Why is Classic Good?

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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I’d like to preface this with the phrase: “Broad strokes paint the fence faster.”

I’ve been playing Classic now since it launched, nearly every day for multiple hours. My Warlock is level 38 and it’s the only toon I’ve created there so far.

I was not around during Vanilla so this was a ‘brand new’ world and experience I was looking forward to, and of course it has its redeeming qualities or I’d no longer invest time into it. But that’s what this is about: time.

The time it takes to grind through each zone, grind professions (though I very much enjoy professions having meaning again), et cetera.

I’ve asked my guildies why they seem to enjoy the grinding and the general answer is: “I feel like I’ve earned something at the end of it.”
And I’ve seen this sentiment not only from people in my guild but on the forums as well, that because more time has been put in to the gear, mats, dungeons, you feel more accomplished.
There’s nothing I’ve found in this game to be inherently difficult, only time-consuming.

So my question is: do people believe that Classic is good because it is enjoyable? Or is it perceived to be good because it takes more time, not effort, to gain something?

This is not meant to be inflammatory, I’d only like to see the opinions of others.

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Yeah the feeling is different. You feel more attached to your character and your gear. Traveling is slow but feels more like an adventure.

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  • More attached to character
  • The world is not filled with clutter, oversized mounts, pets and all the other retail garbage.
  • leveling is more meaningful; harder but the game is overall less complicated.
  • Contrary to your comment, Time is effort
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I never believe anyone who says this. While Classic is not a difficult game in general, there are things in the world that are objectively difficult.

You are approaching this from the wrong direction. Basically you seem to think that this can be settled in an objective manner. It can’t.

If I go and solo a cave full of harpies to get to a nasty quest mob at the end that is four levels higher than me, I don’t care what you or anyone else says, that’s both difficult and time-consuming. It’s also enjoyable, to me, if I happen to achieve my goal. If I don’t achieve my goal, it will still have been difficult and time-consuming, and while somewhat less enjoyable, I’ll have consolation in the form of trash to sell and XP.

Crafting feels better and it too is simply more time-consuming, but the thing is, in Classic the players rely on each other more than in retail, As a LW if I want to make a belt, I’ll get a buckle from a blacksmith. It takes extra time, but it’s more satisfying in the end.

In the end you can try to figure us out for years but if you don’t get it, then you don’t get it, and retail is the better place for you so that your time won’t be wasted.

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With each level in classic WOW, there is a sense of goal, and I think it’s mostly because of 2 factors, i.e. No scaling and skill trees.

With each level, players feel stronger. They couldn’t kill 2 mobs at the same time before, but now with +1 level, they can kill 2 mobs at the same time without dying. Not to mention, their kill speed on the single target has increased, too. With skill trees, they look forward to that 21 point skill and 31 point skill, and they are literally game changing.

Classic leveling is slower but with each level, we get to experience the sense of achievement.

Most of all, we feel like we have the control of our character’s destiny by carefully designing how we want our skill trees to become.
With gears being hard to come by, it becomes more meaningful when we get them.

As long as we keep dreaming those goals, we are in that happy state.
Instant gratification is short-lived.

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I enjoy Classic because it actually takes effort to do stuff. I can’t just blow through mobs like I do on retail. I’m actually looking forward to getting my ugly, slow horse mount that I have never once used in retail. I get excited to get a green piece of gear that’s an upgrade. I would vendor it in retail without a second thought. Everything just matters more because even small upgrades can make a huge difference in killing stuff. Most of all, I’m enjoying the random encounters that I have with people. That never happened for me in retail, not even in guilds. It’s just an overall better experience. :slight_smile:

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They say nothing worth having having comes without toil. I’d say that’s true about most things in life, including gaming.

That said, there are plenty of games more time consuming than Classic WoW. If time consumption was the only metric determining success, EQ1 would still be the top MMO.

People like to spend their time in Classic, not because it’s time consuming, but because it was crafted in such a way that it feels worth consuming one’s time on.

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Because the RPG aspect is more than customizations and petty transmog.

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Define “enjoyable” and give an example of a person having it without it being perceived.

Perception is how we experience the world. Perception is all important because it overrides objective reality. People don’t experience objective reality. They perceive it. And that can be any flavor depending on the person.

I like the rested XP example just brought up in another thread. Blizz used to have experience be at a rate of 100% until you played for too long to where it dropped to 50%. People hated it. So they created rested XP which gave 200% XP until you exhausted it and then went to “100%” XP. Same concept, but presented completely differently such that it was perceived differently.

Anyway, to the main point of your post, Classic is good because the people who made it knew what makes games fun and worked long and hard to make sure that as many facets of this game were designed with fun and socialization in mind. Not “player engagement” metrics. Just because someone does something a lot doesn’t mean they are having fun doing it. They could just be dopamine junkies and clicking their Skinner box for their dopamine hit, but hating every minute of it…like addiction maintenance. Rather, they consciously made decisions to design the game to force us into socializing and forced us into challenges that most people could pull off, but that also most people would feel rewarded for. There was something for the casual and something for the hardcore that would still provide real satisfaction, not cheap dopamine hits.

Mythic raiding in retail is absolutely more difficult but is it the most enjoyable for most of the players? Multiple difficulty tiers waters it down. There’s no mystique or high esteem. People get similar rewards from faceroll versions. The best mounts don’t even come from raids anymore, but from the cash shop. There’s something to be said about about hierarchy. It’s needed for immersion. You need haves and you need have nots. You need gradients of achievement that are meaningful because that’s what motivates people and that’s what makes achievement feel good. Whether you want to admit it or not, we are all comparing everything we do against everyone else in game.

It just hits so many human psychological points well. It’s not something you can chart or graph or feed into some AI data processor. It’s really an art form in creating games that are fun. Even the ones that try to copy WoW, don’t understand what to copy and why and why it goes wrong when they take part A but not part B. They don’t understand the interplay between these things and how this complex world operates and does so by design. So when people want QoL change X or Y, they don’t understand why that’s bad. They just want things easy not understanding that this is exactly how we ended up with retail and why it’s a bad idea. This game is fun because it was made to be fun by people who understood how to make things fun. Retail is made by a company that that wants to make money by a team that doesn’t know how to make “obscenely profitable” also fun.

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I enjoy classic because of the sense of accomplishment, yes, but to me it feels like there is a higher skill ceiling for playing my class. The content isn’t more difficult, I can say that as someone who has the achievement for doing all dungeons on m+15 in time.

That said, I don’t feel like retail has the same opportunity for me to show that I know how to play my class well that classic does. Retail is too random in it’s progression with things like titanforging and socket drops as well.

So for me it’s nostalgia, skill trees and the different builds they allow, class skill ceiling and a more defined sense of accomplishment in progression of my character.

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Good post.

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I believe WOW Classic is good because it is enjoyable. I find it fun, even when I’m cursing at that over-bright greyscale screen because I’m dead AGAIN.

That’s not it for me. I admit, the quote from your guildies could be taken that way - but for me it reads a little different.

When I run the launcher and get to the character screen, or log in, I think about what I want to do, what I’d like to try to accomplish. Do I want to deal with some Elite quests? Do I want to try to gain a level? Do I want to grind some mobs for cloth, coin, and/or skins? Do I want to sit and fish for a couple hours?

And at the end of those hours, or maybe earlier, I’ve usually achieved several things - a level or several bubbles filled in, a talent or a skill, a new piece of gear, a new profession recipe, a flight path, a quest chain completed, helped out someone in trouble. There are a lot of little accomplishments like that.

Back when I quit Retail for the first time, early in MoP, it was because I realized I had logged in every night for more than a week, gotten to my character in-game and didn’t want to do anything. I only ever gained one level on one character, did the pandaren starting zone as a monk, and did the other faction starting quests to Pandaria … and felt like there was nothing I wanted to do. (That was the expac where they tried 5 levels to max instead of 10.)

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The best way I’ve ever known to describe it is that vanilla (and WOW Classic) have a pull effect while Retail has a push effect.

In WOW Classic, I want to do the things, and sometimes there are shinies for doing so, but sometimes there is just that sense of “yes, I did it” and that feels more fulfilling than any shiny.

In Retail there’s no desire (on my part) to do the things, and pursuit of the shinies has become the primary goal. It’s more “look what you’re supposed to want, now do this to get it.”

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That’s a classical distinction without a difference.

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The perfect balance I’d say…not too fast and not too slow.
It’s slow enough to make us feel like we’ve actually achieved something when we do it, but not mind-bogglingly painfully slow.

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Its not rocket science. I’m pretty some psychologist could break it down. But it goes back to the carrot and stick.

A simple analogy but it serves the point. Classic states if you want 60 you have to level. They are honest its not going to be easy. The path forward will not be laided out for you and you have to think for yourself. But should you apply yourself you will be rewarded with a powerful toon far greater then what you began with and abilities to match.

Same applies to a rep grind. Classic wow hid decent meaningful items behind a rep grind. You work and work and you receive your reward.

The formula is simply. Now lets cut to the BFA and legion style. You have a rep grind, with no meaningful rewards at exalted only to learn they have added another rep grind and your reward, some resources and if you are very lucky on 1% a mount or pet or unique weapon.

The problem is obvious and it all relates to “Ion” grand plan to prove that time spent is a better metric then sub levels. He is a muppet.

This is why classic and to a greater extend TBC, and WotlK were great expansions. This idea of risk and reward.

Now if you are not given the best loot (even thou all you do is tourist raiding), this instant “gratification”, its easy to see why Classic shines harder then BFA.

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Yeah Imo I think Classic being more time consuming is one of the reasons that it Is more enjoyable because like you said, you feel more of an accomplishment when you put the time into something without the game holding your hand the whole way through.

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Let me put it another way.

The guy who goes out into the woods, builds his own cabin, grows his own crops, raises his own livestock, chops his own firewood, does most things with his own hands…is 100% more satisfied with life than you or I or anyone posting here. 100%. It’s not a mater of opinion. This is a fact. He has more of a sense of deeply felt contentment and fulfillment than we do. That’s because humans are defined by adversity and overcoming that adversity with the end goal of survival. When we do what we were born to do, that is challenge nature and survive, our brain rewards us in the most profound way.

We are so far removed from this simple way of life, but it’s what we are for. We are now being used against our purpose in ways that our genes have not prepared us for. Our brains aren’t evolved to substitute office work or retail work with the real thing. In the West we are some of the most unhappy and unfulfilled people. Anxiety and depression are skyrocketing. People even take on hobbies to try to reconnect with this primal need. That’s what WoW is in a very light sense. It lets us try to eek out an existence in a hostile world and we get brain candy when we succeed. Games that are too easy or don’t fully give us this immersion that trucks us into thinking it’s a world don’t hit that sweet spot so much. WoW ruined so many lives because it was better than the one they were living. It scratched that primal itch like nothing else…because we grew up so far removed from the real thing. And when exposed to it, we instinctively threw ourselves into it.

Now this is not an endorsement for no-lifing it. But rather an explanation as to why so many did. And why, after all these years, people still get hooked. WoW creates a world where we can do the thing that we were made to do…be challenged by nature and eek out an existence with our own labor. It’s not a perfect simulation, but it hits enough of the highlights that when compared to real life in the 21st century, it might as well be the real thing. If anything, WoW shows us how far from our intended existence we are and how dissatisfied we are with it that we would willingly devote hours and hours into a game world that only very rudimentarily resembles the world we were supposed to live in.

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Classic isn’t a good game. It’s an old game with bucketloads of design flaws.

What Classis is, is a good gameplay experience. Blizz have forgotten the difference between the two. They’ve forgotten the difference between a game which is well designed (from a game development perspective) and a game which provides a good experience (from a players perspective).

And the reason Classic provides a good experience is because it is very free-form. No particular way of enjoying the game is presumed. Players can just do their thing.

By comparison, Retail is a very curated and restrictive experience.

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I mean isn’t that like asking whether people actually enjoy retail or whether they’re just playing because they’re constantly surrounded by skinner boxes constantly handing them rewards for almost no investment?

My experience with classic is that my decisions feel meaningful BECAUSE of how long certain things take. If I were to blaze through 10 levels in a few hours, why would I bother investing effort into my current gear or strategy? It’ll just be obsolete in a few hours.

I also find that I enjoy doing things that aren’t simply “progression” assigned by the game. I encounter an adventurer and help them for a bit. I help a guildie with a dungeon. I fly from STV to alterac because I like the story vignettes.

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My gameplay experience is just as fun in Classic as it is Retail.
Retail has over a dozen different avenues to take in “doing their thing”. Classic has 2, raid or pvp at endgame. And if you’re not 60 your only objective is to get to 60.

Please stop being so delusion as to assume Classic offers you more freedom when you’re running down the same bottleneck just as everyone else is. You just chose to run down it slower or less efficiently.

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