Blizzard announced "Classic" World of Warcraft

[Zeriel]

I always played MMOs on RP/PVP servers, and the experience was much better. WOW will always degenerate into Diablo-style Baal Runs unless players treat it as a fantasy-themed chat room like the developers originally intended. The difference between Classic and Retail is that the playerbase metagames too much now, not that Retail itself is necessarily that much worse. Hardcore fixes some of these problems, but then you get other issues like collusion and players wiping on purpose. Doing autistic stuff like giving other players in cities buffs in exchange for money or buying high and selling low on the auction house should get as much devtime as dungeons. Why the entire endgame revolves around raids makes no sense

It kinda didn't in vanilla. Thing is Classic is not vanilla. As I've said before, it defeats the whole purpose and selling point of the product. Like selling you tickets to a Rolling Stone concert and then it's some cover band.

What are the main differences?

Mostly structural server/design choices. But there's probably plenty I've forgotten. I think those are the most important though. They're what sets vanilla WoW apart from what it became, and they didn't restore it with Classic.

Vanilla did not have sharding--whatsoever. This means when you go to a place, you're there with everyone else who is there. This, yes, crashed lots of vanilla servers back in the day when 100 people went to raid the other faction's capital, but that was an exquisite part of the charm. Single server architecture is what led to all the social connections too. Even if you never talked to someone on the other faction, you knew them by reputation. All you had to do was go places and do things and you would eventually build a story across the server. All of that disappeared, first with cross server queues for BGs (this actually happened at the very end of vanilla with a patch that also gave out all the PVP rewards for free), and then later with them introducing sharding and mixing players across servers in the same area in PVE. Same thing with auction house, probably more things I'm forgetting related to this architecture.

Think of it like the feel of a small town IRL compared to a big city. In Modern WoW, including Classic, everything is transient and you know nobody. Even if you recognize them, there is no connection and you simply don't care. You're an atomized individual just collecting your economic benefit from the huge clusterfuck and moving on with no sense of community. Even guilds have fallen prey to this, where people will just transfer between servers and leaves guilds behind, with little social ties involved.

WoW "evolved" itself out of the genre entirely, and in so doing also destroyed the genre. There is no MMO in the modern MMO. Classic is the same. You're just retreading the content of vanilla WoW inside the skin of modern WoW.

 

[Gromoer]

Yeah, it was a surprise for me when I recently discovered this sharding thing. My pal which we decided to play WoW hardcore together was invisible for me standing right in front of me until I added him to the party. It’s like taking away what is essentially WoW wtf.

 

[staffofaesculapius]

I think the idea is to remove crazy competition for quest mobs. I do lean towards single server though. Seeing everyone in one place would be amazing.

 

[Vic]

just play on warmane wotlk private server

 

[Elttharion]

Catasisters we are so back

 

[whydoibother]

Catasisters we are so back

Weird. The whole point of "classic" is to return to the old game world, which Cataclysm removed and couldn't legally be accessed.
I guess its just a progression server now? Because as far as I know, literally everything in Cataclysm can be played in the retail version of the game.

 

[Zeriel]

Yeah, that ain't "classic" anything.

 

[Elttharion]

Catasisters we are so back

Weird. The whole point of "classic" is to return to the old game world, which Cataclysm removed and couldn't legally be accessed.
I guess its just a progression server now? Because as far as I know, literally everything in Cataclysm can be played in the retail version of the game.

Yes, classic cata is a bizarre idea. Not to mention that for a lot of people Cata is the point where the game started to decline, even if some of the bad stuff was already there during WOTLK.

Also this probably means they will launch classid WOD and even BFA at some point lmao

 

[Caim]

MoP Classic when?

 

[Dr1f7]

$80 for character boost lol

 

[awsker]

MoP Classic when?

WoW Classic Classic when?

 

[ADL]

Catasisters we are so back

BFA Classic hypeeeeeee

 

[Gromoer]

It seems there are always some people longing for something “classic”

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

It seems there are always some people longing for something “classic”

People paid for World of Warcraft and it was a game they enjoyed, and then one day Blizzard stopped allowing them to play that game that they paid for and enjoyed, which is why private servers like Nostalrius became big in the first place.

Also, most WoW fans are Gen Ys or Millennials, who grew up materially wealthy but spiritually poor. That has produced weird psychological effects. It's why they are so neurotic. It's why they rage about Star Wars. It's why people care too much about WoW. A lot of Gen Y and millennials had divorced parents, which tremendously disrupted their spiritual life. It disrupts going to Church. Their parents were not present in their lives life. You're in daycare or at school all day. So they had a spiritually deprived existence, and replaced that with inappropriate things. They replaced missing attachments to parents and siblings and the lack of communities with entertainment and fandoms.

 

[Gromoer]

It seems there are always some people longing for something “classic”

People paid for World of Warcraft and it was a game they enjoyed, and then one day Blizzard stopped allowing them to play that game that they paid for and enjoyed, which is why private servers like Nostalrius became big in the first place.

Also, most WoW fans are Gen Ys or Millennials, who grew up materially wealthy but spiritually poor. That has produced weird psychological effects. It's why they are so neurotic. It's why they rage about Star Wars. It's why people care too much about WoW. A lot of Gen Y and millennials had divorced parents, which tremendously disrupted their spiritual life. It disrupts going to Church. Their parents were not present in their lives life. You're in daycare or at school all day. So they had a spiritually deprived existence, and replaced that with inappropriate things. They replaced missing attachments to parents and siblings and the lack of communities with entertainment and fandoms.

It’s all about family, innit

 

[Talby]

I have no interested in Cata "classic" as most of the things that ruined the retail game are already present by that point. (a lot quicker this time around with boosts/gold tokens already being added to TBC/Wrath which defeated the point) I was huffing copium and hoping for them to announce fresh TBC servers without boosts or tokens, but no dice. Season of Discovery might be worth a look though.

 

[Late Bloomer]

Gen Ys or Millennials

Aren't those the same thing?

 

[Lacrymas]

WotLK was already unbearable and borderline unplayable if you are a healer (I certainly didn't last more than 3 months), Cata was better in this regard. I'd argue Cata was better than WotLK in a lot of ways, especially if you are a PvEr.

 

[Tyrr]

MoP Classic when?

WoW Classic Classic when?

It's already there. You just have to play hardcore.

 

[Myobi]

It’s all about family, innit

 

[ADL]

Season of Mystery is cool but they're still getting mogged by private servers doing the Classic+ thing, with the benefit of permanence instead of it being seasonal shit.

I hope this is just them dipping their toes in the water of Classic+ and they have something more impressive to announce next year.

 

[Reever]

Season of Discovery looks more like a fun server aka Ascension rather than Classic+.

 

[J1M]

It is a classic+ beta. Putting the level cap at 25 is brilliant. Playing for 100 hours to see the new content would be awful.

At this point Blizzard has learned the lesson enough times to see private servers as free market research and beta testing.

The only reason it is marketed as a season is so they can shut it down without losing face if people don't like it. If it is a big success they will just keep bumping the level cap by 5 every 60 days.

 

[Lacrymas]

There are too many changes and a lot of them are straight up taken from retail. The biggest problems of vanilla are things like one-button rotations (for Shaman/Paladin healers as well), the debuff cap, unusable specs that require a single ability to fix and raids that are way, waaaay too easy. Why not concentrate on fixing vanilla's issues first before going balls deep into incoherent private server territory?

 

[frajaq]

Not interested in Wow Retail expansions, nor Cata Classic. But I am very very curious about Season of Discovery