“wahh I want ret paladins and lazer chickens to be viable!”
And TBC makes them viable.
“wahh honor grind sucks!”
And TBC removes it in favor of a PvP system that doesn’t require you to /afk 16 hours a day, and has no issues with queue times because you can fight people of your own faction.
“wahh raids are too easy!”
And TBC’s (25man) raids are an order of magnitude harder than even Naxx.
“wahh lotus mafia and lotus botters!”
And TBC changes lotus so that it’s a random drop from any herb node, and thus cannot be camped/mafia’d
“wahh world buff dispellers!”
And TBC removes worldbuffs entirely. No more having to raidlog in order to keep worldbuffs.
“wahh tons of consumable farming!”
And TBC simplifies consumes down to just food + flask OR 2 elixirs.
etc. etc.
Forget “classic+”, pretty much all of vanilla’s major issues are directly fixed in TBC.
The issue is retail players that can’t accept the premise that this game was released for people that are die hard vanilla players. Those “common complaints” hold no weight and are coming from the same self-entitled playerbase that created that bloated monstrosity that is retail today.
Any little change that Blizzard makes to classic only makes it worse, anytime Blizzard has given in to common complaining in classic it has only made things worse. People are truly naive if they think that TBC classic would be any different when we already have people moaning for changes and crying about faction imbalance in that game.
Except, many of these issues were apparent back then, too. They were actual flaws in the game design that were thankfully fixed in TBC. So you can’t say that they are all just a creation of entitled modern retail players.
I was a vanilla-is-the-best person, but after seeing some of the near game-breaking flaws and rampantly available exploits in Classic, I have to say that I am looking forward to many of them getting fixed in TBC.
Any 16 year old game is going to have some “flaws” or something that can be completely optimized to the point of becoming trivial.
This has to do with people who came to this game knowing full well how it played and how it was ahead of time. They knew how this game was, how things were going to be, and that none of these things would be changed but still chose to tour classic and try to change it anyways. The flaw is not with the game but with said people.
Classic was a mistake for me in that it soured my first memories and good times in vanilla. I wasnt expecting to be transported back in time through a perfect recreation (times change hurrr) but damn not even I could have seen it being this off putting at times. Its not even close to the experience - everything looks the same but thats about it.
Vanilla+TBC was my best time with the franchise, TBC in particular and I just cant bring myself to taint my memories of those times. There’s no fix in there for me.