Classic is a great test environment for sure. There are a lot of systems and mechanics that were removed from the game since vanilla. They can definitely take the communities temperature in classic and re-introduce some of them.
I think though that the biggest issue WOW has for the future is bringing in new players. My son just started playing and leveling for a brand new player is a disjointed mess of story and dead content. He’s asking reasonable questions with no good answer. Like, why doesn’t anyone run the level 60 raids? Why shouldn’t I work on my professions? And a whole bunch of other ones that I always have to answer with “wait to you’re max level”.
One thing that was great in vanilla that I don’t hear anyone ever mention is that in vanilla all content was relevant. Now there is a bunch of dead content you just plough through as fast as possible or completely ignore. Not a great look for brand new players.
From my point of view I did classic x 3 days. Then I realized that I am not sure that I want to do the slow grind all over again. I had leveled up to 12 characters up to 120. I have no energy to do it all over again. I may go to classic from time to time for the sake of funniness but not as doing it all over again.
Such a shame classic players have become so delusional.
Stay in your version, and we will stay in ours.
Im watching people on my friends list who came back for classic, playing 15 hours a day. Sorry, if you have that kind of time to play this game like that again (and its so very unhealthy), you are either a Neckbeard, or a dropout.
I think it’s gonna be a success by that metric. I know of personally at least two dozen people who returned to WoW for Classic. I’ve been re-adding people to my bnet friends list by the fist full.
Now whether they’ll stick with it, or give retail a try, all of that remains to be seen.
Anything would help at this point honestly. Retail is so limiting in so many ways as to how we play, what we do, where we can go, it’s on rails and that isn’t fun at all.
I can agree with that. BfA definitely seems like the most hated expansion to date, so looking at what people liked about earlier expansions and Classic in addition to what people like and dislike about BfA is pretty reasonable.
I think there’s also the need for some new ideas as well to help rejuvenate Retail, like some kind of solution for the “dead content” issue that has been brought up in this thread. Said new ideas need to mesh with what many players want, though.
This is coming from someone that played Vanilla on day 1, and at least a little (sometimes a lot) of every expansion since. I currently play only Classic, and frankly have zero desire to go back to BFA in any way, shape, or form. That said, I can’t understand why people want retail to be more like Classic. Now that we have classic, it seems silly to reverse engineer retail to be more Classic-like. Some changes, sure. I totally get that, but I think some want sweeping changes so that retail mirrors what Classic would be like had it continued along instead of evolving into what retail is. Hopefully someone can provide some input, because in my opinion, Classic is here, and retail is also here. Play one or both as your preference dictates.
If I was the top guy at Blizzard I would think long and hard at why a 15-year old outdated product is more popular than the modern version. That’s a big deal. WoW stopped being an MMORPG. Yu can almost play it on your phone and I bet they made it that way on purpose to appeal to this generation of gamers. They want Candy Crush and Plants vs Zombies.
They don’t even need to do much that’s new for the live game, they just need to go through things that were popular the last 15 years and put together a “Greatest Hits” list of things to bring back to the game:
*Un-prune, add back class abilities
*Reforging
*Profession perks
*Assigned gem slots (not random)
*More enchants
*Guild perks
That can all be done without removing anything currently in game. Stuff like going back to the old talent trees would require dumping the current system (which I’m in favor of, but some people aren’t).
But the stuff I listed is low-hanging fruit that wouldn’t annoy anybody. They should just do it.
But what defines “fixing” retail? If you ask 100 people if something is wrong with retail and what can be done to “fix” it, you will get almost as many answers. That is part of the reason WOW has become like it is in some ways, because players keep demanding things.
That said much of what is in BFA was not due to player demand or feedback and much of that is continuing the theme of “filler” content at endgame. Filler content is repeatable content that gets done over and over just to up a stat meter or damage meter or whatever “power” meter that is the flavor of the moment. That is one big difference between vanilla/classic and retail. Quests in classic only existed during leveling. Endgame was exclusively raid content and dungeons. And raids had weekly lockouts and were long tedious affairs that often took multiple sessions to complete. And many dungeons were also similar, in that “end game” meant doing fewer things over and over but for bigger rewards in terms of gear drops for “progression” and newer raids did not invalidate old ones. Which ultimately meant that there was less “epic” gear and fewer ways to get it, which meant fewer types of repeatable content.
Retail consists of mostly “filler” content where you do the same quests over and over again, plus the same island expeditions, plus the same warfronts, plus the same dungeons, plus the same raids, which are all often relatively short affairs, hence much more repeatable. But the rewards from this are often only minor incremental boosts if a boost at all, which provides no satisfying way to target specific pieces and stats because of all the RNG. In my mind having less “filler” stuff to do, while making the stuff you do more meaningful in the long run might help the game… Unfortunately some of this came from people demanding more stuff to do at end game, which implies more rewards for doing it which simply just leads to bloat and meaningless “chores” that only provide limited incremental progression due to RNG. And then on top of all of that your abilities and talents are on loan and not fixed to the character, which makes all that filler grinding ultimately pointless.
Can I just thank you for making a suggestion that wasn’t “take things away from people who like them”? I actually like a lot of BFA (not everything) and several of the things you mention I either wouldn’t mind or think would be an improvement.
Is classic really a success. you have to ask what really has it added
servers : Classic 18
Servers : Retail 241
players : retail estimated at 4-5 million
Players: Classic estimated at 500k-700k "But here is the rub what percentage are retail players and did classic bring in even 1 completely new player to wow.
There was always going to be hype at launch but lets see in a year where its at.