Classic TBC

Oh ya I completely agree now this is just what I thought would be cool 3 years ago or so.

But without getting into that too much, I don’t see any reason not to have at least the first 3 expansions active at all times. They have MORE than enough fans to supply every version of it.

And honestly I could see myself jumping back and forth for years between all the expacs.

I don’t think they use the words “pipe dream” to refer to something that is easy to do, relatively cheap to maintain, and the most likely thing to happen in the future.

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Having multiple expansions running in a similair manner to how classic was relaunched would be ideal, but the caveat I’d have for it is that transfers would be one way so as to prevent players breaking the game by bringing in exotic weaponry or superceding the level cap.

Though, I suppose it would be possible for them to allow a one time cloning option to allow players to maintain their pressence in a previous iteration of the game; a $20 option perhaps?

I would say the only pipe dream here is that they fix retail to a point where I don’t want legacy servers anymore.

I think this might be a case of one problem solving another.

Every era of wow has had it’s strengths, it’s weaknesses and points where it was on the verge of something truly awe inspiring only to stumble at the end.

Like here’s a few examples from each.
Vanilla: It’s the core of the game. Everything is built off of it and even 15 years later about half of all player options, classes and races are from it.
BC: Added additional 10-20 leveling areas, and JC gave us more options for customizing gear for our needs.
Wrath: added LFD to assist with grouping (a god send at the time), Excellent WPVP in both grizzly hills and wintergrast, Vehicles added new gameplay possibilites, Phasing allowed for more dynamic story telling, gave us our first prestige class, and inscription gave us a lot of options for fine tuning our abilites.
Cata: elevated dungeon difficulty, redesigned classic zones to freshen them up, rewarded players for using archaeology with loot and advantages in dungeons.
MoP: additional race and class, outside perspective on the conflicts between horde and alliance.
Warlords: Garrison was interesting as was the mission table, though it ultimately fell somewhat flat and led to deeper isolation of the player base.
Legion: Artifacts were awesome to level… while leveling was still a thing for them, and the various tokens allowed for further customization of the weapons effects.
BFA: The island expeditions contained a hidden gem that players often overlook when dismissing BFA: the OPFOR that comes after you is an extremely clever (by mmo standards) AI that addapts to player behavior in ways that nothing else in the game’s history quite has, and I immagine a dungeon or Zone populate with mobs or bosses that behave like this and I can only feel giddy.

Now, if we take the things that worked from that list, tweak the things that didn’t and put aside the things that the players are rejecting we can get real feedback on how to move forward with content in expansions.

And the developers can get that feedback by launching all of the previous expansions.

To me, personally though, in order to fix these problems they have to just nuke the game almost entirely and start from scratch with these lessons.

Some may disagree, but I personally think things like achievements, mounts, xmog collections, ALL collections really, LFR, cross realm, group finder tool, the many bgs that were added, all the current gearing/character progression systems, gold, skills, almost everything needs wiped and removed. I believe the perfect WoW is somewhere between a TBC type of game mode and something else that gives it minor tweaks.

TBC PvE was simply the best. It starts off easyish and transitions into really difficult raids. SWP was NOT cleared by many people, christ no one even cleared it on my server until the WotLK talents came out. The way they handled tuning for raids was perfect. You couldn’t just tier skip all willy nilly. You hit 70, you had to do heroics, then kara, then SSC, etc. (I guess someone could have let you into the kara door but you get it).

Pvp was great IMO. It wasn’t this hyped balanced game where everyone had everything and it was all a mixture of the same abilities. Classes were still unique. Priests still had race specific abilities and certain healers could still only dispell certain things for example. Arena was great, yeah it might not have been the most balanced thing but it was still fun. You were forced to get a group you stuck with for a long time, toherwise you lost everything and started from scratch not this BS where you go into LFG, find a group, have one person leave after one loss, and then back into the LFG.

At the start of TBC reps were also amazing. You got some of your best gear for being exalted so farming rep for EVERY faction was a really good thing to do (not to mention they gave you other things like enchants and stuff). On top of choosing the Aldor/Scryer which added another layer to reps which was awesome.

And the dailies that TBC had I actually thought were fun. There was a massive goal hidden behind them. You could get your drake or your nether-ray which was an AMAZING feat for the time. Not like retail where anyone and everyone can get epic flying just for existing.

I know a lot of people hated flying and I could see it being removed if they wanted to move on with retail with these frameworks.

I’m not saying they couldn’t improve retail gradually with changes like these…but I just don’t see that happening.

Minor changes aren’t going to bring back the majority that left, and those minor changes clearly are not okay with the retail community. Christ they removed a couple portals in order to try and make the game feel at least a tad bit bigger and the retail community lost it.

I just think that they need to completely wipe the game of every single thing you can think of and start from scratch.

ANSWER:

Which basically says to me: “TBC seems like the better option, we just want to make sure people really want it”

Honestly Classic + shouldn’t even be on the table.

I actually think this would be a brilliant move…which of course mean’s it probably won’t happen. :woman_facepalming:t4::sweat_smile:

Outland is in retail.

It wouldn’t be hard to give “copied” characters basic default gear (similar to the way character boosts work on retail) and a small amount of “starting” gold. And like someone else already suggested, limited characters to only 1 copy would prevent abuse.

It’s definitely something on their table they are considering.

Classic+ is such a nonsense goal that wreaks of utter hipsterism; It is insisting that Blizz find people who can code new content for the game that stays in the spirit of wow and doesn’t change anything but offers horizontal upgrades and no quality of life upgrades and a whole bunch of othe gobbeldegook that nobody can actually agree on.

Further, it ignores that Retail is where the majority of the development funds for Blizz need to be spent.

Yup. the statement “Keep it in the spirit of vanilla” while also “providing horizontal progression with no quality of life upgrades” is literally impossible. Because offering new content with nothing really ‘new’ to strive for outside of just doing it is already not in the spirit of vanilla. That, or it’s at the very least a complete waste of time.

So they want new raids, with no new gear, or if that gear is new then they have to keep it worse than other tiers, and new zones with quests that don’t offer anything new that would alter someone’s leveling experience or gold farming experience so just empty worthless zones? It doesn’t make any sense and it honestly needs to just be forgot about.

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I dont think a lot of the classic+ crowd cares about the spirit of vanilla based on stuff they have asked for…

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I’m hoping the success of Classic makes them release World of Warcraft+.

After 15 years of releasing content and seeing the general result of features/new things they added, they can move forward to start over from Vanilla, releasing the expansions tweaked with the damaging features removed, or even finding a stopping point and making new expansions branching from that point of the story.

¯_(ツ)_/¯

Based on what they’ve said, I think it’s substantially more likely that they will release BC servers than that they won’t.

Well what you linked isn’t talking about classic + it’s talking about tweaking other expansions.

Which honestly, I’m in full support of. TBC can NOT stay in a state where the token vendor from sunwell stays available. This literally invalidates the majority of tbc raiding. Plus is got rid of attunements

As for wotlk, the lfd tool also needs to go imo. It was fun when it came out first but it obviously turned into one of the worst decisions made. Christ even private servers turn that junk off in 3.3.5 servers.

Tbc and wrath also, imo, needs to find a sweet spot in terms of class balance patches because there were some extremely broken junk during the course of their life times. (Although I do believe dks should be released like they actually were back then just so people can understand what we were talking about when we said they were the most OP thing this game has ever seen :slight_smile: )

They want magic, is what they want. The premise behind Classic+ is that Blizzard can flip a switch and, somehow, this time when they make changes to the basic game, only include ones the person calling for Classic+ is happy with, not the ones that stop them from wanting to play Modern. Sometimes they mention specific things for Blizzard to leave out (“no flying” and “no Outland” are common), but as far as what Blizzard would be putting in…nothing but magic.

The issue is that different people argue about what constitutes a damaging feature.

Like, LFD was something that was praised by all but the most self absorbed DPS when it went live, and the only real flaw it had was that it ballooned from battlegroups (about 5 servers) to the whole bloody region.

Or Weapon proficiencies: I hate the stupid thing since it actively discourages me from switching weapons for fear of my ability to actually make contact with the enemy going through the floor until I’ve spent an hour waving my sword about like an idiot at the house cat. But there are people who claim that this insipid mechanic is somehow integral to the wow expierience.

Or how about when they got rid of ammo and mana for hunters? Both were straight improvements for players since it reduced the mechanics that hunters had to juggle as well as making them less reviled for their eclectic gear rolling, but try telling that to folks in classic right now.