Why Retail Needs to Take a Page From Classic

Community General Discussion
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I’m going to preface this with a HUGE disclaimer: I DO NOT play classic. I won’t. I experienced Vanilla first-hand; hard pass on reliving my trauma. I know classic is making big turns in different directions, deviating from the original with things like SoD. That brings me to the point of this post.

I think the reason so many people clamored to see DF originally was in part because they saw promises of class reworks, talent tree re-engineering, and a brand new class. It’s the same reason “seasonal” players flock back every patch or expansion. There are new things to discover; new concepts to tease out.

When a game becomes fully explored, we put it down. It’s not really fun anymore. Sure, it’s nice to come back every now and then and load up that FFVII save that has all the ultimates, summons, etc. It’s fun to go out and absolutely annihilate the last boss, as if he ever had a chance. But, then we quickly lose interest and go find something new.

That, I think, is a major concern for Blizzard. How to keep a game relevant, especially after twenty years. There’s also that kink in the chain of how to stay relevant without getting gimmicky.

A lot of people felt like Evokers were gimmicky. A lot of people loved them. As much controversy as Augmentation stirred up, it created relevance in a game that was slowly falling off, that…let’s face it, really flirted with the gimmick line. (If you haven’t seen Bicepspump’s video of Aug Evokers DESTROYING Aberrus, I highly recommend it)

There is something to SoD and those darn runes, though. The idea of exploring all new combinations of “this class doing that role” makes the game…I don’t know, I hesitate to say relevant again, but yeah I guess kind of relevant. Retail needs to pay attention to classic for this, and really learn what works and what doesn’t; what’s truly relevant and what’s absolutely a gimmick.

If War Within ends up being just another “grind 10 levels, climb on the gear-wheel, knock down 8 dungeons with the same old tired mechanics, and then wipe 250 times per boss in yet another 8-10 boss raid”…it’s NOT going to work.

If Hero Talents end up where they look like they’re heading (picking an ability from a spec and turning it into some mutation of itself)…that’s not relevant. That’s lazy and shows a lack of creativity. All you’re doing is moving in the direction of homogenizing classes…again. If hero talents are about blending specializations for more power, you’ve already set yourself up for failure with DF by boiling classes down to a handful of spells, most of which are shared across specs, to combat button bloat.

If Warbands is just meant to be a way to ease the transition between “old timer” players and newbies, giving everyone a chance to start fresh on Account Wide systems…I mean, it’ll work…but…you’re not really addressing the major issue at concern there. We all know you’re going to be forced to counter-balance warbands by tweaking RNG knobs until it becomes oppressively impossible to get transmog, mounts, etc. I promise, you’ll see the same cloth belt for a warlock drop on all 13 of your characters you send through BT looking to finally complete your paladin tier mog. Why? Because Blizz has to set loot tables with RNG thresholds, and that belt is WAY less important than those plate shoulders, so it’s going to have a much, much, MUCH higher drop rate…

My point is, none of this feels like new and relevant. A lot of it feels like catching up. A lot of the ideas coming into the game are basically just copy paste from other games that have been doing that particular thing for…a while now. That’s not going to keep players for another 20 years. It won’t even keep them for another 2.

I do think Blizz has had their “come to Jesus” moment and has figured out what kept people coming around for 20 years, but I’m not sure if they’ve quite figured out yet that businesses at their longevity have to adapt to changing times and find what’s new and fresh. I’m not seeing any of that. What are your thoughts?

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It’s a tricky one.

Basically my friends who are old-timers on WoW feel similar to how you do. They come by every season, still get KSM but then pretty much unsub saying they had their 1-2 month fill of the WoW treadmill. For them SoD works after that cause it’s both nostalgia plus innovation.

My friends from Asian MMOs who have spent years in arguably a much longer grind treadmill tend to love the game minus the lack of community aspect (they really need to work on that).

I fall into the latter where I am new to WoW (relative) but also come from a game where there are 100 levels and each level past 80 takes hours and hours to grind, progression is slower and people are significantly more laid back. To me WoW even now 2.5 years in is a super fast MMO which respects my time a lot more, so for me it beats another 13 year old MMO which if I was lucky maybe gave me a yearly update. I don’t imagine my opinion of it will change when I hit my old years (35+).

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It’s spring training in Baseball. This year when the “Boys of Summer” take the field there will be 9 players, a pitcher, a catcher, four infielders and three outfielders.

Pitchers will throw pitches, batters will try to hit the ball and run the bases. After 9 innings the one with the most runs will be declared the winner. That’s the way the game was played in 1845 and it’s the way it’s played today.

For baseball fans it can’t come too soon.

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You hit the nail on the head about the community (or lack thereof). People are impatient and guilds are ghost-towns filled with people that know each other IRL and then…everyone else. Even the actual communities don’t work like they’re intended to. I tried joining a M+ key community…and it’s just a macroscopic version of a guild. If people don’t know you, they won’t do things with you.

Add on top of that the fact that groups constantly look for “the carry”, rather than just playing to have fun. I got turned down yesterday on my 2650 M+ rating 485 ilvl Veng DH for a +20 key. I apped, it sat there for a good 20 seconds, and then they declined. People are always looking for the meta, or the guy that magnanimously climbs down from M+25 Olympus to do an 18. Everyone wants the +3 key. Everyone wants the 15 minute dungeon instead of, god forbid, the full 30 minute run.

It’s Blizz’s fault, though. They designed M+ to incentivize rushing. They’re designing the MMO out of WoW with stuff like follower dungeons and Delves. I guess that’s fine, if everyone’s fine just playing WoW like they play a console game…

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Well that may be true for people who play M+ but that’s only a part of the game. It’s not the reason the entier MMO is having problems.

How does that impact the PvP playrs, the profession people, the raid people or those of us who just do the questing for fun?

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Well this is the fun part ain’t it?

Implying Blizzard needs a “Come to Jesus” moment and rediscover why everyone played wow in the first place, which means don’t change things too much from what worked, while also trying to argue that they aren’t doing anything new and fresh.

This is basically asking they should uproot the game and change everything, but do it in such a way that nothing changes at all so it’s still “WoW”.

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I can only speak from my experience personally, but I won’t even try PvP. As soon as I found out it’s a totally different gearing scheme…nah bro. It’s taking me almost all season to max out in “M+ gear”. Not interested in having to go through a second grind. Plus, the skillcap for playing against other players is totally different that the programmed repetition of perfecting a route in a dungeon or raid.

Professions looked really promising this expansion…and then Blizz turned it into a grindy, “we can’t have you max it out all at once” style system of every week you’ll be able to inch closer to being able to do that one thing you should’ve chosen from the beginning that’s making everyone else MILLIONS of gold…while you can craft some bracers no one cares about.

Raid is pretty much governed by logs. Not purple parsing, don’t count on getting into a progression guild spot. That’s ok, though. Come to our Normal raid fun run on Saturday. What’s that? Normal doesn’t drop anything you need? Oh, sorry friend. Did you try pugging? Or maybe do some M+. What’s that? You don’t like the rush mentality of high keys?..huh…not sure what to tell you. Sounds like you should probably play a different game, buddy.

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If I were on that gear wheel I’d have dropped WoW a long time ago. Alternative content is where I find my fun. Collections and weird novelty playstyles are it for me.

It’s how WoD ended up my most played expansion.

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Really!? What was it about WoD that hooked you? I really liked the garrison idea. I wish they would’ve leaned into it a bit more. The interactive questline was pretty cool too, how the zone changed as you did things. Though, I remember it made a mess when it first launched and whole zones went down.

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Nothing in WoD hooked me exactly, that just happened to be the expac where I ended up ignoring a lot of the current content and doing other stuff. And I found out there was a lot of stuff.

A lot of it was collecting NPC models to transform into, some of which got hotfixed(ESPECIALLY the devilsaur) while others hung around until Legion where another hotfixed wiped out all of my stored forms.

It was around this time I discovered you can transform into certain NPCs which have much higher mount scales than traditional players and effects…

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No I think WoW needs to finally be put to rest. :headstone:

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Retail is retail and classic is classic, no I don’t want to play classic anything or related in retail.

Leave retail alone and go play classic.

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I’m going to have to respectfully disagree with you.

I know people get their knickers in a twist when other games are brought up, but I’m going to do it anyways. FFXiv is an infinitely more social game than WoW is, and Blizz got the solo with ai dungeon idea from them. Solo content does not eliminate the social aspect of a game- it just gives content to the introverts (their money is just as good as anyone else’s) and it gives everyone else something to do when their friends aren’t on.

The way FFXiv brings people together is by encouraging (not requiring) people to work together in a non-competitive way. Some examples-

-Housing- The houses are all in a neighborhood and anyone can see your yard and the exterior. The inside is instanced and you can set it to public access or private. I made quite a few friends there just checking out people’s houses. The guild would actually hang out in the guild house and the names became people. Wanting to fix up one’s own house created a ton of content because the items came from all over. Between the item variety, almost everything being dyable, and the freeform item placement no two houses were the same.

-Community events-In one part of the story a city was attacked and part of it destroyed. It was up to the players to rebuild it- and it was fun. All the crafters and gatherers could contribute and were rewarded handsomely. It was an ongoing thing that evolved to have scheduled events and games that anyone could do and be well rewarded for doing. It was all (sometimes valuable) cosmetic stuff, but the rewards made it worth it and the more people that showed up the more fun it was.

These are just two examples, but I trust you see where I’m going. If WoW is going to get the social aspect back in the game they need to back off the competitive aspect and lean more into the community aspect. Make people want to do the casual stuff together. Give people a reason to do non-competitive things in the same area and let friendships happen naturally.

Neither me nor anyone else cares about the other people I just ran a dungeon with that I will never see again. However, I do care about the person I spent an hour talking to about their house that I ran into casually. I do care about the person I’ve seen at the community event 3 times a week for the last few months. I do care about the number in the guild house that became a person when they helped me or taught me something.

That is where community comes from.

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My thoughts? You spent a lot of time and energy typing something I am sure you thought was thought provoking.

Sadly, it is not. WoW is 20 years old. And many players do not want innovation. They want same old, same old.

We know this, because Blizzard has tried to innovate. And players complained.

Loudly.

And sadly, too many players have no intention of getting any better, which would allow them to bring combat or game mechanics to a modern level. They want to keyboard turn classic. And kill bosses with 1 or 2 mechanics that don’t have any real danger.

So we won’t get anything that would get new or younger players to try WoW. We won’t get anything that would bring old players back. We are just left with a dwindling number of players that get increasing less fun to play with.

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Innovation is fine. The problem is Blizzard keeps trying to reinvent the wheel instead of just giving people what they asked for. We ask for housing and get garrisons. We ask for difficult and meaningful small group content and we get 10 man raids axed at the highest difficulty and timers put on 5 mans.

WoW players are not against innovation- Blizzard just isn’t great at reading the room.

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I enjoy SoD because it’s a great “in-between” that combines the best of both worlds.

It has the shininess of Retail, new reimagined dungeons-turned-raids and runes of old retail abilities that never existed in a Classic setting.

It has the familiarity of the old world, just Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor.

It doesn’t carry the baggage that Retail has, destroyed lore and convoluted profession design, among other things.

I like it because it’s both simple, and somewhat new.

Retail moved away from being simple and that hurt it as a game, imo.

If RuneScape can do a Classic+, and do it well, then there’s no reason WoW can’t do the same.

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LOL.

Sorry mate, the customer is almost never right. If players had great ideas, they would be designing their own games.

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Garrisons were a dev idea, not a player one.

Players wanted real housing, we never got that at all.

Did anyone actually enjoy Garrisons? And not just for the gold-making potential?

I think everyone just thinks of it as scuffed housing that ended up replacing an actual city/hub where we would’ve been interacting with other players.

It was ultimately a bad idea for an MMO to have.

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It’s almost like inserting housing into a 12 year old game, with layers of spaghetti code was never going to work perfectly. Or that a meaningful amount of this player base was ever going to agree on what housing should be.

We got a compromise. And if wow players have shown anything, it’s that they are unwilling to accept any kind of compromise.

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Lol I’d rather not have the Garrison at all, if I knew that’s all the housing we’d ever get.

All I really want is my own instance/dungeon I can decorate, not hard.

Sometimes it’s better to just kill the idea before you start spending resources on it.

Warfronts, were another bad idea they recently had in BfA.

“PvP” zone-wide event, but entirely PvE, against NPCs, stupid lol.

Warfronts would’ve been amazing as open world PvP scenarios, but naw.

And currently in DF, they re-did Archeology but everyone unanimously agrees it’s worse than the Cataclysm version of digging up artifacts.

They’ve no shortage of bad ideas, not always the player’s fault.

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