[C+] Do not do seasonal content/raid tier power resets like retail

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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Party of the beauty of Classic Era right now is that all content is generally considered relevant. Yes, Naxx gear is typically much more powerful than AQ40, yet players still go back to MC or even ZG in search of BiS or near-BiS items. This gives players a reason to continue to do that content long past the point where they get the kill on the end boss.

By contrast, in retail, once you finish a tier and get those achievements there is just little reason to continue to play that content. Once the next season starts, all your player power resets, you go again, and you almost never touch those past raids again until they get recycled in some event down the road.

Please avoid this for Classic+. Ideally, look for some way to provide horizontal progression. If gear power levels don’t exceed Naxx but are still compelling in some way, players will continue to do the content. You can offer incentives to one raid over another (such as double drops for a raid in a given week) if you want to, but don’t fall into the trap of content rot.

Thanks!

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I used to have the same opinion as the OP, but it’s just an unfortunate reality that power creep will eventually become so bad that a reset is necessary. Imagine if 10 new raid tiers released over a few years without reset, every fresh character would struggle to get groups for MC that 99% of the player base has moved on from, and blizzard would start putting in catch up mechanics that delete the relevance of older raids anyway, effectively starting a progression reset in practice.

What blizzard should do when a reset becomes necessary is do what they can to keep old zones and continents relevant, to avoid the expansion phenomena of starting out in a huge world only to get squished into one relatively tiny area. But resets when it comes to raid progression eventually become a necessary evil.

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I would really hope Blizzard explores horizontal progression systems that don’t increase player power, either directly or in a global sense.

I agree with you that the status quo makes this necessary and I would hope to avoid that.

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Don’t disagree but I also don’t know how they could do it.

How long could you get away with horizontal progression before people get frustrated they are not doing more damage?

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Well, what if Horizontal progression was specific to dungeons and raids?

The raid gear may be no stronger than, say, Molten Core gear in the open world, but in any dungeon/raid it’s more powerful. This would lessen the impact of new gear in the open world or battlegrounds, while still giving raiders a goal to work towards.

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highly doubt blizzard is ever gonna add 10 new raid tiers to classic lol :expressionless:

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Interesting question!

What do you value more…

  • Progressing through the content and collecting stuff and things.
  • Bigger numbers!

I think at the end of the day, progression is always going to come down to bigger numbers, but does that have to be progression on a whole? For example, does it matter if, in AQ40 your numbers are bigger or lower in BWL, or does it only matter for BWL?

I think some extent it does… BWL is made easier by the fact that your group has gone into AQ40 and gotten some gear there. Being able to dip into a tier ahead to help the tier below is an important part of WoW’s progression structure and something that allows differing skill levels of players to thrive. Some groups roll into MC on launch and clear it in pre-bis blues, and some groups need to kill bosses for several weeks/months to gain enough power to finally down Rag. This is a good thing!

However, we also know that content rot is bad. I don’t play Retail anymore but one of my absolute favourite modern raids was Castle Nathria. It had glorious style and some amazing fights. Other than farming for transmog, nobody goes back there anymore and those fights will never be relevant again. It’s dead content, and that’s bad. Meanwhile on Classic Naxx BiS groups are still running MC weekly for bindings and onslaught girdle (to name a few).

There in lies the challenge of the ask I suppose, and maybe that’s something that we can discuss here.

I’ve had several ideas over the years since Classic+ became a topic of discussion. Here are some notable ones…

  • Resist checks for late raid bosses that are provided on gear obtained by early game bosses.
  • New raids tuned for Naxx level power but providing alternative drop sources for items or differently tuned items to fill gaps.
  • Special gear progression specific to a raid, perhaps providing sockets or enhancements that allow for progression within that raid, but are globally on par for the power level of existing raids.

Please understand, I’m not saying :ship: :clown_face: :bangbang: here, these are just some ideas. Please think on this and share your own :slight_smile:

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Addicts already addicted.

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You missed the forest in the trees of my point.

But if classic+ is actual classic+ and not another season, yes eventually after 4-6 years that’s roughly the content rate blizzard pumps out.

Unless of course classic+ is total flop and gets put on maintenance mode within a year, which is a strong possibility with blizzard’s level of competence.

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it’s this one :expressionless:

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While I don’t disagree I don’t think you are the targeted audience. You are an era player. The target audience is retail players. Retail player spend more money on the game by a large amount. If retail lost half of its playerbase it would still have more players than every classic version combined. Blizzard wants retail players to play classic+ and for them to add an item shop into the game for a double revenue stream. Honestly you wouldn’t play anyways you would just complain and sit on era. Retail changes are good. They offer tons of QoL features. The seasonal system is meh, but honestly I’m not against it because it will add longevity to it.

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Any game planning infinite horizontal progression is already crap because you know the devs who thought that was a good idea are cooked.

You come up with a handful of knock out phases, you run them, and you call it a successful project.

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I think your points are sound but I’d like to offer a few things…

  • When WoW Classic first came out in 2019, it comprised a significant portion of the WoW player base. It was speculated by many during the earnings call that this was carrying WoW in light of the rather poor performance/reception of BfA/Shadowlands.
  • Many of those players continued to play the game throughout the original 2019-2021 lifecycle.
  • The Vanilla version of the game has had two more significant revivals. First in the form of the HC movement and second in the form of Anniversary servers.

We don’t know exactly how many players Retail has, Blizzard stopped publishing those metrics long ago and, to my knowledge, there is no retail analog to ironforge.pro. Presumably there could be but given how retail’s raid lockout system is structured, it might be hard to draw as meaningful a conclusion as one can with Era.

What I hope we can take from this is that the Vanilla version of the game has drawn many players over the years and have continued to bring them back, in spite of the lack of QoL features that are present. I think that’s noteworthy here.

I think some retail changes are good, to be sure. I’m very much not in the #nochanges camp. I never was and am doubly not in the context of Classic+. I think it’s important to consider each individual deviation from the Vanilla formula based on its own merits.

With that said, not all retail changes are good and I don’t believe this seasonal tier approach is one of them. There’s a lot of content that gets left in the dust, never to be seen again. Classic as a whole has had a hard time gaining traction for resources so I think the concept of more content that people play and throw away is not going to further that.

Keep in mind though that what I’m proposing we consider here still brings us new content in a seasonal fashion, it just means that it’s not a replacement to the old. Instead, it should be a compliment.

Ultimately, we’ll see what happens. I stand by the fact that horizontal progression systems are cheaper in the long run, since you get way more value for your initial investment, the retail formula is definitely easier to ship. It requires little to no design innovation. However, if I wanted to play retail, I would just go play retail :wink:

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If pro goes off of logs. If you check retail logs retail avgs 7million logs and they remove duplicate logs(same player did multiple logged content) it’s not even close. Horizontal progression causes problems. How is a new 60 able to compete or get on a guild that is on p13 content well past naxx and we all have 100% crit

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So what you want is all content to be a static tuning? Getting more powerful gear is part of character progression.

It sounds like what you are asking for is normalized gear like in retail time walking.

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Yea that’s what I’m not sure about, how retail handles the multiple lockouts thing. Like, I can go do the same raid multiple times per week, I just can only get loot from a boss once per week. Can you confirm that the data you’re looking at filters that out?

I did some googling and found several sites claiming to say what the player count was for 2025 and they ranged from 1m to 5m.

:sob:

The bottom line here though is that I’m not going to disagree with you that retail currently makes up the bulk of the player count. That doesn’t mean that the player base Vanilla appeals to is insignificant, or is never present.

I’m not sure if you wrote what you meant to wrote or we have differing understandings of what horizontal progression means.

I’m not advocating for a long chain of gear progression ticks on a list that a player has to go through in order to be relevant. I’m suggesting that each tier be be relatively self-drive for localized progression and that the global power level of gear outside those tiers (ie, open world, pvp, dungeons, etc…) be generally similar.

This means a player could join the game in P14, get decked out in pre-bis dungeon gear, and be ready to tackle early bosses in the new raid just the same as they could MC. They gear up in that raid tier and their global power catches up within that season, though they may still want to chase several BiS items available in other raids to truly min/max their build. When P15 comes out, maybe some of that gear’s power isn’t applicable to the new raid and has to be replaced within that raids progression system, but their overall power outside that tier (and relative to the tier they obtained it in) remains constant.

Or something to that effect…

No, that’s not what I’m advocating here. There would still be expectation that you’d have to progress in some way (gear, but not always) within that tier… just that your global power isn’t reset every tier and you can go back and do all other tiers at roughly the same power level.

Also please keep in mind that ultimately, I’m not saying I have the solution. I’m inviting conversation and speculation.

GOAL: Keep all content tiers in Classic+ relevant.
SOLUTION: <please submit your thoughts>

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You would have to severely nerf t2.5/t3 then or massively buff t1/T2. Currently as it stands a t3 lad will roll any content in classic. If u want all content relevant than u just need lots of raids to be sidegrades not upgrades. Perfectly ok, but would require them to rework a ton of stuff.

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I think you’re right, and at least for the purposes of discussion, that could very well be considered on the table.

Having said that, even with things as they are, BiS or near-BiS alternatives come from non-Naxx raids. That’s the motivation behind my post here. People still have reason to run MC/BWL/AQ40 even after Naxx is on farm.

How do we preserve that?

:100:

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C+ is going to have to take a different way of thinking than what they did to get to where they are now. That is for sure.

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I guess the question is why should that be a goal?

Why even have levels or gear at all?