I think this is where retail has gone off the rails. While resets are periodically necessary to make the game more accessible to new players, retail has taken it to such an extreme it has begun to feel pointless to do anything other than collect things.
It’s not an RPG anymore, it’s a collection game. Any type of RPG character progression you can work towards or spend time on is handed out to everyone, essentially for free, a month or two later. Mounts, pets, toys, and achievements are the only long terms goals that aren’t reset and provide any sense of long term progression or accomplishment.
But the core activity of raiding and instances has been made pointless. A casual guild spends a lot of blood and sweat getting gear from a normal raid… Week later better gear is handed out on WQ’s. Spend a lot of time grinding out your neck, a week later your alt can get to the same point with 1/10th the effort.
The game has literally done such a massive 180 on it’s core purpose that there’s a large portion of players that would rather throw out all the QoL improvements just to get back to an RPG where RPG character progression is the end goal, not collecting pets.
Which I think gets me back to the core premise of the thread. How much of a zero sum game will the success of the WoW’s be? ( I hope it’s not and each can go explore their respective game philosophies more in depth ) And if one of them wins out leaving the other with ghost servers. what happens?
It wont. no demon hunters, death knights, monks or blood elves, and paladins are a far cry from live servers. Ret will go from the best pvp spec to the worst in the blink of an eye.
This I agree with. As a casual player, I feel like I get left behind a lot. The catch up mechanics are good but I just do not feel like there is an end. I am always playing catch up and when I do catch up I get behind again. At least with Classic, I know there will be an end and when I finally get there I can just enjoy doing what I love to do (pvp). Now I have to spend my game time catching up before doing anything.
Think this is because the catch up mechanics aren’t really catch up mechanics. Right now they can give you current heroic tier raiding gear, that’s not catch up, it’s something else.
What they really look like they are designed to do is capture the people that can’t or wont raid into Skinner box loot treadmill.
Originally the game was centered around a character progression and as you pushed further more effort and teamwork was required. Now it’s wait a month and go do an emissary. The problem is it makes the game unrewarding for most people.
The more I think about if classic is successful it might go subscription and retail will double down on store revenue and go F2P P2W.
That’s what wall street wants with any successful game IP and if classic works out they’ll have an excuse to really go down that path because they can say classic is for the purest.
Kinda hoped that classic would be a separate subscription. It would be interesting to see if all these people bowing before the great god vanilla would still do so if they had to pay extra.
I am by no means a “classic fan”, but I will be playing classic largely in part just to thumb my nose at all the jerkoffs who spew garbage like this. And I’m gonna do it purely from memory, right down to grinding the last 4 levels in Silithus on those worms by Cenarion Hold.
Maybe they will not do a level squish and understand that the content/team work outer players is more important then how long it takes to get to the next lvl.
It won’t it will just be filled with all the private server nerds who do not mind paying for the game,after the inital burst of launch it will drop to those i said above either way blizz will have 2 sht versions of wow running .
![:man_shrugging:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/man_shrugging.png?v=6" ":man_shrugging:")
but we all know that isn’t enough