retail is a mess they need to do a drastic change with it, i come back to play tried it… too many new things to learn so i did make a new character and it put me at chromie… 2 full maps essentially worthless, no starting area for my race either, i was like wth do i do? it is a mess.
i honestly think they need to bin it and stop adding expansions. not sure if that is the plan but i suggest they make one part azeroth classic up to the MoP/Pandaren. then bin legion and start fresh from BFA like they appear to have wanted too, up till the current game. there is far to much in the retail game as far as expansions go and they actually ruin the overall game for playing. it isn’t all about end game, there is a lot of good in the game for story and the expansions themselves if it wasn’t messed up by using chromie, shoving the main maps and continents aside essentially making them useless but for a material grind… then adding even more on top. if it meant scrubbing the retail game itself to do this i wouldn’t be against it.
it isn’t a bad idea to limit each version to 3/4 expansions then players have to start fresh on the next project to maintain the essence of the game itself.
the dragonflight version should have been project 3 with a fresh game mode or the compacting of the entire game will only get worse with each new addition.
I tried retail a few days ago as I was curious, I had some old characters from MoP when I stopped playing.
I decided to try out dungeons, I was getting about 2 levels each dungeon so getting from 35 to 60 took no time at all I don’t have the latest expansion so stopped there.
The dungeons experience was soulless, the moment they loaded it was like warp speed to the end, no need to eat or drink, I was healing and I don’t think I ever ran out of mana…it was strange.
I had to swap time lines to BC stuff as I had zero idea about any new dungeon layout and you don’t get long enough to take it in while running after the tank at 150mph. One dungeon had a lvl 10 monk as the tank and we could barely keep up with him, he basically solo’d the entire dungeon himself.
I had no idea what the crafting system is all about now so didn’t get into that side of things.
I realy don’t like the spreadsheet auction house, I prefer the cartoony classic version.
This is a limited view as it doesn’t include dragon-flight dungeons/raids so i can’t say I they make things better or not.
They went a bit mad with the amount of races/perks I think too.
The reason I play classic era and not retail is simple.
In retail there is content coming all the time and there are catchup mechanics making previous content obsolete. In classic era you can play everything from MC to Naxx and there will be players interested in the content.
This is the master plan of blizzard. To bring the new players from classic slowly back to retail, with all those patches.
And i am sure after Cata, will be the next patches. Slowly but steady. Players will get used to retail thing. And i am sure the expansions after Cata will be yearly. So they will reach current expansion in some years.
For me personally, I tried playing retail once when there was an extended maintenance for Classic.
I logged onto my old Legion druid and, iirc, I was placed just outside of Stormwind. There was 100 popups immediately telling me all sorts of stuff that I mostly didn’t understand. I tried reading and getting into everything new, but it all was just too much to take in and make sense of. So since I had a few hours more to kill, I decided to just scrap my old main and create a new druid.
I chose the new starting zone where you start on a ship since I never saw it before. I finished the introduction and was then led through quests to BfA content (I believe, game didn’t tell me, I was told it was BfA content by another player I came across).
After doing a few quests around the Boralus area and doing a dungeon inside a prison, I still just felt confusion and wasn’t really having fun. So I stopped playing my new druid at level 16 and haven’t logged back to retail since.
The retail game I remember (Legion) is just not there anymore, and I think I was gone for too long to get back into it again. It was a completely different experience, and to me a very messy one.
Edit: Also, looking at gameplay from Legion, I can still roughly tell what’s going on. The last retail raid I cleared was Nighthold. Looking at Methods Gul’dan kill, it’s still miles off from the Classic gameplay I’m used to nowadays. But I can still make sense of most things happening on the screen.
Looking at a random Dragonflight boss kill (Mythic Smolderon by Echo was the first one to pop up) I can barely tell it’s WoW. The only thing that tells me it’s WoW are the spell icons, the rest looks like another game franchise to me.
Personally I play Era only. What I like about it is mainly the social aspect, plus the fact that there are no microtransactions, WoW tokens, etc.
Having to talk to people to find a group for dungeons and raids, seeing the same people in different groups, and getting to know who’s a good player etc. is important to me. Clicking a queue button and being teleported to a dungeon with silent randoms I’m never going to meet again kills the joy. The teleport part makes the world feel small, too.
In Era there is also, as mentioned, no pay-to-win. Yes, some people probably buy gold from illicit sources, but that’s against the rules. There is no WoW token for free gold, no level boosting for real cash, no faction/race change. Everything is kept pretty pristine.
My interest for retail WoW died when the group finder tool was introduced, and I never wanted to go back to a game where you could pay for tokens to basically get a legal way to buy gold.
I play both for different reasons. When i play on Classic, it’s basically for the leveling phase, to chill in the old world, to take my time leveling my profession while sipping my coffee.
As for Retail, id say i’m playing with goals in mind and frankly most of the time, it’s around transmogs that those goals turn around. You can be sure that i won’t care about PVP if the mog isn’t appealing to me, but that i’ll try hard my way in it if mog is. I enjoy the new stuff coming in, and i like the idea of earning my mogs while it’s current. Unfortunately, i feel like some recent decisions of Blizzard about mogs (tied to the new upgrade system) hurted my motivation to push further in the game, leaving me with no high end goals to look forward as they’re achieved to quickly too easily.
Well If u played wotlk you would know in Alliance part there is portal or just google it. Even if you just run 10min in total could enter in each building and seen portals lol Dont blame game because u dont want to play it.
I chose the new starting zone where you start on a ship since I never saw it before. I finished the introduction and was then led through quests to BfA content (I believe, game didn’t tell me, I was told it was BfA content by another player I came across).
After doing a few quests around the Boralus area and doing a dungeon inside a prison, I still just felt confusion and wasn’t really having fun. So I stopped playing my new druid at level 16 and haven’t logged back to retail since.
This is pretty similar to my own experience when I tried Retail, except I tried on more than one characters. I think the highest any one of them got was 21 on a Druid.
I honestly tried to give Retail a chance, but it just didn’t click with me. It didn’t feel like Warcraft to me, and it felt more like a game than a world. I tried to level in the TBC zones, the WotLK zones (couldn’t bring myself to go to Cata Azeroth which I personally greatly dislike)… Nothing, it just didn’t click. And no, for me the game doesn’t start at max level - if I don’t “feel” it in the first few hours, I won’t “feel” it 20-30 hours later.
those conspiracy theories never fails to amuse me. why should they want to force classic players into retail? and why do you think classic players are so important for them? Infact they do not care about the classic community. Dragonflight already has more players than wotlk,sod,era,and hardcore. they continue into cataclysm because the wish to continue exists and they will continue with the “classic” expansions until it’s not worth it anymore.
its called money, and its quite hilarious that you can’t form the connection to why a multi-billion dollar company would implement well documented psychological tactics into making even more when they already do it in the form of advertisements
money is the reason why they continue with “classic” until it’s not worth it but they don’t force anyone to play retail. a sub is a sub blizz doesn’t care where it’s coming from and they don’t care about the classic community. you guys are not the maincharacters…
how do you come to the conclusion that blizzard not caring about the classic community means they aren’t able to manipulate them into paying for retail?
