The game is fun, but not because of Blizzard in the slightest. It’s a good game in its own merits. However, I can’t help but feeling almost every call made by Blizzard was a mistake.
And it’s really a shame to see such a good game tarnished by bad decision after bad decision.
Blizzard’s handling alone earns a 4/10 for me, could’ve been lower had I seen this thread a few months ago. Now I just take this for what it is and I’m simply happy to be able to run 40 man Naxxramas with a really cool bunch of people. But that’s about it.
2/10… People wanted Vanilla, they got Classic. Classic is nothing like Vanilla. It is partly the fault of the players and partly the fault of Blizzard, but even where the players are at fault, Blizzard could have prevented it by making the necessary changes to ensure the “Vanilla experience” that people wanted.
In some cases Blizzard did address the problems, such as fixing map terrain exploits in BG’s, but in almost all cases they either did nothing or made it worse(xrealm BG’s too early, and whatever they did to AV).
That doesn’t mean Classic is a terrible game, but anyone who played on the private servers will tell you that the pservers did everything better. Even the critics of private servers never criticize the servers, they can’t, because they know Classic is a joke. So they criticize the people who run them.
I agree with your criticisms, but I’m confused why you rated them 7.5/10. Is the 7.5 your rating for the game, or for Blizzard’s handling of the game?
Exactly, it isn’t that Classic is a terrible game. It’s a good game, and I have no interest in playing anything else right now. But anyone who played the private servers knows that Classic is an inferior game, and it didn’t have to be that way.
Blizzard should have owned up from day one that the vanilla experience was impossible to recreate and not tried to cater to #nochanges. Instead it was kind of a mess of things that were definitely not #nochanges like layering and bungled things like batching.
Dude I’ve hit MC on my main and 2 alts from the 3rd week after launch, until late april. I never saw Baron binding across all 3 of them. RNG means sometimes, it’s random and you aren’t guaranteed shiat.
Listening to the ‘no changes’ people was the worst decision they ever made in the history of developing games. The no changers are some of the most ignorant players who have played the game. Many of them didn’t touch the game in 10+ years and couldn’t remember anything accurate about how classic really was, or have any idea what it would be like again.
They’ve wisened up recently though and are making apprioprate fixes, but it’s not enough. I hope they don’t make the same mistake with TBC. Raid content needs to be tuned appropriately. Server economies need to be managed appropriately. Terrain exploits, fly hacking, all of it needs to be fixed. There is no good reason mages or anyone can solo high level dungeons in classic. Boosting needs to be nerfed into the ground.
I would say a 3.
Most of my complaints with Classic are not to do with Blizzard’s delivery of it, so to get a 10 would not be possible, simply because they were never going to deliver the version of Classic they should have - one that wasn’t just 1.12 with gated raids.
My big issues with Blizzard’s production were as follows though:
Far too many servers with far too low caps early on.
There was no reason to make dozens of extra servers you knew weren’t going to work and cap so many of them leading to massive queues. This is quite unfair to the playerbase and does not allow for a healthy selection process when you are joining a realm you know will be dead in a year’s time.
Far too many adherences to “the reference client” instead of what would make sense in 2020.
Ultimately, this was the biggest issue, and I think they handled it this way out of spite at times.
There are legitimate issues with Classic that needed to be addressed for this to be a fun and progressive experience, but it feels to me like Blizzard said “Hey you guys said you wanted this right?”
I believe they produced this product to give people who KNEW what Classic was what they wanted.
But I also believe they stuck to so many of the crude elements of it because they wanted players who might pick it up on a whim to realize it was unpolished and would lead them to believe they were right to sticking with more modern games.
I just can’t shake the feeling that somewhere they are saying in the back of their head “Good, now that everyone knows what Classic is, we don’t have to worry about people lying about it to try to convince us to change the progressing version of the game anymore”
It was a pretty big issue, especially when it comes to difficulty and replayability.
Now that the facts are out there, there is at least no longer any confusion crowding the pathways there.
One thing to be thankful of, even if it came at the expense of my enjoyment with Classic.
phase 1, despite using the 1 12 talents, gear and difficulty for mC/only, it was the closest representation of the nostalgia the community held dear. Everything up to phase 2 was magical, fun and full of rpg goodness. Then phase 2 happened and it was clear as day blizzard was going to have a hard time managing everyone’s expectations and way back machines archival power against their “reference client”.
all other phases started to become very retail oriented with clear min/max push for control in the minds of players. Phase 2 honor was full of griefing gankers, where as many as 15 would camp FPs. You couldn’t enter blackrock mou in rain and alliance players weren’t interested in PvP like that so a majority quit. If this was vanilla you would have been shamed for such actions.
addons, overly used and required. But vanilla had almost none along with extensive database. This made phases 4-5 a “raid log meta” since you couldn’t explore like vanilla with things like aq gate mats collected before day 1 in certain servers.
bots/overly farmed mats and overpop servers.
confused mix of #changes and #nochanges leaving a retail experience.
PvP meta meant horde stacked and bg across servers meant no que punishment or in general allowed players to be really toxic to reach other with no clear punishment. If this was a 2-3k pop server with it’s own bg que, you’d see more of a community develop much like vanilla.
Conclusion:
Classic was fun but was clearly compiled with a retail mindset. Private servers provided the real experience with more emphasis on protecting the nostalgia of players.
There funny part about that is, and I agree with what you said, that this will only push players to go back to private servers. There’s no way they go past lich King, and there’s no incentive for them to redo the whole experience after each expansion become amuseum piece.
There’s already a core group of us going back to either a TBC realm or refresh of vanilla after realizing the 1.12 vanilla client was superior to the 1.13 classic.
Yup, I agree. I enjoyed Private servers much more than the Blizzard produced version, which is crazy to say.
A lot of that was because you knew everyone playing there were all on the same server though honestly.
Was never realistic to upscale that to Blizzard’s expectations.
They left Hunters literally broken in pvp for over 6 months…
They allowed Streamers to live stream exploits with layering and killing dung bosses over and over by exploiting. If you reported anyone of them you were instantly silenced on the forums.
I could list about 20 different things most of which severely affected game play.
Massive ongoing Botting???
Literal game breaking Hacks wreaking havoc on economies.
Fly hack
Teleport hack
What in the actual is wrong with some of you people??
Totally botched the launch, not nearly enough servers and we had to keep picking a new one due to overpopulation before the game even launched – not an easy task with a full guild starting together and many trying to manage connections outside the guild
Did nothing to combat faction imbalance
Made faction balance even worse with free transfers
Megaservers were a terrible idea
World PvP phase was ruined by overpopulation and faction imbalance
BGs never had a “server only” phase like we got in Vanilla, they were cross-server immediately
PvE content was too easy (until Naxx) thanks to 1.12 talents and itemizationj
Very poor handling of botters, gold sellers and battleground AFKs
Probably plenty of things I’m forgetting but those are the big ones. They did a good job of mechanically reproducing Vanilla but they killed a lot of the community aspects.
I’ll give them a 1, they basically did nothing but release nost code on a legitimized private server that has had us overtuned for content based on the patch for its entire existence up until a week ago.
They didn’t implement the unarmored epic mounts because they said it would “make people feel rushed”, laughable in hindsight.
The gold selling, the amount of gold in general, the gdkp runs… this is worse than ANY private server I played on.
No different than whats going on in live… Certain bots go untouched for months and others are actually getting banned regularly. I dunno, behind the curtains stuff going on?
Yea ofc any time humans are in charge of things like private servers and have power to abuse it some will do just that.
I mean look at how disgusting loot council can be.
7 with my main gripe being the dumpsterfire that was paid Xfers and they STILL need to address their mistake and direct involvement with that disaster. My other real gripe is exploiters not being punished, not naming names but in the 49 bracket a certain druid who is disliked by his own faction manages to cheat every single BG and use wall exploits every single game and is never punished for it I mean, what is up.
6.5/10. I wasnt expecting a perfectly executed recreation and my larger gripes are aimed at the community but the game was faithful enough to the original Azeroth and ran beautifully. You can see the age there but the game holds up as an MMORPG in todays market.
I wasnt thrilled with 1.12 myself but when I put myself in their shoes it made alot of sense. My biggest gripes were with layering, mega servers and cross realm bgs.
