The Anniversary Realms truly show how far this game has fallen: -
Massive overpopulation making levelling an incredibly painful experience and forcing players down the route of purchasing boosts, often with real money.
Massive overpopulation meaning essential materials are ridiculously over-farmed making it impossible to get materials unless you buy them with gold, which people often end up doing with real money.
Cartels ensuring that the boosting market is cornered and anyone who disagrees with them or tries to undercut them is mass reported and automatically banned.
Blizzard taking a complete hands-off approach and relying on automated systems to monitor the servers as they are too cheap to pay for GMs.
“LFM HR everything”
People immediately abandoning groups when they don’t get the drops they want as they know there are absolutely no reprecussions.
Having a single megaserver for either PvP or PvE and relying on layers, which are easily abused, to try to control overpopulation has been an utter failure.
Having a release schedule that is far too fast and which caters to the few rather than the many. (Also not adjusting drop rates to account for this increased release schedule)
Changing the PvP honor system to become a basic grind that has nothing to do with PvP. And although the previous system was still a grind it was FAR more difficult than what has now been implemented, you are going to have a server eventually almost full of Grand Marshalls and High Warlords. (Also the timing of releasing Rank 14 negates a lot of BWL gear, which was idiotic timing.)
Bots EVERYWHERE! Due to some of the points above, players have turned to real money transactions and we now have World of Swipecraft, which in turn has resulted in more and more bots.
Efficiency above all. Don’t dare PvP in PvP, don’t dare not use the optimal routes in dungeons or raids, don’t dare have fun unless it is within the lines of the most efficient method of playing the game.
This used to be such a great game, with a great community, but now it’s mostly a disappointing mess and predominantly its the players fault. Yes it’s an old game, yes it’s all been done before, but it still shows how far things have fallen, it’s not even a shadow of it’s former glory.
And yes this is just a rant post, but it’s something I think a lot are feeling judging from in game conversations i’ve had, so it’s worth saying.
oh man, i would give so much for a fresh nostalrius server. I had the most fun in whole Vanilla there, except 2005. The classic community is very different, already since 2019, they dont like fun
I dont want to hate on your post but i strongly disagree with a lot of your points.
Been playing anniversary since release and yes it was heavily over populated on release. But ive been doing a few alts inbetween raiding and havent had many issues questing or doing professions. I dont think ive ever seen a bot either. I cant comment on pvp as its not my thing. I do agree the phases are going a bit quick, like BWL release on the 20th and I have got all my BiS but then I was getting into raids as a fresh level 60 with green/blue gear so im sure i can do BWL without all purples. Please dont think I am trying to argue with you but my experience seems a lot different to yours. I’m loving anniversary classic and im riding this out for TBC. With retails World of Goofycraft i dont plan on going back to retail anytime soon
I agree! I see mostly none of the points mentioned in the OP on era. We barely have bots at all, no layering, and people take their time to actually play and have fun. I’m in a leveling guild and during peak hours we have >100 players online who are actively leveling and forming groups in my guild alone.
Problem is that Era is only for PvEers. There are no BGs if not that you “make a date”. But that’s not how it should be. At least I wanna queue and within a decent time I wanna get a pop in most brackets.
I don’t have a 60 on Era, but I heard that if there’s BGs then it’s AV.
I love the idea of the small community where you have to build your name and reputation and it actually means something, but for players who can play mostly off peak times, can be really bad due to lack of people, harder finding groups for leveling, dungeons or BG/PvP. Not sure how are BGs now, but last time I played it was viable only during weekends.
Currently I am playing on Fresh and hoping we will get a chance to transfer, but the main reason why I picked Fresh over ERA is bigger group of people and easier way to group up. The community changed and it is not the same, everything is faster, people are more meta oriented and very focused on efficiency over fun, but it is sti possible to find a group of people to play with and make good memories.
To not think I am just talking this, I was playing during the start of ERA on PvE server, where we had only 2 guilds and around 100 people overall. It was nice to know people you play with, but it was also bad if they are not online.
Both variants, ERA and Fresh has prons and cons, advantages and disadvantages, it all comes to what we prefer.
Unfortunately you can’t force people to play what they do not like, and Era players are mostly PvE oriented. So even if all of EU is one big Battlegroup, BGs just do not pop. For me it’s no problem at all, as I do not play BGs - I am part of the problem - but I do understand you missing them.
Most of the people complaining on forums about whatever version of classic they are playing picked the wrong version. Next will be a hardcore player complaining they had to roll a new character when they died.
We actually have at least one of those per week usually, and linking the rules generally doesn´t help, because of course it was because of a DC or something else explicitly included in teh rules…
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- but I do understand you missing them.