I see a lot of complaining on here about preserving classic. But if you log on to the populated servers it’s full of boosting and judging by the prices it’s full of gold buying too. Maybe the best way to preserve classic is to worry about what the community is doing, because there seems to be a lot of cheaters.
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Communities are borne out by the incentives within the game.
If your systems incentivize bad behaviors, bad behaviors will take root.
There are a couple of ways of dealing with this: punitive measures (ban GDKPers, etc.), which is the easy path and is likely useful, and mechanics adjustments, which is the correct path generally.
Basically, Classic needs to be updated for the modern era otherwise it isn’t a good game.
We need:
- World buff removal in raids
- AoE caps
- Pathing exploits are punished like in SoM by teleporting mobs that will pound you into the dirt
- Buff/debuff limit adjustments
- Sensible phasing
- Boosting buck breaking
- Difficulty adjustments
- Minor meme spec adjustments
- Some raid difficulty adjustments
- Adjustments to warriors to weaken their PvE DPS output
- Adjustments to shield usage to block fury tanking
- GDKP ban
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Cleaning up old posts! 
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The only change I can think of that the player base forced blizzards hand in was the PvP system changes to prevent the pool party meta. The rest of their changes are not because of the players in my opinion.
That being said, I do agree with you. The players both make and break this game. Just need to find like minded guilds to associate with… I’m certainly not a fan of the boosting, GDKP, and meta gaming cultures that have permeated wow over the last handful of years / the classic run
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I remember when classic came out, people were worrying about phasing and mob pathing and it’s morphed into this. Makes me think all the people who truly cared about preserving are long gone.
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They are long gone.
The dregs are left, this is impossible to deny.
Anyhow, masses of normal people will come back to a SoM type game IMO because there’s an appetite for it every few years. They can content-drip it and it’ll be great.
They will need to make sure the game isn’t exploited into unplayability by the aforementioned dregs, though, otherwise the effort could go bust.
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100% the community needs to decide what the priorities are for classic. If boosting and gold buying is rampant blizzard might as well make money off their IP or at the very least enforce their TOS
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Remove Chronoboon from the game. If you want to prevent people logging out to preserve buffs make it so the buffs go away while offline.
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Nah, the world buffs aren’t appropriate for raids.
They have this dual nature of both completely trivializing and casualizing the content and creating chores that one needs to complete prior to running content in a normal, semi-hardcore and hardcore manner.
If you want to keep them, the content should be adjusted in difficulty such that you now need them to have baseline performance in the raid. This suggestion seems absurd because it exposes the reality of the world buff raid meta: these are chores and are quite silly to make mandatory.
The stupidity of the SoD difficulty slider for raids is a tell for what Blizzard thinks these buffs do: creates an entry-point for casuals into raid content.
The content is already easy enough and doesn’t need any assistance.
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I agree OP. The issue is modern gaming. If people can’t press a button and auto win, they just would rather pull out their credit card and swipe. The change that should happen is limit exp gains in dungeons with high level carries, remove exploits and make loot in raids personal with no trading, and go from there.
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There is nothing wrong with the fact that some people put in some effort and enjoy raiding with world buffs. I would actually say the people who really tend to destroy the community are the ones that decide everyone else is the problem, and who feel the answer is to force everyone to play the way they want, where often they blame others and their playstyles, for why they aren’t successful, commonly assuming anyone thats doing better then them is obviously cheating and doing RMT, ignoring the fact that gold is extremely easy to get in WOW and the vast majority of players will never RMT.
So perhaps instead of taking away other peoples choices, you should take the opportunity to create your own raids. As you say the content is easy enough so it shouldn’t be a problem, you can show everyone how easy it is, and you can even pick whichever loot system you like,
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I would include World Buff Meta prior to boon here as well. Just like the PvP pool parties, it was players getting caught up in a power meta and playing in a way that was actually detrimental to their own experience. You could argue that this too is the players ruining it for themselves but this was an environment Blizzard created. These are things that Blizzard can fix because they can change the environment that necessitates those behaviours. Especially when the player base wants something else but feels like they can’t. As soon as they put the boon in, everybody started playing the game again.
GDKP and boosting, on the other hand, aren’t things driven by game mechanics. In a lot of ways they’re driven by the need for things like instant gratification and selfishness. I want it now and I won’t help you unless I get something in return, stuff like that. While I advocate that Blizzard bans these things, they can’t really eliminate the behaviours because the players want them. If Blizzard bans them I’m sure players will find something else. These things really aren’t good for players, but they want them anyway and go to great lengths to get them. People smoke too… and that stuff 'll kill ya!
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The playerbase was quite pernicious for a 16+ year old version of the game.
We have an incentive to GDKP
Your point is muted
Play SOD
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its a team effort
both teams lost imo
its sad for classic andys like me
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I’m okay with this list.
Couple things on the Warrior items you have here.
If bosses simply hit too hard and crushes & crits are probably going to kill the tank then without doing anything to the Warrior class you enforce running 440 Defense and using Shield Block on cooldown to push crushes off the table. This is how Warrior tanking was done for a long time, including the private servers (I’m told). Deep Prot can pump a lot of TPS and also has the most sensitive rotation in the game to do so, but it absolutely can be done. Won’t hold a candle to Dual Wield Fury Prot wearing mostly DPS gear can do on TPS, but it is possible to maintain a decent lead over good DPS.
For Warrior DPS I do think they need to be tied with or very slightly ahead or behind of Rogues. That is not my area of expertise on Warrior, but I bet there is something that can be tuned without changing Rage (horrible idea) or gimping Heroic Strike for tanks (another horrible idea). This class scales to the moon on all stats in the game and the gear that permits Fury Warriors to pump that damage comes as early as the 50s, but there is probably something that won’t break the game that can be done.
Meme specs I’m not as concerned about fixing to be honest. These classes tend to be ones that can fill multiple roles and have at least one very good raid spec. If raiding is the main thing you want to do, and there is a main role you want to do (DPS) then it just makes more sense that you role that to begin with. Besides I’m under the impression that it isn’t so much that they can’t do damage, it’s that they can’t do sustained damage. The PVP implications of making a Shadow Priest (or whatever) be able to go hard for minutes straight is probably something that is intentionally not possible.
A lot of people enjoy a lot of things.
This idea that 15 minutes of “effort” is a valid reason to invalidate the difficulty of content for the “enjoyment” of “players” that want to “play the game” on the difficulty slider before “Very Easy” isn’t something that is supported by normal players.
My argument of fixing meme specs is admittedly the most tenuous.
The problem I have with meme specs is that I personally feel that they are legitimately broken, as in the development time to fix the spec out of the “this is a broken feature” status wasn’t accorded due to various constraints in the original run of classic.
Balance and ret aren’t serious specializations that we need to talk about. They are actually broken, as in they don’t work.
I feel similar, that they don’t function mechanically the way they should vs on paper. It’s like ret, you can go into a fight, have SoC blocked, dodged, or parried when it procs only to then have it miss or resisted when judged. They’re a spellblade hybrid class with no supporting gear to really balance it out until late game. I mean simply change it to function where when it procs it can’t be dodged, blocked, or parried yet can still miss on proc and that’s a rather substantial upgrade to their damage without breaking things. Even just correcting their stats and how their skills function to TBC is a benefit even if they don’t get crusader strike. Blizzard clearly agreed Ret didn’t mechanically match what they had on paper yet kept the class fantasy and it was an overall improvement.
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Ret is a more complex case of broken IMO.
Druids are more simple - fix the MCP farm, fix the gearing issues. The general mechanics are okay.
Paladins are just underdesigned and feel bad to play.
This stuff gets into the weeds a bit, but we can shelf it in favor of more important changes.