In the middle of Wrath - approximately one year form the start, and one year from the end - what else would timewise mean?
EDIT:
And contentwise the last patch must be Ruby Sanctum, not ICC.
Well I just checked it was added dec 2009, so slightly more than 1 year into the 2yr duration expansion.
Either way, I remember Forge of Souls and it being pretty cool.
It is also possible that I rejected dungeon finder immediately.
I also get the impression that I had little reason to go there when already wearing raid gear. So yeah.
Either way to each his own, but ‘everyone doing a random HC at least once a day’ for sure is wrong.
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If you think Blizzard has a clue, remember the “you think you want it but you dont”- statement. Blizzard doesnt understand a thing, they are clueless and incompetent. They denied the existence of players that want to play old expansions AS THEY WERE. Thats the root of the problem.
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Is that what you tell yourself in the mirror?
That is one of the worst attempts at a rebuttal that I have ever seen. Again I say:
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If you want to be able to target him he’s spelt Eikkø where you make the ø with ALT + 155 
I think they are doing the right thing. This is classic. They already have retail. I am not sure about the classic direction. It started with “nochanges” and now it is “somechanges”. Maybe they are actually trying to undo some of the mistakes they did back in the days when they dumbed the game down and killed the world in world of warcraft. WOTLK was the peak, but also the expansion that had no climbing curve. The curve was totally flat for WOTLK and then in Cata it started go downhill. Both Vanilla and The Burning Crusade had a growing playerbase WOTLK did not. Who knows, maybe there will be a WOTLK CLassic + after the run of the expansion. Something brand new in the spirit of the way the game were? I cant really see them launch Cataclysm as a classic… but who knows. Not sure even Blizzard 
If this really is their plan, building Wrath upon 3.3.0 is sheer stupidity. It was the first of the serious dumbing down patches.
Sorry to burst your bubble We never had NoChanges.
It’s better to say that it was the first expansion when the subscriber growth stopped. I think it tells a lot more.
It was the easiest to implement. And it was the latest expansion during the private servers boom.
No it doesn’t say anything about the game, because growth is finite. It had to stop growing at some point. I don’t know about the market shares back then, but I think there were not many more MMORPG players back then. At least not for games you had to subscribe to. Free to Play might have been a totally different thing.
Because it’s a known fact, that people usually want to play in the easiest to implement games.
Maybe that’s why there are more WotLK Servers than TBC or Vanilla. But they also had and have a larger playerbase combined.
Both arguments you made are just silly. You just want to downtalk WotLK even though it’s obvious for everyone, that it was the most successful expansion. And still is the version that gets played the most on private servers.
Saying it’s the game where the population stopped to grow is like saying it’s the game, where the ratings stopped to increase. It’s nonsense.
And saying it only is the most played version on private servers, because it’s the easiest to implement is like saying: “Game A sold more than Game B, because it was easier to develop”. This is nonsense as well.
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Yeah, people are not able to realize how the increase in game complexity from Cataclysm onwards affected private servers. On the original Vanilla expansion, most quests were the simple ones of kill X enemies or bring Y body parts, those once programmed how that type of quest every quest of that type works, and that is probably a great % of quests. The few other lefts that require scripting are too few it is affordable for a small team of private developers to make it.
In contrast since Cataclysm and some parts from WOTLK, the complexity of the game and its system has heavily increased. Cataclysm was the point at which the speed at which Blizzard launched new content surpassed the speed at which private server devs could replicate it.
So, at this point, they opt to stop progressing their servers and focus on just one expansion. Blizzard could make an expansion in two years, but every expansion of private servers requires more and more years to have the same quality. WOTLK is only well-replicated because they have focused on it for more than 14 years.
Well it might be, that the newer versions of WoW are harder to create private servers for. But of all the versions where private servers exist, the WotLK servers have the largest playerbase.
And it’s only logical if you look at the playercount of the different expansions. WotLK had the highest player count. So WotLK private servers have the largest potential playerbase. It’s unlikely for a person that never played TBC or Cata to suddenly start playing on a TBC or Cata server.
If you want to argue against WotLK being the most successful expansion, you could do better than that, by looking at conversion rates, how many players played the original expansion and how big the percentage is, that kept playing this expansion on private servers. Maybe there other versions are better than WotLK. I don’t know. But it still would be a stupid measure.
And even if I would give you the point, that WotLK is played more on private servers, because it’s easier to set up servers, the fact, that it also had the largest playerbase still remains.
Plus I haven’t seen any poll about the best expansion yet, where WotLK doesn’t end up on top.
You misunderstand me. I am not saying that WOTLK is the most successful old expansion. It clearly is.
What I said is that other expansions could be more successful than what they are right now if they could have the same development quality as WOTLK, maybe not enough to be more popular than WOTLK, but enough to not be a failure.
But given how hard is to make such private servers, which means it requires those devs to invest more time into making it, the result is a server of crap quality, and that could make an expansion that could have enough audience to make it viable to be a total failure because no one wants to play such low-quality servers.
Probably other expansions do not have the potential to be the top expansions as WOTLK, but they also have the potential to be successful on that kind of Classic server because there is enough population that wants to play it. It just happens that private server developers have no chance of replicating such expansion for that potential population that could be interested, only Blizzard is capable to make classic servers from any post-cataclysm expansion that has the same quality as the original, at least in a decent development time instead of waiting a decade of small development.
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Subscribtions were more or less stable during WotLK, going from 8 mln to 10 mln and back again.
By comparison, vanilla went 0-4 and TBC went 4-8 mln.
Oh ok then I really misunderstood you, sorry. But yes, this might be true. As I said before, I don’t know anything about how to set up a private server, so I wouldn’t have thought there is such a big difference.
But this just shows how good we WotLK fans have it compared to fans of later expansions. If I don’t like where Blizzard is going with WotLK I can play on a private server, that provides the experience I am looking for. For fans of later expansions it’s harder to find a private server, providing the experience they are looking for.
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There are (or were?) private servers from Cata and MoP that are implented and are near flawless…
It’s the xpacks themself that players don’t want to play, therefor the servers die rapidly and the server closes…
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Wotlk should never be a benchmark. It was wotlk that destroyed the RPG elements of the game and made WoW into a mindless one shot AoE arcade clickfest.
It was wotlk that introduced 5 different raid difficulties making the raids feel totally irrelevant and boring after running the same raid thousands of times on different difficulties where even the hardest difficulty was faceroll.
Wotlk cannot even be called “classic”. It was the start of the modern arcade MMO without RPG elements.
The reason the sub numbers started dropping in Cata was because of these destructive elements that were added to the game in wotlk.
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You mean, Because WoW moved on from the most popular and inclusive expansion it ever had?
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More proof of Pandaria’s superior game design.
In my opinion MoP had the best quest design of the whole WoW history.
The quest design of Vanilla was horrible. Each expansion improved it a little bit. In TBC you finally could finish a zone before moving on to the next, whereas you had to switch zones every 3 or 4 quests in Vanilla.
WotLK removed a lot of unnecessary grind from Quests.
And Cata and MoP made questing a more cineastic experience. Plus MoP got rid of grind completely. Every quest item had a 100% drop rate.
Not everything of WoW past WotLK was bad. A lot of people just hate everything, because they want to hate it.
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