I completely agree with you. But, even if Blizzard did have all the data and code from previous patches, i don’t think they’d be dumb enough to go with any other patch but the latest - 1.12. Just like if they were to make TBC, they take the end patch as well.
Why?
They want to attract a bigger audience. A lot of people are trying anything close to Vanilla for the first time. It wouldn’t be fun, nor feasible for them if Molten Core still took 3 hours - even if it was on farm. Wipe fests aren’t fun - especially if you don’t know what you’re doing. The newer people will quit. And blizzard doesn’t want that.
I like that this is being brought up. There is a tremendous amount of responsibility for the community to “be careful what you wish for” when communicating to the devs.
Speaking for myself, yes, I do want the longevity with a “harder” game. Sure…it was a Royal Pain dealing with certain zones\mobs. But the sweet wasn’t as sweet without the bitter.
I wasn’t in the Classic beta, but I did play Vanilla when it originally launched. For me it is a bit early to judge the upcoming Classic release before I’ve played it. But I think the spirit of your post is good to keep in mind.
I’m all for the grindier version. But from what I can tell, and maybe you’re experience is different, is that the people waiting for Classic will still play it - whether it’s 1.1 or 1.12.
The wild card I think is the people who have never played Classic at all or only dabbled in it. IMO, I think it’s a larger crowd.
Wasn’t 1.12 the version used on private servers ? The group that started that petition so unless you have evidence to the contrary, yes that was the game being asked for.
Nostalrius was a private World of Warcraft server, which opened on February 28, 2015. The server ran Patch 1.12, catering to aficionados of the early version of the game, nicknamed “Vanilla”.
No one should be able to level to 60 in a week and beat Onyxia within two. That is not in the spirit of origianl WoW. Dungeons should not be a place to power level by aoe-ing everything down with Blizzards and Cleaves. Was more xp added into dungeons than in the earlier game patches? Is our leveling going to be easier with 1.12? None of this can be good for the ultimate health and longevity of Classic. If people can beat the raids within a month, what will keep them coming back? Yes I’ll have alts but if the game isn’t very challenging I will feel less accomplished when I do finally reach my goals.
By stalling progression in ways that discourages power leveling, according to todays Retail standards (i.e. xp increases on quest/dungeons) and other ‘conveniences’ that began in later Vanilla, only then can we properly recreate Classic. Then again, maybe it was these additions that made later Vanilla so popular that we got the rapid subscription rate that didn’t end until Wrath. I for one would rather see Classic go more towards earlier patches than later. I came in Vanilla midway into 2005, and what I’ve heard about the game before that sounded epic. It would be nice to experience it in it’s original form.
The private servers run with a shoe string budget, and a handful of devs. What people wanted was THE classic experience, not A classic experience.
Blizzard choose to give us the most nerfed version of vanilla possible (2.0 is considered BC). And that is a problem. It waters down and trivializes the content.
Private servers data is simply wrong, no one was asking for wrong data. No one ask for 1.12 servers, they asked for classic/vanilla servers. We wanted to experience the content how it was originally, not how it became as they nerfed it. if the game released with 1.0 and advanced over time THAT would be what was asked for.
OP is not talking about adding new challenges, just reverting some things back to pre-nerf patches. Everything that was already and originally in the game at launch or close to it. You wouldn’t be ‘messing with the system’, but in fact reinstating it.
You know honestly, as I’m thinking about it, classic is not really a game. It’s an idea. It’s the idea that we can play a game that’s not 100% about reaching endgame and loot boxes and mounts and trying to make the entire world fit into the fewest possible mechanics and, most importantly, preventing people from feeling bad.
It was a game where your story unfolded itself.
The line of successive changes would not have brought about the demand to bring things back to the way they were if done correctly.
Yes, “happiness” is impossible to define, etc., but what I’m saying is that if they had moved forward with the game with the philosophy they started with, there could have been no demand for classic, as the game would just have been 100% explicitly better.
Now, what that means is almost nothing because I haven’t really made any specific requests and the developers and teams and such are not superhuman, but I think that finding out what the essence of classic was, way back then, is the key to reinventing MMO gaming.
– and it’s definitely not building the game to make everyone happy. I know this is a silly example because it’s not based in reality, but remember in the movie The Matrix, where the bad guys told Neo that the world was originally created to make everyone happy? Even the writers of that movie got it and they’re not gamers.
So somehow the validity of this arrangement is predicated on time? Nope… The argument is still valid today, and forever. And maybe one day we will get a true vanilla experience if we continue to ask for it.
sherlock