Because the players knew it had a dev team behind it that truly cared for the game and had a playstyle in mind. These devs understood how to make changes without really changing key-fundamental parts to the game’s feelings. For example, the dev team released a whole expansion (The Burning Crusade) and overall kept the same playstyle/feeling that players enjoyed during the Vanilla WoW. They added some amazing QoL features without changing how the game played. (Flying, Summoning stones, etc) They added a whole new expansion that pretty much played the exact same as the game before it.
Flying itself did not kill the game. Back in TBC you had to work for a flying mount. They were expensive just like horses in Vanilla. You basic flying mount was affordable, and your epic flying was a grind. (Note: basic flying was actually slower than your epic ground mount.) You could not fly until you were level 68. You had to earn flying separately on all characters. All characters had to be of the level threshold.
Flying did not kill Wpvp. People were constantly battling in the world. Such as popular quest sites, summoning stones, etc.
Why am I bringing this up?
There are a lot of players that absolutely enjoy how vanilla plays and want to leave it at just that. Which is perfectly fine. However, many more players want to see the game supported and evolve into what today’s current retail version should be. A game that sticks to the roots of how vanilla played, but is updated with new items, non-game changing QoL features (Barbers, Summoning stone), new quests, etc. All without changing the fundamental gameplay of the game.
If this does not happen, you could probably see the Classic WoW experience becoming miserable in about a year or 2. For all the “No changes” people, at the time, I hope you have enjoyed the game while you were able to play it without struggling to find people to do basic content. Changes won’t kill classic WoW. No changes will. Blizzard can even launch multiple sets of servers. Those who want to stop at the end of vanilla, and those that was a true classic wow+ experience beyond TBC.
I have never played a single game in my entire life because the dev team truly cared. I suspect the vast majority of game devs truly care about their work.
There is the very real possibility that they would. Everyone who plays Classic has their own reason for doing so. Their favorite activity, their favorite niche in the old game world. Every change you make to make YOUR game more enjoyable threatens to destabilize the experience of someone else.
People don’t say “no changes” because the game is perfect, they say no changes because they want everyone to have access to the game for whatever reason they enjoyed it back when it was new.
Well, knowing that your char isn’t going to be just deleted, seeing GMs responding in game, indeed played a big part for players who tested the game liked it, got hooked up and stayed for many years.
Playing Vanilla for the first time was like a magical experience. It was a game that was way ahead of its time. The MMORPG market at the time was mostly Korean-dominated. I remember the MMOs I played at the time were click-to-move and used your F1-F12 keys. It was also riding off the hype of Warcraft 3 which was a very popular RTS.
WoW was the first MMO I played that you could move around with WASD and jump around. The quest system was unique because all these other MMOs were monster grinding.
Just a well polished game that came out at the right time. It’s like how big Half-Life was when it came out. I remember going to Game Stop at midnight when BC came out and the line was around the corner (this was before digital downloading everything).
15+ years later… we’ve seen it all already. Modern MMOs are just WoW-clones in many ways. We just aren’t amazed or wowed anymore.
Vanilla is less about going back to nostalgia, but more about remembering how broke it was, and how inexperienced we were as players when the game first came out.
You are talking a lot about flying in your post, so I am going to just assume this is what you are really trying to talk people into.
What you may not realize is the world of Classic WoW would not support flying even though the game engine technically does.
The reason is, the game from the sky looks, well bad… really bad.
This is why in Cata they not only changed everything for the Cataclysm event, but also updated the world to support flying because from the sky Classic loots… bad, and was only designed to be viewed from certain perspectives, basically on the ground or from the taxi and that’s it.
Anything outside of that parameter and its kinda awful, so it’s not as simple as just put flying mounts in the game.
The problem is no one can agree on which changes are good and which changes are bad. For example, I don’t agree with everything on your list.
Yet, the current Classic is still going strong, even with #nochanges. And it’s even full of retail players, who I once thought would never stick with it because they were likely too spoiled by the dumbed down instant gratification and QoL features of retail. Tons of them are still playing it, maybe without even knowing why.
TBC with #nochanges will be another huge success for Blizzard.
The only thing I want is not really a change, but more of an adaptation choice. Unlike vanilla, in TBC, PvE content was severely nerfed over the course of the expansion. I’d like to see them release the PvE content in a manner that reflects that, i.e. the initial release versions should be tuned similar to how they were on initial release in TBC.
If they just pick a late patch and release everything in its severely nerfed state as it was at the end of TBC, that would be a huge mistake, IMO.
The game was a living game. It was very different from the games that came before it. It brought in fresh people who had never played a MMO before because it was accessible. At the same time the experienced players had a lot of content to try out.
As the game went on Blizzard was active in its development. Classes were revisited, changes were made, problems were solved. The game was alive and fun.
We don’t get that in Classic. We’re on the last patch of Vanilla even though the content didn’t match it. Problems pop up and fester for months without any feedback from the development team. People have overanalyzed the content because they knew it to the minute details and there was no exploration left. Blizzard has very few GMs and service personnel compared in Classic compared to Vanilla so you wait days on a ticket and nearly never talk to an actual GM about it.
Classic survives on nostalgia and the fact that the latest Retail expansion was such a failure. People wanted to return to the halcyon days of Vanilla, to recapture their youth. Yes, there’s a lot of fun to be had in Classic but to truly have a great game it needs to be alive. You need to have interaction between the players and the staff running the game. You need surprises and things to discover. Otherwise the game quickly pales for many and they get bored and find destructive ways to entertain themselves.
The reason we say no changes tend to range from minor benefits to huge consequences. The only time I’m afraid of changes is when I play this game. Just my rant, I still love the game.
Agree completely. It seems it was impossible for them to release Classic patch for patch following the path of vanilla because they didn’t have the data for it… but they have the data for TBC. I will be extremely disappointed if they don’t go through all the patch cycles in TBC.
100%, they gotta use pre nerfed content in TBC, if they don’t that’s a mistake. The nerfs were intended in TBC so that players who otherwise could not pass the encounters were then able to progress. It was 100% the LFR of the time.
Classic did the same, just in a different way by buffin classes, skills, talents and armor.
I hope blizzard learns and uses the pre nerfed content so that the PVE has some reasonable amount of bite, and can hold its own vs the bulk of the masses for a while.
Regardless of the patch used for the content, the top guilds will straight motorboat the content and the vicarious derps that make believe they are also top tier will also get on the forums and claim its all too easy while at the same time get on the forums after their first chain wipe and claim the encounters are bugged and need to be fixed.
I want to see bosses that were once considered impossible taken down on the first day guilds can reach them. I’m still salty the “mathematically impossible” C’thun didn’t come back for Classic.
WRONG! You go on the flawed assumption that YOU will love all the changes and there will be no changes that YOU do not love.
Why do people keep trying to change WoW Classic? Seriously?!? It is DUMB at it’s root. If you want a game that is evolving, WoW Retail is available on the same sub and launcher. IF think Retail is a lost cause, why would you expect more from Blizzard concerning a museum piece game, who’s major selling point is to be AND remain as close to the original as possible? Why should they ruin the game so many LOVE, as is, for those who never really wanted WoW Classic anyway?
I would rather see that energy put into a SEQUEL rather than putting a bunch of band aids on a 15 year old game.
Real talk, it was Jeff Kaplan. Nearly every expac post Kaplan has tried to reinvent the wheel. There’s a reason vanilla/BC is regarded as the high point. It was in the right place at the right time and pulled in the right mix of people to make it awesome. No expansion or other MMO as ever come close to what WoW achieved in those first 4 years, and it’ll never happen again. Blizz caught lightning in a bottle.
And I know someone will talk about wrath, but wrath lost just as many players as it brought in, it was neither the fastest growing expac, or the absolute sub peak. WotLK was the first expac to fundamentally change the game, and it did turn a lot of people away.
It was “mathematically impossible” with 2005 theory crafting, and 1.9 talents. Nobody brought 20+ fury warriors to raids in 2005. The major threat changes didn’t happen until the Naxx patch. It very well may have been impossible back then, but it would not have been in classic. Regardless, it would’ve been cool to see.
Actually vanilla was so popular when it released is because it was so easy. This game was born in a world where death often led to permanent loss of everything you had on you and leveling took orders of magnitude more time in other games. WoW was the easy option.
@Sayera
Not sure where you were located but the big dog when wow came out was Everquest which had the same first/third person wasd movement/jumping. That was not unique to WoW at the time.
prior to that it was UO which was isometric point+click and prior to that we had muds which was text based. Perhaps there were a plethera of Korean MMOS in 2004, but they certainly weren’t mainstream for most of the wow population