That’s the whole twist! We both did lvl to 59 for the mount and ditched classic!
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its not nuts. its classic in nutshell .
though after looking what is happening in classic i decided that my boosted pala will be healer after all . many tanks around due to dks but healers are super tricky to get
what is happening in classic is proving why lfd was put into game in first place and why not puting it in classic will kill it for any non tank / non heal chars
Me too! But I remain in Classic and just got rid of my DK. Can’t stand the gameplay at all
If I would have to make a guess… The reason is actual ingame depth of core systems
WoW is too casual in some aspects and too grindy/hardcore in others. And that is the problem. It feels inconsistent. At least to me.
Since it came out 12 years ago, Wrath has consistently been in the top 5 most played MMOs in the world, including WoW itself. It’s just been played on private servers. It’s not nostalgia, it’s just a solid game that a whole lot of people have played all this time.
A lot of what made WoW great back then is the lack of so-called “quality of life” things, like making you not play the game, not need a guild, not need to socialize to succeed. Retail doesn’t have “QoL”, it has systems encouraging anti-social, isolated playstyle. This is not “QoL”, it is a specific gameplay design policy.
If Wrath had Retail’s alleged QoL, it would be actual garbage.
Another problem Retail has is the over-philosophizing and “streamlining”, when back in TBC and Wrath, Blizz really had no idea what they were doing yet. In fact, Wrath with its introduction of seasons ruined the game forever, we just couldn’t realize it. Just like Legion with its inclusion of world quests ruined world content forever, it just took 2 expansions to realize it. World content structure has become stale.
So what we need is Blizzard to kind of… develop a fresh approach to the game, gear, gearing, reward structures, 5 man, 10 man and 20 man endgame, pvp and its rewards, guilds, socialization, downtime and uptime of play, world content, dailies, weeklies, etc. Because let’s be fair - it’s just stale.
Yes… but you are posting on it.
Why do that, it gets much better later in levels imo. I’m level 66 at the moment.
I never understand people who delete a char. You have 50 char slots on the server.
Because
I’ve had DKs up to lvl 90 in the past. Never again thank you
Do you wish to understand? I’m not sure I can help you with that but perhaps someone else can 
Yeah, I agree with that, but since I finally installed it yesterday, I see how much of a difference it is and we sometimes call WoW as a whole an old game, but it’s miles ahead of Classic. I think most retail players who installed it now will just pass their time until DF there or just get the promo mount. Some might stick around. Depends on how DF will go too.
You can still be very social, you’re just not pushed to be and don’t have to be, it should be maybe encouraged more and made easier (redesigning and adding more options to guild and calendar so that Discord isn’t mandatory for group content, the in-game voice chat is pretty usable). Many players like that so I wouldn’t be so definite about this. That’s why we have Classic and retail, you can choose what you prefer, but I can’t imagine removing the QoL stuff from retail… just the delay between picking up the quest and being able to click accept annoys me and I’m sure I’ll find much more when I continue playing WotLK today.
There should be more and better world content, agreed. I do world quests only when I must, there a people who find them chilling though so we gotta keep everyone in mind.
I kind of like seasons, it gives the expansion some structure and upgrading gear is a staple of WoW many people love, the ilvl gaps between seasons should just never be as big as they were in SL, the gear should be relevant longer. I like the way pvp gearing will work in DF from what I’ve seen, didn’t really check pve.
It seems to me you kind of want a completely different game. I hope too it’ll keep evolving though. DF looks like it’s shaking some things up so far, but I haven’t spoiled myself of too much.
This is what I mean by features like LFR, the dungeon finder, party finder, automatic groups for world quests, personal loot etc. are not quality of life, but rather features encouraging anti-social gameplay. Quality of life, I’d say is the map not taking your whole screen. That’s quality of life.
Every game is always designed deliberately so players take the path of least resistance. In Classic, being social, being in communities and guilds, participating in your server’s community is the path of least resistance. This is of course, due to a lack of anti-social features, which makes anti-social gameplay actually harder. With the addition of these features, anti-social gameplay, like what we have in Retail becomes the path of least resistance, and thus encouraged by the game.
You CAN socialize, like you CAN do a whole lot of things, but you aren’t encouraged by the game. Ingame voice chat is pretty good but nobody ever uses it, mainly because they are conditioned to be anti-social.
Another thing that encourages anti-social behavior is the game’s pace and lack of downtime - things like combat being too fast, you always rushing to do the next WQ, the next weekly, etc. The only downtime you have is while you’re getting rejected for 40 minutes in the group finder. Rejection leads to frustration, so people are again discouraged from socializing even during their downtime.
Meanwhile, in Wrath we made a global /world chat so people from across the server can talk to each other. They were using the LFG chat to just talk, but we pushed the world chat as a means to reduce the LFG chat spam and keep LFG usable for finding groups. People WANT to socialize in Wrath - the game is fairly slow, you can even type in combat, there is lots of constant downtime - be it flying, running between quests, sitting down to recover mana, etc. - which is a core part of the game. Downtime isn’t frustration, it’s a feature. EQ devs talked about how they designed the game with deliberate downtime to allow players to socialize, and WoW originally copied EQ.
In order to socialize in Retail, you absolutely need voice communication. It needs to be pushed by the game so hard that people should know they won’t get anywhere in the endgame without getting on voice chat. It can be discord, but preferably it should be WoW’s ingame chat.
It’s clear many boss encounters are designed with voice in mind.
Blizzard should consider adding proximity-based voice chat, because it’s always a good feature and in a game designed to be fast paced, where you can’t type, it’s a must in order to encourage socialization. People should know they need to be in voice chat. New World is another game where you can’t really type while playing, but it is also a game that encourages socialization.
R6: Siege encourages socialization more than WoW by simply having voice chat be the absolute default. Retail should consider that if Blizzard doesn’t want to design the game with downtime allowing players to type in chats. The chatroom aspect of MMOs has been forgotten and the MMO genre is suffering for it.
I wrote another novel on these forums, but socialization is a very complex topic. What is undeniable is that Retail is not an experience encouraging socialization, it is the opposite, and the problem is the game.
All the bad behaviour we see in M plus in Retail is what all dungeons are like in Classic. They can also hard reserve loot from the dungeons/raids and frequently do.
I do not like the Classic Community much. This myth that it’s somehow social just because there are no automated queues is a farce.
I’ve had to report more players in Classic than I do in Retail for bad behaviour.
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This…… 
Don’t get me wrong I’m having fun right now but I would very much welcome LFD right now and group loot being the standard.
It’s also funny to see bad behaviour persist in dungeons like dps pulling for tanks, we see so many complaints in Retail for this.
The other myth I love is that somehow people have more conversations in dungeons because it’s Classic, they don’t. Most of it is, needing a summon, heading to stone, which dungeon are we doing, and the odd I need mana.
Same here I had fun! But I understand your take 100% and I agree!
I play balance while leveling in classic and tank do not even w8 for regen of mana. I have to slam the mobs with my mace or staff and cast a wrath when I have enough mana! This isn’t fun at all!
The rush mentality isn’t better in classic I would almost say worse. 
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Fair enough, I personally lump everything I consider as progress under the QoL umbrella.
That’s true.
I think the potential problem is we usually end up with extremes. E.g. if you remove the according to you “anti-social features” you fully close the game to solo players and I think most of us are at least sometimes solo players, I don’t think any group of players should feel uninvited in an online world. We don’t always socialize irl either, we do plenty of stuff on our own, virtual worlds should reflect that just as much as everything else.
I think no one uses in-game voice chat because the truly social players of today are on Discord and others may be too shy to use it or maybe they gotta be quiet because there are other relatives in the room. You never know. There are many reasons why you should encourage but not force things in general. Enforcing is backwards.
I kind of agree, because I e.g. love leveling in old dungeons if I encounter a social group that doesn’t rush, but I’m not sure current gamers wanna really go too slow, you are trying to create a commercially successful product in the end. I think there’s chill content, like me going on a mog run with a friend is both chill and social.
LFG features can be very frustrating for sure, it many times put me off the game but it also actually encouraged me to look for a good guild/community or rather participating in starting one and adding more friends to play with.
I can’t fully comment on that yet since I’ve played Classic for an hour and I don’t fully remember the old days in detail. It’s true though the current combat is unsuitable for typing things out, you have to stop dpsing, I’ve been using text more in the past and now I only voice chat pretty much.
I don’t know if I miss having to sit down to eat/drink so often, it’s one of the things I do feel nostalgic about but don’t want anymore, just like certain class spells like Warlock’s Life Tap.
EQ is a very old game, WoW is still going after so many years and the (gaming) world changed, I wouldn’t look back at that.
I think I’ve already addressed that, this is very tricky and I’m not in favor of enforcing anything too hard. It’s on the devs to find ways to encourage but not enforce. I don’t want to go too deep in trying to find possible solutions to this atm.
Understandable, happens to the best of us 
They are all QoL
This is true, but there’s another aspect. If I remember right, by default the interface panel to activate voice chat is on the T key. I use the T key all the time for something else, and I don’t even have that panel bound to a key. I’m dead certain I’m not the only one. I am one of those who talks on discord as a means of socialization, however that pushes me to play with my guild over 90% of the time. So a more convenient access to voice chat, making it more visible ingame can help. A lot of players do not know how it exactly works and how to activate it.
Time and again we see MMOs that encourage socialization be that commercially successful product. Classic is a great example. New World as well. That game didn’t flop because it was bad. It flopped because of the exploits, but everyone who played New World loved it and a huge aspect of that game still is the fact that every server is basically a massive chatroom. It also has proximity-based voice chat which is conveniently available and it’s always on. Pressing V turns your mic on, however, proximity-based voice chat is disabled when you’re in a group, because then V is used to talk to your group. It’s a great, convenient system and people use it all the time. Voice chat is very active in that game. And now… New World is opening new servers due to player influx again. Players are coming back realizing the game is now… amazing.
FFXIV is another very successful MMO that encourages socialization mainly through being slow and having downtime as a feature.
Seeing the statistics comparing player activity on Retail and Classic, I don’t think Blizzard is on the right track to make a commercially successful product. I think MMOs who actively encourage player socialization are absolutely where commercial success lies. Wrath is WoW’s height and as we get more and more “qol” we get more and more people dropping the game. Ultimately, commercial gamers want a game to play, and not content to consume. We have youtube for that.
There are far to many factors which plays into its success. Starting with the fact that wotlk was the grand finale for war3 story and warcraf itself was a succesful game.
Ffxiv is succesfull in its way cause it allows people with multiple interests to play the game… including lone wolf players. Its not “raid or die”. If anything savage and ultimates are played by a niche group of people.
Point beeing socialization is a factor sure but its naive to think that if you put a gun to each player and brute force him to “talk” then all of a sudden 12M subs will magicaly appear.
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I had a battle.net launcher login queue the day the pre-patch went live… A LOGIN QUEUE! Last time this happened probably was when Classic itself launched for the first time a century ago.
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I prefer the carrot to stick approach, where players are encouraged by nice communities to chat, not forced.
It can take a while for someone to get courage up to talk to established groups, and don’t get me started if they have sound issues and Discord.
Voice chat is badly broken with Voice Proxy errors the last time I used it. A blue is on the case, but unclear when it will be fixed. People are still asking for a fix.
(Not sure how to link cross board quotes properly)
I have used that, Discord can be hit and miss for me. I left TBC (it gradually got a bit hardcore for me at the time) later the guild fell apart anyway with server transfers, and not really been back. Probably my age, I am not used to using Discord and had re-occurring sound issues. 
I would like it to be easier to find social groups and communities beyond the intimidating 10/10H stuff or full time expert mode RP kind of thing. 
I would start a community myself, but don’t know if it can be done without it turning into a constantly active, full time, all day every day commitment or needing a pre-set group of friends to help run it.
(Would also need more chill, friendly old people 
).
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Considering how Wrath massively outsold WarCraft 3, I heavily disagree. In the US, it took WC3 4 years to break 1 million copies sold, and around 200k copies in England and France respectively in the same time period. PC gaming back then was niche, and RTS were a niche within that niche. Wrath was an enormous success, especially among people who had little care for WarCraft 3.
WoW shouldn’t be raid or die as well. The game’s obsession with endgame is one of its main downfalls. It started with Wrath and its gear seasons, and became quite bad in Cataclysm and onward.
There’s a difference between encouraging socialization and actively discouraging it. WoW is in the latter realm. New World or FFXIV don’t force you to socialize, but they actively encourage it. FFXIV especially does by making sure everyone toxic gets banned as quickly as possible.
Meanwhile, in WoW, due to Blizzard’s shocking inaction, the voice chat icon in the group finder has become synonymous with boosting offers and RMT. I think that’s another reason why nobody uses voice chat.
To be fair, it does look like Blizzard are taking steps in the right direction and who knows - maybe Dragonflight will encourage people to socialize. Wrath Classic’s LFG chat is definitely the best addition to the game. It shows Blizzard understands the MMO genre still.