, as I mentioned in another thread, I’m happy for Cata fans - but it really sucks for Wrath fans.