For me it had nothing to do with heirlooms and everything to do with my classes just gradually feeling like they were forced awkward single specs. Hunters having limited traps, shamans not really even having actual totems anymore, etc.
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they sucked all the fun out of it a long time ago when they took away our classic world, did away with our classic talent trees, and took away the social aspect and made our toons be Super powerful. In a fun world were all small parts of a bigger puzzle that comes together beautifully in classic wow
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No.
Class design is “broken”. Every class is in many ways a clone of another.
The story is rubbish.
The scaling system is the worst idea in WoW ever.
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It don’t know that I could give a definite answer to the question. In part because I’m not even sure what the game would really look like or how many changes would need to be rolled back in order to make it seem closer to what I liked best.
The thing is when I quit WoW cold turkey, it wasn’t even specifically because I hated WoD, it was because I had been playing since vanilla and I needed a serious vacation from fantasy-based MMORPGs.
I tried Guild Wars 2. It was shinier but felt like a lot of time spent to relearn all the pesky little details of a game that was still in a lot of ways based on the same root ideas as the game I’d been playing for 10ish years already. I tried Wildstar and thought it was great fun with it’s totally different theme, but I didn’t have enough energy to devote to it to make it worthwhile to keep playing.
Classic launched at a really good time for me personally and I’m having a great nostalgia trip.
Over the years Blizzard did tons of things that were clearly designed to try and get players like me with changing life stages and who were receiving greatly diminishing returns from each subsequent expac (Especially starting with Cata) while simultaneously trying to make the game inviting rather than overly intimidating for players who had never once touched the game prior to Cata and stuff.
It’s easy for us to all come in with our hindsight and make lists of things that were slippery slopes and try and play pin the tail on the game’s downfall. I think at it’s Core that WoW was always meant to be the MMORPG for everyone, and in order to keep it that way over time they had to resort to increasingly alien game design tactics.
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They really are 2 different games at this point. One more of a sandbox where we the players have much more influence on the world through community, the other more of a theme park ride. There are large numbers of people who like each style and neither is objectively “better”.
Blizzard now has to figure out how to cater to both groups. Trying to change retail to attract people who enjoy classic more is just going to make people who’ll like retail leave and vice versa.
Not sure what the answer is going to be after classic has in its course (classic+, TBC or something else). As someone who prefers the classic game, I hope they figure it out, but I don’t think it will have anything to do with retail.
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One of the reasons why I stopped playing WoW was the fact that I just didn’t like the direction the storyline was headed in. I was okay through most of Wrath of the Lich King, though I was a little unhappy with all the dragon aspect killing (I just love the concept of them), but then they had Thrall do his walkabout, left the Horde with Garrosh, killed off Cairne, and eventually had Sylvanas become warchief (for the record, I haven’t played in years so I have no idea how that last part happened). I don’t remember enough about the Alliance’s overarching story to recall if I hated it or not. I played both sides but the Horde was the one I became the most invested in towards the end of my playtime.
Anyway. Much of my enjoyment in WoW comes from the story/setting and Blizz did a lot I didn’t personally agree with, so I stopped playing, much like someone who stops watching a TV show/reading a book that takes a turn they don’t like. I don’t think I’d be enticed by a “Pristine” server because it would still include story elements that turned me off.
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All that being said there’s one really good example that I can give of how things could be changed for better, and it’s nothing to do with taking away level boosts or LFR.
Things lost their flavor. Stuff that wasn’t very well done in vanilla was changed, but not in the best way possible.
Take hunters. A lot of the basic things you need to know about being a successful hunter weren’t really that obvious. A lot of things in the interface were straight up clunky. Instead of improving the interface and maybe adding a questline or two to help newb hunters learn the expected ways of the hunter, they simply started deleting mechanics that made hunters fun to play. Even before I quit during WoD I had long since stopped playing the hunter class very much because it felt too much like playing a warlock with different pets.
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No, pristine realms was a horrible idea. I was insulted when they first suggested they would do that instead of doing Classic.
Besides, the people who like retail like those QoL features, and the people who don’t have Classic. There isn’t really an audience for pristine realms.
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Nope. I wouldn’t play Retail regardless of modes they put it in. I simply hate the current design. Blizzard seems pretty proud of BfA so I don’t see them putting out anything that I might enjoy.
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Absolutely not. You would have to completely remake every zone, every class and the entire story to make me even consider retail. At that point though, you’ve got an entirely new game, so what would be the point?
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Those were the developers who brought in all the changes that “pristine” would remove. And in fact, they were very popular changes that cause subscriber to greatly increase.
BfA has been Ion’s attempt to return some of the vanilla features he thinks would return the game to its former glory. Instead they’ve had to roll back some of these changes, but too little too late. Lots of people have left the game forever.
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I just do not care for the direction of the game, in just about all fields, after Wrath. I can criticize aspects of BC and Wrath I didn’t like (such as flying in BC and LFD in Wrath, among others) but they were overall a net positive.
Come Cata things started becoming a net negative imo. Blizzard will always do a good, or at least decent, job on game assets, but if you are so focused on those, you can miss the point. I like to make this comparison…
Super Metroid vs. Metroid: Other M
Super Metroid is almost unanimously considered the better game, yet Other M beats it in every measurable way. Graphics, sound, content, length, etc. so why is it Super Metroid is the (for most) better game? And it’s not merely nostalgia, people who never grew up with it still often consider it a better game, which we are also seeing in Classic WoW.
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Fast forward 10 years, we have the homogenized classes we have today.
In hindsight, maybe instead of listening to the min-maxing rule lawyering elitists players (the worst people to play D&D with from what I heard) who must have every single class be exactly “equal” - where a performance delta of 0.5% = uNplAyaBLE - they should have kept the 40-man raid size with medium difficulty, and get guilds to PUG to fill their roster with raid rewards scaling with raid size.
Yes, there will be people being carried but it would be a more welcoming atmosphere and would have helped the community play together.
That’s the theory any way. 
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@ironpelt
this response is just wrong
It has nothing to do if it “resets” That sounds like someone who never plays wow.
the shortest answer is the community. After Dungeon Finder & Raid Finder, the game suffered massively. There are more smaller reasons, but that is the biggest one BY far.
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This 
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Thank you!
I would try it out on retail sure.
Here, here.
Garrisons. Man if housing and guild halls were added this would be awesome.
But not in retail.
As you mentioned, just too much crap that doesn’t mean squat to me. Also, the Lore is a flaming turd at this point.
I could never be brought back to that.
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It would be a step in the right direction, but it wouldn’t fix retail. Classic would still be a much better game. It wouldn’t fix the crap daytime soap opera story, the nonexistant talent trees, the nonuniqueness of classes, the uselessness of professions, the multiple versions of content and gear… just to name a few things.
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Classes have lost the identity and flavor that Distinguished them.