Because if they have era servers you won’t develop rose-tinted nostalgia and come pay to play on the next round of Classic servers. Pretty basic marketing strategy.
The peoblem is Blizzard never had much of a vision of what this game was meant to be and keeping it consistent to a single vision. It became a cash grab for them and that means giving into terrible demands of a very whiny, angry player base. Cata was and still is very much an abomination to what wow was but even to the gaming industry as a whole. The only redeeming quality of this expansion is that it provides a great blueprint on what not to do in an MMORPG.
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Anybody who groups WotLK with TBC and 'Nilla is essentially telling other that they don’t know how to think for themselves.
Objectively speaking, Wrath is far closer to Cata than it is to TBC.
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Cata is here to save PVP, if you hadn’t noticed. It’s more about the vendors and rewards and class design than it is about anything else.
If you hadn’t noticed, PVP is 1000% dead in Retail, SoD, SoM, Era, HC and whatever other game mode you wanna list.
Cata is basically the last hope for people who care about PVP and surprise surprise, it’s more people than you think.
PVE players have lived in this MMO bubble for the past 10 years where they feign superiority over anyone who desires to PVP. They see other extremely popular PVP games coming out and proceed to ignore them out of cognitive dissonance. They then gate keep WoW, preventing any type of PVP innovation… Until Plunderstorm happened.
Now Blizzard is aware of the desire to PVP in players. They are listening to PVE people with a grain of salt. PVE people can report posts all they want, but Blizzard has seen the writing on the wall.
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Retail has the largest player count. But if your subbed to wow your technically subbed to every version. What is this absolute brainrot of a comment
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Completely disagree. Cata made the game much more on rails, a linear progression through each zone til the level cap. The story telling bogged down the feeling of exploration and discovery. Look at uldum and the harrison jones BS. Way over scripted and all of azeroth became a tongue and cheek pop culture reference.
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Classic era is a brain dead slog.
Tbc is when blizzard started warming up
Wrath is like the beta where they finally figured it out and could apply what was learned to the future.
Which is why cata does everything wrath did, but better.
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This might be the funniest schizo take I’ve seen on here, I never post on wow forums but I signed in just to say good job.
I’m having a really good time so far and zones I didn’t think I would enjoy I am actually enjoying this round.
If you don’t enjoy it or like it let it go and move on.
another one not getting the point or understanding what I said, +1 to you brain rotter
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It is not the same leveling system. They gutted the talent trees, they forced players to choose a spec instead of letting them discover through play what they liked / wanted. They turned the questing through zones into a linear them park ride, they nerfed the old world into the ground while buffing the player so that no challenge or danger existed anymore.
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Agreed 100%. I do use arkinventory, altoholic and skillet but do not use any quest helper add-ons. I want to read the quests and figure out how / where to do them on my own.
Also, I’m not against CATA servers for those who want them… if that’s what you like, have at it. My problem is they forced everybody into this inferior (imo) leveling experience 1-80 with no way to play it the way some of us like it. Just like they did in 2010.
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Being on rails though is what I mean by it being a better narrative experience.
Previously, zones consisted of some leveling tasks that were loosely covered by a story wrapper.
I guess you can make the argument that this was better for exploration and discovery since more of it was left up to the player in a way, but as far as episodic storytelling—an interactive narrative experience—what we’ve had since Cata and beyond has been much more cohesive and engaging.
The world is not cohesive, I like the game world to mirror this, and yes I find this disjointed storytelling better for exploration, discovery and revisiting.
I love the zones of Cata, but I cannot stand the way my characters are playing, nor the levelling required to get to those new zones. Sigh! Please give Wrath and TBC servers.
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If this is your preference then I can see why you’d think the questing is better.
I look at it this way… I recently started playing through ‘The Last of US’ with my daughter. The game is fun - once - it leads you through the story with no real way to break out. Had a ton of cutscenes that moved the story onward with some interesting combat in between, but honestly by about the halfway point I was kinda over it, and I would NEVER play it through a second time.
Meanwhile, games like Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2, Skyrim, Morrowind - games where there’s an over-arcing storyline with episodic quests in between - are games that I keep going back to. I’ve replayed all of them multiple times over the years and will never grow tired of them.
To me Vanilla, and to a lesser extent TBC and Wrath are like those games whereas CATA was the turning point where WoW started to become more of a story-driven game like The Last of US instead of an RPG.
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I see where you’re coming from but the fundamental game loop was sort of being redefined when Cata came out.
Zones in previous expansions and the base game had been designed simply for players to level up in. You get to this zone at x level, do this stuff, and leave at x level. Easy-peasy.
Zones in the post-Cata design philosophy were designed to provide the narrative backbone for funneling players into end-game content. You were supposed to get invested in the storylines and characters so you’d stick around and raid.
The fundamental design of the game went from a go-at-your-own-pace and hang out with your friends in Azeroth model, to one that was all-in on end-game content exclusively—specifically raids—so the storytelling evolved not to be simply a way of getting you to do boring grinds without totally realizing you’re doing boring grinds, but as a way to funnel players into raids.
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Play it or don’t. And apparently there was a questionnaire put out in email and people asked for a Cata Classic, so yeah people wanted it.
You love Vanilla classic, cool, go play Vanilla classic.
And this designshift is exactly what bothers me. This is exactly how I do not play.
For me levelling was never a boing grind. It IS the game - And as I have played IronMan (HC from way back when) since 2012, I have levelled in excess of 100 characters through at least the starter zones 
I am so to speak motivated by the XP bar; when it’s not there any longer I lose interest in that character. The solution to my not liking leveling in Cata would naturally have been to level a realmfull character to max in BC and Wrath, so that I could just level through the new zones 50 times. But this requires no ilnesses, no new job, no new babies no [insert life happening here]. And for me life happened, so I have now only one character above 60 
Also apart from the streamlining of the Questing, and the ruined wold, I do not like the way my characters play (forced specs, new powers, missing flavour items) in Cata.
This is why I ask for TBC and Cata Era servers. I STILL want to level more Draenei (and maybe even a couple of Blood Elves) through the old world!
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I love Classic, TBC, and Wrath and I have been enjoying my first playthrough of Cata since I quit in OG Wrath and never got to do it.
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its different and not that bad but I m already missing Wrath cuz thats what I really enjoyed
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