Wow classic?

According to this video https://www.youtube.com/embed/TcZyiY...

and this link: https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/worl...

Blizzard will open up a classic server.

Golly... I am not sure how I react to this news...

Having never played WoW this interests me. Enough to subscribe and jump in? Maybe. Having missed so much it always seemed daunting to jump in on whatever was current.

A couple years back I hopped on an Everquest emulated server. Absolutely loved the game when it first came out and sunk hundreds of hours into it. When I went back to play EQ again, I realized it was better left a good memory. I feel that's the same way people are going to approach the WoW classic server. There's a lot of modern conveniences that are in the game now that were not there on release. I believe people are going to miss those conveniences and play for a month or two out of nostalgia. After that, there could be a large population decline.

Or I could be wrong and people will love it

I’m sure this hasn’t been addressed yet but will it just stay stagnant or will they slowly introduce the expansions? If it just stays Vanilla I would think people will get bored once everything is on farm (if a 40 person raid can ever be considered on farm) but introducing expansions would sorta defeat the purpose.

Docjoe wrote:

I’m sure this hasn’t been addressed yet but will it just stay stagnant or will they slowly introduce the expansions? If it just stays Vanilla I would think people will get bored once everything is on farm (if a 40 person raid can ever be considered on farm) but introducing expansions would sorta defeat the purpose.

They will reveal more in time...

Can't imagine they will keep it the grind-fest it once was. All our memories are a bit sugercoated, I guess.

But I do hope they won't re-introduce the dumbed-down version it became after the 2nd or 3rd expansion. I really loved the exploring in the Vanilla Wow, only knowing that you quest of just south of X or somewhere near Y, instead of a yellow dot you just flew to.

But to kill and skin thousands of things just to get my stead.. nah, will not miss that one.

This is primarily to keep other private emulator servers from popping up. Not that they all go away (there's a bunch of them with different rule sets built off of different versions of WoW), but the one where they just won a ton of money from a lawsuit was a Vanilla server that was doing microtransactions. Which i'm sure they will also do so they can cash in on that revenue stream themselves.

Fwiw this sounds terrible to me. I got burned out on classic WOW when I was single and only working part-time. I really don't see the appeal though I'm open to hearing why this is even a thing.

jdzappa wrote:

Fwiw this sounds terrible to me. I got burned out on classic WOW when I was single and only working part-time. I really don't see the appeal though I'm open to hearing why this is even a thing.

Lot of people like it and want the old school version. *shrug* I know personally i stopped playing after Burning Crusade because i had enough up until Northrend.

Back when i was on a private server kick there were at least 6 different flavors at the time and 2 of them were promoting classic.

WOW classic sounds awful. The fact that healers are stuck as healers is enough to suck the fun out of anything.

I could see this working very well for them if they made it separate from the subscription version. If I'm paying a monthly sub, I want all the content. If I'm on a F2P server with micro-transactions for cosmetic and time-saving items, I'm fine with being limited to the base version.

However, that's not what this is, and I expect Blizzard are going to wonder why their classic server won't be able to hit the same numbers that private server did.

I wouldn't mind checking out the old Azeroth again, if the price is right. I suspect it won't be right. Maybe worth $5 a month to play, but there's too much else out there to pay more than that. I sort of doubt Blizzard would stoop to that low a monthly fee.

Running Man wrote:

I wouldn't mind checking out the old Azeroth again, if the price is right. I suspect it won't be right. Maybe worth $5 a month to play, but there's too much else out there to pay more than that. I sort of doubt Blizzard would stoop to that low a monthly fee.

Maybe, maybe not. If any company has a keen eye on what customers are willing to pay - it's Blizzard. Given the fact that they do produce Blue Ribbon products, and put in a secret cow level now and then.

I puttered about the emulator scene a bit, and would probably play around for awhile on a populated Blizzard server. Those quality of life changes are very evident though as you move from vanilla to BC to Wrath, particularly inventory-wise...limited stacking, pets and mounts taking bag space, and so on. It would be a kindness to roll them in to the original game, if players' vanilla sensibilities aren't horribly offended.

TheGameguru wrote:

WOW classic sounds awful. The fact that healers are stuck as healers is enough to suck the fun out of anything.

I actually didn't mind being stuck as a healer when druids finally got to the point of not being broken. I think when swiftmend was introduced?

But aside from that I agree...WoW classic is the reason I still hate questing in any game and try to get to max level as fast possible.

WoW classic is the reason I still hate questing in any game and try to get to max level as fast possible

This should be engraved in marble and put on the wall above every game-designers desk

I remember being a lowly Tauren Druid on a PvP server. Rolled into Stranglethorn. Proceeded to spend months there trying to level amidst body runs from all the high level Alliance players...Take the PvP aspect and mix that with much searching for named raptors, tigers and leopards. It was a less than enjoyable experience and wouldn't mind ever rolling through that place again.

Gank Forest was hard...

But oh.. the joy of riding forth with your guild and clubbing low-level players to death with your good ol' fishin' pole was fun.

That,

and slapping you minion in Dungeon Keeper

or stunning your first Alien on a 386 DX with X-com

or gathering the 10.000 fremen around the Palace in Dune (Cryo)

or conquer the world with three chariots in Civ I

It's funny that WoW Classic was my favorite time leveling in any MMO, but it had very little to do with the game itself. We had a stable group going through the instances, and on paper... our group should have really sucked, but more often than not we tore through dungeons and had a blast even when we were having our asses handed to us.

Fedayken98 was our paladin tank back when paladins sucked at tanking. No ranged pulls, and problems holding aggro. Copingsaw was our healer, as a shadow priest, which was not a particularly good healing spec at the time. georob the warlock was one of our DPS guys, back when warlocks were essentially broken they were so bad. I led the team as a mage, covering DPS, CC, and pulling, and anyone that played during that time probably just got a twitch in their eye at the thought of a mage pulling... The last spot was typically filled by who we could find available at the time, but generally we'd have a hunter tag along if we could find one. I fully admit that I have rosy colored nostalgia glasses on when I think back to classic though.

I play on private servers from time to time, and quality of life improvements are massive, even from expansion to expansion. I recently dropped from a Legion server to a MoP server and the change was incredibly drastic. Dropping from MoP to WotLK is another huge step back. I couldn't imagine jumping all the way back to a classic server without at least some of the improvements that have come throughout the years.

it's crazy to think about just how long that has been out.

Hopefully they find a decent balance between old game content and new quality of life improvements.
People hating on vanilla questing/lvling are just wrong though. Wrong.

Shadout wrote:

People hating on vanilla questing/lvling are just wrong though. Wrong.

/agree

-BEP

bepnewt wrote:
Shadout wrote:

People hating on vanilla questing/lvling are just wrong though. Wrong.

/agree

-BEP

I loved the Vanilla version. Loved the exploration, lore and reading. I hated the dumbed-down upgrades when you just ran from glowing dot A (quest giver) to glowing dot B (quest) forth and back again... this took down the pleasure of exploring everything for me.

But some of the endless grind-fest things I will not miss

Peoj Snamreh wrote:

But some of the endless grind-fest things I will not miss

It kinda cute that (especially at the time) this was considered a grind fest. It was one of the most streamlined MMOs of its time with the least amount of grind.

Also speaks to the state of mmos today that it's considered that as well.

If Blizzard can get my old gang of rp-pvper's from 13 years ago back together I'll play. But they have to get all 24 of them.

I had plenty of fun leveling in classic. It didn't matter that it took a month to get to level 50. The first time through there's tons to explore and you were rewarded checking out random nooks and crannies you'd probably fly over in future expansions. Guild members would take me to the new dungeons as I hit the right levels and it was great.

Raids, pvp, high-tier dungeons, and other late game stuff? Goodness, no. They were either absurdly difficult with little to no rewards, took ages, or were such a boring steamroll that you'd do them over and over to get some rare drop that barely improved your character.

It was worse for me since I only played an enhancement shaman. Possibly the most broken class until Burning Crusade came out. The mechanisms were so esoteric that I couldn't really optimize myself, and there was no gear for that spec so I would wear weird mixes of leather and mail to get maybe half the damage of a rogue.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/201...

Any EU zoners fancy starting a guild when this thing comes around?

Certainly. I "hope" the patch they use weren't one were rolling ignite was fixed. That was the most fun time mages ever had. Even if it hadn't been too strong, it made things interesting.

I'm in a tossup between playing again when it is available and getting a divorce....

Whynotboth.gif

Arise thread! I plan on playing classic just because it's been so long since I played vanilla, I literally remember almost nothing of it, as I was pretty young. I was wondering if we are going to have a goodjer guild/group for classic, or if I need to look elsewhere. I don't care which faction people plan on playing, I have no preference, I just want to be in a group.

Played the beta for a short while. Got a hunter to lvl 10... But couldnt get myself to play more when it was just a beta where everything will be gone.
Also, unsurprisingly, everything was slooow. Doesnt help that hunters have no pet before lvl 10, but damn my recurring nightmares about vanilla droprates were not wrong. Just about 1 out of 50 bears really do have bear skin.