Just saw the classic+ survey that Blizzard sent out, and they still haven’t figured this out either. They have tried “no changes” vanilla. They have tried out a mechanically difficult season-of-mastery. They have tried new casual-friendly content on season-of-discovery. Kudos to them, some of these were fun games for a while. But they still haven’t figured out the real secrets to OG WoW’s success:
- Gated content
- Community
Sounds so simple. And yet, these are the 2 things Blizzard keeps messing up over and over again
Gated content
Yes, you need amazing content. A beautiful world. Interesting lore. Raids that people are excited to see. Everyone already knows this. But here’s what people haven’t figured out yet. It also needs to be gated. It should take people a lot of time and/or effort before they eventually get to see that content.
Vanilla and TBC do the best job at this. Vanilla had a ton of amazing beautiful content. Most of it in the open world. The dungeons and raids were also interesting enough to make people want to see them. But what made Vanilla and TBC S-tier was that all this content was gated. You want to go see STV which all your guildies are talking about? You need to first spend tens of hours leveling to 30. You want to go see Stratholm, the same place where Arthas massacred an entire town? You need to spend weeks or months leveling to 60 first. You want to go toe-to-toe with Kel Thuzad? You need to spend an entire year working your way through MC, then BWL, then AQ, before doing anything meaningful in Naxx.
None of this stuff was mechanically hard. It just required time and effort. Anyone could do it, your grandma could do it, if they kept at it long enough. And that’s what got people hooked.
Yeah, people complained about it, even back in 2005. “I have 4 children and 2 jobs. I don’t have time for all this leveling and dungeons and raiding. Come on man, just let me have fun and clear Naxx!” And every year, Blizz caved a little. They made it easier to zoom through your leveling. They made it easier to bypass content and go straight to the latest raid. They made it easier to see and kill the BBEG. Fast forward to WotLK/Cata, and a fresh character can zoom their way to max-level in record time, catch up on gear by spamming LFD, and down Arthas/Deathwing in a 10-man easy-mode raid. All this in a month.
And guess what people do when you remove all those content gates. They binge on everything. And once they are done bingeing because there is nothing left to see, they get bored and leave.
Back in Vanilla, only a tiny handful of people even saw Kel Thuzad. But everyone was so amped to work their way towards it, one bit at a time. And they kept playing because they had so much cool content that they still hadn’t seen yet, and were working their way towards. Fast forward to Cata, everyone and their grandma killed Deathwing within a couple weeks of release, and subscriber numbers have been in free-fall ever since.
Community
But the content wasn’t the only thing that kept people around. Vanilla leveling content was amazing, but let’s be honest. The raid content was only 7/10 at best. And yet, people stuck around for years and years. Partly because they still wanted to see the remaining content… but also because of the community. People made real friends on WoW. But it wasn’t just that. People made enemies. They made reputations for themselves, and knew others by their reputation. When I left my guild in OG vanilla, I was literally on the verge of tears. No other game came close.
You wanna know what made the OG vanilla WoW community so amazing? The answer is so simple. People knew each other. That’s it. It’s that simple. When you walked around SW, you saw people you recognized. When you joined a BRD pug, you recognized half the people in it. When you joined a BG, you recognized the guy who ganked you. When you heard about some guild getting the server-first Rag kill, you personally knew a few people from that guild.
All this happened for two reasons. First, you had to talk to people to get stuff done. Want to do an elite quest in Duskwood? You had to ask around in general chat. Want to run a dungeon? You have to talk to people to join a group or put one together. Want to clear a raid? It wasn’t as hard as mythic… but it was just hard enough that you had to either join a guild or a well organized pug where people actually talk to one another.
Second, the number of people you ever saw was soooooo much smaller. OG vanilla servers were basically low-pop by today’s standards. And there was zero cross-realm stuff, even the BGs were only within your server.
Yeah, it was frustrating. It was frustrating trying to get your elite quests done. It was frustrating trying to find a dungeon group. It was frustrating having to wait 20 minutes to do a BG. It was frustrating having only 10-20 guilds to choose from if you wanted to raid.
But this was what made the community so special. It felt like you were a kid again. It felt like you were in school or a small college, where there were only a few hundred people and everyone kinda knew everyone else.
Fast forward 20 years, and WoW is now a hack-and-slash like Diablo, with zero community. Everyone you see outside of your guild is a complete stranger whom you know nothing about. You can play the entire game without ever having to talk to another person, with streamlined leveling quests, and LFDs/LFRs/BGs/Arenas where you will never recognize another person. Even in Classic, the megaservers like Faerlina were so big that the only community that ever existed was intra-guild communities. Yes, those were great, but nowhere close to the server communities that existed in OG Vanilla.
If you want a classic+ that is as amazing as OG vanilla or TBC, those are the things Blizzard really needs to figure out.
- Create content that people want to see.
They know how to do this. They did it already with Kara Crypts and Scarlet Enclave. They have this part down
- Gate that content so people have to slowly work their way towards it.
It doesn’t have to be super mechanically challenging. Just challenging enough so people need to slowly gear up. Learn the fights. Put in their time. Do all of the older content leading up to the latest content. Make friends, join a guild, and talk to others
- Create a real community
Get rid of every single cross-server stuff. Get rid of stuff like LFD and LFR. Cap server populations to the same sizes as the OG vanilla servers. Make server populations small enough that it feels like you’re in a small town where everyone kinda knows everyone else
Yes, people are gonna complain. They are going to complain how unfair it is that they can’t clear the latest raid for a while. They are going to complain about how badly they want to run BRD at 4am in the morning. They are going to beg you to remove the server caps so everyone can transfer to a single mega-server. Ignore them. People will optimize the entire fun out of the game if you let them. That’s exactly why subscriptions and retention are tiny now compared to 15 years ago.
Create interesting content. Make people work for it. Make people talk to one another and work together to get stuff done. Cap server sizes so people don’t feel like an anonymous face in the crowd. Do all this, and you’ll get back the magic of vanilla
