The infamous statement has proven to be true. The same community that wanted no changes two years ago (original bugs and all) as well as the community that wanted the dungeon finder addon banned are proving that he was correct. A vast number of people were against all paid services, even name changes. Less than two years after the release of Classic the community now appears to overwhelmingly support fairly significant changes as well as including the level boost. I’ve even seen people arguing that the game should have the WoW token.
I’ve always wondered the process that caused retail to become the way it is (more of a multiplayer adventure game than an MMORPG). I actually enjoy retail, but it’s a completely different game than Classic. The purpose of Classic is to give us an option to play the game as it was. This community has proved that a vast majority of players just dislike Classic and truly had rose tinted goggles on when requesting it. There is no doubt in my mind that if we get Classic+ after Wrath (unlikely but still) that it will rapidly become retail with a Classic coat of paint.
I should mention that I don’t support a vast majority of the #nochanges arguments (some changes are needed to fix game-breaking issues). However, it’s interesting how rapidly this community has evolved to be the complete opposite of what it used to be.
The people who asked for Classic wanted it as it was. The people asking for changes to Classic never really wanted Classic in the first place; they wanted something different.
The folks like me who wanted a faithful recreation were sorely disappointed, but still play it because it’s the closest we’re gonna get and retail is terrible. I’m sure as hell not about to go play EQ2 or some other crappy MMO, so… here I am.
Nah #nochanges was always a bad idea, and most people knew it. Even many of the most rabid #nochange crowd had some things they wanted changed. The idea of #nochanges also lead to some terrible things being added, like trying to recreate batching.
You might not have, but a lot of people were real quick to throw up #nochanges(except for the ones I support)
And most people were smart enough to realize that even with zero changes, as in blizzard released the game exactly as they did 15 years ago, the experience was always going to be different. Making #nochanges a silly notion from day one.
And based on the changes we’re seeing to BC it looks like blizzard got the message and is listening to what the community has been saying(and said before classic vanilla). Guild banks, seal of blood for alliance, bosses with bug fixes but not balance changes, removing batching etc… all good.
I was part of the #nochange crowd. But this #nochange was originally directed toward any change that was out of the scope of Vanilla such as Transmog, Guild Bank, Flying Mount (yes yes some people asked for this at the time), pet battle or class changes. Not things such as addressing spawn rate or locations as we were having mega servers with 10K+ players on it. So it made sense to address this.
Now retrospectively, leeway and spell batching were not good ideas, and I am fine with saying it was a mistake and I should not have been happy with their implementation.
And I would have loved a different version of Alterac (I still do btw).
BUT, I have not regret that this hard stance on #nochange was followed because it kept Blizzard from adding unwanted stuff and creating a Classic + experience when Vanilla was asked. It would have been much harder to remove things added to Vanilla than to add them now.
We (the players and Blizzard) are learning from this experience and expect some reasonable changes such as the paladin seals, leatherworking drums, mobs/nodes spawnrate and a few other items that makes sense within TBC.
So far, Blizzard is going in a really good direction except the fresh servers part that they refuse to add for the time being. I would put my tinfoil hat on and say that this way people are resubbing to Classic now to level their alts whereas otherwise they would wait for TBC to be released. So more money for Blizzard with this decision hehe… Tinfoil hat off
I think in large part, the reason that the #no changes crowd was so strong with the release of Classic was because people were scared that Blizzard would mess it up and add un-needed stuff to the game. Personally I was always a fan of some QoL changes and even balance changes that make the game more fun/accessable to everyone.
It isn’t really surprising, I’ve always been part of the #somechanges crowd. As well I’ve always wanted Classic to follow a separate but similar track to retail. In that, I wanted to go over the same content as the retail timeline but wanted an “enhanced” version of those expansions with certain QoL improvements that don’t exactly change the game at all in terms of play.
In later expansion further changes to those to keep a more Vanilla-Wrath feel to the game. So you’d end up with two versions of WoW. retail that would be an MMOrpg while Classic would be an mmoRPG. Two separate types of WoW that cater to two separate types of WoW players.
#nochanges was always a dumb movement because those that supported that movement did not think about the future, and knew they would eventually leave that point at Classic Cataclysm if they got that far wanting #changes… such as LFR never being introduced or even LFD never being introduced in Wrath.
You misunderstand why people want the WoW token. Its to chop the legs out from under the bots. Being able to buy gold via the token destroys the bot economy. Why do you think the bot infestation was higher in classic versus what you see in retail right now? The simple answer is because there are more things to farm, and no wow tokens.
Absolutely untrue. The token does NOTHING to stop bots/RMT/hacking/exploiting. The token in retail hasn’t made a dent in bots. It’s WORSE than Classic.
People should at least be honest about why they want the token.
But it isn’t. Retail is lousy with bots. Log in and look around - it’s crazy.
Bots in retail are worse than Classic? Are you delusional? Do I have to pull up the number of bots they banned from classic after they made a post specifically targeting bots in classic? Some people will literally say ANYTHING to justify or push their agenda/beliefs.
every game that is an mmo has some sort of bot problem. Heck I new a guy in college that used a bot program to level his character while he was in class. Always thought botting was dumb, and still do this day.
I’d say the real way you know that people thought they did but really didn’t is all the ways players have found to skip content in the game. All you heard before the game launched is how we were going back to a time when you had to work for things. Now, everybody wants to skip the work. Need an alt? Just boost. Need some gold? Just buy it. A game that was just WoW raids would appeal to a lot of these people.
It’s going to be nearly impossible to make someone agree a list of options. Rarely will people agree on all of them at the same time.
I quite enjoyed the old Vanilla zones, quests, and effort to travel about the world, working for my dungeon drops and getting to see the raids at level instead of level 80-100+ etc.
But we will never get the true old feeling we did playing it for the first time. There is little mystery left to someone who has played it before. Unfortunately, this knowledge was abused to death and new, unsavory metas were born.
Which is why some very calculated changes are important to safeguard that magic.
For some people, min maxing and exploiting game mechanics is fun because its accessible to all and within the games ruleset. Coming back 15 years later to see how much better you can do than you did last time is appealing even if it seems like people are “gaming” the system.
0% chance they ever banned thousands a day. You think they’ve banned over a million bots? Maybe thousands a day over the course of a weekend one time several months ago.
Sometimes if it’s been long enough since I’ve seen a TV series, I’ve forgotten enough about it to be able to enjoy it the second time through. For really great shows I can watch them maybe 3 times. At a certain point, though, it starts to get stale.
I think that was classic for enough people. They were trying to get back to that feeling they had nearly 2 decades ago and I think, for a lot of classic players, it did.
I gave up on no changes when they decided to put out the last patch version of the game to start with. if you were really trying for a “start over” effect then literally start over get 1.00 going and run from there
