WoW Classic Is PROVING Something.. | The Antidote To Modern ‘Empty’ Games - Videos for the 97.4%

That's a big talking point in the community right now. Classic realistically only has the playable lifespan that the original release did before Burning Crusade came out, which was about two years. After that, the safest option is to just emulate the release cycle and move to the Burning Crusade. And after that, WOTLK, the expansion where WoW's playercount peaked and the one before the old world was remade. But after that they're kind of stuck. Late WOTLK was seen as the beginning of the end of "old" WoW and after that the game became radically different. They have a lot of cut content to work with if they want to expand on the vanilla world. Dragon Isles, Undermine, Caverns of Time, Emerald Dream, ect. Plus the empty zones that were not populated until Cataclysm. It has to be cheaper to lower your graphical standards as well. But can modern Blizzard handle it without fucking it up? Who knows. It's entirely up to Blizzard whether they want to treat Classic is a cool side experiment and leave it as a 2004 time capsule, expand the nostalgia and have the golden trilogy of Classic, BC, and WOTLK, or take the riskier but more creative and long term viability route of creating new content for Classic.

In my opinion, the thing that used to make MMORPGs great is that it actually made you a regular guy among thousands of other regular guys in a fantasy society. Over time, MMORPGs started dripfeeding singleplayer RPG elements into their games. Suddenly, every player had to be "The Chosen One". Unfortunately, nothing is a bigger immersion breaker than standing in town and seeing an entire crowd of Chosen Ones all wearing the same legendary weapon handed down only to the one person worthy enough by the game's virtual Jesus on his dying breath. WoW's profession guild halls were an especially terrible way of doing this. The common joke was that the NPC guilds had 30 members and 30.000 guild masters. Every server in an MMO has a handful of legendary players that everyone on the server knows. Whether they be exceptionally skilled at the game, have extremely rare gear, or because they're really good at providing a service. They worked hard to get there, and they provide motivation to other players who see them and go "wow, I wish I was that guy!". By making everyone "The Chosen One", you take away a lot of that social interaction. It doesn't take very long to realize that the game is putting you on a treadmill, openly dangling carrots in front of your face. It's just not as motivating. These tricks may work in singleplayer games because they are built entirely around submerging a single player in those worlds, but MMOs can't do that. MMOs have to always consider the fact that there are more players around. Rather than being the main selling point, the multiplayer becomes a burden to the game.

What about something like what Path of Exile does where they have constant 'resets' with new twists?

People are 100x better at WoW than what they were 14 years ago. People know the content in and out, and the quests and content is still the same. People will blast through every single piece of content the first months. And i'm afraid something ala Apex Legends will happen. Blizzard uses too long of a time to push out new content so people burn out and return to retail.

Old WoW is just slow and difficult enough to force people to talk to each other.

I'm thinking that people will use public Discords for LFG as opposed to in game tools more often than not.

Another this to consider: intrinsic value is something much harder to nail down and get right, and things that work one decade might not work the next.

To be perfectly honest, whilst this video has a lot of good points, it also completely ignores the fact that the systems in WoW classic were far from perfect and had plenty detractors in its hey-day calling for the very same things many games come standard with today. Not to mention the simple fact that the massive success of old school WoW was attributed many different things, and not just being some sort of perfect example of 'meaningful work'. It was very much a product of its time, in a market that it basically cornered and controlled for years. Nowadays with an MMO like Final Fantasy XIV nearly reaching the peak player count of WoW in its own golden age, despite doing literally everything 'wrong' according to many of modern WoW's detractors (FFXIV is heavily themeparky, somewhat linear in its grinding progression, heavily story based with every player being the 'chosen one', random gear rolls, weekly checklists with guaranteed gear, raid matchmaking, and much more) it's very clear that industry has simply moved on as had its target demographic. On a personal note, I disagree with the notion that WoW was the pinnacle of meaningful work in games, considering I wanted nothing to do with WoW back in the day due to a distinct personal feeling that the grinding was largely meaningless and that the game had little respect for the my time.

I've heard the argument against things like classic wow that are along the lines of "people will be bored of it once the nostalgia wears off" but in that case how do you account for the populations that buggy, laggy and just down right unreliable unofficial servers manage to attract? If i remember right nostalrius had over a hundred thousand active players. I mean from a marketing perspective it requires the players to know how to download a client via torrent and modify it to connect to a private server. even though that entails one copy paste line in notepad. already you are asking a lot just for them to know of its existence. There's something there that is driving the player base that modern games are not providing. To the "wow is too grindy" people. Don't know what to tell you. That was the main appeal to the original core base. Classic wow definitely was not for the instant gratification crowed. Not the game for you.

I've definitely been enjoying the grind. It's such a mellow game and I think that's what I need right now. Well, at least the stuff I'm doing now, some of those bosses seem very intimidating. I played when I was a kid but I never got very far. It's been a trip blowing past what I did back then, but there's definitely more to the appeal of it than that. Even with how foggy my memory of back then is, I can tell they added a some content and QoL stuff. I think that's a good idea, and the polls are nice to make sure they don't go too far.

Won't work for raids. There's a concept in WoW, as well as in other games, that I don't think anyone's named so I'm going to call it gear saturation. With 40 players, for every raid, you're going to have 2-3 people that want the same item on every boss. Bosses drop 3 pieces of gear on average from their entire loot table, which means you can raid for months and not see the item you want. With PUGs, loot will be randomly rolled, instead of being allocated via loot council or DKP. This means that you have random chances on: If your PUG can actually clear the raid (otherwise you've wasted your lockout, and need to wait for the next week) If the item you want drops If you get the item With guilds, over time, those 2-3 people that wanted that piece of loot, will eventually get it, and you become next in line to get it, or they find a different upgrade so they no longer need the drop. With PUGs, you essentially keep resetting the gear status of the other people targeting the same item as you, which means that you're always looking at that 1/3 chance of getting the item when it next drops, if it drops, instead of 1/1.

The main appeal of early WoW is that it was *less* grindy and more accessible than its contemporaries, which is what made it break through to the mainstream.

What I don't understand is why everyone thinks that vanilla WoW just can't be fun. There are a ton of old games that are super fun despite showing their age in some respects. Deus ex, SM64, X-Com, Diablo 2, these are all old games with new iterations that are, in some respects, objectively superior. But they're still fun games, and they're still enjoyed to this day by a ton of people. Of course vanilla WoW isn't a perfect game. But it didn't become one of the most popular games in history by accident. The game is designed in such a way that it incentivises the creation and reinforcement of meaningful relationships with other players. The inconveniences that got sanded away between then and now are the things that, to a large extent, helped create that environment. If people aren't invested in an MMO, it's just a shitty single player game. Vanilla WoW motivated people to get invested in the game, and the social groups that built up around that investment are what's sustained it all this time.

Honestly, I hope Classic is a success because it might leave the possibility for a Burning crusade and Wrath of the Lich king (which I had the most fun with) versions to come out.

Wanted to also mention since I don't see many talking about it - I also liked the atmosphere of classic so much better. Horde weren't disgusting super villains and you weren't the "chosen one", you were an adventurer. Also the classic dungeons like Stratholme, Scholomance and Blackrock Spire were awesome to run through (all which have sadly been ruined over the years with updates).

Classic is using a release cycle similar to how content updates worked in vanilla. There will be six phases, each a few months apart, dripfeeding endgame raids and content updates. It will be impossible to complete all the content in a couple of months because it simply will not be out. After that though? That's up to Blizzard. I already made a long post about that.

There's a ton of new content, and the QOL additions help immensely. Having the polls and making the game development more of a community driven thing is great for the lifespan of the game, they just need to figure out the botting problem now. I played for about 5 years in my original run. I still haven't caught up to where I was when I quit, but I'm getting close. I'm amazed that middle school me had the patience to do a lot of these things.

Yeah I understand. Was talking about what happens after the content is out. I really hope they're on the ball and shit out community approved content.

On reflection, extrinsic rewards really do play a huge role these days in turning me off a game much faster. I think extrinsic rewards are great, mind you. I love love love getting a dazzlin' new outfit for my character. But it's used so often these days in place of making a compelling game. Extrinsic rewards are a spice. You play Simpsons Hit and Run because the game is fun and hilarious, the new costumes and cars you get from earning coins just enhance it. But when I start playing for the costumes, then it gets old fast. I'll get my favorite costume, then why keep playing? But I think this is fully expected and accepted by publishers. The flame on these games burns twice as bright but lasts half as long and they know it. They milk their sci fi mmo shooter called Truth until it's no longer profitable then immediately kill it so they can make their brand new altered-to-fit-the-flavor-of-the-month-genre-that-everyone-else-is-milking sci fi battle royale game called Honesty. The trouble is that so many people are caught up with work nad life shit that they crave quick fix games and while we all burn out on them eventually, we have yet to recognize and get sick of this design philosophy. Yes, you may have realized that Overwatch is shitty, but you haven't realized that the game you're playing right now that is doing literally the exact same things with new set dressing is also shitty. It's interesting because triple a doesn't really mean anything anymore. The games that are coming out are so samey and monotonous that people get hyped for a massive release with millions of dollars pumped in to it, tons of marketing, lines out the front door...only for the game to be fizzled out within a half year and it has absolutely no effect on the gaming cultural zeitgeist at ALL. These games are huge for like weeks and then in a year we'll all forget Apex Legends even existed.

How they handle 'the future' and even the phases is probably going to be a very contentious point in the community because everyone seems to have a differing opinion of what exactly WoW classic should be and what extent of changes to the game are acceptable. There are a lot of purists who think that absolutely nothing should be changed, some people think the game should have balance patches so it isn't stuck in a predictable state at a certain patch where certain classes are obsolete and the game is permanently locked into a specific meta, and some think they should go as far as starting to make some qol changes which is what lead to WoW becoming what it is today. I think it's definitely doable to create new content that still is very much in line with the principles of classic. OSRS seems to be doing just fine for itself and there is a ton of new content and changes constantly in that which make it a completely different game from what it once was. I like the voting system in OSRS as well, where every few weeks there are in-game polls where members can answer a series of questions with yes/no/skip about proposed changes, new content etc and if more than 75% of the playerbase vote yes then it's implemented. I think that's a really good way to keep the community engaged and making sure you are listening to what the majority of players want instead of the loud minorities.

MMOs used to be about collaboration. Making friends, working together, managing teams, resources, etc. You needed other people, You needed a diverse team of good players, or at least players that cared enough to learn. "i CaN pLaY hOwEvEr I wAnT" did not fly, you either got good or got gone. If you were an insufferable dickhead, you didn't get groups, unless you took it upon yourself to shape up. Despite all of Vanilla's problems and balance issues I will probably give it a go. I started on TBC but I got a good primer on vanilla gameplay on a private server leveling 1-60 as a protection warrior ArsTech did a really great article about classic EQ that really encapsulates how I feel about MMOs. I could bitch for an hour about every one of the 'thousand cuts' dealt to WoW to have it be as it is today. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/06/everquests-long-strange-20-year-trip-still-has-no-end-in-sight/

I doubt Classic WoW can bring back the "good" times of applying to raid guilds through 3rd party websites, as was the case in vanilla. And I seriously doubt they'll bring back the various exploits and glitches that players could abuse to some serious extent. Mark of Shame, anyone? Best memory is when I figured out how to make the PvP Battlemaster (you had to queue in through these guys, and would exit BG's at their location) in Orgrimmar go in Evade-mode, and occasionally the NPC would use whirlwind and insta-kill any lowbie noob with Neutral reputation to Orgrimmar (Taurens and Undeads mostly iirc.) in their vicinity. Note I was Horde myself at max (60) level.. I got a warning from a WoW admin for abusing this too much and threatened with a ban. One thing Classic WoW can NEVER bring back is the long hair that I had when I was 14 years old "metal-head" - HELL no!

The question is, is Barrens chat a wasteland of Chuck Norris jokes? If it isn't, it's not Barrens chat. People have talked about community engagement but let me underscore that it really matters. FFXI enforced group play for most progression after level 10 (barring special situations like being a solo Beastmaster), back before it introduced NPC trusts and the ability to form an entire party of AIs to let you solo almost anything, and the impact on the game and the community was tremendous. There were no inter-server connections or matchmaking queues, which is a double-edged sword to be sure, but the result was that you had to actually use people skills to get groups, and your reputation would begin to matter when people looked for available players with the jobs their party needed. This made being a good person an act that paid extrinsic rewards in the form of preferred invitations for parties and a greater chance of receiving help if you asked for it. If people recognized you and knew you were a great player (not just a skilled one), they were willing to devote sometimes hours of their time into helping you with nothing more than a thank-you once you finally got the rare drop you needed. Being a friendly team player opened doors that no quest item can unlock. I don't even know how many times I was in a party and we were missing one more person, and I pressed for a specific player to be chosen out of the people looking for party at the time because I'd played with that player before and they were good to kickass-amazing, or because someone in my linkshell had previously gushed about them being a great player. Likewise, although it definitely happened less, I lost count how many times I warned my party off of inviting a certain player because they'd been incompetent or had a shitty attitude in the past, either in front of me personally or with someone whose opinion I trust. Word of mouth was the true player meta in FFXI. And then there was the endgame guild drama. This one dickbag had a crappy reputation on the server already, but not so crappy they didn't get any party invites even if most people at endgame avoided them. Then he sniped and ran off with a very valuable endgame loot drop that was supposed to be split amongst the group that earned it and then he quit the guild -- it instantly spread through every endgame guild on the server and into community-run forums. Nobody trusted him with an invite to an endgame linkshell and he couldn't get any party invites except with low-level newbies who hadn't heard his reputation, which meant he was forced to grind low-level jobs instead of participating in any kind of endgame activity because literally no one would let him. He ended up paying for a server transfer because everyone on my server shunned him. FFXIV, by comparison, has modern conveniences like matchmaking queues and the ability to be matchmade with anyone in the same data center. The result is that your server is just the remote machine you log into, not a self-contained community. The only real reason not to be a dick to people in dungeons is that if you're too much of a dick a GM will punish you if you're reported, because the chances that you will be matched with any of those people again is nearly zero so who cares what they think as long as they're not so pissed they call a GM. Even if they get so mad they kick you from the dungeon, whatever, just queue again and try with a different group of random people you've probably never met before and won't again. FFXIV did a lot of things better than FFXI, especially the v2 revamp and onwards, but the loss of community is big. FFXI no longer has the same intensity of community involvement because you can solo most of the way to endgame, but when it was in its prime it was one of the most rewarding online-game experiences I've ever had.