The below items seem to fall under the above statement, but in more specific detail.
- They skipped 3 months of PvP having no advancement and no gear. (It was originally End of Aug to beginning of Nov 2019 before Honor System was added)
Was that critical? IIRC, as I was there, they had to add in BGs sooner than expected because players were PvP grinding whole zones due to the lack of the BGs. (I remember felwood not being a particularly fun place to be for days at a time.)
- The removal of the 20% decay made PvP gear easier/faster to get (it didn’t make it better gear) The player base, being “path of least resistance” types, decided that PvP gear was the better bet for Bis/Pre-Bis.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure Warlord Gear was technically available as soon as the Honor System was added. I recall starting out as a Grunt on Nov 14th.
Indeed, hence they needed to add the BGs 2 months early. (SoM skipped that problem.)
The below items fall under the above quote, just in more specific detail.
Classic, being a solved game, is extremely easy by comparison, to the point of players’ goals not being to just down the bosses for the loot, achievement, and experience- but to down the bosses with the highest performance percentage to show off.
At least for me, a game is considered easy and no longer a challenge once the meta is not used for beating it in the first place, but beating it faster and with better personal performance than others.
(Like Diablo 3 Ladder Characters…)
At this point, wow classic is akin to Super Mario speedruns. Very niche, within a comparatively niche Genre.
The below items weren’t under the umbrella of my statement, but I also don’t have a lot of stock in them.
This was true in 2019 Classic as well. (And arguably even more punishing in 2019 because of the weekly decay.)
Due to lack of specificity, I’m assuming you’re talking about he dungeons no longer being AoE farmable by frost mages.
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This one comes down to personal taste.
I have a distaste for resource gathering systems that are just gaming the ancient mechanics…similar to Pokemon Gameboy speedrunners that have to glitch a certain pixel to have a chance at the speedrun record.
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It gains personal gold but:
A: In the case of ZF graveyard farming, it didn’t really do anything for the economy- it was just the mage mining for gold and inflating the economy. (Not selling a service or a good.) It’s the bot gold inflation problem, but skipping the middleman and RMT.
B: In the case of Mages selling Dungeon grind carries, it was a driver of RMT gold, it absolutely was. (Much like GDKP.) The prices mages were charging for Mara carries and such would’ve taken longer to grind up the gold than it would have to just level the character via quests or dungeons. (I had a SoM character to play with a friend who missed most of wow classic, I just wasn’t that interested in classic anymore after having played it.)
I don’t know how well this argument holds up since people are asking for 12 month season runs of regular classic, which sounds like they want speed runs they can do back to back…but maybe I’m reading too much into that.
Pretty sure they had that many servers because they anticipated a lot more demand for it.
I’ve noticed since then that they release “too few” servers and then open up more as they become too full. (SoD being a conspicuous example.)
The one item I will grant is the case of the “double nerf” that blizzard seems really good at.
Example A: (SoD)
Making WoE Require a shield to prevent Dual wield massive damage tank (Good), and simultaneously nerfing Rockbiter into the ground…nuking Shaman Raid Tank (Bad).
Example B: (SoM):
Nerfing the Mage gold mining (Good)
Making the raids more often require consumes that gold mining was looking to pay for. (Bad, at least in regards to the economy. They could’ve made farming alts
to make their own consumes, but that gets messier on a PvP server when compared to farming your personal instance in peace.)
TL;DR, my characterization was not inaccurate, just not as specific or holistic.
