How many of you will actually stop playing retail WoW?

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
21

Nope, gonna split my time between both games.

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22

I have not enjoyed WOW since Lich King, I have no desire to play retail ever again. All the expansions IMO have been lackluster.

#nogoingback2retail

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23

RNG on top of RNG.

Not going back to Retail.

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24

Eh I’m subbed but legit don’t log in… I just don’t like the current product

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25

I’m not at all sure I’m in the target audience for this question, but I’m not sure I’m not, so.

I quit partway through Cataclysm. I regret that I didn’t quit earlier, when the dungeon queue was first introduced. In Classic and in BC, forming dungeon groups required social interaction, and once we’d formed a group, we were all pretty committed to finishing the dungeon. There were occasional jerks, but the worst person I ever encountered in those days was still nicer than the average person once the dungeon queue was introduced.

The dungeon queue, combined with the ease of WotLK dungeons and that stupid championing system, changed all of that. Suddenly, instead of coming up with groups for the dungeons we wanted to go to, we were expected to go to seven random dungeons a week, with strangers who increasingly, very fast, acted like everyone there was a bot. Within a couple months, just saying “Hello” got treated like it was bizarre…or, more, like a strange bug. Wiping on a fight invariably resulted in the group picking a damage-dealer and kicking them; needing to go afk to go to the bathroom resulted in getting kicked except for the tank. (If the tank did it, the rest of the group would keep running ahead without them until they wiped and then flip out about the tank not being there, no matter what the tank had said; who was paying attention to chat?) The only approach to dungeons quickly became “run ahead at maximum speed.”

I said “expected to” earlier. You could say that going to dungeons was optional…but, increasingly, the game was about getting better purple pixels. (On the subject of purple pixels, WotLK was the first expansion where epic-level gear dropped from bosses in any normal dungeon, not counting the tiny chance epic-level gear always had of dropping anywhere.) There was no solo fun content, just super-rigid quest chains and daily quests that were designed to be tedious, not fun. All the development effort was put into raids.

WotLK also revised the talent system in a way that annoyed me significantly at the time, but should have bothered me much more as a sign of things to come. BC deliberately introduced substantially more class synergy; for example, enhancement shaman were given Unleashed Rage, which buffed all physical damage-dealers near the shaman when they scored a critical hit. Shadow priests were given Vampiric Touch, letting them restore mana as well as health to their groups.

WotLK went massively in the opposite direction. Stormstrike’s “increase all Nature damage to the target” debuff was changed to “increase Nature damage to the target from the shaman.” Shadow Weaving was similarly changed to only buff the shadow damage of the priest with that talent. Vampiric Touch was changed to grant “Replenishment,” a means of restoring mana which was common to shadow priests, survival hunters, and retribution paladins, and the devs explicitly said they meant for groups to need someone who granted Replenishment–not for any particular class or spec to benefit from the specific presence of a shadow priest. Class synergy in general was deliberately all but eradicated. WotLK was also the era that introduced the concept of the content drought, because it was the first expansion to assume that all players would be raiding and “new fun content” could be safely equated with “new raid content.” Subscriptions peaked and started to decline. Large numbers of people also started unsubscribing temporarily “until the next raid comes out,” for the first time in WoW’s history. Sane developers might have recognized these as warning flags and tried to reverse course.

Then in Cataclysm, they slashed the talent system in half, forced everyone to put a mandatory number of points in one tree, and replaced most of the quests with rigid quest chains designed by someone who thought he was hilarious and very rarely managed to achieve “funny.” “Blood elf men are gay lol” became a theme. If there was a quest your character wouldn’t do, that meant you were done in that zone, since every zone’s quests were an absolutely rigid chain. The “good” news is that doing an entire zone’s quests meant far out-leveling that zone. Also at this point, every major patch entirely revamped the game’s mechanics; it became clear that Blizzard had no idea what they were doing. This was also the era where tier set bonuses started explicitly boosting talents that weren’t necessarily in your spec, because Blizzard had explicitly started taking the assumption by a handful of the highest-level raiding guilds that “everyone uses exactly this build” as gospel–shafting the majority of the original players who simply rolled our eyes and ignored those guilds’ declarations.

Then Mop came out, got rid of the talent system entirely; now everyone who played (e.g.) a fury warrior truly had the exact same build as every other fury warrior. It retconned Varian Wrynn, the frothing fascist who had screamed he was going to cleanse Azeroth of the green-skinned aberrations, into a pure-hearted hero who fought the Horde only because he had no choice, retconned Garrosh (who admittedly had a new personality each expansion up to that point and none of them were particularly appealing) into a frothing fascist, and explicitly declared the Alliance to be about “lawful good overdrive.” Those are the things I can definitely know, as someone who never actually played it.

In a bid to entice me back, Blizzard gave me two free weeks of game time in late 2018. I logged in and played enough to confirm that there are now four classes: tank, healer, ranged damage, melee damage. The only differences beyond that level are purely cosmetic; a Marksmanship hunter plays just like an any-spec mage. Also, the plot of BFA is: Another war has broken out between the pure good Alliance and the pure evil Horde, with non-evil Horde members trying to help the Alliance. Just like Mop. The dev’s efforts to differentiate BFA from Mop have been nothing short of laughable.

So, to answer your other question…could they change all the things I hate about Modern? Someone could, theoretically; the current devs never could. Even if they revised the mechanics to make a fun game again, convinced me that they weren’t going to yank the ground out from under me in the next big patch, and somehow deaIt with the fact that the vast majority of the playerbase who’s still there would be freaking out about the very concept of having to communicate in dungeons and deal with 36 distinct types of characters instead of 4, I don’t know how they’d be able to repair the damage they’ve done to the plot without throwing massive amounts of “it was all a dream”-level retcons at it.

But could they change what I hate about Modern? Practically speaking, no, and so there’s no real answer to “if they did, would I play Modern and not Classic”?

Okay, this was long, and an answer from someone you hadn’t truly asked for one since I already quit long ago. I hope something in it is useful to someone.

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26

I may log on to raid on retail with my friends if they don’t swap over but that all depends on where live cycle is currently at. At least tell my live gold funds run out

27

havnt played live in a couple months, its trash and the devs don’t care. done with that version unless they make drastic changes for the good.

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28

I haven’t played WOW since the end of WOTLK.

I’ll never touch retail again.

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29

I’m dropping retail like a lead balloon as soon as Classic comes out.

The modern game has a couple of nice things like improved graphics and duel spec off the top of my head, but I will gladly give those things up to enjoy the much better overall experience in classic.

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30

I stopped playing BDO just to save up my stamina for Classic, but yeah Pantheon would be a close 2nd choice if classic turns trash

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31

I think most people that will play classic already stopped playing retail. I think retail will struggle at the start until they lower the sub rate to at least compete with the private servers. Once they do that classic will be more popular than retail. Heck it might still be more popular even with the ridiculous sub price.

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32

PREACH BROTHA!! :raised_hands::raised_hands:

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33

I suspect it’ll require a sub again when Classic comes out, but I think Blizzard knows that a lot of us are people who have stopped playing Retail.

They’ve even been pretty lax about letting people openly talk about playing on private servers. Though that could be either because they know a lot of us have done that just to play Vanilla over the years, or because the mods don’t care much about this place.

If Blizzard wanted feedback from the community interested in Classic, they would be missing out on a lot of it by only including those who actively play BfA.

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34

100% quitting. There are too many things I liked missing. Don’t get me wrong I like a lot of the things in retail, but what was lost isn’t worth what was gained.

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35

They are two different games, ill be playing classic during Live downtimes.

36

I already stopped playing retail. I have dabbled in current classic not-to-named method of enjoying classic. And I like it. I will for sure purchase Blizzard’s retail version of classic subscription at that time, but I can see how it’s possible I may never play their current expansion retail version again.

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37

Preaching brother, everything you said hit the nail on the head.
People are blinded by wrath because it had the highest sub numbers but it was the expansion that killed the real wow.

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38

Won’t touch it.

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39

Already at that point. Retail is a dumpster fire and i don’t really see it improving in the future.

Unless they make Wrath/Cata/MoP servers, i will only be on classic.

Edit: The reasons i don’t enjoy Retail is that it no longer feels like WoW.

  1. They threw the classes away and gave us severely downgraded versions that are not fun to play. And they refuse to go back on it. MoP class design please? Artifacts need to stop. They’re not fun, they’re a tedious grind to “fix” your class by gaining AP. Make class design the focus and ditch the entire artifact system.

  2. The game is far too streamlined and as a result the community is dead. No reason to be in a guild unless you’re mythic raiding. CRZ, Sharding, Group Finder, all killed it.

  3. Gear is no longer a reward for effort, it just rains from the sky. You can do a few dailies/weeklies and have a decent ilvl. Gearing up is now boring/professions don’t matter. Remember getting sets and having 2 or 3 sockets in them? Reforging? All gone. Also The old Glyph system.

  4. And lastly, the content just isn’t fun. Warfronts? Boring. Island expeditions? Boring. M+? Toxic and boring. Raids? eh.

Unless Subs reach the red zone and their hands are forced, i don’t see them fixing the game.

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40

I’ll be pretty much 100% classic.

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