I’m excited for Cataclysm. Raids were great. Content overall was great.
Biggest issues with Cata were pretty hard Heroics early on and content drought. Classic can fix those issues.
We don’t have RDF (but same rules don’t apply to PvP), so the odds of LFR are slim to none.
“Classic”, or rather “Remaster” at this point, allows for the dev team to go back and look at all the pain points and fix those mistakes.
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I never liked Vanilla, so I didn’t play WoW Classic for Vanilla Era. Wasn’t my thing. But not once have I ever said “don’t release it” or anything of the sorts. Just because Cata (potentially) is coming out, you are not obligated to play it.
But don’t take it away from others. That’s just pathetic.
I mostly agree with your post, but I super disagree with this. The 5-man heroics were actually fun because of the challenge, rather than being a completely boring Dynasty Warriors-esque experience just blowing everything up with no challenge or danger like in Wrath. I was so sad when the dungeons were nerfed , because running heroics once again became more just busy work than a fun challenge. I was iffy about Cataclysm when it first came out, but the 5-man difficulty was such an incredible breath of fresh air.
We clearly disagree on dungeon finder, but you’re very right, there’s basically 0 chance we ever see LFR in any version of Classic moving forward because it’s easily one of, if not the most hated things in WoW’s history. And removing things like that would be a great improvement for Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria.
Yeah, these people have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. Cataclysm was a popular expansion. Its memory was tainted by things like LFR and to a degree, dungeon finder (I think dungeon finder was far more iconic to Cataclysm than Wrath). I don’t mean to say that those things alone are what did it, but Cataclysm was definitely the first expansion that felt like “modern” Retail.
But overall it was a good expansion and people are just being extremely unrealistic to think that Cataclysm Classic isn’t a very strong possibility/inevitability. I think the big question right now is how they’re going to handle Wrath era/SOM though. It seems like this would be the first time in Classic’s lifespan where we’d genuinely see big chunks of the population splitting off to play different things (Wrath era and Cataclysm Classic).
It makes sense that they didn’t have an era/SOM for TBC, since TBC has always been the least-popular era of the game on private realms by a longshot. But they absolutely cannot deny that they’ll lose a significant number of Classic subs if they kill Wrath and Cataclysm is the progressive non-Retail content to play.
To this day I don’t understand all the hatred towards LFR. It was casual, easier & less rewarding content accordingly. None of that was really all that mandatory aside from first 2 weeks of grabbing tier set bonuses.
LFR are an equivalent to Random BG queues. Casual. Some are toxic. Some are not. Same cross-realm activity. Same little to no communication.
LFR allowed casuals, guildless & non-raiders to “sneak peak” end game PvE content. How come PvP was open for them and not PvE? To this day I think it’s all a tad bit dramatic.
I can’t really speak for everyone, but for the most part, I think LFR is awful for many of the same reasons as dungeon finder. It took a very social and teamwork-oriented part of the game and turned it into something you just queue for and an algorithm slaps together this group of people who are literally only there for loot and nothing more. It was even worse than dungeon finder in this aspect because raids are expected to be more difficult than 5-man content. The content was dumbed down so much that people could literally go AFK mid-encounter and it often made no difference at all. And LFR groups were filled with extremely toxic people. On one hand, you had people who wanted to vote-kick anyone they thought wasn’t performing. And on the other hand you had griefers who would intentionally try to sabotage every encounter. The raid chat was usually very similar to battlegrounds where people were just rude to one another constantly, and the only semblance of nicety was the “GG” some people said at the end of the raid.
And I know a lot of people scoff at the idea of “prestige” in raiding gear, but for all of WoW’s lifetime before LFR was implemented, tier sets had to be “earned” by clearing raiding content which wasn’t always hard, but was definitely a significant step up from 5-man content on top of being a logistical challenge. The game already had tons of catchup mechanics in 5-mans that dropped previous raid-quality gear and badges you could buy current gear with. WoW didn’t need any more catchup mechanics, but they decided to let people get even better gear than they could from 5-mans (including set bonuses) for far less effort/challenge…
The whole thing just felt so nasty… For people who couldn’t raid “normally”, they weren’t actually getting the raiding experience at all. For the people leveling and gearing alts, LFR added another step in the gearing process that felt unnecessary but they HAD to do because PUGs expected LFR ilevel gear for an invite. For the people who cared about the “accomplishment” of clearing raids, the rewards of those achievements were diluted when the casual players were given extremely powerful participation trophy gear.
And this was all because Activision’s ideals were injected into the game and they valued aCcEsSiBiLiTy more than a game with consistent quality and challenge. I think these things mostly sum up what you’re going to hear from people who hate LFR, more or less.
only thing i don’t like about cata is that it changed the whole old world. with no way to go back IF they added the option like they do in retail to use the old world aswell as the new world i think cata would be alot better recieved
Yeah, I’d have to agree. I really disliked the Shattering. It was tentatively cool at first, but it also figuratively destroyed the old zones we loved. I would’ve been so much happier if the Shattering only affected old zones in a cosmetic sense, like Deathwing’s foot prints and the felled statue in Stormwind, and then saved all the massive ravines in the ground for the new zones.
Cataclysm took something away from WoW forever, and now that you say it, that’s probably one of the other biggest things that made Cataclysm feel like Retail. It was a totally different game, not just in the gameplay systems and features, but the actual terrain.
it fails to provide a raid environment, it fails to be a stepping stone to raiding, it gives people the impression that it IS raiding and it is rewarding failure in a way contrary to how raids actually work. It also fails to do anything about the raid-leader shortage - which we’re not ready to discuss yet.
I don’t know if too many are saying “don’t release it”. From my perspective, I’m not interested in playing it if they do release it and I am not convinced it has the critical mass of popular support it would need to be successful.
However, if Blizzard did their homework and surveyed a good section of the community about it and a number of alternative Classic options and that came out as showing Cata Classic to be the most viable of the options then great, more power too them if they go on to releasing it. I won’t be playing it though.
I don’t think you’re wrong to see it that way, but at the same time, I would argue that Wrath Era or Wrath SOM might not necessarily have that critical mass you’re talking about either.
I have a theory about why Classic era and SOM are so unpopular… They really shouldn’t be, looking at the popularity of the different eras on private realms. Generally speaking, it seems like Vanilla is the most popular, followed fairly closely by Wrath, and then TBC is way less popular, and very closely behind (or possibly tied with) it is Cataclysm… By all accounts, it seemed like Classic Era and SOM should’ve been exploding with popularity.
I think that people aren’t playing era or SOM because Wrath is “live” right now with progressive phases. People have to make a choice between experiencing a live version of WoW “for real” one more time, or just playing an older version in almost the same state as a private realm. If Cataclysm Classic never happens and we get Wrath era/SOM, I think it’s very likely we’ll see a lot of people going back to Classic era/SOM since there won’t be a “live” version of the game to play anymore. I also think that there will be enough people who want to play TBC that way that Blizzard might dedicate a realm or two to it per region.
On the other hand, I think it’s extremely likely that many people who would otherwise be playing an era/SOM version of the first 3 eras of WoW would be interested in experiencing a “live” progressive version of Cataclysm again. After all, we don’t know the future, and moving forward into future Classic content may be our only chance to experience it roughly the way we did originally.
At the end of the day, the popularity of Blizzard’s current Vanilla offering is NOT consistent with Vanilla’s private realm popularity…
Funny but true story about the heroic difficulties. is people complained how bad wrath dungeons were and how easy they were. so what did blizzard do? they increased the difficulty of cata heroic dungeons (i had zero issues with them) they were incredibly fun until, everyone lost their crap at how difficult they were. we won’t get difficulty we started out. we’ll get the watered down wrath difficulty dungeons.
this i couldn’t agree with more. the fact they allowed you to get your legendary with out actually stepping foot into normal modes of the raids is pathetic. but this is also where blizzard wanted to make sure everyone received the same experience. since Tmog is in the game, they need to least make an option for for those skins to be obtainable.
I’d say RDF is a guarantee for Cata Classic. It’s completely ingrained in the game by Cata. The entire old world was remade with RDF in mind. The dungeons were reworked and redesigned. All the endgame dungeons were built, balanced, and designed with RDF in the game. It’ll be in Cata.
And the Cata survey actually asked about LFR (something they never did with RDF). So at least it’s on the table.
I’d agree with you about the world being designed with dungeon finder teleports in mind. But I don’t see how the dungeons themselves were somehow “balanced” around dungeon finder.
I never had a problem with the heroics and I only used RDF to play them as a healer. Yeah mana was tight on bosses, but never had a group fall through because they were too hard. I AM KRUMTOILET!!!
I don’t disagree with anything you said there. Really it depends on the survey data and what actually happens.
Personally - if I were to have a punt, I’d punt that everything would happen to the same pattern it did originally. A peak of interest with the new old xpac and then a sharp drop. It is literally history repeating itself.
They weren’t really that hard, even at release. Just compared to the Wrath heroics. My issue with them was more that I didn’t like the aesthetics. The themes of the Wrath dungeons I thought were great, and I did sooo many of them thanks to RDF. I just loved them. Great variety. So it was a wonderful combination of fun dungeons that were easily accessible. Cata only got half that equation right. For me, anyway.
Would that really be a big deal though? Players can always revisit Classic Era and potentially WotLK Era if they wanted to experience those old zones as they were.
That’s quite possible! For me, I think there’s also some extra interest from the parser types of players too. It seems like a lot of the people playing today either didn’t play originally or they weren’t competitive back in those days, so this is a chance to go back and play the warcraftlogs side of the game too.
Interestingly, since Cataclysm wasn’t a popular expansion for private servers, I would hazard a guess that there’s a lot of room for min/maxing and “solving” the game in ways that it never has been up to this point. Even with over a decade of Vanilla, TBC and Wrath private servers, there’s been plenty of new innovation just since Classic launched, so the later and less popular expansions might be ripe for theorycrafting.