I’ll preface this by saying that I’m not a Classic player but I definitely enjoyed it back in the day. I played on the EU at the time, got 4 characters to 60 (priest, lock, hunter and druid), raided MC, BWL, AQ40 and Naxx on that lock and did nightly pvp on the druid. So… definitely got to see all of the features it offered.
And I’ve played ever since, bar a gap in WoD and during patch 8.1.
So…. My point.
I’ve noticed a lot of ‘us vs them’ happening in the forums at the moment, to the level it almost seems like a religious debate.
Classic fans talk about vanilla as if it’s the ‘pure’ form of the game. One unspoilt by terrible, money grabbing decisions Blizzard and Activision have made. It’s described as a real MMO, people talk about community being far stronger and mention how the levelling and gearing are far more rewarding. They also see Retail as ‘far too easy’. A game where everything is handed to the player, mobs are a joke and your character is annoyed rather than challenged by the world.
Retail fans, on the other hand, regard Classic players as folk lost in a haze of nostalgia. They point to archaic artwork, bugs, bad UI and a range of modern conveniences and designs that are absent but expected in today’s gaming environment. They also laugh at the idea that modern wow is easy, when the end game is often brutally punishing. Mythic raiding is almost impossible for the vast majority of raiders and high end mythic + dungeons are infinitely harder to do than any old school versions. You want hard? Retail has hard.
What occurs to me is Blizzard has changed their minds on end game over the years. In Vanilla (and now Classic) the game was largely about levelling. I can’t remember the exact quote, but I recall one developer saying they were surprised when more and more people got to 60 and demanded something to occupy their time. They had some raids planned but had assumed most players would just… wander about, run dungeons etc. So they put more focus on raiding and began to make that THE goal of the game. There are other things to do at max level (arenas and now, mythic instances spring to mind) but the main change was levelling became far less important in their minds. It was an extended tutorial. What mattered was keeping players occupied at Max level.
And this… is probably where the game broke. (Or if not broke… has wobbled seriously over the years). The fact is EVERYONE who plays wow levels. EVERYONE. Its an experience we’ve all done (and done and done…). End game however was never as popular as Blizzard assumed. A lot of people never raided in Vanilla. Most people nowadays don’t do mythic+ or even step foot into normal raids. LFG after all was created to show off instances to players, because so few of the player base ever got to see that content. Blizzard moved away from focusing on an experience 100% of the players experience to one only 10% of them take part in. And that experience is made worse by the difficulty scaling of endgame. To whit - look how few guilds have cleared mythic at the moment. Given the size of the player base, you have an end game tuned to such difficulty that after 2 or so months, only 2400 player in the wold have finished it. Which is… insane. And levelling, the thing everyone does or did, is reduced in difficulty because Blizzard desperately want us to get to end game as quickly as possible. “Don’t bother with those murlocks - just hit 120 where your real adventure will begin!”
(Aside - you also have a situation where due to this desire to focus on raiding and instances rather than world content, said world content isn’t challenging. So the developers add more mobs in the world to at least give us multiple things to loot and kill. Which might work in diablo, but in WoW simply adds to the annoyance. Things constantly add but aren’t a threat, they simply prevent you from moving on to your goal. So mob density = sheer irritation rather than fun)
With that said… what to do?
My hope is the developers take a step back with 9.0 and focus on the gameplay the majority of people spend most of their time in. 100% of us will level and more attention should be spent to how fun this experience is; same with us just running around in the world. We all do it - don’t make it something we just endure. And if they really want us all to raid/instance - that needs to be heavily encouraged. The raids need a better ‘in’ than LFG achieves. And the ranks of difficulty need to be reworked back to an era where those who decided to enjoy that content could be reasonably certain that at some point they’d be able to clear ‘top’ content, not just watch on a stream while method and the like do so. (Perhaps instead of mythic tier, you could simply have a raiding system where players can crank up the difficulty of mobs for better rewards and challenges?)
Anyway - long blurb so will stop for now!