I see so many posts basically begging Blizzard to transform WoW Classic into what Retail is today (not that Retail is bad, it just is a very different game). WoW Classic has grown a pretty big population, big enough to be considered a “stand-alone” MMORPG. I really hope that Blizzard will continue to be heavily inspired by the original games (WOTLK, Cata, etc.), but will continue to try different avenues to change the aspect of these expansions that led to what Retail is today. Again, not that I hate retail or anything, but we already have retail! What if WoW Classic could take a different route? One that lead to another type of MMORPG, a different one.
In other words, while a lot of people are begging Blizzard to keep WoW Classic as faithful to the original xpacs as possible, I’m begging them to continue to try different routes that lead to a a different version of the game.
Before all the posts of people assuming who I am:
I am a very casual player
Not a #nochange, never was
Not a meta slave, pro 99% parser or anything
Not a tank or a high-demand class (my main is a Shadow Priest)
No, retail most certainly IS bad, frankly i hope activision gives up and sells blizzards IPs off soon so a competent dev studio can pick them up and do something good with them, maybe fromsoft or platinum games, i have no idea. I’d say CDPR but they’ve had a huge fall from grace in the last couple of years.
And what, exactly, is “retail” for you? Is this just an obfuscated “Don’t add rdf” post? Are you saying they should add different content entirely? No northrend? Are you saying add more Season of Mastery style changes they are making to the game?
Vanilla was “retail” once. BC was “retail” once. Wrath was “retail” once.
Retail for me is modern wow as we know it. Shadowlands. It’s a much more « esport » type of mmorpg with a lot more quality of life added (LFR, RDF, transmog, switching spec whenever you want, no more talent trees; simplified classes with less spells, etc. ). I’m not saying it’s wrong, I’m saying I’m glad if they are taking a different route. Yes, that includes not adding RDF. But let s not start another RDF battle, all I’m saying is I’m happy with them reviewing these « modern » features and trying different paths.
See, retail for me is developers not responding to feedback and making changes that overall make the game less fun to play. Retail, for me, is having endless progression grinds and struggling to find a group for dungeons like M+ because there’s hundreds of groups, (supposedly this is better?) most of that is boosts.
Jagex handled OSRS much better. They reverted to a point that the community wanted (2007) then polled some of the more controversial changes - e.g. Summoning, which failed, and the grand exchange, which passed. Pretty much everything gets polled (mostly technical things that don’t) and if the community is angry about it, they usually get angry at each other rather than the devs… (not that there aren’t always a few)
every major MMO has some form of LFD and has proven to be successful. trying to deny that fact is just an outright lie.
LFD did not “kill” retail despite what everyone on these forums tries to claim. it was the constant addition of power systems that players said were bad but got added anyways, and how they constantly try and gaslight us by claiming they “listened to the player base” after multiple patches of us begging them to fix a certain function of the game while they kept claiming it was perfectly fine as is.
Yeah, every mmorpg also have a cash shop with plenty of micro transactions, yet I still wish this didn’t exist. Not because everyone does it that we are forced to like it…
Also, the thing is, we’ve seen the alternative. We have examples. Wrath private servers with dungeon finder always have higher player counts, others die. Those that don’t have it usually end up adding it.
We’ve seen classic and BC. Some people might get lucky, but the fact is most servers don’t have people running most dungeons. Even current content dungeons quickly become daily heroics and the odd levelling group.
Sure, this has improved with the 50% bonus and heirlooms help, but even with that its not great. If the goal is to enhance the social experience, you want to motivate players to, well, group up.
You are right, not every mmorpg needs dungeon finder. Classic doesn’t have it. Retail barely uses it outside of levelling (which is not most of the game for most players).
I’m assuming you’re talking about rdf? It’s obvious here that the people that agree it should be removed are not any sort of majority.
I’d say just from like ratio and talking in game to anyone you’ll find people don’t like standing in cities nonstop spamming LFM tank/healer. There was some charm in classic, but it’s lost its charm after years. This is why this naturally progressed to this point it didn’t ruin anything.
I truly think people the majority don’t want to be social with randoms outside of guild so why punish people by trying force an interaction without rdf when it already wasn’t working in tbc?
Wow was ruined by bad loot systems imo, rdf is great.
I haven’t really seen this. I’ve seen people argue in favour of certain changes, because they genuinely don’t believe they are what caused the kind of player disengagement and limited social experience that plague modern Retail WoW.
Sorta makes sense from a business standpoint. You have a version of the game with almost 20 years of decision forks in game design. Each time you go with one path over another, you make some people happy, and alienate others.
If you consider all permutations of forks, you will end up with different subsets of the full potential population of customers, a different subset for each unique permutation. It makes sense to try and find those permutations which lead to a state where the subset of customers is mutually exclusive from the one with already loyal customers. In other words, failing to grow the playerbase longitudinally, they try to grow laterally (or at least reclaim from customers permanently lost). The subsets must be as close to mutually exclusive as possible, otherwise it’s no longer growth, it’s just fragmentation.
I didn’t say WoW was killed by RDF… WoW was never killed, retail WoW still has a huge population base. It is well alive. What I am saying is I would 100% love for Classic to be different than WoW. I would very much like Classic to leave out the “modern” features of MMORPGs, and stick to a more “Classic” approach to MMORPGs. It’s ok to disagree, but that i just my opinion. I truly wish Blizzard will take us to unknown places with Classic, and not simply bring us back to where we are with Retail… why have the same game twice? Let’s have both! The Modern MMORPG, and the Classic one.
I respect your opinion but I think the only reason classic came about is because people wanted to relive the past how it was. Sure it’s a lot different now, no thanks to blizzard, but it’s still recognizable.
A hardcore wow version you speak of isn’t what people signed up for I think. I wouldn’t mind like a purist hardcore server for those such as yourself to chill on. One PvP one PvE and then everyone is happy. I still think forcing the majority to spam in cities to make it look different from retail is missing the point of the nostalgia of old which includes rdf.
