Classic is absolutely nothing like vanilla wow, everyone is well aware of it. Not only are we as a whole much better at the game, and not only are we on extremely superior computers with great internet, but the whole culture of the game has had 15 years to develop.
Classic wow has been so thoroughly min maxed that you’re locked into a single item for all of classic which is considered your best in slot. There are spreadsheets that go in depth telling you the exact micro DPS upgrade a different combination of gear will grant you. You only see people paying for boosts to level. Everyone just raid logs and gears “alts” that they themselves paid for a boost to get. What does all of this mean?
I’ve been thinking a lot about that statement J Allan Brack said about classic servers many years ago. “You think you do, but you don’t”. I believe that the only reason people play classic is because of how bad BFA was and they are not satisfied with the current game. Not everyone, but a huge portion. So they play classic until shadowlands. They think they want classic, but they don’t. They in reality want retail to be good. I’ve reflected on this statement for a long time and I kind of feel like Brack was thinking this. People are caught up in the nostalgia aspect when we all knew it would be nothing like original vanilla. People would play it like retail and min max it to death to a point where it’s not even an MMO anymore. It’s a DPS spreadsheet.
People want a fun MMO that is engaging with good gearing. And that doesn’t mean vanilla wow, that just happened to be the bargaining chip. We could have gone back to any of the previous expansions. But people were under the illusion that classic would rekindle the early mmo days. You THINK you want classic but you don’t. You in reality want wow to be what it was. But wow will never be like that again. The landscape has changed with the best in slot min max mentality. Classic is a prime example of what happens when min maxing a game, which had so much potential, makes the game worse.
At least I can say that the first weeks of classic was almost a fraction of my original experience with wow all those years ago. when people helped each other out and actually ran dungeons as they were meant to be run. I’ve come to realize that I don’t actually want vanilla wow I want to have that feeling again doing something new.
I still think classic is miles better than retail. And no, im not just playing classic while waiting for shadowlands. Shadowlands will end up being a letdown just like bfa.
But this was mostly worked out in vanilla, TBC most definitely had it all worked out to the N’th degree. Its where the whole cookie cutter spec complaint came from… Overall J.Allan Brack was wrong, we did want Classic WoW and we are still here playing. I love it so much I have 3 rogues.
Half true. BFA being bad is why we have Classic. However, Shadowlands needs to be as unlike BFA as it possibly can to be more appealing than Classic or TBC servers. There’s an immense amount of damage to undo in a single xpac for that to happen, and I won’t be holding my breath.
While there is some truth in what you say, in that the culture and knowledge has changed, the game is still based in 1.12, and that’s what I wanted to play.
If that’s what I wanted, then not only do I THINK I wanted it, but I KNOW I wanted it, and it hasn’t dissapointed.
Are you Allan Brack ? Cause if so, you think you’re right but you’re not ! Just kidding though. At all events, Allan Brack didn’t say that because he thought classic would be ruined because of min/maxer. He said it because he couldn’t admit classic was superior to what retail became. He had expansions to sell you know. He just could not admit how bad the game became. Well I guess he finally admitted it though.
Personally, I still think vanilla was the best part of wow. We could even argue which patch of vanilla cause end of vanilla was already not that great (pvp xserver, server transferring, worst av ever).
Personnally, I don’t raid log, I don’t buy boosts, I don’t run gdkp raid. I didn’t see anyone doing it most of my classic experience. It’s a bit different, sure, but I really enjoyed my experience so far. Actually, I think I enjoy it better cause during vanilla, I only played one character and focused too much on him while this time I made several alts and tried each classes.
I hadn’t played wow since MoP until coming back for classic. I did recently decide to try out BFA and I will emphatically say that classic, whatever its faults may be, is miles more fun than BFA.
Dude, every time I am on the zeppelin to booty bay after ony/nef goes out and every square inch of the zeppelin is covered with players and you can’t even see yourself I say “You think you do, but you don’t”.
Millions and millions of people play Classic every day. It’s hard to tell with all the retail gimmicks like phasing and such, but from what I can see Classic actually has more players than retail.
By whatever standard you wish to measure, Classic was a resounding success. Yes people play the game differently to some degree, but people thought they wanted Classic… and they were right!
The “you think you do, but…” was a big true for a lot of players. Firsts weeks and even months into classic and the rant in the forums was overwhelming. When p2 started the wpvp almost broke the forums with tears, and for sure a lot of players leave the game.
That don’t mean that for others the game was (and is) great. And overall classic was a massive successes that blizz don’t anticipate. In my case I love classic for the old lore. The quests are fun, the class feels unique and the pve and pvp are fine. I never got the chance to play vanilla in such large scale (I only played with few friends on a pserver one of us run) and the experience so far is great.
If you still enjoy the game, play it. If you don’t, go and find another hobby. Let people enjoy their stuff.
This whole OP is stupid. Atleast in correlation to the title. Classic is not vanilla. It is literally the very last patch before TBC came out, with mega servers, layering and added things that make the experience completely different.
The playerbase has certainly changed but this is also not the real thing. Its still better than retail
Yes, players have found every flaw in the game design, and there are many, and they have exploited them to the max, which is unfortunate. World buffs, boosting, etc., all of that crap would have been nuked from orbit and removed in 2006 had it played out then like it is playing out now, but we have #nochanges because we simply don’t trust Blizzard to tamper with the game. And that’s just the way it is and the way it has to be.
But even with it’s major flaws and exploits, it’s still a better game than retail, and I’m having fun, as are many people. The game has been a huge success and probably extremely profitable for Blizzard seeing as they obviously dedicated minimal resources to it.
I think ideally, though, along the lines of what OP is saying, if we could get a game like Classic in almost every way, except with all the exploits fixed and the content tuned to be more difficult to match today’s modern min/max gamer, that would be the perfect solution. But that’s not what you’re going to get with Shadowlands, so don’t hold your breath. I think most people who leave Classic for Shadowlands will be back.
On the bright side, I think TBC does fix a lot of the flaws of vanilla Classic, and it is less exploitable, so I’m looking forward to seeing how that plays out. I expect it to be another huge success.
The phrase is actually wildly inaccurate. Many of the problems people have with Classic are a result of changes made to the game because Blizzard couldn’t just provide the product everyone loved. The other problems people have aren’t with Classic specifically but with MMO gaming in general.
I feel like some of it is players doing what they think they “have” to do, instead of what they want to do. I personally enjoy Classic a lot more now that I’ve dropped the min-max attitude.
Did I miss out on quests and leveled slower for not using a guide? Definitely. Will I clear Naxx with a guild that doesn’t require world buffs? Probably not. But those are sacrifices I’m willing to make. If I didn’t, then I would’ve gone crazy and unsubscribed long ago.
Vanilla was and Classic is the BEST game in town, deeply flawed but still the BEST. I don’t mean this as an endorsement of their quality but an indictment of the industry as a whole.
We all do, hopefully the fact that we are all playing and paying for a 15 year old game that wasn’t all that good to begin with gives the industry a “come to Jesus moment”.
It COULD be 100x better if anybody at actiblizz had any real vision.
Several QOL and balance fixes to classes like Shadow priest and Druid dps, not to mention Enhancement being a fun but dumpster fire spec would prolong classic so much.
Spriest would be completely viable with lower mana cost on 2 spells lol.
Buff Windfury Weapon and Enhancement is playable again.
Buff energy regain and dps slightly on feral and its playable.
LOTS of things could be done.
It’s easier to continue milking the subs releasing TBC. That is exactly what they will do once shadowlands starts losing subs at record rates like BFA.
I think the statement is half accurate. I think he said it thinking that Retail solved all of Vanilla’s “problems”. Which is completely untrue. He said it thinking that there would be no market for anything Vanilla like. That is also untrue.
That being said. He was correct in that half, if not most the people do NOT want the overall Vanilla experience as it was. They don’t want to grind. They don’t want to spend the time. They don’t want to spend the effort. People don’t want to figure things out on their own. It’s a different time now. A different generation. People value different things now. If Vanilla came out today, it would flop. “But i don’t have the time …”. And they won’t play. Being second or third best isn’t acceptable. Everyone needs to win. That’s just how it is. And it’s why Classic actually is being played today.
Pre-beta forums, if you mentioned anything post Vanilla or anything un Vanilla like, you’d be told “Go back to Retail”. Now, people are freely talking about TBC and Wrath, and all sorts of other Retail topics. It’s clear the audience (or at least the vocal audience) of Classic has shifted.
The people who wanted a re-tune, etc, wanted the overall Vanilla experience. We thought we wanted it, and we still do. But for the players of today, including the private server players and retail, the statement applies.