From 1 to 10, how would you rate Blizzard's handling of Classic?

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
21

Great effort? Blizzard did as little work as possible. That was evident from the beginning. They’re entire infrastructure is based around sharding, so they pretending to come up with this “new technology” just for Classic called layering when in reality it’s the same thing.

As for rating Classic, it depends on what you’re comparing it to. Actual Vanilla OVERALL experience? Objectively for me, 6/10. PvP is 9/10 because there isn’t a whole lot they could do But raiding is 0/10. But half of Vanilla was leveling and a lot of others things people oculd do. And that has more to do with the world, and that was largely unchanged.

I can’t speak for the leveling experience because my everquest friends told me questing was overrated and to skip everything lol. WoW was my first MMO, so wth did i know.

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22

I’d give it a solid 6. I really wish they could have made the original 1.12 client work rather than this Frankenstein creation of slamming the original data with the modern client. But it’s little things like…the original options menu were so much better than the generic current one. Stuff like that that annoys me a bit.

Their choice of 1.12 AV was of course a horrible one. If it had been 1.7 AV that alone would have bumped my rating up to a 8 or 9. Such a lost opportunity.

They’ve stayed remarkably and amazingly consistent with #nochanges. People like to say they haven’t, and that’s absurd. The few changes they’ve done aren’t very impactful. Sadly those changes do diminish the experience, but by and large Blizz has ignored the nonsensical qq asking for all kinds of balance changes, or QoL changes and things that would drastically impact the experience. I give them props for that.

If they maintain this same philosophy going forward into TBC I can see that being a monumental success…even moreso than Classic, because the potential for a better representation wouldn’t exist. Not for me, anyway. There is no authentic 1.7 AV option, for example. So even choosing 2.4.3 like they did with 1.12 with Vanilla is fine. Some might call it lazy, but to me it makes no difference. I welcome the state of the expansion in the final patch.

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23

I would say a solid 8.

One of the biggest issues plaguing classic still is AV horde starting situation. Then a few minor details.

24

After 15 years they have not fixed terrain exploits in BGs

0/10 useless Activision staff

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25

7/10
-1 for lack of policing of bots/spams
-1 for old glitches not being fixed/no updated textures
-1 removal of funny “corpse graffiti”

In all fairness to Blizzard they’ve mostly remained faithful to vanilla with some graphical enhancements and fixes. Of course it’s not their fault that the player base has changed and that the game has been figured out after 15 years.

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26

Compared to what? I have nothing to compare it to. So I have no way to define 1 or 10.

The question is meaningless, unless there are other things to compare to, so we can define the scale. 5 means “as good as”. 8 means “better than”.

27

The release of Phase 2 without battlegrounds was a touch of Blizzard genius. How many subs were lost in those 2-months, wasn’t it exceeding several million?

Genius handling. 1/10.

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28

Execution was poorer than a good private server, to be completely honest.

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29

Their lack of dedication to museum piece makes it a poor example of vanilla.

But their attempts at fixing core issues vanilla had fell far too short.

_
But to explain this in a…very muscular way…I will show how and why with cause and effect.

-Blizzard used the modern client for a baseline for Classic so it could allow bnet integration. And the cause…
*Many bugs and issues with the modern client were present in Classic(and still are. like characters facing a single direction and running in another)
*Many modern features were present, and some still are (such as right click report) that either do not benefit Classic, or are ‘arguable’ in their level of value.
*Hurt it’s value as a ‘museum piece’

-Blizzard increased server size to compensate for player interest which in turn…
*Increased PvP battle size changing the world PvP Dynamic and lowering the viability of certain classes
*Decreased resource supply compared to demand causing massive market inflation and player frustration
*Caused server instability
*Failed to fix population issues and there were still ques

-Blizzard added ‘layering’ as well. This led to…
*Early exploitation of layer hopping
*Players literally getting into a second instance of molten core
*Players not being able to find each other

-Blizzard opened up free transfers off overpopulated realms without faction restricting and then…
*Players not wanting a que left causing servers to become more imbalanced
*Players not wanting to be on an imbalanced server left
*Servers that were balanced became horribly imbalanced
*Servers that used to have ques would eventually die
*Blizzard opened up $paid$ xfers (and this process looped back in on itself making a repeated issue until FINALLY Blizzard faction restricted xfers)

-Blizzard changed black lotus spawn to compensate for increased playerbase…
*But didn’t take into consideration farming in vanilla vs modern farming causing the rich to get richer
*But didn’t take into consideration vanilla raiding vs modern raiding causing demand to skyrocket while supply barely increased
*And made it less true to Vanilla by doing so

-Blizzard artificially implemented spell batching to appeal to the fans. However this…
*is arguable in it’s value as ‘vanilla-like’. (There isn’t much else to say on this one. Same with leeway)

-Removed large numbers of skeletons and that…
*made it less vanilla-like
*made it less cool all around

I’m sure there is more I forgot with my old man brain, but that’s the stuff that sticks out to me.

Here Blizzard shows they have no muscle. No big, brawny dedication to the museum piece, nor any sort of bronzed, bulging limbs to enhance Classic. They fall short of making it a ‘faithful’ recreation and also somehow stumble flat on creating a better experience.

I highly doubt Blizzard understands what ‘the spirit of vanilla’ really is. This was likely just a cash in. 4/10

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30

I’m still irked by Blizzard for completely dropping the ball on handling servers at the start of classic. The complete hands-off, lack-of-moderation approach was pretty annoying, as well.

3/10.

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31

2/10

Launching 1.12 at the very start significantly cheapened the experience.

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32

The only data they had was 1.12.

33

7/10. The botting and resource starvation could have been handled better, but beyond that I really don’t have much reason to complain.

34

9/10, I think they’ve done the best the can do. They stayed true to their word for the most part and stayed relatively hands off. A lot of people had unrealistic expectations and wanted things to be 1:1 just like they remembered from 2005. That was never realistic or possible. It’s a 2005 game that was released on 2019, there’s gonna be a lot of differences that can’t be helped because of it.

My one complaint is they really do need to be more aggressive with handling bots, I don’t get why they haven’t started swinging the legal hammer with no mercy against the people making the programs.

35

3/10. Nostalgia factor falls everyday. 2 months ago it was 5/10 until…

36

I’m very happy with Classic.

I’d give it 9/10.

I think that I might be one of the few people who remembered what the appeal of the game was. I didn’t leap straight back into raiding - in fact, none of my three 60s are even Onyxia keyed at this late stage. All I wanted was a game that I really enjoyed back instead of a game I hate (Retail).

I got that.

They lose one mark because while I am in the spirit of NoChanges, I wouldn’t mind a few things that aren’t really in the spirit of the game being patched out - “Boosting” – premades graveyard farming PUGS all day long (could have made it so premades meet premades in a sort of handicap system) – but these are minor niggles.

The only thing that will ruin Classic for me is if they progress my server to TBC. I’m not interested in it at all.

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37

5
Meh :smiling_imp:

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38

Overall scripting: 10/10, everything works flawlessly, down to small things like NPC emotes and speech.

Server stability: Again, 10/10 compared to private servers. No random crashes or long downtimes.

Server stability with lots of players around: 0/10, why is this a problem for a multi billion dollar game dev but not volunteers working in their free time?

Botting: Screw this “ban wave” crap, bots need to be banned immediately. The fact that bots can level to 60 and farm for WEEKS before getting banned is nothing short of embarrassing.

I could go on and on, but really, tl;dr the game itself is great but Blizzard’s handling of customer support and banning botters/hackers is pitiful.

39

3/10

While the technical execution of the platform has been solid, several obvious management pieces have gone unaddressed or were addressed poorly. Such items come to mind:

  1. Spell batching, horrific dumpster fire grade failure.
  2. Event and phase launch handling, this could have been and should have been handled with the full community and feel of Vanilla in mind, instead Blizzard chose to cater to the streamers and sweat lords. This has failed to generate a Vanilla feel.
  3. Drop rates and loot IDs. over the last 8 months I have seen 0 shields off Chromag and 1 crossbow with raiding every week. In the last year, I have never seen a binding. This is beyond unacceptable and shows that Blizzard continues to fail at basic RNG functionality. Of course rather than fixing this in retail they switched to the personal loot system, so they have NEVER figured this one out. My hope is that they realize this blunder and do something for the Muru critical Blades in BC.
  4. The handling of the honor system has been abysmal, forcing players to cheat to get even enough participation so at least 1 if not 2 players can achieve bracket 14 in a given week. This is the ONE thing in Vanilla pretty much everyone, including many in the #nochanges community, begged you to change or adjust. Again, another failure of massive magnitudes. I’m only thankful that no one has been reported as dying from attempting the rank 14 grind like happened 17 years ago in Vanilla.
  5. The AQ event. This was the largest level of hot garbage ever done. Not only were community cries of making common sense changes to certain aspects ignored, not only was community pleas to set the opening and completion out by a set number of weeks ignored, the devs decided to move forward on leaving this even identical to the original. This was (imo) one of the biggest mistakes made thus far.
  6. Refusal or consistent inaction against cheaters and bots. You can tell us you’re doing things all you want, when we keep finding bots over and over again, it doesn’t look like you’re doing anything. I suppose we should be happy that it only took you 17 years to finally do something about multiboxers though, right?
  7. Pathing issues and the rise of one pulls. This is NOT INTENDED PLAY!!! Grinding out dungeons on repeat is intended play, what I have witnessed happen in Mara is absolutely not. This is beyond a travesty, especially considering nothing has been done about it.
  8. Bugs, bugs, and more bugs. I suppose 17 years isn’t enough time to fix bugs, so we should be patient, right?

Those are my feelings, I’m relegated to farming for my epic flying for TBC and working on creating a guild for that now that Classic is pretty much over. This experience has been a dumpster fire at best due to the inaction by the devs on the above criticism. Of course, this will be labeled as hostile because it doesn’t fit within their safe space guidelines for this forums use.

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40

10 faithful
It’s a largely faithful reproduction of Classic. With a handful of minor changes that don’t change game play but do enhance quality of life. It’s exactly what I wanted and hoped for.

The only change I’d make is to sell Blizzard coins. The massive numbers of people buying gold affect the economy in ways that penalize those who don’t.