I’ve never liked the idea of being able to steamroll content and earn the coolest rewards with minimal effort. It’s a major reason why the MoP Challenge Mode sets still hold a lot of value.
That said, as long as Classic is balanced nearly identical to its original release, I would be totally down for players being able to earn those rewards for retail.
Which honestly, if you really think about it, could honestly be a huge driving force for the game.
Instead of treating each version of WoW as its entirely partitioned experience, what if they actually compounded on each other?
Let’s keep things simple and say you start a Human Warrior in TWW. You level to 80 and decide to check out Vanilla. Well, you’re able to create a brand new character from scratch, or create a “version” of your retail character. They would start totally fresh, just like any level 1. Maybe you reach level 25 and decide “actually, I’m gonna try TBC”. You pay a nominal fee (ideally waived for super old characters who already progressed through those expansions normally) to “clone” your character and move them forward (maybe with some stipulations, like a gold cap, BoE’s are soulbound, and crafting materials don’t carry forward?). You get to level 50, then go back to Vanilla; you’re still level 25, exactly the same as before. You reach lvl 60 on Vanilla, and suddenly your progress is carried forward to your TBC character – as well as all of the expansions thereafter.
No doubt it would take some clever coding. But consider the potential payoff:
Instead of having competing versions of WoW that cannibalize each other, each expansion (plus the base game, which we’ll just call “Classic” for simplicity’s sake) not only remains fully playable, but hey also remain relevant.
Instead of each new expansion rendering all of your previous efforts null and void, they would finally function as their name implies, expanding upon the options you have at your disposal. Each expansion (“Edition”?) could maintain its own ruleset, and if the community supported it, potentially get minor balancing fixes over time. Instead of pinning all our hopes and dreams into a single “Classic+” (which to be fair, could still be cool), but you could totally play around with the “seasonal” models as well, and maybe just push those characters forward when they are done (ie. a “Season” for Vanilla, once ended, could have characters transfer to TBC). The idea being, we don’t want crazy xp boosts invalidating the efforts of players who put in the work for the “core” version of each Expansion.
Intead of “timewalking”, where all of these games are just using the modern class design pushed into dungeons that clearly weren’t balanced for them, you could have rotating events to play the actual expansions.
I dunno, I just feel like that could be a way more satisfying experience, feeling like A) you’re always making some sort of progress, no matter what version you’re playing, and B) it would eliminate a lot of that pressure to “hurry up and play before this expansion is over!” which has honestly plagued Classic ever since TBC’s end was first announced.
I’m WAY more motivated to spend time in the game if I feel like I could do it at my own pace, and also that time spent working up reputations, or unlocking cool “stuff”, being able to have those cosmetics and such carry forward to subsequent expansions.
I could genuinely see it inspiring a whole new breed of “completionist”, where instead of just blitzing through quests where you’re dealing millions of damage to anything that looks at you funny, it would actually be worthwhile to say “I’m going to truly 100% Vanilla, and then move onto TBC, and so forth”.
It also creates perfect justification to keep challenging content in the game attainable, at the level it was intended to be. It’s a little too late to close pandora’s box on farming legacy content, but I could really see it being cool to just say “You know what? I feel like playing this version of the game right now” and not be on some artificial time-crunch.