imagine, people are still speed running old nintendo games. now consider all the variation in wow by comparison.
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Two types of people.
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Era Forever players who are attached to their character and aren’t looking for endless progression.
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Fresh Forever players who love the format and want to start over feeling the race every time.
Blizzard caters for the first, but it’s a tiny fraction. The second is currently in SoD mixing it up. The real question will be whether they fragment things with a TBC SoD or fold SoD and go to Remix methods.
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You forgot the 3rd type.
Era forever players who are attached to their character and are looking for endless progression.
Once I get this mage full BiS and get spare gear swaps for farming or other activities. I’d still want some type of power gain in some way. But even if I do hit that point I’ll still farm gold and collect useless items to max stack them for the memes.
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That progression will end. Even if it takes years, it will end. The only way it won’t is if you actively delete items.
I wouldn’t call myself a ‘forever-era’ player. I play a little of all of them. But I do still feel like Era is the best version of WoW.
I play for meaningful progression. And I don’t mean incremental stats on gear. Gear is part of the progression … but not the majrity of it. I mean that feeling when you get a new skill (or passive) that you FEEL when you use it. That feeling of anticipation for a couple levels before the next tire in the talent tree, or class trainer, where you’re just itching to get that powerful skill. And then your a MONSTER … for a couple levels. But, then you slowly start to feel that power drop off and then your looking forward to the next big payoff in a few more levels. It’s a similiar Idea to the retail hamster wheel. But each little i-lvl upgrade in Retail feels mostly insignificant outside of seeing slight increase in numbers on a damage meter. Not like when you get a shiny new toy where you can actually feel the impact.
Speaking of impact, another reason Era is so much more effective for the dopamine rush. Skills actually feel good to use. When I press a button on retail it’s just like any other button. They all kinda feel the same. When a major ability procs on Era it’s just simply satisfying to push it and watch the actual impact it has on the fight.
In the end I kinda play the game to level. The game is mostly over for me once I reach max. Often I will put in some time to get some better gear. But BiS gear grind is BORING. And with Era, the whole game is about the leveling process and world exploration ect …
I maxed out my available character slots YEARS ago. Every other version of the game just feels like an incremental devaluing of the dangers of world. It all just got easier and easier to traverse through the story. It became about this ‘end-game’ grind, which can be fun sometimes. But then fun of it has never been getting 2 more i-lvls. The fun of it has always been accomplishing impossible tasks. And Era takes the cake when it comes to feeling like you have done something amazing.
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The constant gear treadmill is a real turn off for me. I’ve been enjoying SoD but the phases are way, way too fast. I don’t enjoy constantly having to get a new BiS set.
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i think Wow Era is the very best of the wow franchise. I do however feel that there is an end for me eventually. The classic era has been around awhile and I was playing retail until a few months ago. I created my first char on Era a few months ago. I think i have many months to have fun on Era, but I’m not the type to have every class on every faction at level 60. that is just not fun for me and i have no need for 9 players with Naxx gear. Its an amazing experience to play era for me. It has a lot more content that i remember when i played back in 2004
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have you done the onyxia attunement? that quest chain is lunacy lol
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I know its crazy but if I had a full BiS Naxx toon with all the best enchants the first thing I would want to do is play my uber character in all the end game content I didnt play on a fully geared toon and do hella wpvp.
Four friends and Strat, Scholo, LBRS (and of course BRD) etc in that scenario sounds pretty awesome to me.
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Our raid lead/mt in Strat pulling non stop is a lot of fun to heal 
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I dont like the current world, prefer the old world, running at a pace that suits and not having to continually chase content.
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PvP on a bis toon is tons of fun, especially when you are doing WSG and both teams have mostly bis players.
Interestingly, pvping on a fresh toon is also a TON of fun, because you are the underdog and it feels extra good when you outplay people, but also there is so much progression to look forward to that every time you get a new item you feel a power-boost in pvp.
In vanilla so much of pvp is about cc, positioning, and consumes, that a skilled player running a fresh toon is often far more useful in any BG / world pvp than a less-skilled player in full bis.
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Lol yah I actually prefer pvping on under geared chars. Dumpstering ppl with my naxx char is nowhere near as fun and eking out a w in a krol blade against a t3 opp
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These are all really good ideas and I’m inspired by them
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I’m not playing Classic Era at the moment, but I feel good knowing that it’ll probably be there for me when I want to return to it. I really enjoy the old version of Azeroth, the quest chains, and even the wonky balance of classes.
That being said, I also enjoy some parts of Retail, too. It’s nice to have options.
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I used to hate leveling, but I have recently found it has become my favorite part of the game. I have lost interest in most aspects of the “real game”. I have lost interest in raids, never cared for M+, and while I still have some fun with retail PvP, the seasonal reset isn’t fun. Socialization only happens on RP realms on retail which is why I moved my characters to Moon Guard. I am digressing though, back to leveling. Classic is just batter for leveling. I will admit it’s a slog and also bland, so I can see why it turns some people off, but the satisfaction for doing it is magnitudes higher than retail leveling which is absolutely atrocious and unfulfilling in any capacity other then “Okay now this is done, so I can get to the real game”. I planned on going through TBC and Wrath, but my line in the sand with classic was if they added monetization that didn’t exist the first time around, and they did that in TBC, then more in Wrath, so I didn’t bother with them.
I like being a pleb in a massive world, I like dungeon crawling, etc. I don’t like being the chosen one, the world feeling small, speedrunning the same half dozen dungeons over and over, getting the same gear over again every few months just a higher ilvl, etc.
The finality of gear (I never have to replace bis gear), and the fact that there is nothing more fun in WoW than a fully world buffed + consumed fury warrior in vanilla.
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