it’s a non-stop treadmill that some people find fun. Regardless of whether you’re a 1% elite raider that full clears out the raid in 2-4 weeks your “fun” is in that opening of the raid and trying to be competitive and then preparing for the next round in ~6 months. If you’re not then you’re constantly on that treadmill of progression and for some that’s enough to keep them engage. As far as classic raiding goes it wasn’t enough to hold my attention. If the casual PvP scene was better I’d probably be playing classic more, but otherwise it’s just a leveling/dungeon game.
To your point that the leveling process is just a big tutorial and the end-game is complex I completely disagree. Neither are overly complex or excessively challenging, but they are dangerous (especially for how people played back then). I enjoyed leveling in Classic just because of that. Vanilla design/balance, imperfect as it is, was not designed under the assumption that you should have access to a massive toolkit the vast majority of the time. PvP or just how you interact with mobs in the game is drastically different than retail simply because instead of having that a big toolkit available almost all the time you have a far smaller toolkit to pull from and those abilities generally have a far longer cooldown. Some things your class won’t be able to do and if you can you can’t do it all the time. This is still possible to occur in retail but it’s not to the same degree.
To answer the question on why people boost though while I see Classic as nothing more than a leveling game I can understand that some people who want to experience end game with multiple characters are probably far less interested in leveling and once you’ve done it once or twice that nostalgia can wear off because as fresh as Classic leveling is the fact is the upper levels of the game starts to drag. If you don’t boost or cheese EXP farming you’re looking at 1-2 months to get to max level depending on how much you play and how efficient you are.
Lol. You just typed what I thought. Just more civilly. The people that wanted some sort of Vanilla experience are still here. We just got drowned out. Not just by Retailers, but also by private server players. They really are part of the same “group” ironically enough.
As odd as it sounds, boosting made a lot more sense 15 years ago then it does now. I mean, Vanilla was a race against time. Classic is … well … forever. i mean what’s the rush? Whatever class you play, it’s not gonna feel a whole lot different. No mechanics because the boss will be dead in 2 seconds.
How do you suppose that serious raiders would feel if there was a way to cheese your way into full AQ40 epics while basically AFK - let’s say you sometimes get an epic from AQ40 every time a herbalist that you’re grouped with (doesn’t matter if you’re near them" harvests a herb.
Maybe EVERYONE in a guild gets a random loot item from the end boss that you kill in an instance, even if not in the raid or inside the instance and channels would then be filled with “LF CTHUN LOOT BOOST - WILL LEAVE GUILD AFTER YOU KILL”.
Would everyone be all “Just people playing the way they want to play” or would people view it as stupid and detrimental to a game mechanism and process they value?
I think they mean the core experience without things like server crashes and crippling lag. So, a grindy, socially driven, community based role playing game.
The Classic player base has zero appreciation for most of those things and just wanted another epeen stroke fest.
Its embraced by a portion of the community who then forces on everyone else. Not the same thing.
My guild died because we were vanilla players who wanted to take an old school approach to Classic. As in, use prot warriors and not sweat perfect specs and BiS everything. Turns out on Mankrik horde you cant even find enough people like that do make a guild that does ZG.
Im sure there are some out there but they are far and few between and Im not playing the realm transfer game to find out.
People who buy boosts already went through the lvling process, the fun in classic leveling is the adventure and without that its just a brainless mob grind. Buyers already made it to 60 and put in the time to grind out gold so I don’t see why people get so bent up about this.
It’s funny that you think less then 70% of people are buying boosts with “grinded” gold. If what you mean by “grind out gold” was buy gold, then yes, I agree. Boosting and the consume meta are the biggest supporters of bot farming in classic.