This is not a post on changing anything right now but a look forward into the years to come. while I like (for the most part) classic I find myself underwhelmed by the ease of the bosses as they are all in the 1.12 state. once we come to a close in phase 6 what will be left I can see some form of diablo style ladder with just a reset or maybe BC. lets assume BC doesn’t happen what is next for Classic. If we wait to tackle this issue after phase 6 we are going to have to wait a very long time (AKA SOON tm). Here are some things I personally could see and my opinions on them.
A pure reset - just a reset fresh start. i feel you would slowly start to see player base dwindle over time but would be the least to stir up controversy. I mean who doesn’t love a fresh server.
Fresh content - new zones new instances and raids. this could be problematic as its not classic at that point but an amalgamation of Classic and Retail. it would be cool though to see places hinted at in classic like the emerald dream something dealing with the dragons that are to be released next phase. another idea open up the caverns of time as they are made and wouldn’t break story if you did it right. there are many ways to go and would be interesting to see for sure.
Pre-nerf bosses - this would put the content at the hardest it could be so the challenge would increase thus providing re-playability. As before we would have some issues with what does pre-nerf mean do we keep AQ 40 C’thun unkillable I don’t think so but if that’s the way it goes it would be interesting to see if it is possible with the way the meta has changed or the years.
here is a thought of my own so feel free to rip it apart
Hardcore wow - no this doesn’t mean when you die you have to start over that would be impossible (or is it 0.o). rules would go something like this you can only run each instance 5x (aka lock out) per day if you die that’s it for the run. Raids have normal weekly rotation if you die that’s it for you on the run. people with rezes can use them once per instance or raid. this would give guilds that have people sitting as back up a purpose as people die you could bring in the bench (or you could just cap it to 40 people). just a thought I had like other ideas there are issues like are warlocks able to make Soul stones as much as they want or just once
these ideas are not a one stop shop by any means. We could have a mix of them with different servers hosting different things just like PVP and PVE. We could see a fresh server and new content server or a mix of any the above.
love to here everyone’s else’s thoughts and comments of what they would like to see classic wise.
all I’d want for sure are more quests, too many zones that feel like they have too few quests or very annoyingly placed quest hubs. Wrap up some of the plot lines that are dead end like burning blade, etc
anything else that came with it I’d just be happy to have, raids that were meant for classic like kara/batol or whatever
Like Jagex, with their OSRS model that currently has 10x the players their “current game” has?
Because that’s what they did. Re-released an extremely old version of the game and improved upon it, and now it’s probably the best MMORPG in the market. Any changes that Jagex proposes has to pass a poll with 75% “yes” votes, or the idea just gets tossed out.
Classic+ won’t work because Blizzard currently has no idea of what made the game great in the first place and the entire original development team is gone, not because the idea itself is bad.
not gonna worry too much about you putting runescape and best MMORPG in the same sentence, but here’s the point:
runescape didn’t go through gradual changes over time, it was one game, and then bam, they released another, COMPLETELY different, 3d, shiny, blabla.
so jagex didn’t have a backlog of ready-made content for it, so making more for the old game was an actual reasonable thing to do, not to mention, come on, its OSRS, probably takes like 2 devs an afternoon and 3 bags of cheetos to make any content for it.
WoW on the other hand, went through gradual changes, that eventually led to a very different game, so blizzard has a backlog of ready-made GOOD content for wow classic, which is TBC and WOTLK and even some would argue cataclysm, so how the hell do you justify spending resources to make “new” classic+ content? nobody thinks TBC was bad, infact most people are only in classic because of the hope we’ll get TBC, nobody wants to stay in this “hybrid classes heal” and raids composed of 18+ warriors are OPTIMAL hellhole forever.
I think you guys are getting hung up on the plus part of this as in it being a confirmed change of some kind. think of Plus as what happens after phase 6. while yes I would love TBC some of the community will not. also TBC will not be classic it will be TBC classic. so if BC does come out what becomes of classic is it just phased out like expansions in the past and we start this whole issue over again? its something that is not talk about much because of people easily dismissing it with #nochanges or BC /thread but its a real issue that will come up post phase 6.
It’s not that simple, but slightly less work than designing several raid instances and all the scripting + items.
They’re both not all that hard to do, Blizzard did the real leg work when they got the Classic Data set translated over to Modern wow… Character models, animations, sounds, spell library, etc.
Some of that stuff would need to be updated further for TBC tho, because there are some differences.
In reality, it might actually be easier to do Classic + given what they have at their disposal regarding map and instance development tools… The stuff Blizzard has in house is super slick and makes a lot of that stuff fairly straight forward… Bug’s and scripting of the encounters are the only real challenge, but all the bugs and scripting would need work for a TBC server given what we have seen in Classic 2019.
The only way they could give us a ready to roll TBC is the use of a REAL 2.4 client and Server.
Outside of that, it’s not just a “bam there it is” like we would hope for.
That’s the point though. All the client port stuff is already done. Yea there will be some tuning I’m sure, but vastly less than was required for Classic, or especially classic+
What will be left?
For me, everything, i will probably still be phase 3-ish.
I am in no rush.
If you want to make things harder, turn off your web browser
stop using all that 15 years of accumulated info that tell you exactly what to get, where to get it, how to spec, how to do XX fight etc.
Just play the game blind and it will be sort of close to 15 years ago.
I try and avoid all the advanced knowledge stuff though sometimes i cannot help remembering something.
Even pre-nerf bosses are not terribly hard when you already know everything.
(And not all bosses are terribly nerfed as much as we became much buffed up by 1.12)
Would rather not have fresh/seasonal servers, as it creates a bizarre meta of a never-ending race. People will abandon their guilds mid-prog to start over on a fresh server in order to try and be “first” or whatever.
I don’t like the idea of BC, either. BC was more balanced, better for the competitive playerbase, but an overall worse MMORPG.
I’d say let phase 6 stew for at least 2 years or so, that way Classic boils down only to its most core, dedicated audience who loves the game just for the game itself and not merely for flaunting accolades. Then, ideas could be proposed to the community of which direction to go in, and only by significant majority would a decision be made.
Personally, I would not want to see any major expansion-level gameplay or content changes. However, I would not mind unfinished content, such as empty zones or things that just never made it in time, to be implemented. I also would not mind tweaking of already existing class abilities/talents, but new abilities or ability overhauls are a no-go.
The flaw with this is that we really don’t have a classic dev team, and anyone who did work on vanilla gameplay has either changed positions or moved on. Blizzard has a very different philosophy of game design, so it’d be a difficult challenge for them to “go backwards” in game design.
It’s like asking an artist to redraw an old picture without using any of the new techniques they’ve learned over the years.
Nope, because there was always new content rolling out. There was no predictable path to do things, and the game had new servers for the sake of a growing playerbase, not to keep things “fresh.”
There was absolutely no reason to roll on a new server and start over when new content loomed on the horizon.