What's With the Hypocrisy of the Classic Community?

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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Heyo, Neko here. I’ve played WoW from Vanilla through Shadowlands, plan on playing Dragonflight. I’ve played every expansion, starting with the OG expansionless WoW, only missing MoP (regrettably) and WoD (not regrettably).

I’m saying that to establish that I’ve played original WoW and current WoW, and I have played Classic as well as retail a fair fair amount. From downing Illidan to getting CE to pugging back in the good old days and soloing ZG originally in WotLK to doing Mythic +20s, I just want to establish I’ve played all versions of WoW.

So, with that, I enjoy all parts of WoW, and please, enlighten me about the hypocrisy of Classic players.

1) "Classic is about the leveling experience."

Then why did people, after leveling their first character up, have their local Mage/Paladin boost them?

Why are people up in arms about a temporary XP boost going away? (Note, I actually do understand people being upset about servers that had it for a shorter duration.)

Why are people upset at people who buy boosts (i.e. people in TBC Classic spitting on those who bought them, and refusing to group with them in both TBC and WotLK Classic? (For the record, I did not buy the boost, I’m just not judgmental to those who did.)

2) "Classic let you experiment and play how you wanted and use Talents you thought were fun and enjoyable."

Then why did people have a bitter hatred for people playing off meta in a very old game?

Where’s the people playing Arcane in Vanilla, people using Poleaxe Specialization/Polearms Arms Warrior in TBC, people playing literally any Rogue spec not named Combat in TBC, etc?

3) "The in game shop and WoW token ruined retail. I miss when I earned my gear and wasn’t handed it out."

These are the same people that go to no-no websites, buy gold from botters/account hackers, use said paid for gold with their own money to go into GDKPs, and “earn” gear in content their character isn’t, progression-wise, ready for in the slightest, and then on top of that, outright get upset that there’s a botting problem, that their own guild members get phished, and that the AH prices on materials is messed up, while they feed that very process.

Why.

I’ve played WoW for about 18 years. I’ve literally never gone to a third party site to buy gold once. I’ve paid some money for WoW tokens (not using compromised no no sites/systems), but I’ve also done -more- of using my own gold for tokens to just get stuff like gametime or the next expansion.

This is literally like buying illegal, um, “mana crystals” from your local dealer, then getting mad that there’s a “mana crystal” problem in your state/country.

4) "We’re about the community. We have our community back. We love the friendliness of our community."

What friendliness? I go on retail, talk about classic, people are chill and ask questions. I go on classic, talk about retail, and get a ton of hate messages and people spamming trade for the next 3 hour about how bad retail is and how retail players are horrible.

Or you know, people being rude to people who have a certain mount in game.

Or people refusing to group with people who want to explore another world (of Warcraft).

Why are so many Classic players outright ungodly toxic to anyone that doesn’t fit their specific bubble

This is something I’ve observed a lot over years and it’s really hypocritical.

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It’s a complex answer but I’ll list a possible factor. The nature of classic is very group oriented; meaning that it is reliant on finding other people to play with manually.

This created a gang… ack… cough!.. excuse me, had something stuck in my throat; this created a guild culture that evolved into exclusivity that also infected classic PuGs.

it’s a miracle they ever allowed for x-realm, automated queued BGs, as early as classic.

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Interesting, so you’re saying it’s because of the clique-y nature that’s reliant on Classic?

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It’s a factor. May not explain everything but let me put it this way,

Until I first got RDF in OG Lich, I never knew what i was missing. I had accepted the “clique-y nature” as the norm.

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  1. The classic leveling experience IS fun… Once. Having to repeat it for alts when you know what to expect around every corner on the other hand is not fun.

  2. This is more of a problem of the static state of the game. When the game has been out for 15 years, people have analyzed it out the wazoo. That being said, even meta builds often have a few skill points that are unallocated and can be assigned to match the player’s individual desires. For example, a sub hemo rogue in original classic could ignore the backstab and ambush talents and pick other things if they weren’t using daggers.
    To add to this, its also about being able to see some kind of progression at every step of your leveling journey, rather than in retail where there are levels where you literally don’t get anything other than a few extra hit points and some extra stats.

  3. No response for this. GDKPs sicken me, and I have personally never participated in one as a boycott.

  4. The grob community was amazing untilt blizzard opened the floodgates and made it into an overflow server for toxic streamer communities. That being said, I think the majority of classic players come to play classic to get AWAY from retail, so this is more akin to you poking a wound and wondering why people are reacting angrily.

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  1. Fair just this also applies to Retail usually too

  2. It still amuses me that people act like you have to play 100% optimally

  3. Same

  4. Sorry to hear, also I suppose I get that.

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i miss the xp buff. LFG is dead and its impossible to find a leveling partner

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Oof, welp, looks like making a WotLK alt will be… “Fun”

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On the note of 2, I think its less about playing optimally, and more about a sort of… whats the word… Investment and understanding of your class, if that makes sense? Someone who wasn’t playing a meta build was one of two things: An absolute expert in their class who knew what they were doing, and would be an absolute pro that would top DPS… OOORRR would be an absolute nub who had no idea what they were doing, and would probably be a complete anchor.

Problem is that 99/100 its the latter, so people don’t want to take that risk. See, that being said though, people couldn’t actually inspect your talents back in OG classic, so really, nobody had any way of knowing what your spec was, so that was never actually a way for people to lock you out until TBC I think?

As an extension of this issue though, the respec fee also created a barrier to entry for experimenting with different talent builds, and the 1 raid/week lockout also created a significant timegate to actually TESTING builds, so people ended up just opting to just go with the safe option. If people could do parse run raids, and there was no respec fee, then I think you’d probably see more people experimenting with different talent builds.

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The answer is simple.

They’re hypocrites.

Just manchildren who have never seen the sun or touched grass since high school. A vocal minority that acts like they can speak for an entire community.

That’s some of the community in a nutshell.

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Who said there is a formula to enjoy classic? For me loved to log my r14 chad warrior and farm in burning steppes while killing the pesants, and once in while I would have a cringelord login their alt account to call me all the gamer words in the book and say he would smoke my a$$ in arenas.

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The “community” you saw claiming those things were a small minority of very vocal forum posters. The same vocal forum posters who convinced Blizzard to make extremely awful decisions, completely against the wishes of the actual majority.

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Simply, there are so many people who play that there are all perspectives represented.

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I get the argument that most “off meta” folks simply don’t know what they’re doing or whatever, but it doesn’t fully explain why people are so VIOLENTLY pro-meta, parse-uber-alles, or requiring Sunwell gear to run leveling dungeons in WotLK.

Anyway, I don’t really have anything else to add besides my agreement, OP. My North Star in Classic has been the boomkin I saw wielding Sulfaras and dancing on the roofs of Booty Bay. That’s a man who had the right attitude towards this game.

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Yeah that was always my favorite from crater.

“See you in arena kid”

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I respect that player

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There is no hypocrisy. There’s old school minded players who see and understand the larger picture and then there’s the frauds and posers who jump on every bandwagon because god forbid there’s something out there they cant ruin with their petty shortsightedness.

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just start wiping characters for having non RP names on RP servers and the situation solves itself. Scrubs go back to their own servers and Grobb can once again be what it was supposed to be.

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sometimes they are different people. One constituency wants faster leveling and another wanting normal leveling, instead of the same one being hypocritical.

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When you have a big group of people you get a corresponding big group of (conflicting) opinions.