yall do know that classic eventually becomes retail right? also no one is being given rank 14, and you certainly dont deserve it because you grind longer than others. it just tells me its a skill issue
The original ranking system was super naive and deeply flawed. It made more sense in a 2005 world where a lot of players had come from other MMOs like Dark Age of Camelot. Everything in WoW was more casual than the hardcore stuff in other MMOs, or so I’m told.
I am 100% certain they were eager to get rid of it as soon as it was apparent that it was just a damn mess. You know they thought it would be fun and cool, that’s why they put it in the game so I do give them props for that kind of thinking.
Blizzard never explained what they meant by saying the changes were for the health of the game. Still think this was unfair to people who earned it in the old system. I would not call the new system “giving away” R14. I’m curious to see in the weeks coming up how many actually get it. Personally I have no interest in ranking but at least there is something in the game for people who only like to BG.
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There weren’t brackets when did it (or there were and I just didn’t care /shrug), but I had to grind as many actual kills as I could as well as spam whatever BG was hot for the day, not just spam AV for a few hours and AFK.
Ranking doesn’t really matter anymore. It mattered then because the gear was superior.
Oh this is nonsense. It still takes like 50 hours a week of pvp to cap. Oprah aint doing that.
I mean, I’d take the group finder from retail and put it in classic. Wouldn’t bother me. (Note: the group finder is not random queueing and teleporting into dungeons)
Hell, I would also take the modern AH too. It’s objectively better than the old AH classic still uses.
#nochanges was a dumb idea from the start. The world has changed since Vanilla, and no one, not even the people who wanted Vanilla servers play Classic the same way they did back in 2004 - 2006. That’s not to say they should make all the changes, but targeted changes that don’t really change the spirit of classic are fine. Like, if they gave Classic the modern AH, would that really make it not feel like classic anymore? I would argue no, it would not.
I get a little less than 10k honor per hour.
I mean, if it was a toggle, would it really hurt the experience of anyone who didn’t want it?
Every spec was always viable or at least useful for something.
This is a dumb idea for vanilla classic.
Also dumb.
Classic+ on it’s own servers doesn’t change Vanilla classic at all.
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Well, the title kind of reminds me of my early 2022 thesis The loss of authenticity in Classic: Welcome to Classic Retail even though you’re only focusing the rank 14 thing.
How many hours are required to get 500k honor?
At absolute minimum, about 38 hours IN the battlegrounds. That doesn’t include time spent in queue, and it assumes games in AV where both teams are playing as efficiently as possible. If either team turns it into a slog then it could easily go to double that on a bad week.
I’ve only just started the journey to Rank 14 and it’s definitely NOT a hand out. I’ll grant you that getting the Blue PVP set is a fair bit easier compared to the old system - and even getting to Rank 11 for the mounts can be done with a comparatively low amount of hours, although it’s still not just “Do a couple of hours of AV on the weekend and get Rank 11”, and would take you about 3 weeks from Rank 10 if you were getting 250k honor in a week.
However, once you want to get to Rank 12, 13 and ESPECIALLY Rank 14 you are putting in some real time over several weeks. The main advantages the new system has (and they are big ones, don’t get me wrong) is:
a) The ability to rank without engaging with the “PVP mafia” and engaging in bracket stacking. You can queue as a solo player and while it might take longer than playing with a group or a pre-made you still 100% have the potential to make it to Rank 14 without worrying about competing against your own faction or upsetting the balance. No one is going to flame you or mass report you for accidentally getting 2k more honor than you were “allowed”
b) You can take a break in the middle of your ranking and you won’t lose essentially all of your progress. You can only decay down to the bottom of your current rank. If you were Rank 12 and 80% and suddenly your PC died, or you got sick, or had to stop playing for any reason at all for the next 4 weeks then you’ll return to find yourself still at Rank 12 and 0%. Whereas back in the older system, you’d likely find yourself somewhere around Rank 8. Even if you took a week off in the old system, you wouldn’t simply lose a week’s progress - you’d lose more like 2-3 because of the massive decay.
c) Those on different sized servers are now perfectly equal. In the old system, you wouldn’t be competing against the opposing faction to rank up - you’d be fighting your fellow faction-mates for limited spots in the brackets. The size of these brackets depended to the amount of players in the PVP pool (those who had more than 15 HKs per week) and it meant that people on larger servers would (assuming everyone obeyed the bracket stacking mafia) have a lot more people able to progress their rank than those on a smaller server. On the other hand, on a smaller server you could potentially need a lot less honor to be in the top bracket, especially if you engaged in “bracket boosting” where you and your friends made hundreds of Level 1 alts, killed an AFK alt at the graveyard 15 times and repeated so that the PVP pool was inflated. None of that is a concern now, and everyone who puts in the work will get the same amount of rank progress.
I truly believe those who think that Rank 14 is now just “handed out” haven’t experienced it personally or are unfairly comparing it to the old system. The original ranking system was absolutely brutal and unhealthy - it was completely normal for people to spend 16+ hours per day PVPing and the only way to mitigate it was for everyone to boost the brackets with Level 1 alts, and by creating an unofficial honor cap that people were expected to obey. People were basically trying to create the system we have now - an honor per week cap, more people getting rank progress, all of this was already attempted through player created systems.
My only real complaint so far about the new PVP system is that I’d prefer that WSG and AB were a more viable route for honor capping than simply pumping AV all week. Perhaps making it so that every non-AV week was either AB or WSG weekend essentially, in terms of bonus honor. I’d definitely like it more if my PVP ranking involved some more actual PVP. But as someone who never attempted to get higher than Rank 10 because I didn’t want to deal with bracket boosting or stacking, I’m mostly a fan of the new system. I’m happy to grind for my rank - I think a 40 hour per week (minimum, assuming ideal HPH) is still a massive undertaking but it’s now achievable. An 80 hour per week grind would not have been, and wouldn’t have been healthy for me or anyone really but especially those of us with disabilities or medical conditions.
Apologies for the really long post but there’s so much misinformation being thrown around but the new ranking system that I thought I should point out where I felt some people were misunderstanding or deliberately misleading.
TL;DR - It’s not a hand-out, it’s still a big grind and unless you think it’s reasonable to play WoW for 18 hours per day for 7-8 weeks without being able to take any breaks it’s absolutely an improvement over what we had.
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Well said. How people think 40+ hours a week is a handout baffles me.
because it used to be a lot more 
they have casualized it.
Yes but only in the scenarios Malignia mentioned. My experience in Era after TBC and pre-population boom of this year was people boosting the pools to create the brackets and setting a soft cap on honor/week themselves. This still happened even after the population boom but in the low pop clusters. So yes, it used to be more except when it didn’t.
Because as soon as Deathwing erupts from Deepholm, everyone becomes a bunch of care bear furries and scalies working to solve the problems of the Dragon Isles with the power of friendship and inclusiveness. Never mind the war crimes being committed in Azshara, Stonetalon Mountains, and Hillsbrad Foothills, because that’s completely synonymous with Dragonflight!
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Oh, and I even forgot to mention “Sand Marshals” who would play on a dead server, do 2-3 hours of bracket boosting on multiple clients and then do the Sand turn-in quest in Silithus for 200 honor each time for another couple hours. They’d be basically the only person getting honor on that server and would get into Bracket 1 with 5-6k honor. Repeat for 6 weeks and they’d be GM/HWL and transfer to the popular cluster. FAR less effort than 500k honor in the new system.
I truly think the only people who are complaining are ones who have never touched the ranking system in any meaningful way, or who got R14 in the old system and feel a bit cheated (this is the only valid position, but unfortunately I think the health of the game and players trump their feelings although I think that they should automatically get their R14 title back since everyone who gets it in the new system won’t decay) and obviously trolls like Eyr who comes into every Classic thread and tries to wind people up.
I challenge anyone to stream themselves getting to Rank 14 in the new system and then say “Well that was a hand out”. It isn’t, it’s just not.
DF is 100% them trying to undo what they’ve done tbh
I’ve shared my opinions on this a lot but haven’t posted on this thread yet. It’s just mostly pointless these days and it tends to involve talking to the same people so I didn’t bother.
First off I don’t think that this system is a “hand out” but I also don’t think that it lends to the “feel of Vanilla” and I do think that it instead makes the game “feel more like Retail”. I’ll explain.
I did fight the change for a few reasons. First, because I don’t agree with changing Era much at all as any changes and take away from what it was (save that for the seasons for Classic+). Secondly, my reasons for really loving the old system involve team play and server community-type things over all else, both of which this change has stripped away (as I knew it would) and both of which were a key part of what made “Vanilla” fun and memorable.
So what is Era ranking now? A highly self-focused time gated grind. Where people mostly just chain AV and, if ally, kill bots.
What has featured highly self-focused time-gated grinds for years now? Grinds that are very boring and largely unmemorable 
Oh yes… Retail!!! Making ranking now MUCH more like Retail.
Whereas before there was an actual old-school MMORPG element that would naturally lead any person with normal social skills to group play where you’d sit in trenches with the boys now running WSG and AB and learning to do better as a team and meeting people you’d end up chatting with for years, and rerolling with on Fresh and doing it again. That’s now mostly missing so for me the end result is hollow and bland.
The people who like this new system the most seem to be those who felt “gatekept” by the old system before, maybe because they didn’t have the time which is understandable and this new system doesn’t change that a ton, or because they just have to play ret pally or whatever.
Also, the people who I see are both happy now and complain about the old system are often those who don’t have great social or networking skills, nor any desire to improve on this, and who don’t play MMORPGs for the MMO part and who don’t play Classic because they want “Vanilla” but more for “something to do”. Often they are big retail fans too who would be subbed regardless.
One other thing:
I won’t quote the whole thing and only didn’t reply yesterday because there are only Whitemane and Mankrik that are “healthy” for Era and a few others where people like the really small pop. So people migrating to these is ok.
However, going back further I do not think it’s good for every server to be the same. Things like the AQ gate opening, resource wars, and even rank drama made each server unique with its own stories, creating real server communities. I remember things from my Vanilla server and it’s been years. I can talk to people from those days and they remember the same things. What do I remember from WoD or later? Little to nothing because bland self-focused grinds are nothing to remember.
Server community is something that retail has been lacking for a VERY long time and that’s killed the game being fun for a lot of people. Something that I’d also say that Wrath Classic is now lacking, which is why I’ll never go back to it.
It’s pretty sad when people want to kill the things that make an old-school version of the game unique due to their own VERY self-centered, often short-term thinking, desires.
Things are as they are now though and Era has another boring and unmemorable system that will stay, centered around the self-obsessed who add nothing of value to those around them, just like Retail.
Also, the 500k may not be great for the “long-term health of the game” if enough decide they are done.
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That’s also one of the reasons retail (and honestly, mega servers in 2019) felt so hollow. Too many people means a community rarely feels like a community. When my server got connected to Frostmourne in retail, the identity of the server died overnight, Frostmourne was too big. We were now just the server tag at the end competing with guilds who could abuse and discard members for their own gain. It’s also a big hesitance I have with ‘‘1 of each server type’’ asks people have for seasonal/fresh. I want the option of the 2-3k pop server not the 7-10k pop.
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Tricksta the one true Scarab Lord!!
But true - this is what’s been really off-putting about classic era for me. Ranking is just throwing enough time at AFK-AV, bots, PVE is running GDKPs. The whole sense of “community” and “camaraderie” feels a little lost. Everyone just on their own personal journey, chasing the dopamine drip. The highlight of classic for me were that of server drama (Earthfury discord!!), Guild rivalries, Guild drama, ranking with friends, spam queuing BGs and meeting people along the way, many were queuing WSG and AB for fun and making “friends” with gamers on both factions (WSG itself was it’s own little community), giving premades a hard time with a little stack etc.
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Hopefully they will create wrath era servers for those that want to stay in wrath and if they do cataclysm then power to those that want to do that.
I don’t understand how no one could have seen this coming.
When you’re expecting them to just release the older expansions with the same timeline of content launches a second time, it’s eventually going to get to a point where it’s just going to be completely unrecognizable as Classic and just be Retail all over again.
They weren’t just going to “build a new World of Warcraft” for you like how you expected them to.
This guy gets it. They are preying on your nostalgia, thus repeats the cycle…
Ugh I’m getting so tired of the term gatekeeping. It’s analagous to entitlement. People feel like they deserve access to a thing simply becuase they logged in and the concept of having to build a group and interact with other people to accomplish a goal is entirely lost on them. This was a fundamental complaint by those advocating for RDF in WotLK, stating that they were being deliberately kept out of groups. Meanwhile I was happily gearing several characters by just building my own groups and inviting whoever.
While I do think some pretty shady practices grew out of the legacy ranking system, I do feel like making the PvP grind something requiring little to no group coordination takes a lot of the Vanilla out of WoW. It is what it is, Blizzard rarely backs down on stuff like this, it’s just kind of a shame.
I mentioned earlier in this thread, but I actually liked that GM/HWL existed in this game and was an unobtainable goal given my current priorities in life. I enjoyed the fact that here was this thing that required a butt ton of effort that yielded some pretty great rewards. Even though I couldn’t do it now, I knew that if I wanted to engage it was there.
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