For most people, there is some moment in WoW history where it stopped being “the old days” and started feeling like Retail does today. In my own experience, most people generally see the line being somewhere between mid-Wrath and late Cataclysm. Though still, there are plenty of people who think that is was at the end of TBC or even later than Cataclysm.
I’d ask that you only select whichever options you think were most instrumental in WoW’s evolution into Retail. Every single option in this poll represents a change that nudged WoW closer to Retail by definition, but I’m curious to understand which of these play the biggest roles in the shift in experience for most people here.
I’m sure there’s a handful of stuff that I’ve missed – If there are any major “early” changes (roughly Burning Crusade through late Cataclysm) that you don’t see in the poll, please let me know and I’ll add it as an option.
Disclaimer:
Polls taken on forums and social media do not represent the whole or even general playerbase. Very few people care enough about WoW issues to come to websites to discuss them. This poll is only intended to gain an understanding of the perspectives of people here on the forums and potentially from other places where it may end up being posted such as Reddit, Twitter, etc. I have some very strong opinions about some of the things listed in this poll, but neither the poll or this thread were created as an argument for them. The only thing this poll represents is the opinions of the people where the poll is posted.
Which i played it and everthing after untill shadowlands. Dont get me wrong I would still be playing retail but Classic came out sounded fun and now playing TBC. Just didnt have the time to play both SO i choose classic and tbc and soon to be wrath. One day might go back to retail though.
To me, it’s the philosophy of play the patch and how they structured expansions.
The game somewhat started resetting during every patch and making everything before it irrelevant. With this idea, patches and expansions do not feel addititive as they should. The game has either been inconsistent or made little progress at times because ideas go as far as their expansion/patch never to be built upon in most cases once it’s over.
The early game was much better in making progress last longer. I’d say this started showing slight signs around the Wrath era because the added difficulty and size gear stretched tier itemization too far. However the Cata revamp really drilled it in.
They could’ve revamped the old world while still preserving what came before it, but instead of having new stuff added onto a great old world pretty much everything was changed or removed. The early game was constantly built on with new long lasting ideas and features, but after Cata this mostly ended.
None.
the player base changed, the game evolved. Shadowlands was bad cause of useless restrictions, time gating and other BS systems(they fixed most of it by now. a little too late if I say so but…) it has nothing to do with QoL’s
i think things really changed in Legion. The talent trees were completely redesigned and all the classes took on some “class fantasy”. As a Rogue, this was where they changed core abilities giving us “Shadowstrike” and “nightblade”. pruning rupture and gouge… there was a whole drastic change to the way spells and talents worked when Legion was released.
That’s when none of the classes I’d played for years even felt the same.
For me, that was definitely a very shocking change. It was pretty cool to see so many zones made “new”, but it stopped being interesting very quickly. It felt a lot like we’d lost something that we’d never get back. Throughout my time playing WoW, I’ve always been a bit of an altoholic and I loved the nostalgia trip every single time I’d level my characters through the zones I knew and loved. Ever since The Shattering, I’ve never had an alt leveling experience that felt ‘normal’.
Yeah, I really felt that. It never felt good to vendor the epic gear I had worked toward with expensive gems and enchants just to replace it with questing greens partway into the leveling experience each expansion. When I first started playing WoW in late TBC, I remembered that the power increases were quite linear, so I got to witness low-level characters occasionally bullying high level ones. Especially twinks!
It was also weird to get used to the feel of an expansion and to basically have it feel like it didn’t exist anymore once we moved on. In Wrath, the ‘old world’ still felt like it existed and it was still there. I actually travelled Outland and Azeroth quite a bit because I enjoyed grinding reps on my characters as well as farm achievements. The new expansions always felt like they took place in a ‘pocket universe’, and they hardly ever actually felt like they were the same game to me.
I quit early in Cata. Held on longer than most players, but still half these things I don’t even know about.
The quest-based zone phasing was cool. It made the world feel more alive. But it was also annoying when you are trying to play with a friend that is on a separate phase. It’s a wash really.
I really hated the talent condensing personally.
I never knew anything about the lore and neither did 90% of the playerbase. This always feels like the excuse response - when players don’t like to admit a feature that they personally like ended up hurting the game.
What really killed Wow was the influx of good MMOs in 2011: Tera, Rift, Swtor, FF14 all released during early Cata.
Retail is an entirely different game, not because of incremental changes, but because the development team changed their vision of what the game should be and started to insist they knew what was fun, even when the community told them it wasn’t.
Look at how people are playing classic era games right now and tell me they care at all about the core elements of the original design philosophies. They don’t.
Agreed the Cata expansion ruined wow for me in a way that I could never get over. And as such when 9 months from when are in the final phases of WotLK classic I will finally unsub from wow and uninstall the game with no planned intentions of even trying dragonflight at all.
“I really hated the talent condensing personally.”
The talent trees in Cata were complete dog doo doo having to specc all the down to a 41 point talent in one tree before being allowed to put points in another tree killed a lot of fun hybrid speccs.
Yeah, ever since Classic was announced, I figured I’d play through Wrath, maybe try out Cataclysm Classic if it’s ever a thing, but then finally be able to put Blizzard as a company behind me forever.
Though now that Activision Blizzard is being acquired by Microsoft, my interest is piqued again. Mostly for StarCraft 2, but I’m very interested to see where this goes.
This was an easy one. I know 100% for a fact that it was indeed Raid Finder that started the downward spiral. I never met anyone in game at that time back in the day that liked Raid Finder. Every hardcore player I have ever known thought their guilds and raids that they put together were just counterfeit by this new tool. A brand new expansion in Cataclysm that destroyed their old world to top it off with Raid Finder, that was the nail in the coffin.
Edit: Of and in case anyone wonders, I had the top 5 out of 6 choices on my straw poll. Pretty sure i’m right.
Stop blaming raid finder its not the one thing that killed the game most people know Queing for raid finder is a waste of time and not worth doing at all. Personally I only ran 1 raid finder dungeon in the past 5 years and it was only to get a quest done otherwise I just stay clear.
So true. The more I think of it this line of game development did degrade any past work I had done.
Now in retail why even bother raiding? You can see all the content in LFR after a few weeks. Really defeats the whole Big Bad Guy scene imo.
They doubled down on this with their systems that even the retail player base hates. Why spend hours and hours and hours getting your power level high when after a patch, alts get steamlined?