I’m curious as to whether or not you understand your own game.
There is a difference between an authentic experience, and something your original team intended for as far as design direction.
WoW was launched unfinished. You couldn’t race to level cap and jump right into raids and content was added later, that if development constraints had been removed, would have been included at launch.
ZG gear (barring a few specific pieces) was inferior gear to someone who had already completed MC, and it served to supplement for gear that wasn’t dropping (one of those rose colored glass things… meaning I got my tier 2 shoulders before tier 1 ever dropped).
After the release of ZG, it became a natural progression before stepping foot into MC. Why? Rewards and difficulty. If the original creators had to do it over, that is how it would have been released? Are you even consulting them at all? Or are you just arbitrarily picking what gets the “authentic experience” and what doesn’t?
I mean low level content like Maraudon and DM, not available at launch? [Removed by Forum Moderator for language.] Why? Because reasons…
Most of this stuff just wasn’t finished for the original launch, and things were added through the first 2 years, to smooth that transition from 1-60 as well as smooth out the gear progression at 60. Like seriously how do you not understand that? Moreover I’d love to understand the logic behind following that development plan when low-mid level content was added to address the problems with that experience.
This is really why the accounts of the “vanilla” experience differ so much. Because if you played at launch, you didn’t get Maraudon, you didn’t get DM. The only reason you went back to it was for resist gear. But if you started playing later in WoW’s development cycle you had the benefit of this additional low level content, so you might not remember having to GRIND out levels, because you didn’t have to.
You have the benefit of hindsight and you’re pissing it away, and for what?
I could not be MORE disappointed.
You went for the 1.12 version of the game for class design because it was the most complete. (Which I agree with) Some classes waited almost a year before they got their “class review”. The same though is true for all content, PvP, PvE, quests, leveling, etc. 1.12 had the complete experience. If you want to gate tiers to prevent people from plowing through it fine, but employ reason. Releasing a tier 0.5 raid AFTER tier 1. How would that work for the live version of the game? It’s stupid right? That would be like only having 5 mans and Mythic+ at launch, and then releasing 5man heroics several months down the road… who is that for?
I LIVED IT THE FIRST TIME AROUND! I STUCK WITH THE GAME THROUGH ALL OF IT’S GROWING PAINS!
But now we are going to “fake” those growing pains for the sake of nostalgia?
To me this is the equivalent of kids not listening to their parents. You know that what they are doing is going to hurt them, but they do it anyway. It’s maddening, truly maddening.
Perhaps people shouldn’t be able to play on anything newer than a computer from 2006, or maybe force the majority of players to be on dial-up. It’s just as ridiculous.