Look at what they did to ranking, it’s very similar to what they did to epics in Wrath and onward.
All we need is Oprah standing on stage, and You get R14! And you get R14! And you get R14!! Sure enough, pretty soon that title, and the gear won’t be special. Just like the smart and strong kids aren’t special anymore because everyone gets a participation award.
Pretty soon we’ll get a “harder” version of R14 with a different color sceme 
It’s an infection, and it shows that no matter what their original goals were, they just can’t help but infect another project. It’s a human condition.
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I am sure absolute TERROR runs through the halls of Blizzard and the WoW staff. The 20 year old version of the game, without any modification, is wildly popular. THEY have to justify their paycheck to the people who write the checks. I am predicting a blood bath in the halls of Blizzard when the Microsoft deal is done.
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I’m sure it is frustrating for Blizzard being unable to decipher what makes classic so wildly popular.
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Blizzard has the retail touch. Everything they touch turns into retail. It’s all they know how to do. They have a team of developers who don’t even know why Vanilla is good. They’ll parrot things back to us that they’ve heard us say, to try and ensure us that they understand, but they really don’t grasp it. It’s proved by what they did to WotLK Classic, and the fact that they’ve never even made an attempt to undo what they did to the retail game.
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Yep, I wont be playing Cata, that’s why i left retail, if people want to play cata just go back to retail and play it till their hearts are content, what a joke there was a reason people only wanted classic to stop at WotLK because after that it’s retail again.
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i love retail so this is a good change for me.
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I like the new ranking system.
Still not a handout to reach 500k, but no longer impossible for non-NEETs
Only thing they need to do now is split PVP gear into three phases, with additional requirements for phase 2 and 3.
Yes because 40-70 hours a week in BGs for 5 weeks straight is just handing out gear. You really want to address ease of gear it’s GDKPs … I spent less time for better gear and didn’t even have to be good dps because the groups are hand picked to have a few strong players carry you through the raids.
This is hilarious to me. As someone who both received participation awards in youth and was a starting lineman on a Colorado high school championship football team, I can assure you the former does not take away from my accomplishment of being a state champion.
However, what the participation trophy did was keep me playing. So if the ranking changes are like participation trophies and they keep people playing, then it keeps people paying. Which to Bliz is the bottom line.
One can argue that it never was really that special. Just required you to spend a lot of time in the game. It never meant you were good, just that you had the ability to spend every waking moment in BGs. I remember times during BC where I’d fight a high warlord and just stomp on them, there was one specific instance where my 63 prot pally was jumped by a 70 high warlord rogue and just destroyed him.
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Yeah it’s social equity infecting classic now. Very retail. The journey was the fun in the vanilla honor system. Not just getting rank 14. You didn’t need to get to rank 14 to have fun. Blizzard’s design philosophy is all just about getting everyone to the final reward so everyone has them. Thereby ruining the experience.
Like just let us have vanilla. If I want to play retail I’ll go play retail.
Now everyone and their mother will be rank 14 at the 8th and 9th week. Which means a new form of griefing can begin which will result in no games happening at all anymore. A bunch of rank 14s will just gatekeep anybody who doesn’t have rank 14 from progressing. Thus no one will queue anymore.
It’s beyond me how Blizzard hasn’t thought experimented this out yet.
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Not possible. Classic and retail are mutually exclusive. If something is retail it ceases being classic. Tbc/Wrath already went that route years ago when blizzard maintained their flying mounts, gamestore boosts, and all that other garbage. Classic Era is still Classic and will remain Classic.
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Even though I mostly like the new changes, they should have just reverted back to the old vanilla system (yeah that insane grind) and kept it as authentic as possible. It seems like one of their main goals was to patch up the whole pooling issue, which is basically an exploit. If this is the mindset they have, then what about stacking world buffs? Isn’t that an exploit as well? Personally I would like to see world buffs gone just like how it was in SoM.
Now, what happens when the battleground activity decreases? Grinding up 500k honor/week isn’t a walk in the park even right now. Are they gonna lower the caps? Increase honour gains from battlegrounds? This is a slippery slope they’ve walked into.
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You’re like 4 years late.
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It’s well intentioned and some of it is thoughtfully designed but some of it is not.
Having straight cut-offs for which anything in-between the last threshold and the next one equates to 0 additional progress is fairly obnoxious and poorly designed.
The amount progress you get for your rank should be a fairly smooth curve against the amount of honor you earned.
Instead, if you’re rank 10, the difference between 256249 and 256250 honor is decaying orprogressing 50% of your rank bar, which isn’t logically sound at all.
It’s the right direction but it still needs to be fine-tuned.
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Agree.
As I was ranking, I was kind of perplexed by that design decision.
If they could fix that problem, it would be greatly improved.
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Having wildly outdated systems and graphics is not what makes classic popular. EQ 99 is a thing if you really love janky crap dripping with nostalgia. I wouls love to see the modern engine and UI slapped on clasic
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No one will answer the million dollar question. How is 70 hrs a week casual? Unless they plan on addressing this question then they shouldn’t make threads.
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This.
If they ever add in-game store, boosts, transmog, into era - it would no longer be classic/vanilla it would just be another form of retail.
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The new ranking system is great. The old ranking system was abysmal.
We play classic because we don’t like retail.
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