I’ve played classic all throughout it’s lifespan since it’s release up until ICC. After returning to classic era I’ve come to the conclusion that the playerbase has once again optimized the fun out of the game, and that some tweaks would improve it’s longevity and enjoyability to new and returning players
To give some background I started playing classic shortly after it’s release, have two rank 14 chracters that I farmed Naxx on during phase 6, and have been in a range of guilds of varying quality. This is my favorite game ever, with vanilla being my favorite iteration of it. So this is my appeal to reason to protect my favorite game from dying. It’s very lengthy so be warned.
While Vanilla Classic WoW is my favorite game ever, the game is old. And inevitably ripe for exploitation at the hands of a playerbase which will always take the path of least resistance and instant gratification over approaches that protect the game’s longevity and approachability. Every playerbase does this and Classic WoW’s is no different. There are a couple of ways I mainly see this made manifest in Classic Era :
1: The Alterac Valley meta. For players who want to rank, the pvp meta has reached the zenith of it’s evolution, which is unfortunately spamming AV to maximize honor per hour and ignoring the other battlegrounds to the point that they are completely dead. Putting aside which battleground you prefer, I think it’s safe to say that the game is being undermined by having multiple fun battlegrounds be unplayable due to low player count caused by a lack of incentive to play them. Thankfully the solution here is simple and even multiple approaches could work. The issue could be solved by extending the BG weekends of WSG and AB and maybe adding more bonus honor to them on top of that.
Really it doesn’t matter how, but the endpoint just needs to be that AB and WSG offer a comparable amount of honor to AV. It’s also important to take into account the fact that AB and WSG also allow premades, and maybe some incentive should be given that makes it where getting stomped by a 10 man premade still comes with the silver lining of rewarding the player rather than make them fustrated and only want to queu AV. These changes would be mild in comparison to the ones already made regarding ranking, and I don’t even think anyone would oppose them. Anyone who likes PVP in wow classic would probably agree that WSG and AB being completely dead is a bad thing and that my proposed tweaks to rectify this are reasonable.
2: The GDKP meta. This problem is far more glaring in my opinion. In original classic there were definitely GDKPs but the majority of the raiding scene was guilds with soft reserve or loot council distribution systems. Everyone had the option to pick and choose how they wanted to gear their character. I’m not going to talk in depth about how the GDKP meta incentivises gold buying and botting and kills the social spaces offered by guilds as that’s been done to death. But I will say that this meta has become so pervasive that it seems most players do not have a choice in how they gear their character.
There are obvious advantages to GDKPs, such as the fact that they encourage people who don’t need gear on characters to continue running content on said characters. Or the fact that they are ultimately a fair and unbiased system that isn’t RNG based so long as you look at them exlusively within the confines of the raid they are used. For these reasons I’m torn on wether I want to advocate for banning them. However, the GDKP loot distribution system comes with MANY drawbacks that negatively impact the game at large outside the confines of the raids in which they are employed.
New and returning players who missed out on the initial gold rush caused by the surge of GDKPs are gatekept out of Naxxramas for a very long time. If you are a returning player you basically need to hope you had good gear when you stopped playing so that you can farm lower raid tier GDKPs as a carry for months on end before you accumulate enough to be rostered into a Naxx. As a new player you effictively need to either join GDKPs as a fake buyer and leech some gold from pots (until you get enough to be a real buyer) and hope you don’t get called out and potentially blacklisted. Or you need to achieve high enough PVP gear to be considered a hybrid or carry.
This is because most Naxxramas GDKPs have become a country club of core raiders who have all accumulated a very high amount of gold and thus are the better prospective buyers and hybrids to bring. Once their characters get sufficiently geared they can funnel their mains gold to their alts and continue the cycle of bringing a bunch of gold to nax, gearing their new characters, etc.
You cannot compete with these players for a roster slot as a new or returning player . Gold does not trickle down to the new, lower raid tier players because the super rich are all dispraportionately in naxrammas runs which, by and large, gatekeep said new players out. Basically the economy has become one where the rich get richer and get gear, and the poor stay poor and confined to tiers 1 and 2.
You could try starting your own raid to counter this, however for the average and even above average player, this is just not feasible and a bunch of work to expect just so that players can have a shot at experiencing the late game content.
You can try joining a guild to counter this, however good luck finding one, especially if you play as a hunter or warlock. The GDKP meta has siphoned players away from this style of playing. I’ve been spamming for a naxxramas guild for days as an almost fully bis hunter and have had no luck.
You can try pugging, but again MS>OS / SR pugs are few and far between, and the ones that exists have their adverts drowned out in the trade and looking for group chat channels by GDKP adverts (which are inherently lengthy due to the breakdown of cut % bonuses that almost always accompanies them)
^^ So if all of these methods suck, then that’s problematic because it means the path of least resistance for a new or returning player with the goal of getting late game gear is to buy enough gold to be considered a good prospective buyer.
This is a major problem, of which I see no “clear” solution other than banning GDKPS, which is not really something I want to advocate for. I just want players to be have a plethora of choices as to how they want to get late game gear for their character. Right now one choice dominates all of the others, which means players are basically subject to the cons of that one choice. Cons which are made irrelevent if you’re rich enough, and primarily negatively impact new and returning players, which is obivously very bad for the games longevity.
So while I don’t want GDKPs to be banned, a less drastic idea I’d like to spitball is account wide limits on gold, but I’m not even sure if that’s something that could be implented into the game currently. I feel like at one point this was a thing in Classic but I might be imagining things, and don’t know if it could now be implemented retreoactively even if it was. If account wide limits on gold could be done, then it would cap how far ahead the richest players can be from the poor and make the late game content more accessible, but as I’ve said I don’t know if this is possible. I’m not sure if character limits on gold are possible either, but it would have to where only level 60s could accquire thousands or else it would just be nullified since people can make a bunch of alts.
Anyways, assuming gold caps are off the table, I am stumped on this and would like to start this discussion to get other peoples thoughts and ideas. I am sure there is some obvious solution that I am missing, but it is currently escaping me.
