If that is your experience, then I feel sorry for you son
Gdkp(aka gold buying service), Boosting, Botting, flyhack etc etc thats classic for ya 
but again why u complaining open your client and go play it heard firemaw needs more gold buyers anyway
So, currently the only evolving Classic project is SOD, and even there they are introducing megaservers similar to how retail server tech works.
But in real, I feel personally that launch of Classic was one big chance for playerbase as a whole to provide unmitigated feedback to the old WoW philosophy.
They released Classic as close to the OG as they could scrap up, for playerbase only to “upgrade” all that for gold buying, bots, boosting, hacking, sometimes unnecessary hyperfocus on parsing (kinda funny in Classic, isn’t it?).
To me it seems they never really cared enough. This is the only rational explanation why Blizz never seemed to be very decisive in terms of the most striking problems which EVERYONE and their grandmother could see. (Light Hope’s chapel flyhack into dungeon and back? People REALLY loving DM runs?)
Maybe they really wanted to take the old philosophy into modern audience, not moderate it at all and see the result of this marketing/product management study.
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What Blizzard and the community collectively did to Classic was tragic.
Blizzard didn’t understand the game at all, the community didn’t trust Blizzard to and therefore did the whole “no changes” thing, and when finally any change was allowed in they were the same disasters they had done the first time around except they added to them significantly with a level boost for tBC, as an example.
Meanwhile, cheaters and botters were completely out of control and destroying the whole economy. GDKP was nothing more than a front for this. Blizzard utterly failed to maintain the integrity of the game and so it devolved into a few cheaters poisoning the well until every single server was infested with cheating and botting; and if cheating gets sufficiently normalized, everybody does it and the game breaks.
And even when specifically instructed to recreate vanilla as is and saying they would, they introduced layers which were not in the original. Layers are directly opposed to one of WoW’s core design elements, but they didn’t know and thought it was a tech limitation because they didn’t know anything at all. It was absolutely crazy.
If Blizzard wants this to work they have to understand vanilla WoW, meaningfully add to it, and moderate their game properly to remove cheaters and bots very aggressively.
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And that’s where our views differ. You view it as a problem. I do not.
Where’s the problem?
Exactly. I don’t.
I play WoW to play a game. Not to make friends.
I circumvented that by playing with IRL friends. I didn’t really socialize in WoW, except for guild chat. And I relied on my friends to get into groups or raids.
Well I think it was worse on both accounts. Because yes from a gameplay perspective it was worse. But from social relationship perspective for me it was also worse; because I’ve never had the desire to find ‘friends’ online and being forced to doesn’t actually make that a fun experience. The opposite in fact. It just made me hate making or looking for groups worse; and that feeling still lingers to this very day.
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huge difference is wow had 12 million subs in 2010 not 12 million chars in 2024 meaning people play and raid with more than 1 char but i guess that went above you.
Data without any real context or analysis can be pretty much twisted to fit any narrative…
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well we do know wotlk at its peak had 12 million subs in 2010.
but this guy claiming wcl numbers mean the same is not being logical or honest.but after dealing with him befote he well known for changing context to suit his neefs.
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Maybe it was part of Blizz’s outcomes for Classic. To unleash it with as little moderation as possible, and let it gauge the natural registry data for Classic design philosophy.
I can’t really be judge here, because retail being more and more retail is the reason why I am still enjoying WoW.
I am not here to have socially interesting experience forced upon me in-game, for that I have job, wife and friends. I am here to enjoy the game with my buddies on discord.
You can’t force it but removing the LFD tool would help go along way to keeping the mmo aspect alive in game and would probably cut down the toxic players allot.
The amount of times we have guildies being thrown down by a keyboard warrior because of silly mistakes is frightening.
For you it may be worse but as I wrote you can argue about that for a long time as it would be completely different for every player. A lot of players came into WoW without their real life contacts. In fact back in 2005 it was a lot more common that people who didn’t have a lot of friends were more into video games and therefore came into them on their own.
And for quite a few it was a good thing to have this somewhat “forced” social experience as it also helps somewhat to interact with your fellow human beings. And let’s be honest here. There’s a reason why over the past 20 years you had these kind of threads pop up over and over about how social interactions have decayed or disappeared from the game and that it actually has become quite lonely for a lot of people to the point where they just quit.
Social bonds will also bind you to a game to some degree. Quite a few people haven’t quit WoW because they have people here they care about and I think most newer players never got to that same point which is also why player numbers in each expansion have started to drop off rapidly after the initial hype is over. There’s no reason to do the endless carrot chasing if the content behind it is not very exciting and you have no people that you’d want (!!!) to play together with.
Btw. this is not me complaining about WoW. It’s an attempt to rationally analyze what is going on.
I don’t think that’s true. That’s just old prejudice towards gamers.
Just because it might be helpful for a few, doesn’t mean everyone should be subjected to it.
Yes, because some people like the social aspect.
But a lot of people don’t or at the very least don’t care about it.
And nowadays you have a choice.
So it’s better.
I’ve grown up in the 90’s and early 2000’s. I’ve seen what went on during that time and who was and who wasn’t into gaming. Of course it was true that generally kids who were not very popular and less socially active were more drawn towards video games as you don’t have to deal with people when you play those.
Also in the 90’s most games were single player oriented as the internet was still slow and brought a lot of problems if you had no access to broadband or couldn’t afford it. So you had the “loners” and people with very small social circles that were used to that and those were the people also playing games like Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo. Once the internet started to grow more rapidly after 2000 you got more and more other types of people playing games. Still the core fans of Blizzard back then came from that earlier generation of gamers and those are the ones that made WoW successful.
Where did I say I want to subject everyone to it? Don’t twist my words please. I wrote before that I’m just trying to provide a rational view of the matter. Back in the early days of WoW you had to interact with people for various reasons. Now most of the time you do not have to do that. Both aspects of their pros and cons. The player population with the newer more QoL centered approaches is far less stable though and that is a fact.
WoW until halfway through WotLK basically had mostly stable play numbers with very few drops. After Cataclysm though you had more and more rollercoaster like statistics in many active players the game has. High numbers at start of the expansion followed by a rapid drop. Then it bounces back on the first patch to then drop again (usually even more than before) - rinse and repeat for the patches followed by another spike at next expansion release and so on.
For players it’s potentially okay as well. Some literally just come back for a month when a patch drops and then they cancel their subs again after completing the content. They are likely to consider the current “social” structure in WoW as ideal because they can see the content without having to care about all the drama and other potential problems within guilds and communities. But of course pugs in raids and dungeons are far less stable and have more issues with leavers. So as before - pros and cons…
I’m pro-choice on that matter (same goes in many other aspects of life as well). I can however recognize what positive and negative consequences something like this can have.
I can respect that. I’m looking at this from my own perspective only.
The reason for that is simple: Going back to a situation like we had back in the old days would literally ruin the game for me. So I am strongly against such a thing.
Selfish? Sure. But a logical decision imo.
That wasn’t my intention. I was merely going off of the assumption that if they would go back to how it was in the past; that would be forcing everyone into it.
Classic classic Andy.
And on retail you dont get even Hi or BB. In fact you will propably get kicked for being annoying.
That´s BS. I have never been kicked for saying hi and bye or thx gg or whatever in retail, not in LFD, not in m+ or raid pugs.
From my experience saying hello is normal and expected when joining m+ groups. Maybe I play in a parallel dimension, but people often talk while forming m+ groups and sometimes even during random levelling dungeons. There is just usually no downtime during runs, chatting while button mashing and doging stuff on the floor is not really possible (accidentially pressing R and typing out a rotation in chat never gets old tho XD).
Tho a few people have perfected the art of standing in fire and ignoring every mechanic while typing out long rants about how bad the tank/healer/other dps are…
Best way to make friends was and is to join a guild. It´s how I made most friends back in the days in vanilla/tbc and hasn´t changed since. Second best way is to not be shy and start a conversation while waiting for a group to fill, also hasn´t changed.
I do remember those days and you go on to paint them as the glory days but that wasn’t reality.
I recall spending hours trying to form a group only for it to fall apart before the first boss.
I remember people refusing to run to the dungeon so you had to go back out to summon them.
I remember the arguments people would have because people invested time into waiting to form a group only for it to not work out.
Look at Mythic+ as a guide to how having no LFD would work. Gate keeping, being denied a spot unless you have a magical score. Arguments when anything doesn’t go to plan.
Why would you subject the vast majority of the casual playerbase to that? I also haven’t heard of any stories about the friendships made by people who do Mythic+. The game now is primarily a single player game in which you need to use other players at certain times in order to achieve your goals.
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Yes this is one of the things that bugs me in game. I played warlock in classic too so it was 10x worse
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