I’m in exactly your boat here, I started in TBC and was extremely excited when Classic was announced so I could experience the original game that I had only heard about before. However, I think that recreating an approximation of that original game experience does require a lot of changes, and that simply emulating the mechanical aspects of the game in 2020 cheapens the experience substantially. Plowing through raids as speed runs with stacked buffs is not how anyone experienced the game back in the day. Neither were cross-server premades or spellcleave groups or single pull instance farms. A much more thoughtful implementation of Classic would incorporate mechanical changes designed to make the game experience feel closer to what it was in 2006, accounting for the fact that the playerbase and technology are vastly different today. Pure mechanical emulation is the cheap way out, so I don’t think the many threads asking for changes are really off-base from the spirit of recreating something close to a vanilla experience.
Are you familiar with speedrunning? Actual speedruns, not the colloquial term. Runs submitted to a leaderboard. Competing for world records for a given game.
People who study a game and learn how it works are able to optimize a run to a degree that it doesn’t look at all like it did casually, your first time through. They learn the inns and outs and beat the game faster and easier than ever intended.
What happened in classic is very normal for a game that has been out for 15 years. I don’t think it diminishes the experience at all. I’m not interested in a game that deliberately breaks the meta just so it’s unknown again, or a game where strong tactics are removed simply because players are aware of them.
I’ll agree the itemization and talents are too strong for the current content, ideally they would have done patch progression (although I heard there were technical reasons they didn’t.). But if a tactic isn’t breaking rules, I don’t think it should be nerfed. Players should not be obligated to play the way they did back then, as you say.
You keep using that word “We”. I do not think it means what you think it means …
What does this even mean?
Yep, I follow a lot of speedrunners of old N64 games like Ocarina of Time and Mario64, so I’m familiar with breaking a game in creative ways using accumulated knowledge and exploits. This is fine, but I don’t think it’s what a majority of the Classic playerbase actually wanted from the game. As an analogy, when games in franchises like Zelda or Final Fantasy are remastered on new platforms, those remasters can still be speedrun (oftentimes with new strats peculiar to the re-release), but that’s not at all how the majority of new players experience the remaster. For most players the game plays and feels just like it did on its original release, and the speedrunning aspect is a niche subculture that most never even hear about. For MMOs this model doesn’t work at all, since the social and competitive nature of the game makes the speedrun the only acceptable way to play. Counteracting this requires continual balance patches to sculpt the player experience closer to the original design intent. This is what we’re lacking in Classic in my opinion, and it leads to the entire playerbase subjected to a warped experience of the game that would be a niche subculture in any other “classic” game release.
Warts and all went out the window the moment Blizz took away bg numbers and gave alliance a 99% av loss ratio for the rest of the game.
The moment they had server populations over say 3500, “warts and all” was thrown out the window. The Mega servers required lots of changes just because they made that one major change, to compensate for the larger population.
I don’t think the devs should try to counteract it at all. Like minded players can and do find like minded players to play with.
I agree the speedrun becomes the optimal way to play; but that’s not really the same as the only way to play. And something will always BE optimal; you’re trading a known optimal to one that, assuming the balance patches are the appropriate complexity for classic’s framework, for an optimal that simply forces players to change simply for the sake of change. It won’t be long to figure out the new optimal. And if it is, that’s because you’ve fundamentally changed classic in a way that’s hard to analyze; which is the least ideal outcome.
It’s not better; it’s just more punishing to people who know what to expect. It’s subverting expectations simply to subvert expectations.
From what I’ve observed, these complaints grew over time. I think people realized that either vanilla WoW wasn’t as good as they thought it was or didn’t account for the 15 years that have passed since then.
Personally, I didn’t wasn’t a fan of the whole #nochanges thing at the start, but since that is the path the players chose, let them stick to it. Let classic wow succeed or fail by its own virtue, both playerbase and gameplay.
If done well, this wouldn’t be the intent at all. The intent should be to deliver a Vanilla-like game experience to the majority of the playerbase. For example, if world buffs were removed from the game, then raiding would feel more like it did in 2006. If dungeon boosts were severely nerfed, then leveling up a new character many months after release would feel more like it did in vanilla. Of course we’re never going to undo 15 years of accumulated knowledge without morphing the game beyond recognition (which I agree isn’t something to strive for), so there’s a compromise to be made for deciding how many changes to make. Being open to intelligent and well-intentioned changes is still superior to a dogmatic insistence on exact mechanical replication in my book.
Have you ever had a wipe on trash before you get to a boss? I can assure you, it does not feel more like 2006 when no one has buffs. Bosses aren’t mechanically dense enough to challenge 2020 players and they frankly should not be in a rerelease. It’s not a hardmode hack.
My roommate has been with WoW since open beta. I asked him about dungeon boosts, and he says they’ve been done as long as he can remember. He was actually really confused people were calling to nerfs for them.
Also, I don’t use boosts myself, and levelling feels just fine. I have personal experience that says it’s pretty easy to get a group for a dungeon and do it at level, even for annoying to get to ones like RFK and WC as alliance. Even as a dps. That’s on Bloodsail, a server that is by no means full.
Devs have rules they set out for their players. And that’s really the full extent to which they should try to control gameplay. Dungeon boosts are fast, but not fast enough to warrant breaking imo.
Right, and in MMOs the rules are continuously refined as the playerbase evolves. It’s fine if you personally don’t think player behavior surrounding world buffs and boosts merits a change to the rules, all I’m saying is that the devs should be open to considering input like this and making changes which are good for the health and feel of the game while preserving as much of the original gameplay as possible.
What if the issues the playerbase brings up are the warts the devs were referring to when they said they wanted to give us classic, warts and all?
The very nature of that statement was that they knew some issues and problems were present and chose not to fix them. They considered accuracy by numbers more important than good game design. They left problems in on purpose, knowing they are problems.
It certainly seems that way.
I think there is a good amount of the forum dwellers want classic to fail, they nurture the delusion that everyone will go back to Retail, and will be happy after being in the Wilderness that they think Classic is.
No one wants to change it to retail, we just want it to be Classic with more code fixes for obvious bugs and to bring it to a more supreme state of itself.
For example, most people came back to play for the classic experience, except the current experience does not reflect that at all. Only minor changes would need to be made to dissuade the new behaviours seen in the game.
The new behaviours are not cheating, but its a damn culture shock when you come back and hope to play the way you used to.
And honestly in a culture sense, boosting feels more like retail than classic, so fixes to get rid of it would make it closer to classic than retail.
Retail is all about rushing. Boosting is all about rushing.
The charm of classic was the pace, restrictions on the pace wouldn’t be hard to implement.
Obtaining a level 60 character is meant to feel rewarding and should be challenging.
Yes this is what they said and what they largely have abided by, I just don’t think it was the right choice for this game. To clarify, I am 100% in support of keeping in known “warts” such as the crappy honor system, the extreme class imbalance, the unfinished specs, the simple raids, etc. All of these are integral parts of the vanilla experience, even though most of it is bad game design. What I’m advocating for are changes addressing the differences in player behavior in Classic compared to vanilla, in particular the ways in which modern min-maxing culture when combined with the game mechanics create an unhealthy game environment. Hence why the examples I gave (world buffs, boosting) are specific interventions in response to unusual and unhealthy social systems in the game which were not present to this degree in 2006. Eliminating world buffs is a qualitatively different mechanical change than say making ret paladins viable: the latter is a game design wart that was known about all along, while the former is a response to a player driven ecosystem that the dev team was genuinely surprised to see in Classic.
So why not advocate for retail to be changed rather than change Classic?
Many of the ideas people have come up with are actually very good BUT I don’t see the retail forums alive with them. It’s seem silly to try to change the OLD game rather than the evolving version of the game.
Changes would tarnish the metas that we have established on Private Servers. If they started to overhaul the game with many changes, many of us would leave. We’re not here to ‘‘re experience the mystery & the journey’’ it’s an old game and we understand this. If you’re looking for something new, go look for another game to play and give them your ideas, this is mainly a PvPers game anyway.
People wanted Classic WoW in order to repeat history and turn it into retail again.
You’re not the one who took it all seriously. But with the dozens of obvious bugs that they claim are “consistent with their reference client”, which of course is something they insisted for almost a decade didn’t exist, and wasn’t possible, and that their vanilla archives were gone forever due to machine transfers and cleanups, and all of the excellent quality of life changes that weren’t asked for, and the lower performance of the client as a whole, and the consistent fixes due to complaints, you’d have to actually be 100% braindead to take “warts and all” seriously at this point in time. Everything is up for debate now that they’ve gone against their original statements so much. I for one want LFG, LFR, and transmog. And maybe shadowstep.
Also remove premades. There is no decent argument in favor of their existence, not even from a classic purist point of view. Get mad nerds.