SOM failed, due to its rushed deadlines. The word on the street back then, was that servers, would only be ON for about 1 year.
I started playing it, leaving behind early TBCC and it was all good, besides the crescent feeling of being playing Vanilla with a short span of life, which is a non sense.
Normal fresh servers, without a dead end, would have had much more success.
Exactly! Blizzard didn’t understand till probably some months ago, that the classic playerbase that really makes the wheels turn, isn’t based on streamers and min max meta players.
This notion that the game style with more views on social media platforms, is what the majority wants, is so 2015…
The classic audience is old and the only changes that it tends to upvote and make them subscribed, are the ones that give more resemblance with what they experienced back in 2004-2010. Preferably changes which not turn the game in a rushy rushy circus, oriented to zoomers that will play it for 100+ hours a week and then ditch it like a used rag.
People want fresh classic servers, because they, (me included), love classic and where classic really shines, is in lvling, dungeons, professions and pvp farming. Whoever is rushing the game to raid, is just missing the point and no wonder that many of them turn to be disappointed and demanding changes, to get the e-sport, (rush), among other things, that classic, (specially vanilla), isn’t supposed to give them.
SOM didn’t fail. Was a test, the announcement of fresh servers probably didn’t help
I still don’t get why everyone is in a c crazy rush to consume the content.
That might actually be true had they not announced fresh Wrath servers I probably would have given vanilla another run.
SoM failed because many realized that Classic (vanilla) is a really really bad version of the game compared to the next few expansions that came after it. Classic (vanilla) will never again be as populated as it was during its re-release.
They are allowed to exist because the demand is there for a large selection of people to play with. Hard capping the servers at an arbitrarily low amount just lowers the play experience for everyone by making it impossible to play. You can’t have your friends join your server after the lock.
It’s a much harsher penalty for the people playing on those servers, as you may find yourself unable to play that evening because too many people chose to roll on your server.
Low population servers are still more likely to die off than higher ones, and the artificial blocks on who can play there adds to that volatility.
The free transfers already fail to properly balance servers. Further limiting paid transfers aren’t going to improve that.
The consequences of enforcing small communities are worse than those from allowing mega servers (and by extension, cross realm grouping).
Even leveling feels so much better in Azeroth than in Outlands… I respect your opinion, but i have to disagree.
One evidence playing in my favor is the state of TBCC during the last 8 months, compared with the final months of Vanilla classic… And if Blizzard won’t give a motivational boost, (don’t ask me how), for the last 10 months of WotLK, well it will probably won’t be a joyful thing to see. TBCC last months had WotLK in the horizon and even so…
How is Azeroth leveling better than TBC? The zones are bloated, the gear is horribly itemized, and you don’t have a mount for half of it. 1-50 is a huge chore IMO.
Thats fine, vanilla was/is made to take longer. More about the journey than destination, etc, but even the destination in vanilla sucks. The raids are bland and boring. Itemization is complete garbage. Classes are more unbalanced than any other iteration of the game. Its just…bad. I had fun leveling during Classic Vanilla, but as soon as I hit 60…it hit me. Wow, this is absolutely terrible. Went to level an alt and decided that the long dredge that is vanilla leveling isn’t worth doing more than once.
I’ll personally never play vanilla again because it was such a bad experience, and it felt like it was drawn out way longer than it should’ve been.
TBC zones are basically a theme park, (in WotLK it turns out to be even worse), in Azeroth you have to fly/travel to many different locations, with different plots connecting them. The difference between classes is much more noticeable and the gear is much more subjective and talent tree dependent, which in my opinion turn everything much more interesting for an RPG.
Everything is more raw, different, you have to adapt to your class, to your talent choices, etc
Azeroth/vanilla gives a feeling of sand box playing, in outlands, the zoning, sometimes just feel like different arcade levels of a platform game.
adapt to my class?
You mean pressing my 1 action ability to kill 20 zhevras that are apparently missing all their hooves?
What adapting to my class am I doing mindlessly grinding mobs in the barrens?
Yeah it was great when quests literally took hours because I had to go to 6 different zones and got a whopping 2 bars of XP for it…there’s a reason most quest guides told you to skip them…why most sane people skipped them.
Quit and play retail if you dont want to level. SoM failed because people just spent 2 years playing vanilla, and the changes were do minor it was just a copy. Boosting was not intended to this level which is why they now have killed it…
Blizzard likes to claim they’re “protecting us from ourselves” and yet this is a dereliction of that duty. They allowed megaservers to exist, and the toxic behaviors that come along with it. You might be happy with that toxic behavior, though you’re only on the “Alliance mini-megaserver”. But many people resisting the move to megaservers are doing so because of that mindset on servers like Benediction, Faerlina and Gehennas.
Nonsense. They actively made free transfers to megaservers from low servers making the situation worse. They didn’t limit the free transfers, and that’s how we got where we are. This isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.
So why are we playing Classic, since Retail does everything you want? If all you want is a dungeon simulator, Retail is literally designed towards your needs.
Could it have failed because people were now playing tbcc?
Whi knows!
Also, your definition of failed is different than mine.
Honestly? There are things that retail got very right (like being able to group with anyone you want to, regardless of server choice).
There’s also stuff that got really old, such as the same activities constantly being upscaled to give you better gear, so it became too treadmill like.
Retail WoW has shifted to gameplay that rewards you more for logging on than doing particularly tough challenges. There’s very little incentive to even push to do hard content because the next tier doesn’t even slightly require you to try.
So yeah, I think that retail completely does grouping and server selection stuff far better than classic ever could. It’s the reward and gameplay structure of retail that I hate.
I just find it funny that all of the “fixes” to the community that people put forward on classic invariably ends with restrictions prohibiting people from playing with the people they want to, where they want to.
This is what cross-realm aspects did to retail. Because when they changed the focus to dungeons and raids alone, people stopped feeling like they were in a world and just in a dungeon simulator.
I find it funny that the one element that demonstratably made the community bad, is the thing many people want in Classic. A product specifically designed to recapture that old community. If nothing else, that one aspect is what people knowingly, or unknowingly, miss from the old game.
As any long term player what their favourite expansion is, and why, and invariably when you dig into the why, it’s because of the people and community they had when they were in that expansion.
No, that wasn’t cross realm. That was a constant push for daily / weekly activities to be the focus of your progression. The game doesn’t break if you can add someone from a different server to your dungeons and raids.
It does feel crappy when the only way to keep up with your character power is to do all of your dailies/weeklies.
Cross realm doesn’t make every content patch invalidate the last one.
Cross realm didn’t cause the removal of RPG elements for homogenous classes.
They are unrelated things. Having access to people to play with in a multiplayer game is a good thing. It was other decisions that changed HOW the game was played that led to retail feeling soulless.
Modern gaming patterns obsessed with optimizing every aspect of the game does far more to damage the community than blizzard could ever fix. The obsession with gearing fastest, perfect group comps, labelling any spec that’s slightly suboptimal as trash… Classic failed miserably to recapture the community feel. Smaller servers certainly didn’t have it, and most of those died as people moved off to high population servers to better chase optimized gameplay.
So sure, they say it was the community that makes them come back, but they certainly are lightning fast to ditch it for better gameplay experiences and more people to group with.
Might as well allow those left behind to still have good grouping experiences without needing to pay extra to leave, or hoping that blizzard forces more people onto their realm.
I agree, but the people playing Classic, in large part aren’t modern gamers. We’re in our 30s and 40s, some even older, who remember what it was like, and want to actively get back to it.
“they say” puts you in the “Not around the first time” group.
I very much remember what it was like. Unfortunately, modern gaming patterns have largely taken over the game and ruined any sense of the old community that existed in the early expansions.
Across the board, raid comps are meta chasing. The class breakdowns are heavily skewed toward current best performers. GDKP runs have largely taken over. I’ve seen week 1 SWP clearing guilds server hop because they can only do 2 splits.
The overall feel of classic has been nothing resembling that of the original game. This became obvious as early as phase 2 classic, where dominating factions made the game nearly unplayable for the underdog faction on pvp servers to chase rank 14 as efficiently as possible from day 1.
Almost everything has been warped around meta play now, which has absolutely decimated any of the old classic feel I remembered as a fresh hunter going into molten core back in the day.
Cross realm can’t damage a community feel that already doesn’t exist in TBC classic.