What are the pillars of Classic WOW's core design?

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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Apart from what the original devs set out to do, apart from what Blizzard in general thought at the time, what are the principle aspects of Classic WOW that make it a good game?

I feel like this is crucial in understanding where Warcraft goes in the future post Classic.

Obviously, with Classic having a two year road map of content releases over 6 phases from Launch to Naxxramas, that means there is a lot of time to address that issue. What lessons does BFA or the future expansions take from Classic to make that version of the World of Warcraft better? If Blizzard wants to do more Classic like content what can be the clear sign posts for them to look for.

Sense of Community feels like one of the biggest, BFA has attempted this, but it seems its assumptions on what drives community is biased against the type of experiences Classic is known for. So there needs to be a way to expound on that term that will help us as a community better understand with Blizzard what exactly we need to see in the games Blizzard makes in the future.

If I had to expand on the idea of community, its the idea that any individual in a society is not self sufficient. By having this weakness it becomes core to the idea of seeking relationships in order to fulfill personal needs. As the expansions of Warcraft made the game more and more possible to play alone they sabotaged any need for relationships under the banner of accessibility. People became reliant on Blizzard’s systems rather than each other. There needs to be gaps in game design where player choices make some content inaccessible to them without the help of others.

So this first pillar, what do we call it? Reliance on Other Players? What would you add, what other pillars of design make Classic what it is?

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  1. Epic beards

All else is trivial.

Jokes aside, “Community Cooperation”? I don’t know if it needs to be (or can be) boiled down. Basically it’s a community that’s reliant on others.

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Dwarves have 99% of the best beards in the game. I’ve been leveling a human warrior as I wait for Classic and wish there were more FULL beards.

Its essentially a societal model thats needed. Funny how that works for an MMO in some aspect needs to reflect our needs as people in a society. As a matter of fact, life does seem better when I learn to cooperate with others to get things done I cannot do alone.

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It also forces better community interactions when you’re reliant on others. Complete self-reliance and being essentially anonymous fosters the so-called “toxic” social interactions that retail has.

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Sort of like what I mentioned about people being reliant on systems rather than people. When something is wrong, its not their social skills at fault, to them its Blizzard’s fault. They have become reliant on the systems.

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  1. Requirement to team work - This is the core component of the community side of things. If you got a reputation for being an idiot, people would avoid you. But the major parts of the game that you want to be in, require cooperation and team work, so people suppressed their inner 13yr old and were civil to each other.

  2. Reward for effort - Things were hard in that they took lots of time and effort. A Wintersaber Mount wasn’t available from the store, or through a simple quest chain. Getting into a raid required not only attunements, but finding a team willing to take you based on your ability, which meant showing your ability in other less critical areas.

  3. Progression was progress - There was never an era where people skipped Molten Core with a new raid group. An individual might have been carried through BWL till they were geared, because the raid had stopped going to MC, but no raid group started in BWL without people who had already heavily farmed MC (as a group or individually in other groups). Every time you leveled you got an incremental talent point increase. Spells came out at different levels and you had to go back and learn them instead of them just appearing on your bar and then improving over time silently.

  4. Not Homogenised, RP based - Every class started with an RP theme and spells and abilities were added as appropriate to it. Every DPS class didn’t have an interrupt, different classes had different buffs and not every healer could dispel everything (and not everything that needed dispelling was Magic). Classes were varied, and because of this, you had to bring them all, instead of these “2 Warriors, 14 rogues, 9 Paladins” raids that skipped classes for optimisation.

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Well said.

On point 4, this was something that is so simple. Things made sense from an RP experience. If you played a tabletop RP there is some logic you expect of a fictional game world to still hold true. This RP element becomes the theme for classes that reenforces Point 1 as a system. Its the in-game excuse why you need help from others and serves as a basis for the mechanics of the game.

Thanks for taking the time to write out your thoughts.

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Oh also

  1. Repetitive effort had a goal - Partly on the same topic as point 2, grinding had a goal and once that goal was achieved, there was no reason to keep repeating the task. Grinding out Rep had an end point and you knew you could reach it. There were no modern dailies where they are the same thing over and you know you’re going to have to keep doing them if you want “War Resources” or “Paragon rewards”. A path to a goal, vs a treadmill with an unreachable carrot.
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No Gear Reset Every Six Months: the continual gear treadmill in Modern WoW is awful. Things from earlier in the game were still viable or useful (luffa!). Thisight be the same as Elorarells progression was progress, or at least an addendum.

Lack of Dailies didn’t make you feel punished for taking a day off

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Yes! There is definitely something to be said about the idea that “not all grind feels the same”. So often I hear people compare grinding in both versions of the game as if they are the same as a form of criticism. However they are not the same are they!
One is a big grind, like the Winterspring saber, with a calculated goal and mental picture of what you needed to do to reach it, and the other felt like a grind that was a mandatory timegate.
Video for reference of how that mount worked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-lKGQcJ3hk
You can repeat the quest as many times as you wanted. So you could take it on as casually or hardcore as you wanted. Not some artificial 24h clock to wait to do 20 minutes of content.

@Renthelm
The irony is that Blizzard should have known better from lessons learned from Naxx release and TBC announcement. Naxx only saw less than 1% player participation because people knew the gear would be replaced by Greens in TBC.

If you know replacement gear is coming and it will be easy to jump in and obtain, why do the previous content? This is similar to point 3 Eloraell mentions!

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I’ll add:

The game starts upon character creation. There is no filler. It is intended to be fun from the beginning.

The community aspect mentioned in the OP extends to creating events and content.

The entire world is a grand setting for for both provided content and spontaneous activities.

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The choice of the most watered down version of the game elements was the most important pillar being chopped down.

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The 4 pillars of classic/vanilla

Joanna
Leroy
Oxhorn
That 1 rogue in stv.

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You hit the nail on the head, Epicbeard. It’s called cooperation I suppose, that intangible dynamic of needing others and being needed by others.

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Yeah, compare that to current leveling in retail. Might as well be time walking in past expansion content. Cata fundamentally changed Azeroth in many ways and makes for wornout leveling experience being subjected to Miami CSI references in Westfall and Rambo in Redridge.
I enjoy easter egg mini games like Joust in Hyjal and Plants vs Zombies in Hillsbrad Foothills, but these zones, stories, and systems have been abandoned in terms of development with Rambo (John Keeshan) making appearances from time to time as a Rambo joke even in BFA.
The scaling of old zones was a bandaids and no real thought has been made to make leveling a part of the game’s experience.

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Thematic elements have strong preference over balance

For example. Death wish grants fear immunity, increases damage dealt AND damage taken.

That doesn’t mean current racials or classes can’t be more balanced, such as by enforcing the weaker racial’s strength’s like making troll regeneration racial stronger or by introducing new abilities.

It just means that strong theme should take a precedence over balance, and if it’s the question between those two, the thematic element should always win. Each ability should be played to their strength’s, or otherwise everything ends up bland and homogenized, like on live.

Healer balance in PvP

No stupid OP healers that heal someone to full in one instant and cannot be stopped by a single DPS. Healers routinely get put into their place by DPS in Classic as it should be - If PvE classes like healers were dominant in PvP, that’d just make the experience awful for everyone else that is not a healer.

No Flying

Seriously, this single-handedly ruined world PvP and doesn’t belong in Classic, at least not on PvP realms.

Arenas

Ruined WoW PvP, no need for that in Classic. If you want arenas go play TBC.

Epic is Epic

There’s no welfare epics aside from AV, and that’s how it should be. If everything is epic, then nothing really feels like epic anymore. Might as well just remove the tag like on retail.

No grinding for 60!

This is actually not the meta for leveling currently, but the developers have stated that, unlike other MMORPG’s at the time, the original intent of the Vanilla questing system was so that players wouldn’t have to grind to get to level 60.

Thus, leveling should be changed to be more rewarding, especially quests that require travel and elite quests, so that this original design goal of Vanilla can be achieved.

Higher grade and ilevel weapons(such as epics) should generally be more desirable than lower-grade, such as blue weapons

For example, Feral Druids currently don’t benefit from weapon DPS at all, leading to lacklustre leveling compared to other melee classes.

The most important slot for melee classes for Feral Druids is practically DEAD, which is why, among many other issues, why Druids are so much more unpopular than other classes, and boring to level.

Devs stated that people not upgrading to higher quality, higher ilevel problem was a problem in Vanilla, so Druids not equipping higher DPS weapons is against the design philosophy of Vanilla and should be fixed.

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Throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks, also make sure it’s casual friendly.

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Exploration feels entirely different from the ground. I recently leveled through Northrend on a DK and consciously made an effort to stay on the ground instead of being tempted to fly. I saw waaay more interesting perspectives from the ground, but as I continued to level that character it became clear that some designs around flying made the ground content seem like it was being designed to be as inconvenient as possible to encourage flying and wanting to fly.