The loss of authenticity in Classic: Welcome to Classic Retail

Hey, everything I pointed out caused a change. We got free server transfers, altered queue systems, the chronoboon… Willful ignorance won’t win you an aruement.

It also caused single-faction servers. But we know you don’t like fair PvP anyway.

:man_shrugging:

Yeah, but if you would stop buying gold, there wouldn’t be bots.

The Chronoboon exists.

Single factions servers are of no concern to someone who is scared of griefing, because you can go to pve and not worry about it. Do not left field me when you know there is a feature allowing you to avoid pvp with your world buffs because you cannot pvp nor do you have the knowledge to keep them

I don’t even know what argument you’re trying to make. The first post of yours I responded to was when you said Blizz tried nochanges and it was a failure. That made me laugh really hard since Classic was such a success. Then you immediately flip sides and say Classic wasn’t authentic at all. It seems like your stance changes post to post.

He’s mad because his problems could have been avoided in a pve server but he has some sort of ego and felt he didn’t need to be on a pve server and was proven wrong. Basic human psychology

It’s a consequence of behavior. Plain and simple.

Yes, that’s abundantly clear. At least you admit it.

Zaalg is a retail player who trolls this forum every once in awhile.

Ask him to prove he has a character higher than level 59. He doesn’t have one. He boosted it and quit the game because he hates Classic. His trolling is very peculiar, being a retail player who doesn’t play Classic and comes here to try to claim that changes make the game more like the game he plays, thus ruining it?

Odd, for sure. Look at this blatant trolling…

  • Modern API allowing far more advanced addons but also restrictions that Vanilla didn’t have.
  • Modern shadows, water; grass effects.
  • Modern raid frames, huge change. The Vanilla frames were absolutely garbage.
  • Layering.
  • Spell queuing. This wasn’t added until original TBC but Classic had it from the start. Huge, absolutely huge change. Without it, you’d have to be mashing keys as fast as possible because spells wouldn’t cast seamlessly.
  • Other modern UI changes and graphical options.
  • Loot trading in raids.
  • Toggle for auto looting, used to have to always hold down shift to do this.
  • In Vanilla, you used to have to mail things one at a time. We didn’t have that at any point in Classic.
  • Battlenet integration.
  • Right-click reporting feature.
  • Battleground Wargames.

Virtually all of this was received positively. Maybe only the right-click reporting and layering have any complaints.

Oh, this one is good:

a “BLANKET CHANGE.”

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Classic was scuffed from the beginning. Mega Servers aren’t the classic experience. The server capacity in 2005 was roughly 4-5k. Not 20-30k. It was doomed from the start. This ruined World PVP, the community feel, the auction house, contributed to a lovely boosting community that plagues the game to this very day. Thank you Blizzard!

Yea, man me and the boys used to kill Ragnaros with no fire resist in level 56 greens all the time!

Yea man, that blizzard. The multi-dollar company.

Allen Adham wanted concurrent players online to be something like 500. It’s amazing how they went from that kind of philosophy to how the game is now.

500 is far too low, but they still managed to get the balance just right, even if that was due to hardware limitations. They should have respected that limitation when making classic. Another thing that severely hurt classic was open realm transfers.

They obviously didn’t launch at that amount, but the fact he wanted it shows how committed they were to a small community where you know everybody on your server.

Doesn’t even mention the biggest, most fundamental changes like the max population of servers, the absence of GMs, and the lack of devs responding to changes in the meta, etc etc.

And still there are people who are like “oh classic was authentic”.

I suspect the people who say things like this never even saw the original Battle.net, so they don’t realize that Battle.net 2.0 didn’t even exist back then.

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I noticed and talked about these things many times where I agree did matter in Classic and have said so. Although I was very happy overall with Classic Servers, TBCC servers are another story entirely, and IMO are terrible, but for Classic because layering was taken out things ended up being OK, and a lot of servers had identity and many had a close to 50/50 faction balance. There was a choice for every player. It was good.

Still, I’m not the OP but Classic did have the “Vanilla vibe” to me I guess you could say, which i said to him. Yes, the world buff meta and stuff were not authentic but what actually counts for me was there. Things like community, faction wars, having fun with people in BGs and PVP etc. All of which have mostly vanished from Retail and are even mostly absent in TBCC (and the people who gravitate to Retail and even TBCC seem to be all about themselves and not the community. This is next to impossible for me to relate to and therefore it’s been very difficult to have a quality experience in them as finding like-minded people in TBCC and especially Retail is like finding a needle in a haystack).

I also think the old world is “magical” in that how it is just working to WoW better than any other since.

The UI changes and stuff didn’t change that, we used addons back then to change the Ui in raids etc. Even today i don’t talk about QoL suggestions that IMO just don’t matter, but when something does matter to me I’m all over it and will post hundreds of times about it, even when that leads to nothing.

I played open beta, Vanilla at release, and even subbed enough to get the 10 year Veteran statue. Also since I have a good memory and was in my 20s when Vanilla came out remember it well.

So while you can say stuff like “Oh the raid frames are different” or “Oh there’s battle.net integration” it’s like: OK… I know that already… but what’s your point exactly? it doesn’t really matter at all.

So going back to original post, I guess I can see why some of that stuff doesn’t matter in the same way. On the other hand Classic Era really shouldn’t have changed much, and things like bugs that result from changes and aren’t being fixed are definitely a problem.

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Didn’t list a single gameplay change to Classic.

You don’t have to hold shift to auto-loot and you can mail multiple things at once? And because of that Classic wasn’t authentic?

Talk about grasping at straws.

Imagine when wotlk launches, servers are still a total disaster, people go in with astronomical real estate, and 10 alts per player. I actually lost all motivation for wrath and know I won’t be playing. Would be a different story if it was fresh. The fact that TBC ecosystem runs the way it does now tells me it will be the same in wrath, with different scenery. Pass

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Just wanted to pop in and say thanks for the well documented post. It really puts together the issues with Classic Era post TBCC launch. I also appreciate your courteous responses to other posters as it reflects well on the Era community.

As to the matter itself, the lack of responses to players detailing issues through official channels is the heart of the issue. The unfortunate reality is that the current Blizzard culture simply does not value player feedback nor quality from it’s maintenance games. SC2, WC3, HotS, Overwatch, and Era are all deeply suffering from gross mismanagement. Our only hope is to keep documenting issues so that fixes can be made once the Blizz culture corrects itself to value player feedback again. Someday, Era will truly be the Classic experience once again. Until then, keep up the good work on detailing what is wrong and what it should be. Even for all the players seeking a classic+ experience, I am sure the seasonal WoW devs would appreciate your input.

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Being a new player in Wrath Classic will be a complete nightmare….unless they add a fresh option.

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I also expected it to be like this. But, like you mention, this seems to be the pattern of Blizzard games.

They were pretty clear that knowledge of the game couldn’t be eliminated so it was to be expected that players that wanted to could learn the most optimal and easiest way of clearing content, which led to things like this. It was stated from the beginning that since you can’t unlearn things it could not be an exact recreation of the experience. What I mostly refer to is the 1.12 reference client, not the actual players or community.

I agree these changed the overall experience, but what I mostly refer to is not the players or community but the pure gameplay/world/items and experience when using your character and interacting with the game world.

Some of the other changes mentioned in this thread, like API changes, Battle.net integration, spell queuing and other things I don’t think change the gameplay much or its mechanics. Maybe for very heaving addon users some things might change related to ease of playing and game information. Other than that you would have to spam spells a bit faster than usual. I already spam spells so not that big change for me. It would be a bit more annoying to send mail items one at the time, but that would not have made me quit playing or anything just taking longer to send items.

Thanks! It took me a while lol.

This is my hope as well. This forum is supposed to be the official channel for feedback to the devs so here I am trying to detail what is happening, even if it gets ignored, because I have to try. All I want is for Classic Era to be like what they promised… WoW Classic pre-TBCC Forever. I’ve been hearing many similar stories with their other maintenance games as well.

I only play Era but WOTLK has me very worried just thinking of all the changes that will carry over to Era.

Your observations aren’t facts and figures