I don’t think you understood my post. I was very, very pleased with WoW Classic as it was spot on authentic to the 1.12 client they were aiming for, just the way they did it. What I am not pleased about was how they have handled it afterwards.
Others in this thread were discussing about the decision to use the 1.12 client from the start and whether or not that was good. I never criticized this decision.
Gotta back u up on this bro. People believe we should be playing the game the same way we did when we were 10 years old or it breaks the immersion
Classic was never focused on an authentic experience. Even leaving aside for a moment the fact that the experience is dependent upon the community as much as the developers, there were numerous MASSIVE mechanical changes before Classic ever released.
If you thought this was going to be “truly authentic”, it means you weren’t paying attention.
If you weren’t paying attention, we can safely dismiss all of your conclusions.
I don’t necessarily think that is 100% true. The majority wanted to see changes in Classic, but they didn’t introduce the right kind of changes.That and they kinda rushed TBC out before fixing it. I in particular wanted the vanilla gameplay but not the vanilla balance or limitations.
It would have been nice if they fixed the completely useless specs with vanilla spirited changes without directly copying the TBC changes. I probably would have been fine with limiting the raid buffs too so that it would be less time consuming preparing.
Then again what I really want is to start with classic, but don’t go to TBC. Take those same characters and gameplay down a different story. Now there are quality of life changes vanilla needed to be less annoying, but you can implement those changes without exactly turning into retail. The problem is they essentially released it exactly as is and borderline gave up on it with season of mastery changes.
Not to mention the same exact thing actually happened in classic that was harmful in actual vanilla. Which was toxicity. Nothing was done to lower it because the original game was just a breeding ground for it. The community ended up pushing away a lot of people who wanted to play.
Not to mention a lot of changes weren’t faithful to the original. I think I know what it was too. The original game had scripts written into the world that caused things to work differently.
Like when Warlock class mobs fought you, you killed the master, and the pet is supposed to disappear. That was a thing in vanilla, and I remember it because it was literally my favorite world building thing about the game. None of those scripts were rewritten and implemented. Which honestly is probably impossible to know they even existed with the tools they had. They would have the data for pretty much everything but those. Since a lot of them were typed by hand at the end.
There was most likely one that limited the dungeon experience you gained for being overleveled for a dungeon too. Since the number 1 complaint about vanilla wow was dungeons gave virtually no experience. I know from first hand experience reading on the forums what people were angry about during the time. Not only was that the only real thing they were complaining about, but it dwarfed virtually any other problem. XD Which led to power leveling dungeons way too fast in the classic release.
You could kinda do that in vanilla, but once you got to the level they dictated to be the cap for the dungeon it stopped giving you normal experience. You probably got more experience killing greens in the world than what it was giving you, but it was meant as a mechanic so you couldn’t skip all of the content in the game and powerlevel to 60.
Those were parts of the vanilla experience, but those were completely missing. The dungeon one is kind of important since you are kinda meant to do the quests to level for the most part, not skip a huge chunk of them. Another potential issue is they lacked data for some of this stuff because retail wow still has a lot of the TBC code in tact from that time. It has none of the classic code from that time and TBC changed more than you can possibly imagine about the game.
A lot of things people say is wrong with retail was introduce in TBC. That was the quest reward buff and Dungeon Experience buff. Doing dungeons in retail is the most effective way to level is because of that change. The majority of the community never experienced TBC leveling so a lot of them wouldn’t even know tbh. Only those who rerolled as one of the new races, leveled alts to lvl 45 to 60, or those who were paying attention to the changes.
The problem wasn’t really that they made changes or weren’t completely faithful to the original design. It’s that they rushed straight into a TBC launch and didn’t make a couple common sense changes to the vanilla classes so that the classes would at least not be broken. Some people looked at their talent tree and saw how bad it was, looked up when it got fixed which is most likely in TBC for most classes, and gave up on the classic launch because the spec they wanted to play just flat out wasn’t viable.
Now I’m not talking min/max top end viable. I mean the build just flat out doesn’t exist in vanilla due to broken class design. Which plagued vanilla so badly they bandaid fixed it in TBC.
People did not want to experience vanilla how it was. They wanted to experience vanilla how it was meant to be. For a lot of people that meant the changes that came in TBC which is why it got completely abandoned. TBC kinda just has all of the same content classic does with a couple more additions. I think it would have been wiser to listen to some of the complaints people were probably having. At the very least you could have tried introducing the TBC classes into season of mastery to see how it would effect the classic game with 2 more additional zones, but not the entire outland map.
That way you could leveled the class you wanted for TBC and not have to wait for TBC classic to do that. That’s an example of 1 change I don’t think the majority would have cared about.
Also because of the dungeon leveling not being toned down like it was in vanilla. The leveling was too fast. That was a thing that at least took a couple months of time gated leveling to do during actual vanilla. It wasn’t that they were bad. Though they were less skilled, it’s not like it required a lot during vanilla anyway. It’s that you literally could not level that fast even if an entire guild power leveled you.
So they missed some things they couldn’t have known about that only the original dev team would know about or those that experienced the actual vanilla game from before patch 1.12. They didn’t change enough to have fun with season of mastery to make it interesting. So ya of course it didn’t feel like classic vanilla. We didn’t really get a classic vanilla and that wasn’t really on the table from the start. The changes they did make though weren’t good changes either. At least alone they weren’t. Needed more time and planning. Should have looked at the talent tree and tweaked it because realistically they didn’t have a clue what they were doing when they made those talent trees. TBC was their real first crack at it once they learned from their really bad mistakes.
Tldr he is looking for a new mmo that is similar to wow
The OP is a perfect example of why Blizzard should never, ever have kowtowed to the #NOCHANGES mob in the first place.
I read your post and I get what you are saying. I was a release player and had all but given up on WoW when Classic came back. Playing Retail WoW was like going through the motions, and it wasn’t fun for me. It lost the spark. So when Classic came out I was following nothing but resubbed over an ad for 1 month thinking I had changed and not the game, but I got back into it more than ever possible and had just as much fun with Classic as I did with Vanilla, and the community I found was awesome too. 15 years later my experience was pretty close, maybe people were more sweaty and stuff but the general vibe was the same.
That changed with TBCC which has been a huge disappointment, and does feel quite a bit like Retail that I quit with a BC Classic skin, and I don’t have a lot of good things to say about it, but for about a year and a half, I enjoyed WoW again a lot. For me it was like being back in 2005, no matter how many times people say that’s impossible. Although people can have their own opinions on that.
Even though I would have preferred changes similar to what I experienced in 2004 - 2006 what we got was fine. As fun as things like 10 man Scholo would have been the very first release was loaded with bugs etc. We didn’t need those IMO.
From your post, it looks like you are talking about Classic Era and yes that was supposed to stay the same so you are right to complain about changes to that. We were always told Classic Era would stay the same, I’m not sure why people are responding saying otherwise.
They repeatedly mention in every promotional material and their developer Q&A, both linked in my original post, that they wanted to deliver an authentic experience to the 1.12 client. So, yes, it was focused on being authentic to the 1.12 client at the very least for the most part. What my post is referring to is that towards the end of WoW Classic towards TBCC and afterwards the “staying true” to the 1.12 client was abandoned and dismantled.
I think SoM was the best place to experiment with these kinds of “Classic+” scenarios. Maybe we’ll see things like Classic with TBC talent trees in other SoM seasons. I personally like the whacky talent trees and honestly everything about how Classic was originally released. You are right it was never on the table from the start to make an exact vanilla adaptation.
I’m a perfect example of why they did. I loved the #nochanges WoW Classic game they made that lasted almost 2 years.
This is exactly my sentiment.
Yes, I’m talking about how Classic turned into Classic Era and has been changing dramatically to go hand-in-hand with other WoW versions and not stay like the promised “Classic Forever” pre-TBCC version.
So what? Their actions didn’t match their words. AGAIN
Are you new to this company or something?
Their actions should match their words. I know the bar isn’t very high for Blizzard but still we can either call them out on it or roll over and keep taking it. Not everyone needs to accept their behavior.
But they don’t… and thus the most basic premise of your entire screed is negated.
Yeah, Blizzard tried the no changes thing, and it failed. Why? Blame the players. People tey to abuse every single mechanic as much as they can, and expect things to not change?
That’s in all video games. Once you start forcing players to play a certain way they move on. Look at retail, look at som
I don’t consider it failed. Sure, many people wanted additional changes the same way you can see people asking for changes now, but they did not stop playing it. Over the time pre-TBCC WoW Classic lasted, the biggest “failure” I can think of was the population problems with the servers that had free transfers getting depleted of their faction. It wasn’t as bad as it is now for TBCC though.
How do people not laugh at this? It is factually wrong. Classic was a huge success. TBC, on the other hand, pales in comparison in terms of playerbase and popularity.
Now, there can be a thousand arguments made as to why that was the case, but what you can’t say is being more authentic was a failure. The numbers say otherwise. The more authentic version was the more successful.
The problem is people think the 1% of forum posters represent the playerbase as a whole. That’s never been the case. Just because the outspoken tiny minority are here every day whining for changes doesn’t mean most players want them. And when Blizz adopted #somechanges, the playerbase substantially dropped. So the lesson here is look outside your echo chamber.
I’ve taken notice that the people who call classic a failure and want a boat load of changes unironically are not very good players in general. Never met a great player that wanted classic plus or som
Absolutely false. The majority of players who wanted a #nochanges experience are casual levelers, a lot of them never even making it to max level.
#nochanges was a failure and Blizzard has even admitted it. You can cite Classic being more successful than TBC but once the hype wore down, Classic ended up at about the same level TBC is at now. It’s a lie to pretend that Classic was successful because of some absolutely garbage #nochanges philosophy that was NEVER faithfully adhered to.
Classic was obviously not a failure. Authenticity for the sake of authenticity was:
How is it false when my observation proves otherwise to me? Do you have any statistics to prove me wrong? Again this is my observation
Nothing about Classic was authentic. The game was different. The players were different. The whole thing was different.
Why do I need to cite statistics? You made the initial claim; the burden of proof is on you.
The vast majority of players in top guilds in Classic absolutely despised all the #nochanges decisions like spell batching. Go watch old vods, go watch this video from Nano (top player and Nostalrius dev) talking about all the changes he wants to see in TBC Classic:
Go ask Monkeynews or Maitoz if they thought strict adherence to #nochanges was a good idea. How have you “observed” anything when it appears you’ve barely played the game.