Coming back to classic era WoW, and it's depressing

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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  1. Everyone is max level and just interested in GDKPS
  2. Anyone that is leveling has a 60 main and is just paying for boosts
  3. Everyone is buying gold with RM or swiping credit cards for runs
    4 No leveling guilds are recruiting and the zones feel empty

If I was a new player or wanted to start a level 1 character, it becomes very clear that unless I have gold, i will not be doing raids at 60 funneling me to either try and play catch by farming gold, which is so inflated, or worse using a credit card to buy carries and or gold causing account suspension and further fueling the problem.

So how do we solve this? I have some ideas. The first and most obvious is to just for Blizzard to do classic fresh, but that is just beating a dead horse, most people will just stick with SOD, cata classic, mop, etc.

I think it would be cool if Blizzard just breathes some life into classic wow. Blizzard could do something like single player RPGS with a New Game+ weekly,monthly, 3 month races. At the start of the race you have the option to have your character level artifically set to 1 and start questing again (with the low level players) while either keeping your gear (it becomes leveled like BOA gear) or if to powerful Blizzard could nerf it or start with level 1 gear.

Along with experience you also get a new form of currency for each quest you complete and 1 weekly dungeon (you can only get the currency for 1 run only) At the end of the race, people who have completed the most quests will get a boost of this currency, and have their 60 level returned to them.

The currency can be used to spend on sought after end game items like gear, and mats, even from raids, or unqiue new classic era cosmetics and titles (for those already geared) This could help break the cycle of GDKPS, a carrot and horse method to get people to play the game instead of just boosting to 60 and doing gdkps.

Obviously Blizzard would have to make changes to how boosting works so a 60 player couldnā€™t just around with someone in the race and just kill everything for them or boost them dunegons,.

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tl;dr:

  • Deviate Delight for Fresh.
  • Grobbulus for no-RMT, small server raiding.
  • Mankrik/Whitemane for the leveling experience.
  • Eraā€™s popularity isnā€™t for Blizzard to fix, itā€™s for the players. Thereā€™s fun to be had if you want to engage with it, but it will also come back in popularity.

If youā€™re having trouble finding fun in Era right now, you actually have some options.

If fresh is something youā€™re interested in, search around here for the Deviate Delight group. Theyā€™re attempting to create their own fresh movement by rolling new characters on a previously dead server. Itā€™s been going on for a bit now but to my knowledge thereā€™s still a lot of levelers. Be aware though that the community is trying to impose some restrictions on content pacing and there has been a bit of drama surrounding that. Also, thereā€™s no guarantees that there wonā€™t be RMT on this server as, with anything popular, botting and RMT is inevitable. Still, itā€™s a community driven effort and you can probably still have fun there. Blizzard has given them a bit of support by disabling transfers into DD so that can help.

If you donā€™t like RMT/GDKP you could check out Grobbulus on Alliance side. Itā€™s a mostly dead server with one active Alliance guild (30-40 raiders) and one active Horde guild (15-25 raiders). Thereā€™s been a handful of players leveling on this server recently but youā€™ll mostly be on your own; however, on Alliance at least people are more than happy to help with dungeons/elite quests. You can transfer in but as gold has no value on this server, there is no RMT. If this interests you, search for posts by Jarl-Grobbulus about Legacy for Alliance, and posts by Kittysters-Grobbulus about Requiem for Horde.

Finally, main cluster leveling is still active. Era is in a lull right now to be sure but this also means diminished RMT and bots. The price of goods has fallen, almost certainly due to lack of demand. Thereā€™s always going to be a lot of GDKP on those servers but there are non-GDKP guilds/groups that do exist, you just have to look a bit harder for them. Either way, on my own leveling characters I do see people in the zones and dungeon groups do happen, you just have to wait for them sometimes. I play on the Mankrik cluster and itā€™s been ok, but I did have to wait a good 40+ minutes last week to find DPS for Deadmines, so your mileage certainly may vary here.

For my personal recommendation, I would suggest playing as Alliance on either cluster, Mankrik for PvE and Whitemane for PvP while you level to 60. You just have more opportunity to find groups for quests and dungeons. Once youā€™ve hit the level cap and are at the point where you think you want to start raiding, pay the $35 transfer fee and come to Grobbulus to raid, though absolutely do keep other characters on the main clusters if you enjoy doing dungeons.

My last thought hereā€¦ I donā€™t think Blizzard actually needs to do anything. Era stands on its own and will always go through peaks and valleys of player interest. When TBC launched Era was a ghost town, almost certainly due to player burnout and TBC being new and shiny, but players did come back. This was instigated by the HC movement but I think that just put Era on peopleā€™s radar because all servers saw a big uptick in population. That was more than a year ago now and weā€™re in another lull but it seems reasonable that it will see another wave, and another, and anotherā€¦

Era is there for the players and itā€™s entirely up to us to make Era what we will.

Anyway, good luck to you! :slight_smile:

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Come play on Deviate Delight, itā€™s great!

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Deviate Delight is as close to fresh as we have right now. Lots of people leveling from scratch, economy is still decent/realistic, no GDKP/RMT/Boosting which I think many playing here are trying to escape all of that.

I agree here, and would extend that to the problems with Era as well. The things people donā€™t like and are major turnoffs (GDKP/RMT/Boosting/Bots) are more in the playerā€™s hands to solve than Blizzard. Iā€™m sure thatā€™s how they see it too.

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For the most part I agree, we can choose the way we want to play the game and we can try to attact others to that way. We saw this before with the HC movement and weā€™re seeing it again with DD.

However, itā€™s a lot easier for players to build a following for something like HC or fresh than it is to deter behaviours like GDKP/RMT/Boosting/Bots. While HC did show us the power of player-driven content, we also saw that with popularity come the masses who are willing to pay to circumvent difficulty. Itā€™s absolutely mind blowing to me that RMT exists on HC servers, yet it does. We saw this same trend in Classic 2019. The game launched to insane popularity and retention for its 2 year run, but it was whatā€¦ 3-6 months before RMT took root and it was hard to find a legit dungeon group because everybody was sitting AFK in SM/Mara getting boosted?

In much the same way, without Blizzard intervention I give DD that same 3-6 months before RMT takes root there. Itā€™s not my intention to be negative here, I think whatā€™s happening on DD is great and while I donā€™t want to participate, I do want to support it how I can by bringing awareness to it. However, weā€™d all be kidding ourselves if we didnā€™t acknowledge that it has a shelf lifeā€¦ so get from it what you can, while you can, because if it continues to grow in popularity it will move towards the same environment that Mankrik/Whitemane has, just like HC/SoD has, and just like Classic 2019 did. Prior to DD those folks were actually looking to start up on Grob. For those of us who play there, this was actually a big concern because we knew that if it took off, our server would change significantly and become a lot more like what many of us went to Grobb to escape. It doesnā€™t mean that the fresh movment is bad and that we didnā€™t want good things for it, just that we were worried about what it meant for us and our community. In the end they chose another server and so it worked out.

This all brings me back to the pointā€¦ I think Blizzard does have a responsibility to at least decide some boundaries for how their game should be played. I greatly appreciate that in Era, those boundaries are loose, but for stuff like this the players just donā€™t have the tools to solve it in meaningful ways. The only real choice is to walk away from everything you built and try, again, to start over. It doesnā€™t mean we shouldnā€™t continue to try and do the best we can to build the kind of game we want, but itā€™s definitely not sustainable. We need support from Blizzard, and we do see a little bit of it in the form of things like experimenting with no GDKP in SoD, turning off transfers to DD, and their continued efforts to combat botting.

Even if we may not be happy with all of the results and may choose to do things differently, it should be clear that they are, at least, doing something as opposed to nothing at all.

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False. I finished leveling my warrior last Tuesday. Never boosted him. Leveled 100% from questing. But now Iā€™m done leveling horde side. Got a 60 of every class. Only one of them was boosted, by the way, and I did most of the boosting myself. Didnā€™t care much for it so that was the last and only character I boosted.

Also, boosting is fine if thatā€™s the route people want to take. Not my cup of tea but itā€™s part of the game. No one is forcing you into it. Stop focusing on what other people are doing and just play the game.

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Hey, congrats :slight_smile:

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No, Iā€™m not and no, I havenā€™t - argument falsified.

I love the Era servers. I love levelling, I love that they are forever, so that my progress is never lost.

All your suggestions are fine - for a seasonal server, where players eventually end up on the existing Era servers when it ends.

Or try out Hardcore - thatā€™s ā€œfreshā€ too.

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Ladder servers that reset yearly, and characters go to era. No additional changes like SoM or SoD; just vanilla Classic on a yearly cadence with or without gated content.

Just regular intervals. Could do the same with each expansion as well, with the ability to ā€œupgradeā€ a character to whichever expansion ladder characters could upgrade to ladder expansions but non ladder could only upgrade to non ladder.

As for too many servers, they could just make one per expansion type (excluding ladder servers), and make it mountain time, like they did with SoD servers.

:woman_shrugging:

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Bi-annually, once a year is too fast for us filthy casuals.

two per expansion type unless you agree to PvE servers.

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I think that seems fine.

I donā€™t think it matters which type for expansions, personally. But I do think more than 1 would be a waste of resources.

:woman_shrugging:

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Donā€™t come back then.

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I generally agree with this sentiment.

Even while reading OPā€™s post most ā€˜issuesā€™ they label solve themselves after playing for a few weeks or months on the years-deep-phase-6-server.

While I advocate for 2-year cycle fresh servers because I do think they create a better experience for players that want to join in Era, I donā€™t agree that Era is currently full of issues that need to be solved.

I think if players arenā€™t interested in playing the game and want everything to align for their needs, so they are at the center of the world, and have no desire to get to know the current culture of Era community, then they probably should not play on Era.

There are tons of modes that you can catchup with just a few days played or paying a bit of money (retail, cata, SoD, etc.). Era is good as is and the people playing there are having a ton of fun, it doesnā€™t need to be designed to cater to players that just joined. Those that care will remain and be able to achieve all they want in Era.

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Also very important to remember that ā€œLevelingā€ on whitemane is not constant, it comes in waves and long as you get in with a wave of levelers its really good, just donā€™t out run them or get too far behind otherwise its solo play or buy a boost.

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Everytime I leveled alts on Era iā€™ve found plenty of people out in the world.

Sure there are more empty places here and there, but in generally each zone will have at least a few friends and enemies.

I do support boosting thought (done by other players) because I understand some people are on their 10th+ alt and they want it for raiding not leveling.

If one wants the most fun pve leveling experience I would suggest hardcore.

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I donā€™t object to boosting character classes you have played a few times or more because nothing left to learn,

I do kinda get annoyed by boosters who have never played a class because they generally need that leveling experience to help them to even cope with the basics.

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Yeah totally agree. Even I will level a class I havenā€™t played in a while, it is a great way to get used to rotation, practice a bit with low stakes, and fun in general.

But I also have a warrior I am slowly boosting when I afk sometimes and I appreciate that I can use in-game gold to pay other players to help me level that alt quicker.

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You can solo to the level cap so I donā€™t think the game is prohibiting anyone from joining. At some point during that journey you can help yourself out by figuring out if the culture is something you can jive with and perhaps joining an active guild.

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Thatā€™s a good thing, because you arent buying it. (buying gold was meaning)

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There is not really a point in playing classic unless you want to see the same sweaty rude people like walka among others who run gdkp and uses their character as their real life identity.

Other than that the server, like whitemane, is dead in all other aspects, there is no groups for dungeon lvling and youā€™d be lucky to find a someone to level to 60 with because all people do is stand around in the captical feeling good about themselves in the gear they never use other than running a 19 year old dungeon.

The pvp scene if there ever was one is dead and people only play during AV weekend, this way they donā€™t have to be killed and get their egos a reality check.

Then if you happen to gank some of these losers they start to whisper you about blacklisting you from certain gdkp provided they lose their world buffs they need ever so dearly to do any content it seems.

If you are interested in pvp there is about 10 players who donā€™t backpaddle on the server and they can be found in durotat at times.

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