Recreating TBC vs. Recreating the TBC Experience

There’s a difference between recreating TBC line of code by line of code, patch cycle by patch cycle, and recreating the players’ experience playing through TBC expansion for the first time.

I know there’s a lot of opinions for how TBC Classic should be rolled out, but I wanted to gauge a feel for how players (who want to play TBC Classic) want it to be implemented.

Vanilla Classic was pretty faithful to recreating the content cycles, scripting, and game code, but not so much the players’ experience because the content was recreated 15 years after the original launch.

Some private servers have attempted to keep players’ experience intact with some gameplay restrictions that didn’t exist in past versions of the game like stricter anti botting/multiboxing technologies/enforcement and a “fresh” server wipe. We also know now that the there are clear benefits for players to roll Horde over Alliance that weren’t common knowledge when TBC first launched. So some private servers have measures to maintain some faction balance like free respecs for the Alliance only and forcing players to commit to one faction for that server.

If I was the game director…

Strick anti botting/Multiboxing. Ban waves on the Weekly. 1 day a week the team compiles the list and Bans the offenders.

keep the attunements perpetually

Game wise use the final 2.43x patch leave the bug fixes but remove the content nerfs across the board.

Simple approach.

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I can’t even think of anything right off the top of my head that’d need to be tweaked/broken in TBC in order to counter the metagaming that sucked the fun out of Classic. I mean, there’s drums but we did that back then so idk.

Boosting was never such a widespread thing in Vanilla. Or at all. When I was ‘taken through a dungeon’ it was just a level 60 friend helping you do the quest.

There was never hoards of mages AoE farming a group of 4 naked AFKers exp.

People are going to be bringing in tens of thousands of gold into TBC and that frankly is crappy.

If there is no limitation on what it brought over upon moving to a TBC server then I really hope they add the option of fresh TBC for those who don’t want to deal with that trainwreck.

You can never ever re-create “”"“the experience”""" of playing TBC for the first time. It is impossible. You would have to erase your memory for that to be possible.

So I don’t understand why people are so hellbent on “duh twoo TBC experiunz”, when it is literally impossible to ever achieve that. Doing some dumb “patch by patch” crap won’t erase your knowledge of the game. It won’t make you 13 years old again. It won’t make the game (all that much) harder.

People keep crying that bosses should be “pre-nerf” and such…yeah, that’s what vanilla private servers did. And it didn’t “re-create the experience”, people still steamrolled MC and BWL very easily and AQ40 somewhat easily. Naxx remained as the only remotely challenging raid.

I’m kinda glad that Blizzard doesn’t listen to these people because they clearly have no idea that the thing they are asking for is impossible to create.

If I had all the power of blizzard I would

  1. Use swp patch talents, balancing and itemization.

  2. Keep attunements until t6 as it keeps people running dungeons.

  3. Give both faction Paladins the racial seals.

  4. have raids be progressive phases so people aren’t rushing into hyjal in week 3

  5. Keep raid difficulty as it was during initial release with exception of any bug fixes (looking at you t5).

  6. Use character copy with option of race/faction change for a price and have people progress to tbc only servers. This allows classic realms to still be a thing.

I agree with you except a hard NO on #6. Copies will not work now or long term it has to be Transfers whether downward or upward. But Downward is the logical way.

Yes. One of them is an actual attainable goal.

For my part, I want the game I had fun with back. I don’t want the people currently at Blizzard to guess at what made the “experience” for me and try to recreate it. Considering the reference to private servers…I especially do not want Blizzard to make the game harder, or nerf the Horde (really, “we know now that there are clear benefits”–do those “clear benefits” assume that everyone worth mentioning considers PvP hugely important, by chance?) in the name of “recreating the original experience by making changes to the game.”

PvP realms are, were, and presumably will remain “you can only play one faction.” It has no place on PvE realms.

Don’t expect game major overall mechanics to change if it didn’t exist it vanilla TBC. Just not gonna happen.

Blizzard vs Private Servers you just not gonna win because I do not ever see Activision/Blizzard folding as people complaint about #NoChanges

Progressive patching using final versions of the patch before moving to the next. Let the chips fall were they may.

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Progressive patching. No transfer servers, or at the least, some fresh servers with no transfers allowed for the first few months. something to keep the bloat from transferring over.

I don’t expect to get the old “feeling” back. But as someone who played on private servers in the past, the game itself was different, and even today I enjoyed my time on those servers more then I do in retail. The game was simply that much different. That in itself will be a feeling that I am looking forward too.

I also look forward to running dungeons and raids from these expansions as they were released…as an example, anyone who runs the “new” Kharazan will not have an idea of what the original raid felt like. it was fun, interesting, and had fights that even to this day I enjoy more then many of the current raid options.

TBC classic is going to suck. The pvp meta will be guaranteed cancer and raid meta even worse.

Bots will still be there to lessen the experience.

I’m still going to play it. It will suck.

They already do this: