Oh, absolutely. I think vanilla has plenty of replayability on its own. (The best thing Blizzard could do to keep my money coming is have both WOW Classic and TBC Classic - I’d be buying game time in 6-month chunks again.)
I hadn’t quite hit 60 when TBC arrived (dawdled a lot with roleplay and alts), but was pretty close. I leveled a lot of alts through 1-60 vanilla even when this gal was raiding, and by the end of TBC had raiding on a healer (HolyDisc Priest), a range damage dealer (AffLock), a melee damage dealer (SubtRogue), and a tank (ProtWarrior), and had other lvl 70s I didn’t raid on.
The thing about progression servers is there’s no sense of progression, you just lose all the time you spent because a green in outland is better than your previous bis. I’m all for Classic servers for TBC and, eh, possibly wrath (anything after cata would be pointless, the entire world changed). But I wouldn’t see any reason to raid in say, the vanilla phase of a bc progression server because I know it will all be invalidated. The game wasn’t really set up with a Progression Server mindset, it was more like “buy this new expansion because everything you just did is no longer relevant.” Of course it started out just being a little that way and has since become a lot.
Maybe a few years from now we will get burning crusade classic then they can introduce a way for players to group cross expansion and still be able to field the 40 players. Sort of a timewalking, but only between the classic servers lol.
I wouldn’t mind a new flavor of classic even every five years, like you said, to keep things slightly fresh. Me, I’ll be happy if I’ve ever “won” classic and can just walk around like a boss. I’ll help other people gear up, level alts, farm, the possibilities are endless. The only thing that would stop me from playing a bis character would be a ghosted server with no one to interact with, so I hope you’re wrong that most people will leave when they are “done.”
I’m planning on going RP so I’m hoping people will stay for the community and eventually gearing up will be something you can easily do with friends who can already beast the content if you’re behind. Not saying I’m looking for a carry, just that if I end up on the other end of it I’ll be helping guildies down MC or whatever to get their tier even if I outrank it or have everything I need. Helping is fun, I’m hoping it’s one of the things people with gear wish to do. There are always people who complain about “content droughts,” but I don’t think that’s the base they’re catering to in Classic.
LOL, I’m not one of those three, but I managed 15,000+ posts on the previous iteration of forums, and that included a hiatus when I quit early MoP until I came back for six months of Legion. I post on my breaks and lunch from work - when I can’t be playing WOW.
See, I don’t think that will happen. I don’t know if you followed the PServer community, but all you have to do is provide a fresh start server, and it will always be filled. There is a massive community who just continuously replays through content every couple years. Sure, I think with time the fringes might drop more and more, and I actually would love separate TBC servers after one or two Vanilla server lifetimes… but I don’t think vanilla is ever at risk due to boredom, only from changes that make it not vanilla.
Blizzard forced everyone playing end game classic to buy TBC. The pvp bracket went from 60 to 60-69, if you didn’t buy TBC you would get destroyed by level 69s in green quest gear even if you were R14. It was a blatant cash grab and everyone knew it. Not everyone was happy about TBC, they were literally forced into it.
Your “2 year” comment tells me you didn’t actually play endgame classic and are projecting your understanding of current retail expansions onto something you don’t understand.
Since apparently YOU are the clueless one who doesn’t actually understand how vanilla content even works: You might have had a point there if the content didn’t require groups/raids to complete. You engage the community primarily by consuming content together that requires cooperation.
A community without things to do/goals to reach is going to stagnate and die.
I get it, you’re yet another entitled person who thinks the game should bend over backwards catering and warping/changing to your entitled mindset, because having to level up once every 2 years (oh the horror) and regear isn’t convenient for you. Despite the fact that the character progression system is the engine at the heart of the entire game/genre and despite the fact that every single era (“era” in this case being every expansion, but also counting vanilla) has exactly those kinds of resets in place.
Listen salty britches, my mindset is that classic is a much better game than anything which came after it. There is a massive community of other people that feel the same way. This community is so strong, blizzard already did bend over backwards for us and we are getting a classic museum game. You need a reset? Roll an alt. If not, you can kick rocks back to bfa 2.0+++ all you like and transmog yourself into a keg of salt for all I care, enjoy your “community” with all that “great new content”, but don’t come here with your sodium soaked cheeks and expect anyone to care about your desire to be spoonfed terrible content every 2 years, no one cares about your retail mindset, you are not getting a vanilla reset, and I don’t care for your tone.
I agree completely! I prefer having a fixed end point. It’s disheartening to have the end regularly moving farther away. I want to be able to complete the game, at least as far as I feel like, without having it snatched away with each expansion.
Pretty much all the players I knew were looking forward to TBC by the end of Vanilla.
Also, for the majority of Vanilla, everyone knew that an expansion would be coming.
TBC was announced just 8 months after Vanilla went live … They announced it less than halfway through Vanilla when only MC, BWL and Ony were the available raids. Part of the announcement was that the level cap would increase to 70. Players widely expected a gear reset, since that seemed to happen with each raid tier anyways.
By the end of Vanilla most endgame raiders, at least on Silver Hand server, had either gotten stuck in Naxx or had achieved their PVP goals. As such, there wasn’t much to look forward to except for upcoming TBC.
And TBC had a lot of stuff in it players were looking forward to. Things like flight, a new storyline, new zones to explore, and fixed talent specs (arcane mage becoming a viable spec, etc.).
TBC and later WOTLK were both very heavily anticipated by the playerbase. Not surprisingly WoW’s playerbase in both TBC and WOTLK was larger than the playerbase for Vanilla. Also, players giddy with anticipation lined up around the block at many stores at midnight the day these expansions were released.
You seem to be inferring rather a lot about my experience based on 2 words. And you are very wrong.
If I recall correctly, they did indeed play end-game (in every expansion, unless I’m mixing people up) and are the epitome of “I’m done with that, give me more”.
My take is they’re projecting their inability to be satisfied with a static game on the larger population.
I started WoW 2 months after Vanilla went live and have been playing it non-stop since then, including endgame in every expansion.
At the end of Vanilla and at the end of every expansion there is a customary lull where we relax and enjoy the fruits of our labor while waiting for the new expansion to come.
Vanilla was no different from any of the expansions in that respect. TBC was announced just 8 months after Vanilla went live. Players had over a year to get used to the idea of TBC before it hit. TBC was not a surprise.
That said, had Blizzard not announced TBC, I suspect player interest at the end of Vanilla would have been higher. The feeling of “why bother putting in more effort when a reset is right around the corner” would not have been present.
My expectation that players will get bored with a static game is because of my experience playing other static games. In my experience static games become boring after awhile. Eventually you exhaust the content or just have had enough and are done. It’s time to move on to some other game.
It might take 6 months to get that point, or it might take 3 years. However, no static game I’ve played ever held my attention for over 3 years.
In contrast WoW, has held my attention for nearly 15 years now. The thing that sets it apart from the pack are the regular infusions of new content. Even when things get boring, I still play because a new infusion of hopefully more interesting content is right around the corner.