My first time round experience of TBC was worse. Elitist judgemental nasty people who drove me to play alone. So I’m not so sure the playerbase is any different.
People are obviously much wiser as nothing is new. It’s all already known.
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strange maybe you just got unlucky in tbc… my best guild was in tbc days personally… some of my most fond memories of group content as well… and random encounters…
EDIT: ofc there was toxic people around in tbc though… and i met my fair share… but the positives were there and they were good .
Tbh it’s a miracle I kept playing. People’s experiences vary ofc.
yeah i agree, put in that position i doubt i would of stuck around much either.
Quite a bit of the playerbase missed TBC raiding. I only started just before Wrath, and only starred tor aid just before ICC.
Also, there’s been over a decade of guides for TBC so you just need to level, get x gear from y and then perform tried and tested tacts.
An interesting fact: Vanilla classic is now dead!
wonder how many of those went to tbc classic… or how many were left in vanilla classic with empty servers and stopped playing costing the game subs.
i mean there must of been some collateral damage.
i cant imagine the playerbase grew very much from classic vanilla numbers… as nostalgia only appeals to those select few…
does make me wonder… if it dealt more damage than good releasing a new expansion in classic.
I do indeed know full well that the forums has been in an uproar of denial for ages. To a frustrating level.
People got very defensive about the fact that Shadowlands isn’t having a good time due to its structure - that it wanes and waxes so fast due to release cadence. It’s not sticky - people aren’t invested any more; they’ve only got a sunk cost fallacy rolling in their head like a drumbeat.
I said, for years, that sooner or later the lack of social MMO structure combined with the above would create a situation so volatile that the game would die.
I don’t know that that moment is upon us, but it’s feeling dangerously close, and I’m not hearing much excitement about 9.1, either.
I’m both, though mostly a Classic player.
I’ve got some social attachments to retail, mainly. Only bloody reason I’m there at all. I don’t like retail. I thought for a minute Blizzard had done a really good job with Shadowlands, but then they nerfed it back to its usual broken self and basically stopped releasing content, and now it might be one of the worst expansions they’ve ever done. Quite a turn-around!
I am long, long past the point of trying to argue my case now. I did my part!
I’d say a very large number. I dont think people want classic they just want to progress from the start again. Wrath servers are when I’ll get excited.
When I got in the TBC classic beta I pick all the classes and some specs just felt so hollow and incomplete.
I feel it too with SL. But what could Blizzard do differently.
I dont think there’s anything left they could try. WoW’s just old now.
Strongly, strongly disagree.
They could start by sitting down and understanding what an MMORPG is at a fundamental level. Perhaps then they might realise what kind of systems are toxic to it.
It’s not that it can’t be fixed - it’s that they can’t fix it because a minority vocal community is puffing itself up and making a huge fuss.
yeah hopfully if blizzard have any moral sense left… they will kill classic off after wrath runs it’s course though … i cant imagine very many people want to relive the following expansions… (MoP questionably the most out of them).
Strange i remember the forums saying for a long while about :-
WoD lack of content and TW/WF system bad
Legion AP and Artifact system bad
BFA AP and neck grind being bad and azerite system bad and corruptions .
SL convents and conduits and other things being bad
You know this as you were part of all those beta’s aswell .
I agree with you on this and you know this but how does Blizzard force/make players more social again ?
I was so upset in classic with how pugging dungeons and how some not all guilds were with the class choices you make or spec . It seems like meta and gogogogogo mindset has seeped into classic aswell .Plus all the ZG boost leveling spam .
TBCC is not all sweetness and light either which is a real shame but its how the player base are what can you do ?
I thought you were GM and the guild doing okay ? please tell me you have not given up ?
Ah, yes - but these are all horrible distractions that have nothing to do with why the game is failing - if anything those systems help, albeit through addiction rather than attachment.
The reason the game is failing is due to it divorcing difficulty from location and enemy and because the social systems have been changed from a connected town-sized game world into a lobby and queue system. Systems like guilds also work inconsistently as it interacts with this.
It has resulted in a horrible, horrible hamster-wheel grind with no social structure.
By not feeding them bad groups for free and instead having them NEED to talk to others
By not having the game move so fast that you don’t even time have to talk (drinking pauses did serve a purpose!)
By dangling interesting content before them that they can only see if they work together - while still of course providing content for those who choose not to.
And so much more.
I’ve said it all before already. You know I’ve said it. 
The playerbase will always work as hard as it can to optimise its way out of everything. They will “solve” the game - create a meta.
It is Blizzard’s job to shake up that meta whenever it fails to live up to their design goals, not bow to it when the game starts breaking.
I have gone down to membership rank and now raidlog.
The guild’s doing fine, though, even if it’s noticably thinner on members than when the expansion came out. People quit this expansion in droves in our guild, too.
But we’ve had problems with a bugged raid lockout which nearly destroyed our chances of clearing the tier by destroying 3 raid weeks completely! But I think we’re gonna get the last boss anyway.
But yes, Daestra, in many ways I have given up.
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people prefer easy raids - you cant blame them for that.
9.1 raid will be another overtuned to much mechanics raid so its natural they rather play 1 mechanic easy TBC bosses
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Ragnors had no LFR and no Mythic. It was still only normal and heroic. Archimond new phase wasnt relevant becouse cinematic was exactly the same for both lfr and mythic. Ending was same. He dies.
Also its always about effort vs gain. Effort yo beat mythic content is 1000% higher than LFR and gain is close to 0. You seriously expect players to waste so much time just to see few new mechanics? Path of least resistance is major factor in decision making. People tend to sacrifice their own fun for sake of efficienci. This has been case since ever. If you want players.to be interested in the game for long period of time than acessability is not option.
In my personal opinion it’s just a matter of content draught.
I am a person that can play only few hours a week due to family and work, but I run out of things to do very fast.
I enjoy doing torghast and m+ with friends and guildies, even some raid nights are fun, but the vast majority of time I find myself and my friends to do old content that we’ve missed, like legion campaign or bfa MOG runs.
I understand that this patch required more time than usual for valid reasons, but Blizzard should have introduced some mid way implementations, like a small scale 2 boss raid or more difficult world bosses, like the sha or the dinosaur in MoP that required some tactics to down them.
Tl;dr: content is fine and fun, but repetitive, should have added something. Positive facts: more time to level alts and do old content without missing on important stuff.
My two cents btw.
And Ragnaros Heroic is what is now Mythic. And what is now Heroic was once Normal. So by god spare me this nonsense. Ragnaros had a secret phase on the highest difficulty that only a fraction of people saw and it was lore relevant.
It wasnt the same and if you have no idea about the lore then shush. Archimondes death in the cinematic is not final as he doesnt die in the twisting nether but on Draenor. Archimonde cant permanently die outside the Twisting Nether. He will just ress after a while as does every Demon that is killed outside the Nether. On Mythic difficulty he gets killed inside the Twisting Nether. Ending his existence. Also reading is hard i suppose as i said Mythic difficulty contradicts the cinematic as Mythic had been declared canon.
You do it for the sake of doing it. If all you want is loot etc then i prefer the system as it is now as it spares me to deal with players that share this certain PoV.
No, i expect them do it for the sake of wanting to do the highest difficulty.
It isnt. Not to mention that the gear on Mythic is better than HC gear by quite a bit. That alone would morale boost loot hunters.
They stated ages ago that stuff like LFR is even justifying pumping so many ressources into raiding in the first place. Lets say they do what you want and remove everything but HC and Mythic. A not so minor part of the players would stop touching it. Only Mythic? Ye nice, only 1-5% (and that number wont change) of players even finishing the raid in the first place depending on difficulty of the tier.
Don’t waste your time with this classic andy. He thinks raids should have 1 layer of difficulty, without a knowledging that raids are going to be easier than current lfr.
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Let’s be fair mate - people are done with 9.0. No matter if we like the patch or not, it’s just done. Some went to FFXIV, others to Classic, and some play entirely different games. People will come back when 9.1 launches.
This is especially true for raiding. The goal of the PVE game for me is to clear the raid. And once you’ve “beaten the game” to your satisfaction be it on easy (clear normal raid), normal (heroic) or mythic (hard), you are done with it.
It’s not an indictment of Shadowlands, which has its problems, true. It is an indictment on the patch cycle. It’s been too long without new content. I think many players are in the same boat as me - we don’t care about gear progression but what that gear allows us to do and once there’s nothing to do, there’s no point in acquiring gear. So yeah, my main is 220 ilvl and we’re not gonna get cutting edge before 9.1 comes out, soo there’s nothing to do. So I play something else.
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It’s not a good thing that they throw this much into raids, though.
Raids are great - most of us love raids - but I’d rather have several less grand raids with increasing difficulty instead of the same raid on 4 difficulties to “justify” it.
Put those resources into the game world and some dungeons instead.