The genius of fresh start TBC only

Okay, sure buddy. Because YOU get to be the arbiter of who is a pure TBC fan.

well at least you guys aren’t using bot farms/gold farming as an argument anymore.

ill be rolling my first ever Fresh Alliance if tbc ever comes out.

The people that want fresh servers didn’t invest any time in preparing for tbc.

I spent a lot of time in dmt on my hunter to make the gold I have and it is to buy flying.

And boost runs will still be a thing, just with paladins instead of mages. Concentrate has no are cap in tbc. Nor will are capped damage stop mages from being able to aoe farm old content with their improved gear, level, mana pool, exc. It will just take more time with the damage cap.

Fresh servers delays the inflation by maybe 2 months.

Now I do think blizzard should have a few fresh servers for the new players who didn’t play classic, but it should by no means be all fresh servers.

See, here’s the thing though: at the end of OG vanilla we had no idea what would be required for the expansion. A large number of players were not walking through the portal with 10s of thousands of gold to dump into epic flying. People were not walking around with hundreds of thousands of RMT gold either, as blizzard actually actively hunted those types down. Nor were there as many people with full stables of classes that had been boosted to L60, due to the current gold bloat.

I like the idea of optional fresh TBC servers, but unless blizzard actually takes meaningful action against botters, exploiters, and most importantly those who are buying RMT gold, then yeah, what’s the point?

One could argue the same for Fresh classic at this point. While everyone starts with nothing, without blizzard really cracking down on bots and not by limiting instances, we run into to the same problems that Classic had with its bots.

I would argue though this effects more than just Classic or TBC fresh or not. Its rot in the game itself. The bots also infect the live game in the same manner they do Classic. Even with the tokens its still better deal to get gold from RMT because if it wasnt the Live game wouldnt have as many bots as it does.

Until blizzard cares for the health of the game overall Every part of it is just going to rot whether you enjoy Classic or Live.

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True, but I suspect that bots would move to where the biggest crowds are.

Pretty much. They are clearly not the same people as were running the show in 2005.

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I realize this was not your point, but I just have to interject that damage caps are the proof of low quality design.

Wow, this guy is a wonderful combination of arrogant and ignorant:

  • “darkness looms along that path”
  • “each expac loses the ones who cannot lie to themselves”
  • “True fans. Die hards.”
  • “uncorrupt TBC”
  • “entryism of the swarthy retail crowd”
  • “It is all corruption”
  • “insatiable need for WoW daily tasks in any form”
  • “pure TBC fans”

It’s us v. them with strong moral superiority overtones about how people enjoy a high fantasy video game. Settle down, Spanish Inquisition, we see you coming.

Anyway, if you really want no changes (the true “tribute to the fans” that “honored them as they honored the game”), why do something that’s entirely different than the original experience by starting fresh? Oh right, have to keep out the filthy immoral heretics, er, retail players by, um, doing something that in now way stops them from doing anything. Cool.

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That’s good stuff @Koyo. I dig your roll. Funny. Poignant. You could write an opinions page that would be lauded by wealthy and savvy gents.

I was not intending to keep out all players of modern WoW. The intent was to make the experience tailored for the pure fans. No exclusivity was requested. Only service management. Nice try though.

I was not intending to keep out all players of modern WoW. The intent was to make the experience tailored for the pure fans. No exclusivity was requested.

So “[n]o exclusivity” but keep out most of the unwashed masses and tailor it to a specific subset - the “pure fans” (might I suggest the word “holy” next time so people know that your words are divine?) - that (apparently) you get to designate?

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Fresh means two things- 1, everyone goes Horde on pvp servers, period.

2, anyone not min/maxing their racials will go belf, belfs are already bound to be one of the most common races but if you make it so everyone starts at level 1 in TBC it’s going to be world of belfcraft.

3- anyone saying ‘gold’ is a reason for fresh is an idiot. Bots/scammers/farmers will have 10s of thousands of gold in a month with or without fresh, the only thing fresh does is get rid of gold that legitimate players might have and make them spend a lot of time getting it back- but in terms of massive amounts of bought gold, that’s not going anywhere.

4- there’s a far more awful side effect that nobody is really talking about. TBC fresh would completely remake the TBC early experience, you’d have a considerable amount of players racing through early zones, but perhaps the most concerning thing is going to be professions. We went into TBC with max’d professions, but imagine if everyone had to start from scratch? Just think about how messed up 1-300 herbs/skinning/mining is going to be with every single player wanting to rush it, and most players that don’t get the nodes and aren’t willing to spend crazy time fighting for it will have to pick between spending a lot of time fighting in those early areas for their profs, or, go into TBC without being able to use their profs because they’re still at a Vanilla level.

The amount of nodes in Vanilla’s world simply does not handle 5x servers sizes when EVERYONE on the server is fighting for them because they want to hit 300 in a week before they go to Outland.

There is nothing wrong with having certain classes Excell at different things. Mages being great at aoe isn’t bad design, but it did lead to abuse and putting a damage cap on it is a good way to let them be strong at their aoe without being overly godly at it.

The damage cap let’s mages stay strong as a powerful aoe class, while toning back some of the abuse it saw.

I don’t like retail personally because all the classes can do everything just doesn’t feel like a good design to me.

You don’t have to explain why a damage cap is logical to under-informed players. Damage caps tend to be implemented for very good balance reasons. What I said was that damage caps are a sign of gawd awful game design. Why not put +1,000,000 to each stat on every piece of gear and cap all resulting values as a way to balance? Because that sucks. That is an extreme example, but it shows that damage caps will cover up an obvious flaw in design. Damage caps do the same job of shortcutting a fix and covering up design flaws even when the problem is not obvious. It also allows devs a way to escape accepting responsibility for their errors, and it never truly tests their competency. Do you see what I mean now? Damage caps are always the wrong decision despite their prevalence in this game genre.

Thank you for putting thought into this and attempting to write enough to support your position.

One thing that might cause A-B to promote fresh start TBC as the primary server expectation is profit. Two reasons :wink: :

  1. Players starting at level 1 take longer to get to level 70, as does all raid progression.
  2. Potential players that missed Classic vanilla won’t be motivated to start in a TBC loaded with established accounts, but will want to join if the whole server will level with them.

I know that I am not looking forward to seeing “world first” and “server first” competition lead to TBC being beaten in one week, or two, or three … This launch could make or break everyone’s TBC experience, and that would threaten the possibility of WotLK.

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I don’t think that’s quite right.

Yes, lev 1 to 70 takes far longer and gets those players subbed longer, but, 60-70 still takes longer than 60-unsubbed in terms of game time. The sheer amount of boosting that happened and the difficulty in finding low levels in the world or legit dungeon runs after the initial Vanilla rush I think made it very clear that the majority of classic players don’t like levelling.

If levelling were considered one of the high lights of the old game people would take their time. I think a pretty substantial number of players will just not bother with TBC if it means having to basically redo vanilla’s levelling process (and prof levelling, getting gold for mounts, etc…).

Also, even for those who say, want another class because they went warrior for the OP vanilla dps but want to chase the TBC meta- it’s easier to get their new alt up to max with a lot of resources.

As for those who didn’t do classic but want TBC- ultimately, they probably are going to play TBC no matter what, since that’s what they want.

Furthermore, if they do fresh then that means anyone who was playing classic solely to prep for WotLK has no reason to do TBC at all.

The same people who were in the running in Classic will be so in TBC- they’ll be using the same exploits/gold buying/no lifing/account sharing/botting strats they used to get ahead in Classic, and whether they start from 60 or 1 will mean nothing beyond adding a few more days to the race.

If we keep what we have, Kara will be cleared week one. If we don’t, it might be week two. Assuming we don’t get t5 for a few months, and t6 for a few months more (and they’ve already done so many changes in Classic that I pretty much assume they’ll stagger the tier release dates considerably)- I would be very shocked if all the release content wasn’t completed in the first week or two regardless.

Keep in mind these guilds have players rotate play for the main roster, and a large support group that just goes to get gold/mats needed- they spend a lot of money, and make a lot of money on these things, this is a job for them.

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I’ll be rerolling Blood Elf paladin, either way, and I know enough how to make a lot of gold on either a fresh start, or established server. The only problem with starting on an established server, is there will be less players for me to kill while leveling up.

I didn’t sink all these hours in this character to just walk away from it. If I don’t keep my progress into TBC, I just don’t play anymore.

I’ve said a lot already without mentioning my plans, but to add them.

I currently am Alliance with a few 60s on a pvp server, having put up with situation dispite starting on Stalagg. As bad as the pvp situation is, I’ll be sticking with Alliance because I have the levels/gear/gold already if it is not fresh.

If it goes fresh though, there’s a 0% chance I’d roll Alliance from level 1 on a pvp server again, especially knowing how bad HFP is going to be. I’d likely make a belf priest or lock (not a pally simply because I expect that to be half the playerbase). And I’m quite certain that with fresh, that’ll be the mindset of most players on Alliance right now, because they know if they go Alliance they will be alone against a colossal Horde (at least the name fits) in pvp.

And it’s not just about sticking it out- on Stalagg, it wasn’t the Horde so numerous there were more of them in IF than Alliance at all times that killed it- it was a bare AH, no dungeon runs going, and nobody logged in other than for raid day. Nobody wants to play on the faction that can’t do content because it has no players, and can’t find anything on the AH because there’s nobody left farming.

Fresh=death of wpvp, though for the most part it’s dead anyway so perhaps we should just kill it off entirely.