We can recognize the success of things we dislike without needing to make ourselves feel superior because of the flavor of WoW we consume.
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As a player of all versions of wow that has been released in the past over the last 20 years. And still plays on each version there is now.
Plus having a wife that played for 8 and two kids that have played since cata or later.
Everyone has their reason why they prefer each one.
Retail never failed if you think about it…it let down different people during different intervals.
There has been a lot of good ideas in every xpac. Just some implementation was done poorly.
Honestly retail overall is a success story. There isn’t a lot of games in the world that can say they have been online and profitable for two decades.
The way I look at retail now is like a PTR. With what they are doing with classic’s they should just start adding in the stuff the majority liked and revamp wow and start a 2.0.
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Thank you Darkwandon for taking the time for that explanation. I never had a problem with LFR for the reasons you stated. The gear is not worth it or should i say, nothing special. For super casuals it allows them to see the raids and to them, the gear probably is pretty nice. But for normal players LFR is just more content and for some, a chance to “show off” how much dps they can do with thier epic raid gear. But a few popular streamers make negative comments about it and the followers jump on and repeat. Oh well.
You are correct about the using gold being important. Its not the gold really. Gold to me is a way of accumulating my accomplishments from everything i do in game. I like to be able to collect from that. Gdkps fill that for me. Unfortunately with the wow token and illegal bought gold, it gets a bad rap and absolutely can be pay to win. However, i do disagree somewhat there because i absolutely think that there is no difference in the skill needed for GDKP vs non GDKP raids. You are not getting into a Heroic TOGC gdkp if you are in low gear and suck. ppl in Gdkp are many times better than in a regular raid.
It sounds like crafting may interest me. I don’t know exactly how it works obviously but I can forsee, maybe in a future expansion, a very expensive crafted gear that players like me would love to be able to dump our gold into crafting and the “raid loggers” just won’t be able to get. And i don’t say “raid loggers” in a negative way. We each play how we want.
Thanks again for the reply. Oh and i love the ability to solo que for Arena in retail. Something ive wanted since arenas first came out in original TBC. I am still on the fence about continuing on into CAta classic. One HUGE thing that they did is announce they will be allowing the Heroic Plus dungeons with LFD tool. I hate that you can not join mythic dungeons with LFG tool. it is the #1 reason i gave up on retail. I think the keys should be the gatekeeper for LFD just like they will have a min gearscore or ILVL score for the higher heroics built into LFD in wrath. So if they continue doing this for cata, AND add some sort of solo que for arenas, i would probably have to continue lol. I don’t thinkt they have the vision for that though since it took them 20 years to do it for retail.
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Wrath is retail WoW. You’ll find better answers in the Classic forum.
fixed that for ya
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Except that it literally is not retail WoW.
It’s basically the final most refined iteration of vanilla design before they started making massive changes in Cata.
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Crafting was very nice for S2. I will warn you that I’ve read they will not be repeating this again for S3. What I heard is that people will not be able to craft the highest ilvl in S3. I should also inform you that leveling up crafting takes AGES in retails. It is a time gated grind with a few, but not anywhere near enough catch up mechanics.
HUGE agree here. This is a big win. I am not sure how I feel about trying to raid 2 nights a week with a guild doing heroic ICC progression AND doing progression with a guild in retail when S3 drops…which will probably only be a couple weeks after ICC drops. I play a lot, but I work nights at a hospital with random shifts, so scheduling raids has been VERY difficult. The ability to queue up for content is a giant win for people like me. I am EXTREMELY pleased to hear I’ll be able to queue up for the toughest dungeon content in WOTLK Classic. Even if I can’t make many raids, it’ll be nice to gear up some alts in dungeons. I really do hope it is a success that retail can look at and potentially unlock queuing for M+ in retail.
Here’s to us continuing to find things to enjoy in WoW after all these years.
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I’ll take whatever your smoking
Getting to play classic again and progress through TBC and now to Wrath has been amazing.
But getting to do it all again really showed me that the jump from TBC to Wrath is where I think the most major design changes to be like retail happened.
Especially Wrath classic which added even more retail like changes like updating the same dungeons every patch, WoW token, and expansion of cross realm functionality.
Multiple raid difficulties, more focus on aoe spam, more catchup and “play the patch”, more class homogenization with playstyles and buffs (a ton of specs got aoe in Wrath).
It’s fun, but it’s a clear departure from vanilla/TBC.
I’ll have to emphatically disagree. The passage through The Dark Portal ushered in Flying, purchaseable boosts/mounts, and gathering stones. All of which shrink the World of Warcraft. They castrated the Factions by allowing alliance shaman/horde pallys & same-faction battlegrounds. TBC also initiated the fixation of the game’s narrative on WC3 heroes with Illadin. This continues with Arthas in wrath and is the foundation for the Sylvanas debaccle. Wrath doubled-down on these faults, eliminating any residual RPG/class fantasy with dual spec, ‘Hero’ Classes, and race/faction swap.
I am not a Vanilla purist. I never played Vanilla, only Classic. It is clear that neither tbc nor wrath are Classic.
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Here’s my original post:
I quit playing wow around the middle of BFA and went to vanilla classic a few months later. Everyone I played with in classic said the same thing all the way through vanilla and tbc classic. “retail is dead”. I heard it so much I just assumed all of retail was 3 people standing in org exchanging insults and that was the entirety of wow now. I jumped off the nostalgia train at the end of tbc and went back to retail at the very end of shadowlands and I was very surprised to see retail is far from dead. They also made a ton of amazing improvements to retail at the end of shadowlands. So this whole notion classic players have that retail is dead is incorrect. It’s very active and, from someone who has played since vanilla, this expansion is one of the top expansions wows ever done.
Look at all that heavy criticizing I did or all them generalizations. At no point did I criticize anyone or make any generalization. I simply stated my opinion on what I thought about retail and how it’s not as dead as classic players seem to think. So, once again, it seems like your just out here trying to look like a jerk instead of arguing your opinion. If you don’t like retail don’t play it. There’s obviously a whole other version of the game your welcome to play and enjoy, or not. Maybe you just get your rocks off by telling everyone else your better than them and spend your days trolling the forums. Whatever makes you happy.
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Words have meaning.
You generalized feedback to “retail is dead”, beating that strawman all across the floor.
And still doing it.
Not all feedback or criticism mean retail is dead.
You can like something that someone else dislike, but that’s not the point when people talk about specific points why the game has problems.
If you don’t like the forums don’t use them 
Because being a jerk is the less of my worries when faced with people like you that can’t handle any criticism. Which I will point out, you’ve now posted multiple times because you couldn’t handle someone criticizing your experience solely by stating it.
I’m not sure at this point there’s any logic to you other than revenge, clearly you feel attacked enough to keep insinuating stuff on me, which again I don’t care but at this point you should understand that you’re just making a show.
I don’t want to seem like a doomer or ragging on retail, but I actually do think it’s uniquely performing very poorly right now which is why it has been on sale so many times and free weekends and barely anyone interacting with the new zone. It is reflected by YouTube views as well retail content creators are unfortunately struggling. And it shouldn’t be a surprise considering all the controversies and people disliking the previous 2 expansions. I don’t know how it compares to classic but I wouldn’t be surprised if classic is more healthy most online WoW content right now is about hardcore.
I would caution ANYONE using these as a metric for how a game is doing. There MAY be some overlap between wow subscribers and people who follow and stream from content creators, but I’d bet most of us don’t stream/subscribe to these people. I’m also not sure there is any evidence that these followers make good long term customers.
Streamers/content creators interests don’t and likely can’t line up with a WoW players best interests. Aside from being “entertaining,” you probably wouldn’t watch them if they didn’t have any tips/tricks for you. They need the specs to have complicated rotations that change a lot so that you’ll need to come to them for help. They need encounters to be difficult and require strategies you may not have thought of on your own… so that you might seek them out on how to overcome the challenge. They need you to need them, so they can stay employed. They want what’s best for them.
They also need changes to happen frequently so that you would feel you need to check for new content/streams frequently.
I’ve tried watching a few of these people, but it’s just not for me. I feel most of them have garbage, self serving takes on the game/systems. They often feel that my takes are trash and would ruin the game(for them.) so I have no desire to hear some loudmouth go on for hours promoting themselves, trying to find controversy to stir up, or suggesting the game changes in a way that’s better for them personally(but not for me.)
I find it funny your criticizing me for responding to your criticism… but you are also responding back to me … so does that make us both dumb? Honestly I just felt like you needed some clarification as to what criticizing someone actually means…as I did not criticize anyone nor did I belittle anyone else’s opinions, as you’ve done. I can handle your criticism just fine. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this or not but we’re having what some people like to call a conversation. However if you feel like you need the last word and justify your reasoning for being so upset with my opinions you had to go research my achievements to conjure up a completely wrong response to my post then go for it.
False equivalencies, on one hand I do enjoy discussing with people and I don’t mind being criticized. On the other you keep trying to insinuating that because I stated facts that I belittled you. I did give you a proper answer many times, so you can accept it or keep giving people a show.
I actually think in this case, it is indicative of the game health. numbers across the board are way down a YouTuber like taliesin went from breaking 400k to 40k, to me the obvious answer is the right one simply put interest in the game is plummeting. And I do trust these YouTubers when they echo the game popularity is very poor at the moment, it’s their whole career to pay attention to this sort of thing and it’s especially trustworthy from the YouTubers that aren’t so critical of the game again like Tali
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Asmon makes money on youtube being a doomer. News at 11
Also imagine using youtube as a source lol
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Holy smokes pal is that asmon guy living rent free in your head or what, I did not mention him. and I wonder who I should trust more: some guy on the forum or a youtuber like Tali who made a career talking about WoW. It’s not like I want the game to be doing badly but sometimes people just need to read the room the game went on sale like only 2 weeks after the launch and has been on sale must be 20 times now, all the WoW YouTubers numbers being 1/4th what they were during SL & especially BFA isn’t something I can just ignore either. And that’s not even talking about Warcraft logs it is too depressing looking at those.
It’s too bad because it’s not like DF is bad but I do think the damage has been done.
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This mostly seems to just be community differences between back in the day and classic. Turns out when pretty much everyone is front loaded into the game and knowledgable about it from day one the experience is quite difference.
Most of the changes people claim were so original to wrath were started earlier, either in vanilla itself or TBC. The only thing I would consider truly a wrath idea and not just a logical extension of some earlier design was legendary gathering drops as a departure from the items just being rare raid drops.
Neither.
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