When I started playing WoW, during very late classic, my friends and I played it like it was D&D in many respects. We didn’t know where we were, what things were, how dangerous things were. We explored and felt a sense of wonder and won many fights and sometimes got in over our heads. We leveled and got a bit stronger and moved through a world area by area.
Gradually, an expac or two in, we became aware that we were expected to watch Youtube videos before doing group content. For us, this was like buying and reading one of those huge game manuals before trying to beat a PS2 game. That wasn’t why we played an MMORPG. We were playing to have an ADVENTURE and think on our feet, not copy some dude who did an instance before we did.
But Blizzard AND players gradually moved the game more and more toward the Elitist Jerk mode of WoW. The game became less and less playable as a grand adventure and more and more a series of minor chores followed by a “video class” in how to do a harder task followed by a harder chore repeated ad nauseum. All players had to have the same talents, gems, rotation. Instances became entirely about rushing through as fast as possible to get to that big dice roll for loot so that you could DO IT AGAIN and roll those dice again.
Here is my point (I do have one). If you are excited about Classic, are you excited because you remember the adventure of Classic? Or are you going to play Classic WoW like most of you play current WoW: Go go go and watch videos and look everything up online so you don’t have to figure anything out on your own?
Do you want an adventure or do you want to follow instructions.
I’m curious. I STILL try to play WoW like it is an adventure . . .even though Ion and his crew don’t design the game to make that a priority. Do YOU play the game without knowing what to expect?
I don’t think Adventure vs. Work is the only dichotomy here.
I just view WoW as a game. When there’s stuff I want to do that’s fun, I play it. When there isn’t, I log off and play other things. Sometimes the effort involved in gearing or leveling a new toon is fun for me, and sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes raiding is fun, and sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes PvP is fun, and sometimes it isn’t.
I set all my goals, and choose goals that are obtainable in the short-term, which may or may not add up to completion of a longer-term goal.
As someone that has never played classic, I thought about going back to give it a shoot because i was playing everquest 2 at the time, but then i realized that im not that type of player anymore.
How can Classic be a new adventure? It’s not new content. Even if you didn’t play vanilla, millions of others already did. There’s nothing stopping you and your friends from going thru BFA dungeons like your first time in Wailing Caverns.
But expecting “new” from a recreation of 15yr old content that’s been done millions of times over? That’s never going to happen.
I’ve raided before, I’ve put alot of time an energy into it to boot.
I just simply don’t see the point anymore, so any amount of time spend reading up on anything outside of a lore snippet on who the person is or why we’re killing them feels useless to me.
Honestly, I’m exceedingly casual, at this point I only really care about storyline, or social interacts inter-characters.
Greater Rifts are dull, raiding is the same old same old it has been for 12 plus years, and they took away all the things in raids that made things worth going for (Gear looks like garbage, and lack of tier sets means I literally could not care less)
I really just don’t see the point on spending the time on it.
And I have no issue for that. If you don’t like it, you don’t like it. I just wanted to clear up the misconception it takes hours of out of game research/whatever to participate
Oh, no I wasn’t saying that the one play-style was elitist but rather it is the play-style fostered more by the website “Elitist Jerks” website. They chose the name, not me.
I have been reading articles about people climbing Mt. Everest lately and there are so many people doing it that there is a LINE they stand in to keep climbing. I mean . . .the mountain is a garbage pit and you have to queue up to climb. And that isn’t an adventure to me. It’s just doing something risky.
Adventure: “an undertaking usually involving danger and unknown risks. (italics mine)”
So if you know what to expect, it isn’t an adventure. Hamstringing yourself? That would be taking off all your armor. It isn’t hamstringing yourself to want the game to be an adventure like it used to be.
If you willingly avoid any information on basic gameplay mechanics, that is hamstringing.
You are fully able to avoid learning anything about the game before playing it on retail.
The game was only an “adventure like it used to be” because you lacked knowledge. I am saying you are 100% able to still do that. It may be tough to find enough other people that want to also do that. But you still can.
![:slight_smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")