Why Classic has a big draw and what Retail WoW can take from it (Opinion)

Community General Discussion
1

First off, let me give a little background on who I am and why I decided to write this. So I am a WoW Veteran, been playing heavily since 2004 and have only really ever taken one break which lasted 4 months at the end of WotLK and beginning of Cata. I am not a R1 player, not a Mythic raider, not a streaming will a big community of followers. However, I have played multiple aspects of this game at a decent level and have either been heavily involved in the community of my server or heavily engaged with the community in its current state (streamers, esports, content creators, etc). I have talked with many players at some point or another that have specialized in different aspects of the game. Again, I am not some high end player, I just love World of Warcraft and have logged more hours than I care to admit. Now, with WoW Classic on the horizon I have a renewed sense of excitement of what this could mean for the game. My wife plays and now my daughter (who loves the stories of WoW) has also begun to play so I wish for the game to begin to renew itself from a health standpoint. My main focus will be community since to me, that is the most important aspect of WoW both past, present and future. Community and its current state is why I decided to write this, and why I think Classic WoW is important. I will be focusing on a few key aspects that I feel are important that are listed below.

1) Servers

2) Guilds

3) LFG/Solo Que

4) Streaming/Content Creation

5) Classic WoW Influence

Servers

The difference of what a server is today to what it was in the past is night and day. Servers are meaningless in a lot of ways do to cross-realm grouping, sharding, LFG and just a dwindling player base in general. People flock to bigger servers for obvious reasons now days, while other servers continue to die off. This wasn’t always the case however. Servers in themselves were communities. I played on a relatively big server from 2005 on called Emerald Dream which up until recently was a RP/PvP server and everyone knew everyone. There were celebrities, trolls, cliques and communities within the community. I feel like this is what it was like on a lot of servers from what I have been able to research. People knew the top end guilds, the notorious gankers (PvP servers), R1 players/Grand Marshall/High Warlord players. There were even people who got known for their dueling outside of Stormwind and Orgrimmar and people would hang out in those places just to watch these players do their thing. Now with the demise of servers and the implementation of cross-server interaction and sharding the chance of you bumping into any player that has a following or celebrity to them is very rare. I myself have many IRL friends and people I still talk to that don’t even play now that I met from my guild or server years ago. Servers like I said above were their own community, and for me even when I wasn’t enjoying the game particularly I would still log in to engage with that community and my friends.

How would I fix this? For one, Blizzard needs to start shutting down servers and merging them together. I realize some people are still attached to their servers but all that server is now is a name because they communities on these servers are basically non existent. All Cross-Realm and sharding does is give those players someone to play with, but are less likely to engage in the same way as if they were on the same server. I know there were players for me that I would end up befriending or playing more with simply because I would run into them out in the world regularly. Sharding almost completely eliminates that aspect even for people that are on the same server. Throw in War Mode and they are separate even more. Blizzard needs to find a way to dwindle down the server list and make things like sharding be more of way of separating players and more of a way of bringing players together. To many things implemented, whether on purpose or not, only serve to separate players more.

Guilds

Guilds were a community in among themselves and then there were guilds that also would work with other guilds to expand on those communities. Guilds were large, medium and small. Now guilds have also felt the wrath of medium/low pop servers. Throw in cross-realm group and there are even less reasons to be engaged with a guild. Now, guilds only focus on size. Players want size, quantity over quality only because the game has forced it that way. Small guilds, while they still exist, come and go simply because players can really only get anything out of a guild with a larger player roster. Starting a guild from scratch is even harder unless you already have a decent amount of players to start up with you or use an addon like Super Guild Invite to just spam recruit which gives you number quickly but it doesn’t make a healthy guild. I know from experience trying to recruit with an addon to do it for me the first question I would always get is “how many active players do you have online”. It’s hard to find players willing to build anything only because they are either looking for an established guild, or just a guild that has an active social aspect already. Which again is been forced on to the game because of how easy it is to just solo que for many things and the only thing you really need a guild for now is if you want to do high end raiding, and even then you don’t always even need a guild to do that.

How would I fix this? This one is harder, because to me this relies on a healthy server population and more aspects of the game that you would rely on a tight knit group for other than high end raiding. If Blizzard isn’t willing to kill off servers and merge them then maybe cross realm guilds would be the answer and honestly I don’t even like that idea.

LFG/Solo Que

For the longest time in order to complete a lot of things in the game required you to form groups, even after LFG was introduced. You could just play the game solo with little interaction but there was a lot you would miss out on. Questing, dungeons, pvp and raiding all required some kind of player interaction in some way to do or to complete. Now so much content is to easily solo’d. What LFG has done to the game is made it to easy to just be toxic and leave a group. If things aren’t going right, you can just leave the group and queue up another group. Before is was sometimes close to an hour to form up a group, getting a few to the summoning stone, summoning and then doing the dungeon. People were far far less likely to leave a group because of the time involved to form a group. Not to mention far more likely to help a struggling tank, healer or dps because it was essential for that struggling person to at least improve to the point they could at least complete the dungeon. This in itself would eliminate toxicity and players able to just leave while insulting the rest of their group as they left. There was a vested interest in the group being able to succeed. Now there is almost no repercussion for leaving a group hanging. You are either just replaced or people can just que up a group again. Same goes for Looking for Raid. Not only are the mechanics of the fights easy to the point of boredom it’s far too easy just to leave because there is no vested interest in the group succeeding. I understand giving more players access to raiding, but raiding use to be a point you would need to work towards, now an toon can be geared in hours or less and hop into LFR sometimes without even really knowing how to play that class, and LFR doesn’t even push you to know things like mechanics, roles and rotations.

How would I fix this? Honestly I don’t know how you fix this because to many players use it and are used to it. I think Blizzard is already to deep into this system to just roll it back. I think they could do things like making quests you need a group for that and you can just go to LFG for. Start with that and see what the reaction is. Of course these quests would have to have a reward to get players to do them. I think and issue again is servers though, because it would be harder if not impossible for people on low pop servers to get these done without being frustrated. I guess we will see because in Classic WoW these systems don’t exist.

Streamers/Content Creators

Let me preface this by saying Streamers and Content creators are largely a positive for the game because it advertises the game. However there are a few aspects especially it its current climate it can have a negative affect. It use to be people use to create content to sites like Warcraftmovies and YouTube and these projects would take a lot of time and effort to create. Now since this content is a source of income for some many people it’s now quantity over quality. These content creators are almost forced to put out content as quickly as possible because otherwise their channels may suffer. However since they have to do this it forces them to search for anything they can to talk about. They negative affect this has (in my opinion) is everything is analyzed, analyzed and over analyzed to the point where it seems nothing is good. It’s a fact that negative content, or what can perceived that way, gets reactions and views. That goes beyond just the gaming universe.

Now I am not saying people are not allowed to their opinions etc but I just think at times some of these content creators jump to conclusions and at times overreact to changes etc. Now I will admit my income doesn’t rely on how successful a game is, so to these content creators they may seem that any little change could have a negative affect on their income or their channel. However on the flip side so many people watch and follow these content creators and base their opinion completely on what these content creators say that they don’t form their own opinion. “Oh this streamer says WoW is crap, so why would I even try it” kind of thing. I don’t maybe they don’t think about that or think they have that kind of affect on people. But they do, and you see it in their chats and comments. I just think these people who are ambassadors to the game can still be open about the issues with the game without just making blanket statements like “the game is crap” etc. They have large communities of their own and are extremely influential themselves on their viewers opinions on the game. That is why a lot of their viewers watch them to begin with.

Classic WoW influence

So Classic WoW is going to be a good gage on how the current player base reacts to the community based game WoW Classic is. Their is not LFR, LFG, etc. It will be interesting to see how well this version of the game does with players that never experienced the game without the systems the game has now. Even more interesting will be if Blizzard start rolling back or re-introducing systems that are successful in Classic WoW. To me the biggest reason Classic WoW has gotten so much hype is it is to me what the game should be, community based. Players need to interact with others in some way to even do so much of the content. Making connections is important which in turn leads to making friends whether in game or ones that translate to IRL friends later on. Yes it has some systems me and others would like to see come back but again to me it’s all about community. That is why I am so hyped for it, that and just the nostalgia of a game that has so many memories for me. This is why WoW Classic is so important for WoW, to see if the community that existed in Classic WoW can exist in current retail.

This wasn’t written really based of any hard numbers or research. It was based on my long experience with WoW and my interactions with casual players all the way up to “celebrity” players or content creators. I would love to see people reactions or you take on what I discussed here. I could have written so much more but didn’t want it to turn into a small novel. Please keep it civilized and constructive.

Twitter: @mhortigaming
Twitch: mhortigaming

Thanks!

Mhorti

5 Likes
2

I say this every time someone talks about how the dungeon finder is bad for WoW. The system works just fine in other MMOs, because those companies actually take action against folks abusing vote kick and being toxic. The fact that Blizzard does absolutely nothing to punish players for being d-bags is at least part of the reason why the system sucks. In my opinion, the rest of the blame lies on the players. There’s nothing Blizzard can do to fix the system on their own, we would need to help, and people won’t.

6 Likes
3

Nice blog post.

Classic forums are that way. :point_right:

11 Likes
4

This applies to the current state of retail as well. It isn’t just a classic post. But I will post it there too.

5

Agreed. It works, while not flawlessly because humans, quite well in FF14.

2 Likes
6

Yeah. I wish the community in this game was as good as FF14. I would enjoy WoW a hell of a lot more if that were the case.

7

FF14 also carries a big incentive to queue up for old content with roulettes as well and everything is instanced through their duty finder.

1 Like
8

That is true, however, I don’t think adding rewards to content in WoW would make people act any better… which I think was the point. :slight_smile:

9

You. You wrote so much. In my country, we read 1 million page novels and your post is like a tweet to us. I wish you all the best with your country’s home-schooled-and-drooled audience. I kid, I kid.

2 Likes
10

The community use to be good and diverse. Over the years the game has moved away from things that build community, and I am not even saying LFG was intended to do that. Its just in it’s current state it does.

11

Yes. Can you imagine if Blizzard did something like that? Being able to run older dungeons and raids for currency and gold, and maybe rep or something? That would be a hit in this game, I think. It works SO well.

3 Likes
12

That’s not the tools fault though, which is what Nillah was saying. You can have strong community values and have queueable content. They aren’t mutually exclusive. You are addressing the wrong issue.

1 Like
13

I am not disagreeing with you, it’s how this que based content was implemented

14

It’d be real nice. They’re almost there with dungeons now that timewalking is all the way up to WoD. It might not be feasible to do raids, but it’d be pretty cool.

15

Old raids use to give a ton of gold. Some even gave rep, a few still do. MOG is a big draw for old raids too. But blizzard nerfed the gold from old raids into the ground.

16

Oddly enough home schooled kids do better in school than public schooled kids in America.

17

I feel like I should, and shouldn’t, add fuel to a potential fire and say that FF allows you to queue for Savage (equitable to Mythic) content. While true, I would never suggest that for WoW because the playerbase is vastly different.

18

I would love this, but only if there was a spectator mode so we could watch queable mythic CoS.

19

The thing is, you’d be running them synced down to that level, like timewalking does. I would think increasing the gold reward in that case would encourage people to run them more. But they seem to have a thing against players making a bunch of gold lately, since they’re trying to put more gold sinks in to drain our pockets.

And thankfully it doesn’t seem like hardly anyone uses that option in FF, except on the Japanese datacenter from what I heard. I’ve always thought they should just take it out. Not much point except to torture mentors trying to do their roulette.

20

Yeah, for sure. It would definitely be good for that. Well only assuming that no cries/complaints would be listened to. That’s really the main reason I’d be against it. Blizzard has too strong of a history of nerfing things for me to ever really suggest it.