After two weeks of playing, I think people who have played on Private Servers a lot will have formed a idea on how the current state of the game compares to playing on a Private Server such as Light’s Hope.
I personally only played for a very short time on Light Hope, on a friends level 60 warrior just a few weeks before Classic release. I have to say that the experience was good and that especially in PvP, it felt pretty authentic.
I had hopes that Classic would finally be the ‘real’ Vanilla again, I was afraid though that the approach Blizzard took with reverse-engineering the complete game in a newer base version of the client/server was just asking for trouble. And that turned out to be true; the game is still great but there are countless (thousands) bugs, inconsistencies, intended and unintended ‘changes’.
So, if you are a experienced Private Server player, what is your take on this? Is Classic worth it so far?
Oh and one thing. I am pretty sure that there will be fanboys wanting to come in here trolling/flaming and what not because of the controversial nature of this topic. If you guys manage to get this thread deleted, locked or whatever, the conclusion will be that Private Servers win because of censorship.
This is not that far from truth. I play on another private server as well, and not only that their customer support is better but the maintenance they do behind closed doors is absolutely awesome.
Short answer: No, classic is NOT worth it. If I want my classic experience, I go on that one WOtLK private server and go through the quests at 1x rate, with no (noticeable) bugs, and the only downside being some mob scripts being a little rigid (they do not have the “tactics” the AI has on Blizz servers).
I don’t know about authentic but so far I prefer the last Pserver I was on to this.
The world was vibrant with players everywhere. Zones were packed, you never had to wait around for group quests etc.
Here it feels like I’m playing on a 6 year old half dead server.
Layering is a disaster IMO.
Also the game was responsive, none of this BS spell batching that makes everything feel like I’m playing on dial up.
I’m mind boggled that you actually have to install an add on here if you want to get rid of loot lag. It was added artificially /facepalm
Blizzard did get fishing correctly, unlike private servers that had both fishing pools and loot so wrong that it doesn’t even look anything like vanilla. Tried that on Nostalrius. I do fish a lot, so that’s a big issue.
Private servers did many things better: launches, population handling, etc.
But they failed on certain things like mob locations, patrolling mobs didn’t work as well, etc.
They also struggled on some of the same things Blizzard struggle with: dealing with cheating and exploiting.
Overall I prefer classic, although I think that had blizzard given the reigns over to someone else (private server staff or a dedicated remake company) things would be better. We wouldn’t have had the absolutely shocking launch, clueless ideas behind realm transfers, terrible layering implementation with queues that fragmented communities, etc.
edit: also agree with some of the others that spell batching should not be in, I hate simulated lag
edit 2: releasing each tier along with corresponding items and talents also would have been more realistic but they should have actually just buffed everything slightly to account for 1.12 talents (dungeons and raids)
The add on is called Leatrix Plus (Classic) , it can do a bunch of quality of life things like auto dismount, auto decline group invites/duels etc. and cherry on top there’s an option to get rid of this weird loot lag.
I think that classic is slighty better, because of npcs and mobs working well, as well as the majority of aggro work, grafics are really well and respectable to the original state…
… But im discontent about how new blizz treats the game overall, launch was a total chaos, long time layering and dinamic spawn until lvl 30, unable to ban or rollback quickly cheaters and exploiters, batching bothers me too, lack of real rp in rp servers (compared to private rp servers), made the game easier (toned down some things that ar obvious in my opinion). Bugs, there’s a good amount of minor bugs rn, like weather, for example.
Major difference is that you pay for one, and for the other, we dont.
I beg Blizzard to put all the huge money they are earning into doing their job, but so far Im enjoying my stay, staying or not will matter on how blizz will manage things the 2 first months, I guess.
As a long time pserver player. I can tell blizzard has made an incredible effort to deliver the true classic experience. Using the 15 years old 1.12 client would have been perhaps better at the start. But in the long run it would have been a nightmare to maintain and develop.
The problem is not with the client, which is perfect (I love the graphics upgrade!). The problem, as usual, is with the server.
The biggest issue for me is the patch we are playing, there are items dropping which should not be there.
More debuff slots which will make things easier on progression, and overall the mobs feel a bit weaker, but again, who is right? blizzard or the pservers?
I tend to think the PvE will be way easier than on the pservers, but I will not judge until I see it for myself
Classic is authentic 1.12 vanilla version. Private servers are closer to real progression feeling as it was in vanilla during patches. So if you want authentic 1.12 numbers, Classic is for you. If you want authentic feeling, private servers are better. They have wrong numbers and wrong spawns and slightly bugged scripts, but those are small things. You won’t have SM SPAM GROUPS, inv to asmonlayer or 5 day Ragnaros kill. Big things are actually authentic in their nature.
Though Classic killed all the good private servers, so it’s all empty talk.
Private server vanilla servers come with full lua automation scripts for rotations, healing and auto interrupt macro’s, bots, corrupted owners selling gold and a lot of exploits that are fixed in the modern client. Blizzard toke the right decision with their 1.13 approach.