Then make the old m+ hero titles available again, and magetower weapon skins, and both challenge mode Mogs, and the old gladiator mounts + titles.
When does it stop? Some prestige is needed in a seasonal game. You scream entitlement, nothing else.
Its not the reward that looses meaning. Its the journey.
Il ask you a question: Why would you even want to attempt KSL this season if you can get it next season with 100 more ilvl by soloing dungeons on your own. As if it was a Delve.
If i cant have it, nobody can have it.
This is why we can’t have nice things in the game. Entitled people.
I am done with the forums. People troll who wants to remove everything from the game. And on the other side people say who isn’t in title range in M+ is too stupid to breath.
I am so done here.
They didn’t remove the grinds in Dragonflight, they removed the chores. And good thing it was, World of Chorecraft was turning into a major problem and almost killed the game in 9.1. I quit for months during that. Absolutely not having any more of that.
By chore i mean an activity that must be done with a certain regulatory. If it is not done you fall behind. Most likely it is also very easy.
Chores are mostly gone. All caps are cumulative, and the other chores can be caught up. All that really remains is the vault.
Ideally that should go, too. But it’s a good start.
This was one of the core pillars of WoW questing back in the day. It was one of the things that made it different from other MMO’s and made it far more approachable. Glad it was rediscovered, and not a moment too soon.
The truth hurts, I know. But reality shows that every single person who never played at that level is clueless about m+.
I stand corrected on the size.
Sure. A trip through memory lane. We can talk for hours about what they did or did not do 20 years ago.
However. I fail to see how an incomplete vanilla questing experience, both in quantity and quality, can in any shape or form be even considered… “better” than the complete experience, both in quantity and quality, to retail questing.
Its not both !! I would be constantly seeing the same people over and over again if there was no sharding.
My server (Uldum) has the population it has. I would be seeing the same people. Or atleast, alts of the same people (like it used to happen back then).
And Sharding was not put in place to fit some “agenda” of quests designed for people not to party up. It was put in place for 1 purpose only: To give low population servers someone to bump into, and potentially to play.
But we can argue this on some other post if you want. Fact of the matter is that this “small village” feeling you mention, is a “no-sharding” world in which the only people you see are those that are in your own server. And evidently, it would be an 100% identical experience in Retail as well, IF I could only see the people from my own server.
That also tells you some information. So what you are telling me is that a mysterious person told you that since 2019 when Classic Servers were launched, out ALL the people that tried to play only 17% actually managed to get at-least 1 toon to level 60 in the 5 years time they had to do it?
WOW. Unless I misunderstood something, the information I get from that is that out of 100 people, only 17 of them stuck arround long enough to actually enjoy the full experience. Out of 100 people, 83 of them abandoned the game mid way and never reached level 60… in 5 years… because… ???
?? Maybe some level 60 elites near dungeons… Normal mobs? NOPE. 1 ability. At MOST. And its 99% of the time some “mage” or whatever. Melee mobs just white attack you. And ranged, also white attack you but with a bow.
And I do remember. I mean… even in dungeons. You cant compare the Priory humanoids to the Scarlet Cathedral humanoids. Its night and day!
I mean… you got videos of raid bosses doing nothing but white attacks in MC… in a world where raid bosses have 1, often times 0 mechanics. What do you expect the quest mobs of a level 20 zone to be?
Thats my point. EXACTLY my point. You can only play wow for the first time ONCE. Not twice. And that is what made Vanilla so great. But Classic is not Vanilla. As you say.
That is why when you said that Classic Era questing is better than Retail (TODAY, in 2025) I was really confused. Classic Era in 2025 questing >>> than Retail Questing in 2025 ?? It stroke me as odd.
However. We could do a nostalgia trip and claim that Vanilla 2004 questing >>> than Retail Questing in 2025. And my opinion on that is: Maybe. But it’s an unfair comparison because part of the charm of Vanilla 2004 was the fact that it was new. Something both Retail and Classic can never have.
Expansion by expansion they removed 1 annoying thing at a time. Point being: Transforming Retail into Classic, or taking elements of Classic is like swimming backwards.
Retail problems require retail solutions.
Because there is a big difference between leveling 60 levels or leveling 10 levels you know? Also, Retail is really seasonal gameplay. Retail is good with the end-game because it focuses on the end-game. You cant simply block people for months at a time questing to get to the raids and dungeons.
So blizzard is forced to condense the best experience possible in the shortest amount of time.
Wich… to be fair… its what Classic Era servers did as well: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fn-BPmfZ1tE
I love parody videos because they make things more obvious than they already are.
And having more game versions? Absolutely not. That is what Classic servers are. THEY are that 2nd version.
And making Retail more similar to Classic in any way or form? ALSO a hard pass. If you do that, I want M+ in MoP Classic… And Mythic MC in Classic Era with Retail mechanics and design… What are we talking about here…
However. If you REALLY want the best possible questing experience ever made in WOW… it would be to get a level 1 toon. And level him through ALL the expansions. One at a time. With your level blocked at 60.
You start in TBC (cause Classic dosent exist). Then WotlK, then ALL of Cata (from the beginning, including ALL level 1 quests for all races)… and so on…
You can spend 2 or 3 years doing nothing but that. A truly epic experience for those true and dedicated Loremasters of WOW.
I am joining you two today if you don’t mind. Just some stuff that I recalled reading your exchange here.
I think retail questing is like eating instant noodles with a silver spoon, or microwaving a pristine piece of steak. It is super efficient but something is missing or weird, just like in the metaphors I provided.
Vanilla DARED to be incomplete and it in many ways became its strength because the players were part of the content, some would say the players were all of the content. In like manner, a huge portion of the playerbase never reached nor wanted to reach max level because some of the segments of leveling were filled to the brim with people they had met along the way and the storytelling in some zones was just epic. The human leveling experience up to and including Duskwood, The Barrens and its chat, STV starting hills.
Sharding and connected realms destroyed a huge portion of it in the name of efficiency. And yes, this happened already in WotLK so every time someone points out how this expansion was the best I assume they either forget about this change or did not care about the that side of WoW.
I don’t think retail should stop focusing on max-level content, but there are definitely things they should do to polish the leveling and so-called noob or casual experience if they want to attract new target audiences. I also tend to think society goes in circles so sooner or later we can expect things to slow down a bit I think.
Btw, I think it’s less about one being better than the other, but about Classic offering a kind of raw, unscripted immersion that comes from restraint from not filling every gap. You know, like in music the emptiness between the notes can be the most meaningful, or the silence in conversation.
And maybe that’s why some of us keep going back, not for the quests, but for the quiet stillness of the content. And because we are still passionate about WoW and want it to thrive and that does not mean replacing whole systems of Retail but tidying small nuances here and there. It is usually the small things that have the greatest impact.
In fact I think there are already signs of this already happening. From how vast the DF zones were to experimenting with group-focused elites in Forbidden Reach and Zaralek Caverns to even the talent trees.
I think what they promised to remove they baked into other areas of the game, ones where the choreyness is less palatable.
- Knowledge Points and professions is an endless weekly grind.
- Valorstones and Crests being selectively capped and uncapped/warbound to curate player behaviour.
- Reputations like Severed Threads and Undermine Cartels making a return just when renowns become warbound/account-wide.
And more things like warbound gear nudging you to start the grind on another alt, and so on. It has been thought through elaborately I think, but the goal is to make it seem as if there are less chores.
Not in the name of efficiency. In the name of fairness and gameplay.
Back in the day you had a handful of overpopulated servers that had the “true” WoW experience. All other servers were underpopulated and had issues finding people to simply do 1 dungeon or 1 raid. Not to mention that the open world was empty.
THAT is what it solved. And yes. It killed the “village” feeling. But it improved gameplay by a mile for a lot of people. So. IMO it was a worthy exchange.
You cant compare Vanilla 2004 to Retail 2025. I dont even understand why you even try.
Like I said before. What made Vanilla in 2004 so great in so many aspects was the fact that it was revolutionary for it’s time. Not to mention the technical limitations. We lived in an era where Tomb Raider had pyramids on her chest and that way considered “skimpy”. We lived in a time where we all still had dial-up modems. And we lived in an era where the competitors to WOW was Everquest…
So you are not doing a fair comparison.
We could compare Classic Era wow to Retail. Because they both live in 2025. We can compare quest A to quest B. 1 to 1.
Do that comparison. TODAY in 2025, with TODAYS situation and technology… What conclusion would you reach? Still the same? I doubt it. It cant be the same. Its impossible. Because 2004 is not 2025.
Retail needs to do better to attract new players. But going back to the “classic” way of doing things is literally the worst thing they can do.
What new players need is not to be droped at level 1 in some expansion. They cannot engage in the game if they only get to play a fraction of it.
So what they need is a whole brand new continent. From level 1 to 60. With tutorials, a generic bad guy… cutscenes… ect…
- Generic Story because you want it to last more than 1 expansion. So it cant be tied to the general WOW story.
- A seperate continent because you want the scaling to remain the same for more than 1 expansion.
- Tutorials and cutscenes to engage players.
- At the end, you get a level boost, a cinematic of “the story so far” and a set of green items. Then a boat to the relevant expansion pack.
- Depending on the quantity of players, a single unique shard for the whole continent. To see a ton of people.
THAT is how you make a good new player experience. You DO NOT make a new player experience by doing a cheap copy of vanilla wow.
Retail problems require retail solutions.
This is why I think all this “classic” talk is a waste of time. Many people give the argument “well you bumped into people when leveling and it was more social”. And at the same time they also give the argument of liking to play in the “quitness and stillness” of a game with out people… contradictory at best.
Look. Just be honest. When I get sick of Retail I go play something else. Some, like FF14. Others GW2. I personally play Darktide. Some even play Everquest… and SOME… play Classic.
ANY choice is acceptable. Because it’s OK to get sick of something every once in a while. Happens to every game, and anything you do in life. If you swim every day, eventually you want to do something else, like running, for a day or two… Thats OK. But that dosent mean we can argue that swimming with running shoes is a good idea.
But that’s the thing. When is something just grindy and when is it a chore? It’s very interesting in this context. In Shadowlands Blizzard made everything as grindy as they could, but see: It turned into a chore for people. So they can’t just statistically copy classic based on numbers to get the same result, which is very interesting to me.
Something interesting: In Dragonflight some activities started feeling like chores, even if they didn’t feel like chore before, after Blizzard made them very fast with low friction
Just keeping the quotes short so post is shorter as well.
Yeah, gameplay and “fairness” fall under efficiency for me already. You’re right that sharding solved real issues but how it was done was not the only way to fix these. Essentially the baby was thrown out with the bathwater.
Alternative solutions: opt-in and opt-out. Or giving dead realm players a free transfer to someplace else, something they consistently refuse to do even now in Cata Classic. Easy money. It could have also been more gradual and built so your friends and guildmates or people you have regularly bumped into remained in your shard at all times.
I’m not comparing mechanics, I’m comparing the vibe. The difference is between inhabiting a lived-in world vs a spreadsheet-informed content delivery pipeline. Organic vs inorganic.
2005 is not 2025 but the CRAVING for texture, for more organic pacing, for a more breathing world is timeless. And if anything, the sterility of modern tech makes that yearning more relevant. As I said, I think society is going in circles and I am also among those that does not consider the coming generation (Z and Alpha) doomed or anything like that. I think it is the opposite, the demand for such games that breathe and honor player agency etc will come from those generations. And it is not going back to the “old days”, it is rebirth through new eyes. We see that already in popularity of Stardew Valley, Spiritfarer, oldschool Minecraft etc.
So while millennials have wanted it faster faster, the new generations actually want more friction and they want it more real, more raw, more “organic”.
Continuing from before, I dont think players want handholding. Or I should phrase it differently, less and less players are suspicious of railroaded experience and curated playing sessions. They actually want obscurity and being anchored and choosing their point of anchoring themselves. That is why the old Classic model was great, it made players matter. Not in a “I matter and he/she does not” way, but in the sense that “I matter because I`m part of this world”.
I feel we are more like passengers now, not players. Our agency is decided for us before us. And this right now makes me think that when players crave more and more content, what they actually crave in WoW is meaning, which the current design fails to provide.
I meant “stillness” in the sense that you did not know what was going to happen. The game was less curated, the people/players played a bigger part in it and events happened out of the blue, not based on the calendar. These still take place but to a much much lesser degree and are mostly relegated to RP realms only.
I like your swimming vs running metaphor. But it is not so much about switching sports but about what happens if the water in the pool becomes Gatorade or Red Bull. You can still swim, technically. For many it just does not feel right.
If anything, thats the “beauty” of the forums. We have diverse point of views from the absolute extremes in every direction possible, and everything in-between. But of course the extreme ones are heard the most.
In the end, every decision by the developers is based on metrics and revenue, and not on morals, good gameplay or player enjoyment and retention.
They turned the game into Chorecraft in 9.x because they literally failed to create as much content as the expansions before it (partly due to covid and partly due to their internal turmoils), therefore they had to stretch it. It was WoD all over again. There has been “proof” that we have at least 1 cut raid and possibly a true 9.3 patch as well, with 9.1 being much smaller than planned.
But the irony is that TWW has essentially as much content as WoD for the cutting edge people. 3 raids with 8 bosses each for 24 bosses total. Less than either Cata or WoD. Just 8 dungeons at release with 1 additional 4-boss in 11.1 and from what I’ve heard the one in 11.2 will be 4-boss one as well; essentially same content as 8 dungeons + 1 megadungeon. Except, both the 11.1 and 11.2 dungeons will be copy-pasted areas of the overworld, and not new “zones” on their own. Which means… less content.
Slowly boiling frog…
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I felt SL was one of the more content-dense expansions yet, if you had a character belonging to each covenant.
I never got the criticism it had little content. It was also the most fascinating expansion for roleplayer-type players I have heard (and from the PoV of the covenant system, makes so much sense)
But yeah, crests and item level / turbo boost shenanigans makes it seem TWW expansion is content-rich :D. WP by Blizzard
I respect you. But what the hell are you talking about? The “vibe” of Vanilla wow depends on these factors:
Factors that cannot be replicated. Of course Retail is different to Vanilla in terms of “vibe”. Its not even the same decade !
Look. What you say is the equivalent to this statement:
- Mexican culture in 2025 is barbaric because Aztecs performed human sacrifices.
Its not a correct comparison in any way. Plus… all this philosophy bores me.
With out specific examples, specific quest-lines… and a PROOF that its not YOU that plays like a “treadmill” in Retail but the game that forces you to play like that… then whatever metaphysical concepts you talk about are useless.
I never said that. You comment on what should the specific content you would put on that continent. And we can debate that if you want.
But the existence of a separate, modern and targeted experience made FOR new players specifically… is what WOW needs.
What events that happend out of the blue? Be specific please. Because there were no events in Vanilla wow. And before you mention RP servers, remember that the most popular servers by FAR were PvP and PvE servers.
And second. Have you joined an RP server in Retail? Cause they have a seperate sharding with other RP servers, specifically to do RP. And there is a ton of people that actually do that.
Again. The option exists in Retail. You just chose not to take it. You chose to join a PvE server and do M+ dungeons like everyone else.
The pool water did not turn into Red Bull. The pool was simply torn down and replaced with a pool that meets modern standards. With regular water in it. And people feel nostalgic for the old vintage pool “vibe”.
And now I am arguing with people trying to explain to them that Asbestos in the ceiling needed to be removed, and you cant continue to heat the pool water with coal. None of that meets modern standards.
That’s what happened.
First, game-play is not “efficiency”. Its gameplay.
And second… Dude. When did you begin playing WOW? Do you realize all those solutions were already tried, with failure?
They gave the option of low pop servers to move. Where did they want to move? To overcrowded servers. NEVER to another underpopulated server with the “hope” that it would become popular.
They gave the option of high pop servers to move out. They did not.
In fact. They even made it so that if you wanted to move into high pop servers, you had to pay 40E. A premium. To encourage people from stopping that trend. Guess what? People did not care. They payed the 40E anyways.
None of that worked.
Because the first 40 levels are amazing fun and even after that I still think it’s quite entertaining, and I also think that finishing it is far more exciting than a new retail expansion, however I completely agree with you that playing the same old game with the same old incomplete collection of quests is frustrating, which is why I hope for Classic+ or something to that extent.
They are starting to understand but have focused too much on dungeons and raids so far in SoD, and they built it on top of a server that loves to speed you past the levelling due to its history and its extra abilities.
So SoD isn’t it, but SoD is getting closer to it.
Yes it’s both. Doesn’t matter if you see them again and again if you never need to talk to them, whether it’s the banal annoyance of tagging or a group quest.
That mysterious person is Shane Dabiri. 
He announced tBC at BlizzCon 2005. Yes, I knew him… but we don’t talk anymore. We met in Guild Wars 1. He’s probably still on my friends list over there.
I also many times spoke to Vaneras aka Bo Hansen, a Danish CM on the WoW team. Used to moderate here. Met him at DreamHack.
And now that we’re done with that, 17% completion for a game is actually quite normal. For a 200+ hour game it’s actually quite impressive. Only 10% of players have completed Baldur’s Gate 3 yet everyone agrees it’s a jolly good time.
Games are long.
No, they didn’t abandon it. They were just levelling. :'D
For real.
Outland was introduced so they could have a 3rd (well 4th if you count the instance server) world server per realm and spread the load between them instead of making more servers.
The expectations is that the 3 servers would end up at maybe 30/30/40, and this turned out to be true.
The endgame focus didn’t really start until Wrath.
There’s a lot of different kinds of mobs though
But people actually tend to overlook some abilities. For example, most ranged mobs have a snare, and almost all melee humanoids have multiattack (most people thought it was lag)
The reason Era isn’t vanilla is that one of the core pillars of vanilla is a constant stream of content.
Classic transitions out of vanilla.
SoD is the closest thing to vanilla we have, but they made too many changes to the core reward loop.
They took out some annoying things, sure, but they also took out a ton of great things.
Knowledge points is a chore! Well spotted, yes. I hate knowledge points. Specifically, I hate that they are per character and cap out. That is a huge mistake.
Not a chore. If you don’t get them all for a week you can get them next week. That’s just regular old character progression but with timegating, which is also normal.
Not a chore, but too grindy.
That’s easy, and I already explained it. If we take the dictionary definition we get:
- a routine task, especially a household one.
- a tedious but necessary task.
Obviously it’s not a household task
So something you have to do that’s tedious and easy, but necessary, and it must be done on routine rather than completed or caught up on.
The difference is simple - if it locks you out of rewards that were available on a timed basis and it’s also grindy, it’s a chore.
A WoW dev whose name I forget now told me about Ultima Online where they had made a mode called Siege Perilous where instead of gaining random skill points you got one immediately every 20 minutes.
What people did was created 10 characters and log between them, and then they set an eggtimer for 20 minutes. That’s an example of a chore with a small reset timer (WoW’s were usually longer), and what happens is you start optimizing wall time for reward and you stop having fun.
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This has nothing to do with the game. But the player. Its not even a factor to take into consideration.
You said you dont see people anymore in the open world. That is a FACT. An observation. And its true. In Retail, with sharding you will never see the same person twice.
Vanilla did not have sharding. Everyone you saw belonged to the same server. That is also an observation. A FACT.
Weather you talked or not to them. That is a totally different story. Do you really think that everyone playing in Vanilla was so open to pausing their “grind” to talk to someone?
So I dont get your point.
Classic+ with modern QoL improvements already exists. Its called Retail.
That’s disingenuous. If you only interview people from that 10% that completed BG3 then of course all the coments you will receive are good coments.
But if after 6 years only 10% of people completed BG3 it means only 1 thing: It means that 90% of people got bored somewhere inbetween and quit. Are you sure that is a “good metric”?
I dont get your “girl math” here. If you wanted, in Vanilla you could power-level a toon to 60 in 1 week. Usually, people took some months. And if in 3 years (the time Vanilla wow lasted), plus the 2 years of TBC you still did not manage to get to 60… it implies that you simply got bored and quit.
Nope. The environment has to encourage cooperation, otherwise people separate. It’s an observed normal behavior. If you try to break from it then in most circumstances you’ll be seen as a disturbance.
… no.
You obviously don’t interview only the people who completed it…
It’s 17% of the subscribers. If they were subscribed, they were likely still playing.
And I can tell you from experience that most zones had a lot of people in them. Low level ones, too, even towards the end of vanilla.
But you said most quests were yellow. And not intended for cooperation.
Its only the “elite” quests that were intended for cooperation. Point being. Nothing changed from Retail to Vanilla in that regard. Not to mention Dungeons…
Thing is. Sharding was put in place because most servers were underpopulated.
See why its two different things? FIRST you have to see players. THEN we can talk about what players did once they did bump into each-other.
Please clarify. Are you talking about the first element (bumping into players) OR the second one (doing something with them).
Why not? Its how Retail was born. A long 20 year old sequence of QoL improvements and content…
Well. I think you have to ask your friend once more about those stats.
83% of players simply pay a sub and dont play. Sounds weird.
Are you sure its not toons? 17% of toons are at max level? I would believe something like that.
Like I said. 2004 is not 2025. 2004 WOW was growing in payers all the time. Today, im sure you dont have those growth curves of Vanilla. If you did, you would also have new players questing on TWW.
Again. Please.
Stop comparing the year 2004 with the year 2025. You cant. You simply cant.
Just say you have fond memories of 2004. We all do. But that feeling will never come back. You will never be 15 years old ever again. No matter how much you make your life, or this game look like its the 2000s.
The the worst part is that by insisting on that fallacy, you loose sight on what you play today. And it impedes you from enjoying Retail for what it is.
Every time there is a discussion about this, I bump into this issue.
If you read the rest of my post, you’d know that I do not support handouts of performance rewards.
And maybe I missed something but how could you even attempt to get KSL retroactively when the dungeon pool changes and you can no longer do the relevant dungeons on a required difficulty because you cannot get relevant keystones?
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I did read it. And maybe something was not clear or I did not read it well enough.
Sorry.
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