With apparent development to attempt to create a “Classic+” era version of World of Warcraft, here is a thought that would require minimal development cost and create a version of World of Warcraft that has an enormous amount of content and would almost certainly give Blizzard a long lasting population of players.
There is a population that wants to play on classic content (with quality of life improvements and class balance). There is a population that wants to play on The Burning Crusade content. There is a population that wants to play on Wrath of the Lich King content. There is a lot of overlap between these populations. Launching era specific servers for each of these (in addition to the progressing Cata classic server and the vanilla classic server) causes a problem where there the population is split between too many server types.
The solution for this:
Launch a classic server with quality of life and balance changes. Have the classic server progress through content over the course of about a year. After that year is up the classic server moves on to The Burning Crusade. Once a character goes to The Burning Crusade content for the first time it causes the character to have two “character states”. One is a Classic State and the other is a TBC State.
The Classic state is automatically active when you are in any classic zone or instance. The talent trees for this state is pre-TBC. The gear that can be equipped in this state is pre-TBC. The consumables that can be used in this state is pre-TBC.
The TBC state is automatically active when you are in any TBC zone or instance. The talent tree for this, gear usable, and consumables usable are what was usable in TBC.
Have the server progress through TBC content over about a year, and then move into Wrath of the Lich King content. When a character first goes into Wrath of the Lich King content then a third character state is created, a Wrath of the Lich King state. Same rules apply here: The WotLK state is automatically active while in any WotLK content. After the year of WotLK content Blizzard the server becomes static. If it has enough demand Blizzard could additionally roll out a seasonal server that goes through the 3-year-cycle again (maybe with transfers back to the static server at the end of the cycle)
This allows players to have one server where they can play with the same people through all three expansions of content. There are something like 21 raids and a whole lot of dungeons to play in, all at the appropriate level due to the active state/passive state mechanic that changes their state to be appropriate for the content.
For Blizzard’s part, this lets them use the massive amount of content they already have built for vanilla/TBC/WotLK. If they wanted to further develop the game using minimal resources they could add challenge levels/heroics to the earlier raids and dungeons so they stay challenging.
Tie it all together with Chromie imo. She can stitch together any mess.
Instead of phases and patches, I’d much rather see a more organic and natural form of time and difficulty gating content. Release a version of the game that has everything up to and excluding Cata, turtle WoW it by expanding on what’s in game and finishing zones, no new releases, no phases, it’s just all there.
Developers shouldn’t be afraid of Karazhan existing at the same time as Molten Core because rewards available to someone who hasn’t done MC shouldn’t be enough to do Karazhan. Outland should be there, but you should be so pathetically weak until you’ve gotten tier 0.5 that you wouldn’t even bother going through the portal (instead of the nonsense level 58 continuity of original TBC). Progressing via difficulty outside raids should follow dungeon rewards, raid rewards should allow you to skip the dungeon grinds in Outland and go straight from T3->T4.
I just feel that all these phases and patches are a cover-up for a lack of competent QA.
In my dream, we stop this feast/famine cycle that just completely ignores non-raiders and constantly fragments the population, we get one giant world and it has meaning in its natural progression. Set it, forget it, let people play it.
Require 0.5/equiv but recommend tier 1 to quest in Hellfire Penninsula (or insert some Classic+ content here and just shift all the levels up by 5 or 10)
Require lvl 70 heroic dungeon gear but recommend tier 3 to clear tier 4.
Gear got funny in TBC with pvp gear being better than pve gear in many cases, definitely revamp that, add a new epic set for each class obtainable via the Outland factions equal to tier 5 and have that be the required ilvl to begin questing in Fjords/Tundra while recommending SWP ilvl to begin Naxx10.
Then whatever you do in the wotlk content, stop whatever tf happened with numbers and scaling during/after Ulduar and prevent that inflation.
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I don’t understand the need to just make Classic+ into Retail 2.0. I’m not trying to be… rude… when I say this, but why are people so limited in their imagination?
Why not keep it in EK and Kalimdor and expand on that? The whole reason Retails story turned to crap was due to the absurdity of the scaling and the egregious lack of creativity by the writers.
Classic+ should absolutely be a retelling of events. Such as, let’s have Varian come back and lead a conquest to retake Lordaeron. Or have Thrall barter a deal with the Dustwallow Ogres to bring them into the fold and sack Theramore due to the fall/retaking of Lordaeron?
That gives a route to bring the Ogre into the Horde. Why not bring High Elves back into the Alliance after taking Lordaeron. What High Elves? The ones in The Hinterlands who have been there forever.
Sheesh. Use your imaginations.
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Jojlin: Absolutely 100%. Bronze Dragonflight time travel shenanigans to tie it into the game.
Ginzo: I don’t disagree at all, but what I’m seeing from classic era, the classic->cataclysm server, SOM, and SOD is an attempt to make use of the “old game” that already exists using minimal resources.
A more thorough retelling, as you’re describing, would be fantastic. However, it would take a lot more resources.
Creating a Classic+TBC+WotLK combination server where you can play each of the era’s contents at the appropriate level would make use of all the content that already exists, and seems like the logical way to create a group of WoW players that would have fun (and stay subscribed) for a long time.
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