Retail this, retail that, retail retail retail its all you ever go on about at this point and its getting boring. Stop living in the past man what are you teaching to someone in a 20 year old game that has already been fully min maxād cleared? Your beloved 40 mans arenāt mystical raids that havenāt been touched by the playerbase before they have all be done countless times. An average gamer today isnāt going to struggle with the mechanics that classic gives to them. Especially ones that have dozens of guides and videos for you to learn from before you even step foot into the raid. As i said earlier this was cleared by people in weeks from 0-60 MC to naxx. Anyone who has some previous gaming knowledge can understand classic mechanics. Most people arent gonna go into this Blind progressing.
What you fail to see is that the playerbase has changed a lot from 2004 -2019 and from 2019-2024, The āWeakest linksā Will want to play with the better players to get through the content easier, and the better players wonāt want to play with the weakest links due to wanting to clear content they have already cleared hundreds of times in a reasonable time frame. Do you honestly expect your 25 best players to stick around and want to carry people through the content when there is no challenge to the content? If the content is easy, which becomes boring eventually. People want fast and efficient clears. That has already been shown with PuGs for gnomer and ALL of BFD. Do you actually believe this is going to change at 60? People will still gate keep the bad players, and the good players will leave the bad guilds in favour for something better because they actually have options.
Your idea of classic might not involve people that can press their buttons right, but for 90% of the playerbase that gets posted in LFG every day itās something they care about.
hell people already donāt wanna bring people to raid even if they press their buttons right just because their class is currently not meta for the current raid.
The idea of 40man raids back in 2004 were cool, when it was actually a feat for your guild to step into the raid, each week was fun and progress was made. But after 2019 it wont be the same. Now the raid is gonna be cleared first reset there will be no progression since people dont have to discover the fight its all be done before. Raiding isnāt a prestigious feat anymore, itās content designed for the vast majority of the players to do. Whatever new raids blizzard implement will be harder difficulty than anything you had in era just going off the difficulty jump from BFD to gnomer compared to anything in MC or BWL.
25 good players can carry 15 bad players. But 25 bad players canāt carry 15 terrible players after BWL. The playerbase for the most part is already pretty elitist when it comes to requirements to do ālevelling raidsā you think that will change when it comes to actual raiding? āMostā People dont want to spend 6 hours clearing the raid let alone all the BS that comes with being a glorified baby sitter, ontop of loot drama that comes with 40man raids. 2004 or 2019 re release people always had some loot drama.
The vast majority of people will take a smooth clean run and collecting their loot over carrying some people to wipe for hours on 20 year old content and then have some loot debate on discord for 2hours after it, I donāt want a second job.
Classic purists had their chance at fresh again with SoM and it was pretty damn unsuccessful even though it was everything you are basically wanting with some added challenge.
Blizzard probably wont remove 40 man raids from being a thing, and its fine. But people will get gatekept. And considering the latest blue post from aggrend says " On the flip side, we also always wanted to make sure that any 40 player raids that exist remain approachable (i.e. able to be completed in pick-up groups) and that they maintain that āsoda and pretzelsā feel of 2019 Classic raiding, where you could bring almost any group composition or experience level and have success."
Good luck to any of the people running a trade chat PuG that doesnt have some form of gatekeeping. If your class is underperforming wont get brought, dont have clear exp? donāt get to come to raid, Logs are bad? Just find someone that actually has decent logs.
This will be the reality for a lot of people. And judging by the amount of people that didnāt want to join a guild or make their own group for raids as small as 10 man. GL with 40 