It’s clear to me that there is a gradient. On one side, you have vanilla, and on the other, you have retail. As you progress through this gradient, or spectrum, you add more and more “stuff” that is retail.
So what is it? What’s on the gradient? When do you cross the line and now you’re in retail?
I can’t answer this question because I didn’t play the original line of games past week 1 Cata. I have no idea what kind of systems are in place in retail nowadays.
But I also think this is a personal opinion for many of us. Some might say retail crosses the line here, others there.
So what do you think?
the sale of goods to the public in relatively small quantities for use or consumption rather than for resale.
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I was under the impression we call it retail because that’s what it’s listed as in the folder.
One thing i learned is that when people say “Retail”, it could mean different things. There is the grindier “mythic raiding” side of retail. And there is the casual friendly side of Retail.
Needless to say, the current player base is playing for the latter. Tedious and grindy are bad words.
Some people will argue Vanilla is the best version of the game, that even flying in TBC ruined the game. Others argue WoTLK started it all because of LFD, but for most LFR seems to be a big turning point in retail design.
There’s no one definitive point where Classic is no longer Classic and it’s now Retail. I think it’s better to think of them as era. Vanilla through WoTLK was an era, Cata through WoD was another, and Legion and Shadowlands was the most recent.
My guess is beyond WoTLK Classic is in trouble solely because people really like the old school WoW lore and once you’re done with WoTLK you are done with a lot of the lore people are overly familiar with.
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crossservers, lfr, rdf, mandatory daily chores that are part of power progression, 4 raid difficulties, borrowed power when classes stay same for three expansions (4 now) in a row, content gets obsolete withing a patch instead of expansion, normalization of weapon stats and speed and overall class homogenization with less and less buttons, classes butchered in barebones specs.
Madseasonshow had great video before he stopped covering wow
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The way I divide classic and retail is by Pre-Cataclysm vs post-Cataclysm.
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Retail starts when activision takes the wheel.
That is 3…3+
Basically cataclysms systems and wods model.
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Flying mounts, cross-faction classes, purchaseable mounts, purchaseable boosts, and characters leaving Creation above Level 1 are all proof-positive you’re playing retail WoW.
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Somewhere around Cata and MoP where they drastically changed the world and started simplifying things like the talent system and taking away so much customization and then it continued leaning into borrowed power and causing all sorts of issues with players not feeling a true sense of progression. You get hyped for the expansion and you progress and get all of this power and then the next expansion you lose it all. And I don’t mean you’re just not max level anymore but you lose actual functionality. You lose power, you lose abilities, you lose a lot.
Not taking the bait on this one.
I’m tired of hearing retail defined as anything outside of what is the current retail. A lot of these classic Andys have no idea what the current retail experience is like and it shows.
The QOL features in retail are pretty great. What currently isn’t great about retail is the content, the story, the encounters, and the class design.
Almost nobody in the current retail is complaining about lack of community, finding groups, finding challenging content. The problems classic Andys claim plagues retail simply don’t.
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From what I can tell, anything that makes it “retail” is being automated, but only when it’s involving the pve side. Look at what they did for BG’s, most of the people that complain about RDF or RF will glance at it and say we don’t like it but~ then they trail off into a rant on RDF/RF as being worse for who know what reason.
In regards to your “daily chores” comment, do you find the dailies in TBC and WoTLK part of this problem?
You don’t have to do anything in tbc and wrath, most gear rewards is rarely irreplacable and you do stuff for mounts or tabard. In retail you can’t skip Torghast (on release), your legendary might aswell deal 40% of your total damage
Dailies are not bad, mandatory dailies/weeklies are
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Retail is what is currently on the main World of Warcraft client
When you have multiple options (those currently being Vanilla Classic, Wrath Classic, and WoW) insisting that there are only two categories (Classic and Retail) and nothing in between is being purposely obtuse, especially when the dividing factor in that person’s mind is the underlying systems within and not the actual gameplay content
To put it another way, calling Retail as such purely based on systems like RDF, LFR, Cross-realms etc. indirectly implies that, if they theoretically removed features like that in a future expansion, Retail would by that logic suddenly become Classic again…despite it being an entirely new expansion and thus cannot be “Classic” by the literal definition of the word
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But you’re not the target audience of Classic. I mean from what you said, you sound like you’re a retail player (or as your favorite streamer would say, a retail andy). Which is fine. However, they’re not here to appeal to you. They have your subscription already on retail. You’re not double paying your subscription to play Classic. Classic’s target audience are the players who don’t play retail. Players who would rather go to a private server then play retail. That’s the playerbase they want to attract because that would grow their audience portfolio. It would add profit, instead of just adding more work for the same.
All the things you reference to being troublesome in retail are fixable in an expansion release. So in a way, it sounds like Classic is more of just a waiting room till retail gets their act together. Which begs the question, should they listen to your side of the playerbase?
Personally, I think not. If classic is to survive on its own, it will need to make sure it has a clear distinction between Classic and Retail. And simply classic being retail without mythic+ or borrowed power won’t work. These “QoL features” are one of the clear distinctions to it. There’s a whole list of things for each expansion that “define” that expansion. And for a lot of the things, they can be viewed as concepts that lack QoL/convivence.
Now no matter what MMO you’re playing, if you join a guild you can find a community. It’s the “random social interactions” that are one of the things that are different between classic and retail. I can play retail, join a few guilds and socialize. But random people in pug groups, out in the world, etc. They rarely communicate with one another when I used to play. However in Classic, that is different. People will invite one another for quests and chat while doing the quest objectives. I’ll go do a dungeon and people can have just random idle chatter while playing. At the end of the dungeon (if it went well), people will add one another on friends list and say to hit them up if they ever need a DPS/healer/tank. It’s those little things, little social interactions that are a vital part to classic vs retail. And many “classic” WoW players who played before classic vanilla (private servers) all agree that automated RDF are one of the things that contributed to this decline.
That’s not to say this is a yes/no matter. I think RDF has a place in lower level dungeons after a certain time period. So like if a server isn’t fresh and wotlk releases, I’d say all instanced content between level 1 - 60 should have a RDF attached to it. For TBC content, I’d way about 3-5 months after wotlk releases before opening up RDF. But RDF should not be added during wotlk’s life span. The current LFG system they have works perfectly fine for “current” content.
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Kind of like the other poster said of course the people still playing don’t complain about these things. The people who cared quit the game.
That’s because the people playing Retail will give you a list of gripes but they are still playing so they are still content enough with the game as it is. Meaning they are happy and content enough with the direction it has gone to keep playing.
You don’t ask the people who are still there. You ask the people who have left. That’s where you get the real answer.
(also side note, every time I see that “Classic Andy” thing my mind goes to “Immature streamer follower, does not think for themselves” and it’s hard to take the rest of the comments seriously)
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