There’s lots of talk about why people aren’t playing or are quitting. First, Blizzard’s role in this:
Racial trait imbalance was known to players since Classic. Why anyone should be surprised by this (including Blizzard) is beyond me. AV queues for Horde were 1-2 hours in Classic;
Boosting probably made Blizzard a lot of money but it was (IMHO) hugely detrimental to the game. It allowed people to reroll to the latest meta easily and as such they weren’t invested in the game. Everyone knew these were the people most likely to quit or simply raid log;
The 13 day prepatch (we missed the first day from downtime) made the experience worse and made people less invested in the game.
But here are some things that have always been true about TBC that have nothing to do with Classic:
The lore is terrible. Space ships don’t belong in WoW. WoW needs a rewrite with the same systems and to totally retcon the Burning Legion out of it. Or at least, make them come from a plane of existence not on space ships;
TBC levelling is awful (60+). Everyone complains about it. It’s just dungeon grinding and really boring. Levelling for many was the best part of Classic. Classic levelling with the lower TBC XP requirements and higher XP rewards is actually good;
Flying is bad for the game, period. It destroys the sense of being in a world;
Bind-on-pickup crafted items is awful game game design.
Having Outland be separate to the rest of the world was a huge mistake. I mean there are exceptions (Ghostlands, Karazhan). It should’ve been woven into the world much like ZG was woven into STV;
More compressed zones in TBC was likewise a mistake. It begins the road to retail of conveyor belt content. Empty space isn’t necessarily bad. It’s the difference between wandering in the wilderness and wandering around Disneyland;
Itemization sucks. There’s almost zero reason to do Heroic dungeons as anyone who is remotely playing just gets full T4 gear. In original TBC this didn’t happen because players weren’t the min-maxers they are today and the raids were bugged.
For a game to be good the whole game needs to be good. You can’t view levelling as the price people have to pay to get to endgame (raids, arena).
I honestly think people are more excited for fresh Classic servers than they are for TBC. Or WotLK.
Dead wrong. You aren’t even remotely close. Fresh Classic servers will have 1/10 the population the servers had between 2019-2021. Possibly even less.
Classic was a complete joke and way worst than what TBC is. Nobody enjoyed world buff meta. Boosters every where. Multi boxers every where using terrain exploits to farm gold, or sell summons.
The fact of the matter is any game that is as old as classic or tbc needs significant changes if you want to keep the experience fresh or prevent players from ruining it for everyone else.
Yeah, reminds me of people that keep saying Star wars episode 1,2,3,5,6,7,8,9 are trash… so you like only episode 4? You don’t like star wars, you just happen to like ONE movie of the entire franchise… like 10% of the total work.
I find the leveling to be pretty relaxing. The lore is ridiculous but that was always the case. Boosting was the real killer though. There’s nobody in the old world.
I can kind of agree with this. I started in TBC, so I have a soft spot for it. I really don’t like the art and “asian-ness” of MoP, however. In hindsight, I’d assume that’ how a lot of OG Vanilla players saw TBC.
You don’t have to dungeon grind, so I think this is a bit unfair. People made the choice to do that cause it’s more “efficient”.
I can see your point here too, but good luck putting that genie back in the bottle.
I don’t mind this actually. Makes you actually consider having a profession. It’s certainly better than retail where you don’t need professions at all.
Outland being separate makes perfect sense. It’s supposed to be a different place.
I’m sorry, but I actually like this. I can see your point, but it just feels so much smoother.
So T4 is easier than the average heroic? Probably.
Except that doesn’t really solve the problem. You still need to grind the rep so you’ve simply deferred the grind until level 70 and decided to do the same quests for less reward (ie the gold rewards are higher at 70).
In Classic, dungeon levelling is a choice. It’s arguably too good XP-wise, which creates the problem of dungeon boosting. I’d actually like to see this cut but that’s a whole separate discussion.
Except it’s so often not having A profession, it’s forcing you to have a a specific profession. Like if you’re a caster and you basically have to have tailoring, it’s not a choice. It’s just something else you have to do. It’s part of the reason why the drum meta sucks.
Classic had this too where any serious PVPer/raider basically had to have engineering.
I think that’s true for a lot of people. I think we’ll definitely get Classic WotLK and, if I had to guess, I think late next year, early 2023 at the latest.
I think that’ll be it for Classic reruns though (as in no Classic Cata). I could be wrong. But I always thought each expansion would have diminishing interest.
I’m mostly waiting for WotLK Classic, as that was my favorite time playing WoW.
I had actually quit for most of TBC and played on private TBC servers back in the day as I was a really dumb teenager during classic/TBC, but as an adult, I’m having more fun with TBC, though I exclusively just raid/do heroics with guildies/friends.