I played up to early Cata and quit, then came back for MoP and had a lot of fun.
WoD made me completely abandon the game. There is no way in hell I would have ever come back for anything other than Classic, and I have zero interest in ever going back to the newest xpac.
“Bad” is a bit too vague…
It’s overly streamlined, dumbed down, and on rails.
It’s patronizing. It’s very design assumes that players are too stupid to figure things out. Everything from class design and character progression to the uselessness of professions and quest helper-esque map markers reflects that.
Retail WoW is basically the Hello Kitty Adventure Island of the MMO genre these days. Just to put things in perspective: when people complain about other MMOs being “too hard”, they’re told to go back to WoW.
To make the problem worse, it is curated by a dev team who decided that Flying was “the problem”, and blatantly refuse to fix the real problems with their product. And they do it at the behest of players who think navigating the terrain through hordes of rapidly respawning wet-noodles is somehow a “challenge”.
Classic, on the other hand, is messy, unbalanced, possibly broken in many ways. But, it’s also nuanced and open. It allows players to make mistakes and gives people a reason to discuss strategies, level professions, sell useful things on the auction house or even grind for gold. There are real milestones there, not just arbitrary time-sinks.
Overall, Classic is the better MMORPG.
It isn’t just the QoL changes that made retail unbearable for so many people. A decade and a half of questionable game design choices made WoW into an entirely, fundamentally different game, and the removal of a few conveniences like heirlooms, while certainly a step in the right direction, just isn’t likely to be enough to make people interested again.
No. I like developing my character in Classic. Every talent point is meaningful, everything I craft feels like it means something. Being on the ground makes the world easier to escape into, and I like the feeling that I start out as a nobody and become someone else over the course of a long adventure.
I want to have total control over my character’s development and final result, not be shoved into the same shape as everyone else of my class.
Also twinking without being put into a separate pool of players. Some people don’t like twinks and think they’re only played by bad players who can’t win without an advantage, and to them I say: Too f***ing bad, lol.
Before Classic I deliberately tried to level an alt “from nothing”… boring as ever.
They need to get rid of cross realm zones, dungeons, and raids for me to even start thinking of playing modern WoW. The next thing they’d need to get rid of is the WoD style expansion design they’ve been following. That would start to get me to consider modern WoW again. Phasing is another thing that would need to go for me.
You’re asking the wrong crowd OP. As a Retail primary player I’d love to play on Pristine Realms. They’re a different form of challenge, and very much pay homage to the appeal of a more hardcore realm. Most Classic players will also likely never return to Retail because they’re so left behind and lost they have no idea how to get back into the game again. For them, they likely wouldn’t be happy unless everyone else had their progress wiped and we all started as nothing again.
But for primary Retail players, pretty sure there’s a crowd out there that wouldn’t mind seeing what the world is like without heirlooms and LFG. Plus no transfers on or off the realm? Sounds like a pretty wicked idea. There’s tons of potential in Pristine Realms. It seems like a logical step forward.
No. The lore is irrevocably screwed up, most of the interesting RPG elements have been nixed from the game, and the new models are absolutely atrocious.
There’s even a strong argument to be made that the MMO part has been removed as well. People in your lfg dungeons may as well be npc’s.
You mean like the challenging that has you level 100 in a week of casual playtime because literally every step of 1-110 is handed to you, heirloom or not?
Pretty sure someone got to 60 in three days without heirlooms. So was that handed to those who made it to 60 in less than a week as well? There’s challenge in Retail if you’re willing to test yourself. But most people do the bare minimum and suddenly feel they’re gladiator Mythic tier level player.
Nothing like getting rid of the Forsaken’s identity of “an undead race of humans” like retconning all of their towns into a chic-goth appearance and away from the ghostly ruins of a once proud human empire.
I don’t know to what degree it is the culprit but it’s definitely a factor.
Essentially what it does is it takes player investment and it quantities it in a concrete fashion that forces players to look at their time spent playing differently.
Another way of looking at it would be the real money auction house in Diablo 3. Now, there were a lot of factors contributing to Diablo 3’s problems, but one of the effects the RMAH has was that you could spent 10 hours grinding for a new equipment upgrade and then open the auction house and see that you could have just spent $8 for that upgrade instead.
For a game that includes some amount of grinding, quantifying accomplishments with real world money can make those accomplishments feel trivial and in some cases a waste of time.
So much this.
The problem with post cata leveling is annoying quests that are given out 3 at a time and you are locked into it. The quest reward gear is ugly and just recolors as you go up. You can one or two shot any mob that is in your level. The quests themselves are predictable and unimmersive. It’s boring. I like questing. I like leveling, but I can only level a new toon by gritting my teeth and trying to ignore how awful it is on the normal servers. They would have to completely rethink the logic of the game, not just remove a few conveniences. Classic is everything I like in gaming. In order for me to want to do something else in WoW, they would have to extend classic in a way that doesn’t break what we already have here. Fat chance.
100% yes. I absolutely hate what they did to the Forsaken.
No. I would hate a pristine realm. I don’t like BfA because it has poor class design, titanforging is a garbage mechanic and D3 style infinite grinds for AP are stupid.
I actually like most modern conveniences and QoL changes in retail. I just don’t like BfA.
A pristine retail realm would leave all the garbage and take away a bunch of the positives and be even worse than regular BfA.
You should probably try playing classic before making such a clueless statement.
No I would not.
Also I think this is a very common attitude. There was never a movement spanning multiple years advocating for pristine realms. There was for vanilla.
Pristine realms were invented by blizzard, not fans.
I think this is an important point. Don’t confuse what J. Allen Youthinkyoudobutyoudont said with anything people actually interested in Classic ever said.
I’m willing to be proven wrong but this doesn’t even sound like a particularly new idea. Even to WoW.
I mentioned it briefly in a different thread post, but weren’t there XP buffs for previous content as early as BC in order to help new people and alts play catch up? Along with that were free level boosts and stuff and that whole thing that ended with like special two seater rocket mounts where you could fly your lowbie friend around and help them play the leveling catch up game super super fast. They’ve always tried to address the concern that the game wouldn’t be able to gather new subscribers if they didn’t somehow have a way to reduce the /timeplayed for previous content for select individuals.
Not saying that I have some other special solution to how this affects the game overall, just that it’s been around in other iterations for a long time.