This is very true its the same thing with music. Lots of artists created amazing tunes early in their careers but years later they just couldn’t write songs anywhere close to as good. Creating something truly special is hard and usually only comes once in a persons lifetime if they’re lucky.
THat's because the old wow devs were all fantasy nerds and fantasy book readers, todays devs are just a bunch of spoiled brats most of the time from rich upbringings with no life experience, why do you think the games suck? what are they suppose create?
Classic was great because there was no flying mounts. No group finder. The game almost required you to be cordial and fear consequences of being a jerk. Everyone is on foot. It's in your interest to contribute. Drive by buffs and hand waves. Quality of Life kills reliance on other players and your engagement with the virtual world. If the experience is stripped down to zipping into a dungeon, doing big pulls and getting through it as rushed as possible, it's not playing a game it's doing a chore.
@@Seb7an I honestly didn't quite understand it until I heard the CEO of another studio explain it. "Fast mounts / flying mounts make the landscape smaller, and our game is about immersion in a harsh environment." - Not word for word, but just to summarize Made a lot of sense though and I personally find to to be true. Even verticality can be obtained on foot. If one guy climbed a mountain and another took a helicopter to the summit, which one would have a more memorable experience?
@Seb7an and yet...other games can seamlessly integrate flight into an MMO world. Its almost as if...yet again...Blizzard says it cant be done, after everyone else has done itI quit WOW back In 2019. WoW is over 20 years old and continually fails to keep pace with MODERN gaming. This ain't 2004.
It broke my heart to do it, but that's why I left Classic. But pumpers gonna pump, unfortunately. I just wanted to do BRD, ZF, and WC runs with people and have a good time. You can't do it though, without raid scum abusing you.
There's definitely room for both, people just need to respect other people's preferences and co-exist. I sit in a weird middle ground where I play in a sweaty guild and a casual guild equally, trying to bring a little of each to the other.
I discovered a big secret this time around - I don't need to play how anyone else does. I can use a piece of gear because it looks better, I can help someone else do quests and get nothing out of it, I can take a "suboptimal" spec into MC and still have a good time and no one really cares. I highly recommend just playing the game how you want it to be played, because we all know that Blizzard won't fix anything that they don't have to.
Yeh, that's a wise move. Back when I played 09 I was always staring at the dps meter sweating that someone else will overtake me. I stared at that thing more than anything else in the game I reckon. Talk about cortisol rush.
If you're in a guild that plays this way, excellent, though I hope Blizzard slow down the speed of releasing the expansions rather than speed it up because some players blitzed through a 20 year old game in 30 seconds....
Private servers are trash say for very few of them... For the life of me i dont understand how can people hate on blizz for having ingame shop and complain about not wanting to give money to them, but then they go and play on servers where people can literally buy gear for money.. Its literally the definition of drinking poison and wanting for other person to get sick.. Dont get me wrong, i dont like ingame shops but i can tolerate stuff that doesnt give unfair advantage like cosmetics, toys, pets, mounts etc.. If this changes i am done playing all together.
Warmane is more popular than classic wow, but it's 90% EU player base. Only reason classic has any active players still is due to Twitch streamers doing that weird cringy HC crap. The actual classic cata and classic anniversary servers are kinda not active. Diff not the same type of hype as 2019 classic vanilla. People in general are tired of Blizzard.
If that works for you that’s great! But there are those of us that have been playing more than most since 2019. I mean I was playing era up until anniversary dropped. To say no one wants to sweat is a weird take tho. There are the diehards that have been around since the rerelease that do enjoy trying and do enjoying clearing content quickly
Nah man you can't go back... i didn't really min/max that much back in the day but still tried to be little competitive and the more the years passed and the more i was min/maxing and the fun was getting squeezed too over the years...
@@mike3667 Exactly! To haters nothing has value unless it's a part of their own little bubble and who cares for the rest of us because it's good only if they like it... Previous and current expansion have been very solid, and world building with earthen lore was amazing. I don't remember last time I had so much fun just doing random quests around the map and exploring random houses.
Part of the problem is modern game designers aren't intellectuals. They take no influence from art or literature and only influenced by video games which is why they lack original ideas or intelligence in design.
They don't even realize how much politics can drive warfare and conflicts. We don't need a bunch of existential threats as a reason for fighting something. All it takes is one bloodthirsty noble house in Stormwind, one hyperaggressive clan in the Horde to spark a new, terrible conflict.
Pretty sure most modern game designers would rather be in Hollywood making movies but failing so they opted for video games instead. Reminder that video games were considered a weird niche hobby before Lets Plays on TH-cam and idiots falling for marketing made them huge.
I would love a WoW 2. Renewed engine, slow the game down again, BAN Weak auras and Addons. But it won't happen...pretty sure Blizzard realized they are unable to remake the magic that WoW was, and nostalgia is all that keeps the money comin. I recently jumped into Fresh Classic Classic with a friend, and even today, it's mind blowing how much world and exploration there is in the BASE version of the game.
yes, this. they are not creative enough to do it, old blizzard is dead and all they want is money without effort. For effort they have no writers, no visionaries, no invest. We see that in other games like Diablo "immoral"/D4/Warcraft Rumble.
Addons has always been part of wow. Im a day1 vanilla player and started using macros and mods the second I got defensive stance and could not figure out how to not have my bar change when I changed stances. Making me dl a mod to fix it.
not sure what a wow 2 would look like... just wow 1 with a different engine? They are going to do that with turtle wow soon, maybe Blizzard is waiting to see how people respond to a fan upgrade version of their game.
min-maxxing i think basically ruined WoW for me, I used to do the hardcore raidings and I stopped after OG Cataclysm (BC, WoTLK) then over time all the challenges get solved, everyone is obsessed with numbers and instead of working together to figure out hey we can clear this if we work together as a team! became more okay but my DPS/HPS is higher, and we need to be on this leaderboard. After mid-legion I just play casually now, on/off like for a month every year or two and I keep coming back and leaving just disappointed. I keep hoping it will get better but it never does. I can't even get into classic for the same exact reason. I wish they did new stuff for Classic, start it over basically imho.
This all sounds like the choices you made out you in places you don't even enjoy there are more casual players then sweats there is no need to be in the minimax scene if you don't want to be
Don’t underestimate the extent to which abandoning customer support to machines and allowing bots and gold buyers to run wild has poisoned the player base.
THIS. They banned me for installing a software for a new keyboard (at least thats my guess). It took me 10 tickets to actually reach a human being. At this point i even didn't wanted to be unbanned anyway, since i lost any residual trust in Blizzard. For sake of GF and friends i finished appeal and my ban was automat-ishly reduced, but there is a catch - there is nothing to come back, since everybody quit wow due to bad expansion except few people who never played anything else in their lives. Where are they now? On private server with helpful administration, no P2W and no bots where nobody is going to fk up balance with another path to create artificial engagement by forcing people to catch up with twinks.
Gold buying ends up benefiting the players who buy the gold, the sellers who make the profit of their bots, and Blizzard itself who sells WoW tokens to players who then sell the game time to the gold farmers to run their bot accounts on... it's a vicious cycle once and once you understand the flow on economics of the gold buying market, it's clear why it has turned out this way, everyone gets their cut.
You can't say that you want "wow classic" and at the same time say the game is inaccessible and everything requires too much time and that it should be faster. The things that make up all that time "IS" the game. What you cut out if you take away from that is the actual game. I disagree with most of the things you say here part from hunting bots. The game should not be made quicker to level rather the opposite. Slow things down even more as that is what this game is at it's core. If you fast track to 60 you are left with raiding and prepping for raiding and that is about 5% of the game, and while you wait for your raid you play an alt. So what would the point be? If you make it slower instead content can be enjoyed for longer without adding (what I think broke the game) daily quests or other miserable time gates.
@NickCoder agreed, I think he means ‘other people’ want it faster, as in a new wow player who starts out to populate the world won’t get far with the game being ‘slow’. Which to me is also bs. If you take out the levelling, classic loses a whole lot of charm and world building.
I think a middle crown can be reached. I don’t think the problem is with leveling quickly. I think the problem is that there need to be more things to do while you are leveling to make the game, entertaining and enjoyable throughout the whole process. I was replaying one of my old favorites. Final Fantasy six I hadn’t played this game in quite a few years as I’m going through it. I never felt like I need to grind to get higher level quickly. Why is this? Because I’m enjoying myself going through each chapter of the journey . Back in the day before MMORPG’s existed the only reason you would level up in the first place is to be able to complete the journey and finish the story which was the point of the whole journey in the first place. An MMO needs to keep players invested. I get it, but I feel like there needs to be more stories to unlock when you get to level cap something other than beating the same content over and over again just for the hell of it because right now “ endgame” is really just a series of personal benchmarks. How much DPS can I do? What’s the highest key I can run? Am I able to clear the hardest raid difficulty? Because we already know what the story is. So then we just benchmark ourselves over and over again till the next season till the next expansion and then start the wheel over and over.
wow this was a really good video with everything being ON POINT. im playing the classic just because thats ALL WE GOT AND CAN GET. its time for something new. ( I hate retail )
That's simple. Insufficient staff, too big a cash outlay and too big a risk. They are down to a very small staff level for WoW. About 20% of what it used to have from some estimates. Classic uses a 5 man dev team apparently.
As an MMO player since 2004, I honestly think quality of life severs your engagement with the environment and the community. Flying mounts and group finders are the worst things to add to a game that was built without them originally, imho
WoW have become the world of Dark Souls 3 by this point. An ancient, tired, worn out world, a shell of its former self that has lived on life support for way too long and should have died long ago. Killing it would be an act of mercy which will finally give hope for a new world to be born. But it is being kept alive against its will by the ruling overlords afraid to let go of their power.
To be fair, all I want is 1 PvP "trilogy" realm that goes from Vanilla into TBC and end with WotLK. After Wrath, the realm resets and starts over with a fresh Vanilla again..... and it does this over and over and over again forever. Once Blizz makes this, idc what else they do. That's just me personally. Also, I wouldn't mind Blizz making a few changes to WotLK to make it more in line with Vanilla & TBC. I think that'd be super cool, but that would just be the cherry on top.
What if level 70 and TBC's content were inaccesible until Ragnaros killed by a 60 raid group, and level 80 and WotLK's content were inaccessible until Kil'jaeden is killed by a level 70 raid group?
@@TimJBucci Why would you ever want that? Do you not understand how fast the top guilds finish these raids? As in day 1 they are released? Final TBC raid drops. Cleared in less than 4 hours. Oh, guess wotlk is out now.........wtf????
As long as they don't touch the era realms i don't mind. I am in what seems to be the minority of players who don't want to constantly relevel and have progress erased.
I'm sorry to tell you this, but there is less than zero chance 2025 Blizzard is remotely capable of creating anything today even close to the quality of the original 3 WoW expansions. Be careful what you wish for.
Why do people go back to classic fresh every time even though its the same shit ? Because at least we know its good and the devs won't probably ruin it. A lot of people wants Classic+. But a classic+ in the same vein as Turtle Wow or OSRS, not the retail plagued shit that was SoD.
Classic + is the stupidest sht I've ever heard of in gaming history. It means nothing and you guys all act like it exists and that you all are in making this "+" right now. Ya'll are delusional and need to do your role irl and stay out of creativity and ideas which are usually 100% terrible ideas
I appreciate the content and the hard work you went through making the video, but I honestly don’t agree with the sentiment. I started playing wow entirely as a brand new player when ICC dropped in WOTLK classic. Leveled a character up to 80, ground out thousands of dungeons to gear up, got into my first raid, leveled a second character and then a third and just played the content over and over and had a real enjoyment that I haven’t had from an MMO in years. I was sad that I didn’t get the chance to experience classic and TBC, but when the anniversary realms came out I realized this is my chance to get to run through those old raids and experience the dungeons and raids that drew people to the game in the first place. I’m excited to take part in it. I wish there was a slightly faster leveling experience to the original vanilla, but I’m currently at level 50 and plan on leveling multiple characters and trying to get them all ready to run through back to the first raid I ever took part in. When cataclysm dropped after WOTLK classic, I did a 24 hour stream of getting to level 85 and getting the cataclysm lore master, and I raided the first tier with BWD and TO4W and the third one but honestly I didn’t enjoy the game as much. A lot of the mechanics were too hard to grasp for a lot of the players coming from WOTLK. I had in my down time started playing retail in dragonflight and got AOTC and keystone master so it wasn’t a huge deal to me, but I realized that that was the shift that everyone was talking about. So at the end of the day, to me, starting fresh servers and progressing through gives players like me who don’t wanna be sweatlords on retail a chance to play a much more relaxed version of the game. Cataclysm started more advanced rotations and tougher raiding experiences and unless you were known well enough to get into a high tier guild, you had to pug for a nefarion kill which was almost impossible for the first 2 weeks. When I get on wow, I wanna relax and enjoy the game. I enjoy retail, but I don’t like having to do some 100000 APM and if one person messes up the entire raid wipes and just constantly stressing about it. The relaxed pace makes it so I can take in the world around me as someone going through it the first time. And the progressing through TBC and WOTLK is a bonus. And when the prepatch for anniversary Cataclysm drops, I hope they start another set of progression servers, and I’ll play some different classes to experience the game through some of them. Maybe I’ll even switch to the Horde! Lmao
My wife and I started playing WoW in the early 2000's, through Cataclysm. We played quite a bit and it took a LOOOOOONG time for us to get our main characters to first, L60 when that was the cap and then from 60-70 (which really took about as long as it took to get from 1-60). We played for years. We were not hardcore raiders but we had a small guild that would do dungeons, regular and heroic when we had enough L60/70 members. We helped each other max out or talents, shared loot and gave it to guild members who's class the loot matched instead of selling it in the AH...It was a fun time. FF to 2024, my wife and I had a bunch of kids, had not played WoW since 2013 or so and say the Ads for the new version of the game. Our kids are old enough now that we can nerd out for a few hours here and there and play and we missed the game, so I got her Blizz account up to date and bought her the newest expansion. They had knocked her L70 characters down to like 30 or so I think but within a month of playing maybe 3-4 days a week, 1-2 hours a day she had already maxed out in level. Part of the fun of the OG WoW was how long it took you to get to 60 or 70. It was a real achievement. I remember when both my main characters hit 70 to this day. Random people would congratulate you in the chat because they knew what kind of dedication that took. Now, it's like it is just given to you. And since we did not Raid much on the old WoW, we are not really into the raiding that goes on now. Our server has very few other people on it (you may see MAYBE 10 other players in capitol cities and the AH is empty). It is depressing. Never the less, it is fun to be in that world again, even if they did kind of ruin things.
I went out of my way to do the quests that were 'too out of the way' for my normal leveling path. I didn't do more than 5 dungeons before hitting 60. Maxed cooking and fishing before 40. It was completely inefficient, and I had as much fun as I did my very first character 20 years ago.
Damn, you really hit me in the feels at the end... I keep coming back to WoW hoping it gives me that feeling I experienced as a kid playing with all my friends, but sadly its not there anymore. It's the same hope I believe that gets people excited, but ultimately let down. Phase 1 of SoD was fun while it lasted.
idk what's wrong with having different formats akin to a TCG/CCG - a server cluster each for vanilla, TBC, WotLK, etc - with the ability to mono-directionally "graduate" from one version of the game to the next at level cap. Why not? There's no downside on player nor dev nor publisher side. win/win/win for oldhead casuals like me.
*Solution* ->Make Classic Burning Crusade Realm_ ->Male Classic Wrath of the Lich King Realm._ *Allow players to import their characters after completing each Expansion*
Exactly! This is what i thought they were going to do when they lauched classic back in 2019. I even thought they were going to do more expainsions... Why not? I would play some Legion right now. I dont really understand why they took this route.
Excellent video man, the same questions I'm asking to myself aswell. A mystery to me there is no one left in blizzard with sufficient influence sharing this kind of reflexion on the state of the game today
This sounds a lot like how Magic the Gathering is now! Is WoW also like 5 times as much money to play? And everything that came before is power creeped out of existence? And the original story is dead now they bring in Lord of the Rings SpongeBob Godzilla Transformers and SpiderMan??
If the veterans who still worked at Blizzard in the past were still around, we would have probably seen both Starcraft 3 and Warcraft 4 by now. With the release of Warcraft 4, World of Warcraft would have gained a ton of new lore to play off, which would have significantly increased its lifespan.
only way to save the current lore abomination is to set a new game 1000+ years in the future after a massive ice age that reset most of the world, and do that with a good lore building wc4
@@dannyp9210 I mean, the sheer number of gravestones from HC characters and dead bodies from regular characters would tend to disagree... admittedly, I'm still low level, but I've seen a whole lot of death on Turtle just this weekend alone.
Terrible client, unsafe and greedy owners too, they run a private server mafia. Not to mention the custom content is incredibly doodoo fart and amateur-ish. Just try the Kharazhan Crypts dungeon, it’s god awful.
I was expecting more draenei type characters after I saw them. Itd be so cool to explore something like that. More races that are otherworldly and unique. I know void elves was kinda like this, but to me it's like "the lore is there, but it feels like another elf character" I guess i just kinda want to see new zones, new lands, and new adventures with the same mechanics as before. Vanilla ice cream is good cause its simple. You can use add-ons if its too simple to dpice it up. You can make it whatever you want, throw in mods to change graphics even.
I genuinely just want the same game I had in '04-06, forever left alone and in it's original state. I don't even need graphical overhauls. I always felt the artistic style of the game made it timeless. I've seen some really cool fan-made overhauls of the older models and textures that I feel nail it and are still faithful to the original art style of the game but at this point I don't trust Blizzard with much in the way of innovation. They are kings of, "if you take an inch they will go a mile," among game developers. I don't want retcons to reflect the current lore, not so much as an easter egg. I just want a space to play and RP in with my friends in the setting we all loved with the game we all enjoy with no rush to progress. Most of us are people with jobs, families, lives, other communities we've become invested in. I speak for most of us when we say we just want a chance to go back to the game we all loved and experience it unsullied. Most of us RPers aren't even Min-Maxxers; we knowingly handicap ourselves, trying our best to avoid addons and Googling solutions, making unique builds (I don't care how non-optimal fury warriors are, I think the class fantasy is pog; I don't care how slow paladins are to level or if it is a two-button rotation most of the time, it's the class fantasy and being the god-tier WC3 support hero serving all believers) while taking our time to savor the world.
Play Conquest of Azeroth that's in Alpha right now. 21 new classes with most having 4 specs based on 3.3.5 version of wow. It starts in vanilla and will progress through Wrath and they are planning to create new encounters and are adding new mechanics to the old raids. Different ways to level. Scalable mobs, etc... the same company, Ascension, is also working on a classic version that's actually difficult and has all the same quality increase to content in the works.
A game that I loved and played for years. Played all the expansions but I can only say I loved vanilla and the 1st 3 expansions. For a working person, time is not on my side to raid as before, so I am always left behind because I am slow in gearing due to work commitments. Retail doesn't give me the joy that vanilla gave. I am still subbed for the love of the game hoping blizzard will do something better for us, but my patience is wearing thin. I just find retail too grindy especially for gears and professions. For gold making there is bots to deal with. Too much for me to take. Now I seldom logon to play. It's so Sad that this game has fallen from grace.
I quit around mop and play classic era now. Leveling all classes. No main. Could be 60 by now, but I'm 27,24,18,14,12,10,6,1 What do I care if minmaxers world first anything. I world last or whenever the time comes.
I still love playing the game but they made to many changes and made so cermercial. Back in the day, when we played WoW, or EverQuest, and so on, That was real vintage. We had to figure out how to beat the boss on our own and not follow some guide book that was conciderd cheating i feel. We might be stuck on a boss for days but we figured it out eventually. We did not have all these add ons and what not to make the game easier, we had play the game raw, like how real life is. We shouldnt have to go on a website and just buy as much gold as we want with real money because where is the challage in that. I feel like a rich person cutting corners. Lol Make or earn gold in the game!! And im old school, when they first introduced getting gold with REAL MONEY! i said NoWay!!!!!! As mush as I love Blizzard, its getting to crazy. I think ill go back playing simplier games. Midevil Sims sounds nice. Lol
The War Within Saga has a good potential to be the "end" of Azeroth as we know it, sorta like the FF14 Realm Reborn reset. Void lords successfully takeover Azeroth and the soul is transferred to a new world to grow, becoming WoW 2. Updated graphics, engines and addressing the problems all previous games have had
Ill enjoy messing around on mop because i enjoyed pvp a ton during that expansion and the raids as well as the inital kit of the mistweaver monk. But if i could choose between that or a true Classic + I would choose classic. Idk what it would look like, I think its different for everyone, but I hope to see it one day. As far as the leveling aspect. I think a happy median could be met. 100-300 hours to hit max level is way to much now adays. However 5 hours to max is also crazy. I think a good 30-60 hours would be a solid pace. Things I would enjoy seeing, more spec viability but still feeling like classic. For example, boomkins spriest ret paladins sin rogues. Removing the 10 debuff limit. Moderate skill tweaks that remove worthless skills or talents. End game class quests that either unlock a special talent based on spec or unique weapon etc. AH wipes or gold wipes. I know a lot would hate it but think it would assist in inflation and gold buyers.
The only thing I can say with certainty is that classic vanilla is still the best experience for me gameplay and social wise. Met a lot of cool people on there because I was forced to do so. It's the way the game was made.
Buddy classic fresh exists right now for people who have missed the OG classic release like me, and honestly i have been having a blast playing it The other complaints can be summurized in one thing go play SoD if you want something new i dont want anything new, classic exists for people who dont like retail and all it stands for
A very interesting video with lots of truth to be sure. In my experience, being an older player who plays solo and doesn't have time to raid, I find that the Retail version was overwhelming as far as trying to keep up with all the changes. Also around the time that Heirlooms came out, the game was getting too easy for my taste. WOW Classic has let me relive the "good ole days" when gaming was hard and you walked everywhere until level 40, a rare drop off a random mob was like hitting the lottery. For over 5 years now I have paid my monthly subscription to play a "free" version and have not touched Retail since Shadowlands. Just my two cents worth...
Some of us loves to play classic (or real vanilla actually) forever and ever. I played vanilla for over 15 years (10 years on private servers) plus when it came out in 2004, and will never get tired of it
everyone loves fresh, Im trying to play through a dirffenent class this time and love it so much now. I love retail but its so fun finding groups for scholo and just running it
its pretty sad when private servers come up with more fresh and new innovations and yet blizz still won't even just copy them, much less come up with their own ideas.
I was a beta tester for over a year prerelease the game was completely broken when they launched "warlocks didn't even have a 3rd talent tree yet" but Blizz was burning through money and pushed it out they promised us testers that we wouldn't be deleted again then at launch they deleted all of us FOUNDERS saying it would be unfair to all the new players having a community full of end game geared players.
2 things that cata did was remove talent trees and remove iconic quest lines. They finally brought back talent trees. Some of the vanilla versions of quests and areas are there behind quests to unlock which is nostalgically cool. The biggest economical problem that blizzard did was the game time token i litterally watched it flood and inflate the market. I have only used it twice and only for transmogs and mounts but there are some people who have a disposable income and buy gold legally regularly, i dont agree with that cause that gets into the concept of pay to win which is so very wrong.
Ironically, what people would love would be making useless specs work in classic (not OP, not sod-retail like. Just make them work. Like giving bear tanks real threat and upgrading paths), some QoL adjustments (like working meeting stones. Everyone just pay warlocks for this anyway). Some gear adjustments, a bit of class balance, some bug fixes and thats it. No real need for drastic changes or hard effort, just a couple easy changes. But they are too lazy because people will play regardless anyway. People already love classic. Just spice it up a bit. They could even finish some unreleased content that fits the mood, but that would be asking too much if they just cant deliver the previous things.
I feel like blizzard should do what Jagex did with OSRS. After TBC have the game go it's own way and split off what happen to something new. Hell maybe even do it at the end of vanilla. Re-balance things(classes) make new dungeons, new raids, new this, new that, and make the story go a different way.
If Blizzard had to really work on something similar than classic, they probably would have to create entirely new game from technical point of view. That game would have to fight with retail and that's something they won't ever invest in. Why would they bother if they can put a 2 week of work of 5 people team and make another 90$ mount... People who wanted to have a real wow experience already had it on plenty of private servers way before Blizzard finally released classic servers.
The problem is twofold. One, as others have noted, the Blizzard of today isn't the Blizzard of yesteryear. The current iteration of Blizzard doesn't grasp what made the original game so captivating to us years ago. This has been made apparent with Season of Discovery and their attempt to reimagine the game. Second, the players now are different, as you said. Even if Blizzard could pull off the perfect continuation of the journey we all loved, the players would ruin it. The problem is that what players want from a game isn't the same as it once was. People don't want to learn, discover, and explore. They want to be spoon-fed rotations, mechanics, and find the fastest way from point A to point B. Again, look at SoD. How long did the "discovery" part of that last? One person figures it out, shares it to Wowhead, and everyone else goes looking for the answer. I'm afraid we'll never get what we want. The gaming culture on both sides has changed too much to ever get the sequel we crave.
I want to die to mobs on retail, that just doesnt happen... In vanilla, you pull 3 things and it becomes a serious problem of CC'ing management, or running away That for me is the number 1 difference
It never meant any sense to release expansions for wow classic. If they want to add to it, they could develop new areas based on classic graphics and gameplay.
People are just looking for that nostalgic "wow" feel of those early days (when EQ and DAOC had pretty much been the "best" up to that point) and Blizzard seemed to be doing everything right. WOW was like a refreshing dip in a spring after spending years in the desert. For me it was those early pvp days when no one had legacy gear and a 10th level noob casual player could actually compete. Those days are long dead and will never be back though...and neither will I.
Main point is the sheer laziness Blizzard has shown towards classic. No sign of Classic+, everything is rereleased & recycled. They’ve given up on class design in SoD.
And i think a lot of the player base would absolute LOVE to replay the story all over again with massive graphics and engine improvement, something like the nowadays AAA games. Not all of us tho, but a lot of us yes lol
The issue is that the player base today are all focused on min/max and all of the content has been farmed for years, so there’s no real challenge outside of world firsts or speed runs. It’s not even fun anymore
6:00 No Changes was a Lie. They made LOTS of changes in 2019 and the later releases and in the new "Fresh" Anniversary realms. I guess you don't play them did you?
This video is incredibly accurate. Unfortunately, as much as we love WoW, we end up playing any version just to get our fix. The harsh reality is that Blizzard seems like a poorly run company with uncreative and lackluster leadership. Re-releasing MOP feels like a sign of the times-just another example of how things have gone downhill.
"Why can't blizzard..." because they lazy and do the bare minimum just to keep the servers up. We basically just play a puppet of a game rather than something that is actively being worked on and improved, at least for Classic.
I totally agree with all that was said in this video and I'm glad that other people think the same. I was shocked by the hype that came with the launch of Anniversary servers. Personaly, I was thinking : "A new classic release... Again ?! There's no way players can keep going with that trend". Boy, I was wrong... The day of the release, my server was almost empty so no more PvP rank grinding for me... It was the same 2 years ago when my previous server was also deserted for the new classic expansion release... I was naive and thinking people couldn't take that much time to exp and grind a character, stuff, professions, etc... And just throw it away to do the exact same thing. Facts prove me wrong but like the creator of this video I'm really tired of this loop and stomped that players keep resetting over and over with minor changes and for what ? A 1 year experience before the server dies ? No thank you, I think I'll pass this time, maybe I'll come back in a year or so to see if I can finish my PvP grinding on my original server but I won't level another character again and again and again, sick of this .... Good job on the video though 👍
Turtle Wow proves a classic plus experience can work and if your looking for one that's probably your best bet (Although I wish they had put in the High Elf capital and starting zones... they recreated a smaller version of it off the coast which I guess is ok) I'm really looking forward to the engine revamp to unreal, looks awesome. There is also Wow Acension which somehow has ads on youtube but isn't Blizzard approved. I haven't tried it but it messes with classes in such a way I can't really call it Wow anymore outside visuals. I've heard Blizzard has given a blind eye to both of these technically pirate game versions of wow and that Turtle wow might be something they are looking at for any version of classic plus they might try in the future.
I played Star Wars Galaxies in 2003, it was my first MMO and you could rearrange the Interface. When i got into WoW, 2 years later, i was wondering why the Interface was nailed in place. Been at it, on and off and still doing solo questing. No raiding, no boosts, no farming, no gold buying EVER, just playing it as i did 20 years ago. And they should stop at Cataclysm and not go into Pandaria, that'll be retail AGAIN.
Well put. I've been teetering on playing again (over the past several months) but I recall the last few times I have played and the 'community' just wasn't there.. Everyone is so focused on endgame that they haven't stopped to just play the game.
Blizzard has been forced to lay off lots of people. They've lost all the leadership that put games first. And most of all, they have other properties, that are cheaper and easier to develop, that brings in more ROI. They are not working on Classic+. They don't have anyone on their payroll that have the vision or drive to undertake such a project. And WoW 2? Hah! They've already scrapped several mmo projects that has cost them hundreds of millions of dollars. Blizzard is like a ship adrift at sea at the moment. The people with the power to make decisions don't understand games, nor do they care about anything other than ROI. And the people who potentially could make something good either have absolutely no say on the matter, or they have already left due to frustration with the management. For anyone who thinks that Blizzard of 2025 is the same company that made World of Warcraft... Think again. It's the same in name only. It's possible for Blizzard to do all the things you mention, but they are risk averse. Better to rerelease over and over again, and make a little bit of money, than take a risk, and perhaps lose a lot of money.
This video better deserve a title this dramatic. Edit: It didn't. Though I interpreted the title to mean that Blizzard has done something reprehensible with the game when it actually meant "WoW has STRAYED too far". Similar wordings but completely different meanings. Seeing as I wouldn't have clicked on the video had it been called that though I still feel clickbaited.
If I were to go back into wow for the classic, Naxxrammis is the only thing on my list that I haven't done. But the grind to get there is not going to be fun for me to where I want to go back in. The grind to get gear to be acceptable by the guild/group to raid aq40 every week and then get on their main group that will start naxx when ready and continue grinding to get my gear and mats. Start the runs with instant wipes and more grind more and more and more and more grinding. Oh, and did I mention, I am one of the poor soles in Ret Paladin damnation.
Cata is to WoW what Luclin (or better yet, PoP) was to EQ. The metagame of the game changed completely. The system that you learned to play and thrive in the game, changed.
Blizzard is a business. At the end of the day hands-down that is their ultimate goal is to make money and profit. The Avenue by which they take to achieve that may not be in alignment with all World of Warcraft players. The problem is this. Even if specifically the content creator of this video gets every single thing that he wants and is asking for somebody else will just complain about it. There is no making everyone happy. So blizzard has to just keep doing what blizzard does. Run a company and make money. Make one player happy? Piss another one off. That’s how it will always be. Comes with the territory.
Classic was a stroke of accidental genius if you ask me, it's not easy to recreate. And yea pre-patch tbc is definitely where the game takes a major different direction.
Sorry to say, some of the problems will still exist even if blizzard is creating a classic wow like you ask for. People will still do all these things you say. I dont play classic, but I am myself "guilty" of farm raw in alot of expansions and now war within. I do that by clearing old raids on 14 characters, I ofc also makes by other things, like selling mats and transmog and battle pets etc. I also do other things than gold farm, I also do delves, open world content, farm transmog, battle pets etc to my own collecting. I play war within (newes expansions), because I would getting tired of do the same thing over and over again, thats also why I do different things when I play.
I’m honestly feeling like I will just move to a vanilla only server once classic anniversary gets to wrath or onward, I just don’t care for the other stuff. The classes no longer have the RP flavor in retail
The way Blizzard started making the player the saviour of the universe feels so patronising. "There you go, subscriber who pays us money, here you have all the validation you want."
So your point is literally like what Activision does with Call of Duty of which who also has their hands in Blizzard. so.... the issue is a corporate money grubbing company who wants nothing more then companies to pump games and content so they can make money. The old Blizzard was a group of gamers making a game for gamers that actually had real love in it and wasn't monetized to the point of just pure stupidity. So honestly everything your complaining about you can blame ACTIVISION since they got their grubby hands into it.
Bro... this is my thought EXACTLY. what is the point of classic if it's just going to expand into the expansions. They need to just keep Classic Era but do gradually updates that doesn't take away game experience.
I want classic + also. I will say i don’t know why nobody remembers what blizzards plan was when they decided to start classic. They had plans to rerelease classic multiple times over a period of 15 years. It’s not lazy, it’s planned. And these devs suck compared to the talent of OG devs
Amazing video. Great take on the current situation. I have 7 days left on my sub and I have been flipping back and forth from classic and SoD trying to understand if I like it. It requires so many addons to do what retail has default now and classic should have quality of life improvements. If you want the crap OG then have that as well. They clearly can do multiple things at once
Man I am lvl 40 on my shaman in anniversary realms and I'm imagining if they actually released a classic plus or something, by that time I'd already be too burnt out of wow to start ANOTHER leveling journey
![Going Zero To Hero In Cataclysm Classic [Full series]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/bY6mkzPN5Is/mqdefault.jpg)
![Going Zero To Hero In Cataclysm Classic [Full series]](/img/tr.png)
The Blizzard that made WoW in early 2000s doesn't exist anymore, and you can't expect them to create something of similar quality.
thank goodness
100%
This is very true its the same thing with music. Lots of artists created amazing tunes early in their careers but years later they just couldn’t write songs anywhere close to as good. Creating something truly special is hard and usually only comes once in a persons lifetime if they’re lucky.
THat's because the old wow devs were all fantasy nerds and fantasy book readers, todays devs are just a bunch of spoiled brats most of the time from rich upbringings with no life experience, why do you think the games suck? what are they suppose create?
@@klefthoofrobert787 they are also women and lgbt
Classic was great because there was no flying mounts. No group finder.
The game almost required you to be cordial and fear consequences of being a jerk.
Everyone is on foot. It's in your interest to contribute. Drive by buffs and hand waves.
Quality of Life kills reliance on other players and your engagement with the virtual world.
If the experience is stripped down to zipping into a dungeon, doing big pulls and getting through it as rushed as possible, it's not playing a game it's doing a chore.
Flying was the biggest mistake they ever made. It completely destroyed the immersion.
Amen brother, amen.
@@Seb7an I honestly didn't quite understand it until I heard the CEO of another studio explain it.
"Fast mounts / flying mounts make the landscape smaller, and our game is about immersion in a harsh environment." - Not word for word, but just to summarize
Made a lot of sense though and I personally find to to be true.
Even verticality can be obtained on foot. If one guy climbed a mountain and another took a helicopter to the summit, which one would have a more memorable experience?
@Seb7an and yet...other games can seamlessly integrate flight into an MMO world.
Its almost as if...yet again...Blizzard says it cant be done, after everyone else has done itI quit WOW back In 2019. WoW is over 20 years old and continually fails to keep pace with MODERN gaming.
This ain't 2004.
@@MinecraftMartinwhat studio?Who said it and when?
I think it goes down to, "Why can't people be less sweaty?"
It broke my heart to do it, but that's why I left Classic. But pumpers gonna pump, unfortunately. I just wanted to do BRD, ZF, and WC runs with people and have a good time. You can't do it though, without raid scum abusing you.
@@petrus4 i have had the opposite experience this time around, the people i've come across have been, patient and not toxic sweaties.
@@shwaaankon god probably the best Gaming Community ive ever met so far
There's definitely room for both, people just need to respect other people's preferences and co-exist.
I sit in a weird middle ground where I play in a sweaty guild and a casual guild equally, trying to bring a little of each to the other.
People speedrun all types of games. I don't see this as a problem.
I discovered a big secret this time around - I don't need to play how anyone else does. I can use a piece of gear because it looks better, I can help someone else do quests and get nothing out of it, I can take a "suboptimal" spec into MC and still have a good time and no one really cares.
I highly recommend just playing the game how you want it to be played, because we all know that Blizzard won't fix anything that they don't have to.
Yeh, that's a wise move. Back when I played 09 I was always staring at the dps meter sweating that someone else will overtake me. I stared at that thing more than anything else in the game I reckon. Talk about cortisol rush.
If you're in a guild that plays this way, excellent, though I hope Blizzard slow down the speed of releasing the expansions rather than speed it up because some players blitzed through a 20 year old game in 30 seconds....
I feel some private servers are doing more for advancing classic plus than blizzard ever does nowadays
yeah, until they just "balance"/destroy classes :D
Vanilla wow isn't exactly the paragon of class balance either
Private servers are trash say for very few of them... For the life of me i dont understand how can people hate on blizz for having ingame shop and complain about not wanting to give money to them, but then they go and play on servers where people can literally buy gear for money.. Its literally the definition of drinking poison and wanting for other person to get sick.. Dont get me wrong, i dont like ingame shops but i can tolerate stuff that doesnt give unfair advantage like cosmetics, toys, pets, mounts etc.. If this changes i am done playing all together.
Warmane is more popular than classic wow, but it's 90% EU player base. Only reason classic has any active players still is due to Twitch streamers doing that weird cringy HC crap. The actual classic cata and classic anniversary servers are kinda not active. Diff not the same type of hype as 2019 classic vanilla. People in general are tired of Blizzard.
Turtle WoW represent
if you want to enjoy fresh, do this. Level at your own pace, dont rush to get pre bis and raid with sweats.
Preach!
If that works for you that’s great! But there are those of us that have been playing more than most since 2019. I mean I was playing era up until anniversary dropped. To say no one wants to sweat is a weird take tho. There are the diehards that have been around since the rerelease that do enjoy trying and do enjoying clearing content quickly
@@Malav18sure, right. For me its first classic ever. So I take my time
Nah man you can't go back... i didn't really min/max that much back in the day but still tried to be little competitive and the more the years passed and the more
i was min/maxing and the fun was getting squeezed too over the years...
@@whereisthesurvivalhunter9525 Course you can, its all down to channeling that knowledge base and need to min/max in other directions.
Retail isn't WoW, just another game in disguise, that stole WoW assets
yep :/
Season of Discovery is pretty much the closest we will get to Classic +
Lol ---> WoW turtle
@@YatsuraHeadOn I think he was talking about an official server, otherwise project ascension is way better than turtle for sure.
I really hope they took lessons from SoD and they will take only good changes from it + some extra new stuff for Classic+
And the irony is that SoD is in some ways the closest version of Classic to Retail.
You say that like you know the future.
It's simple, Blizzard can't be trusted to do new content well. Classic is much better than all the new soulless content
True
It’s soulless because of a in game store. Every single game with a in game store is trash. It’s not a game at that point it’s just a business
Sorry chief but its hard disagree from me.
Have you actually played TWW? Pretty sure people hate just to hate.
@@mike3667 Exactly! To haters nothing has value unless it's a part of their own little bubble and who cares for the rest of us because it's good only if they like it... Previous and current expansion have been very solid, and world building with earthen lore was amazing. I don't remember last time I had so much fun just doing random quests around the map and exploring random houses.
Part of the problem is modern game designers aren't intellectuals. They take no influence from art or literature and only influenced by video games which is why they lack original ideas or intelligence in design.
They don't even realize how much politics can drive warfare and conflicts. We don't need a bunch of existential threats as a reason for fighting something. All it takes is one bloodthirsty noble house in Stormwind, one hyperaggressive clan in the Horde to spark a new, terrible conflict.
everything has to be fast paced now. Probably the FPS trained mindset and social media scrolling.
Pretty sure most modern game designers would rather be in Hollywood making movies but failing so they opted for video games instead.
Reminder that video games were considered a weird niche hobby before Lets Plays on TH-cam and idiots falling for marketing made them huge.
I would love a WoW 2. Renewed engine, slow the game down again, BAN Weak auras and Addons. But it won't happen...pretty sure Blizzard realized they are unable to remake the magic that WoW was, and nostalgia is all that keeps the money comin. I recently jumped into Fresh Classic Classic with a friend, and even today, it's mind blowing how much world and exploration there is in the BASE version of the game.
yes, this. they are not creative enough to do it, old blizzard is dead and all they want is money without effort. For effort they have no writers, no visionaries, no invest. We see that in other games like Diablo "immoral"/D4/Warcraft Rumble.
Addons has always been part of wow. Im a day1 vanilla player and started using macros and mods the second I got defensive stance and could not figure out how to not have my bar change when I changed stances. Making me dl a mod to fix it.
Classic players are truly delulu if they think everyone playing retail wants all WA and addons banned and lvling slowed down lmao.
not sure what a wow 2 would look like... just wow 1 with a different engine? They are going to do that with turtle wow soon, maybe Blizzard is waiting to see how people respond to a fan upgrade version of their game.
@@dficwriter what's the point of leveling up if everyone wants to just rush to the end game as fast as they can.. i don't get it
min-maxxing i think basically ruined WoW for me, I used to do the hardcore raidings and I stopped after OG Cataclysm (BC, WoTLK) then over time all the challenges get solved, everyone is obsessed with numbers and instead of working together to figure out hey we can clear this if we work together as a team! became more okay but my DPS/HPS is higher, and we need to be on this leaderboard. After mid-legion I just play casually now, on/off like for a month every year or two and I keep coming back and leaving just disappointed. I keep hoping it will get better but it never does. I can't even get into classic for the same exact reason. I wish they did new stuff for Classic, start it over basically imho.
jusst dont minmax
This all sounds like the choices you made out you in places you don't even enjoy there are more casual players then sweats there is no need to be in the minimax scene if you don't want to be
@@serendip1tyz"after mid legion I just play casually" -op
Hur dur reading is hurrddddd
@@tazmanian4874including you in my mockery. Why respond if you are unable to spend the 2 seconds it takes to read a comment past the first sentence.
try hardcore classic, it feels really good.
Don’t underestimate the extent to which abandoning customer support to machines and allowing bots and gold buyers to run wild has poisoned the player base.
@@mikemoody3651 completely forgot about that customer support aspect. Huge huge huge point that I missed. Good call.
@@javamonkeyj back when the moderators were actual players and would teleport you to random places and say fun stuff lol
THIS. They banned me for installing a software for a new keyboard (at least thats my guess). It took me 10 tickets to actually reach a human being. At this point i even didn't wanted to be unbanned anyway, since i lost any residual trust in Blizzard. For sake of GF and friends i finished appeal and my ban was automat-ishly reduced, but there is a catch - there is nothing to come back, since everybody quit wow due to bad expansion except few people who never played anything else in their lives.
Where are they now? On private server with helpful administration, no P2W and no bots where nobody is going to fk up balance with another path to create artificial engagement by forcing people to catch up with twinks.
Gold buying ends up benefiting the players who buy the gold, the sellers who make the profit of their bots, and Blizzard itself who sells WoW tokens to players who then sell the game time to the gold farmers to run their bot accounts on... it's a vicious cycle once and once you understand the flow on economics of the gold buying market, it's clear why it has turned out this way, everyone gets their cut.
You can't say that you want "wow classic" and at the same time say the game is inaccessible and everything requires too much time and that it should be faster. The things that make up all that time "IS" the game. What you cut out if you take away from that is the actual game. I disagree with most of the things you say here part from hunting bots. The game should not be made quicker to level rather the opposite. Slow things down even more as that is what this game is at it's core. If you fast track to 60 you are left with raiding and prepping for raiding and that is about 5% of the game, and while you wait for your raid you play an alt. So what would the point be? If you make it slower instead content can be enjoyed for longer without adding (what I think broke the game) daily quests or other miserable time gates.
@NickCoder agreed, I think he means ‘other people’ want it faster, as in a new wow player who starts out to populate the world won’t get far with the game being ‘slow’. Which to me is also bs. If you take out the levelling, classic loses a whole lot of charm and world building.
this 100%
I think a middle crown can be reached. I don’t think the problem is with leveling quickly. I think the problem is that there need to be more things to do while you are leveling to make the game, entertaining and enjoyable throughout the whole process.
I was replaying one of my old favorites. Final Fantasy six I hadn’t played this game in quite a few years as I’m going through it. I never felt like I need to grind to get higher level quickly. Why is this? Because I’m enjoying myself going through each chapter of the journey . Back in the day before MMORPG’s existed the only reason you would level up in the first place is to be able to complete the journey and finish the story which was the point of the whole journey in the first place. An MMO needs to keep players invested. I get it, but I feel like there needs to be more stories to unlock when you get to level cap something other than beating the same content over and over again just for the hell of it because right now “ endgame” is really just a series of personal benchmarks.
How much DPS can I do?
What’s the highest key I can run?
Am I able to clear the hardest raid difficulty?
Because we already know what the story is. So then we just benchmark ourselves over and over again till the next season till the next expansion and then start the wheel over and over.
wow this was a really good video with everything being ON POINT.
im playing the classic just because thats ALL WE GOT AND CAN GET.
its time for something new. ( I hate retail )
I find it fascinating that the most exciting 'new' developments in WoW are continual rehashes of 'Vanilla' WoW content.
That's simple. Insufficient staff, too big a cash outlay and too big a risk. They are down to a very small staff level for WoW. About 20% of what it used to have from some estimates. Classic uses a 5 man dev team apparently.
As an MMO player since 2004, I honestly think quality of life severs your engagement with the environment and the community.
Flying mounts and group finders are the worst things to add to a game that was built without them originally, imho
WoW have become the world of Dark Souls 3 by this point.
An ancient, tired, worn out world, a shell of its former self that has lived on life support for way too long and should have died long ago.
Killing it would be an act of mercy which will finally give hope for a new world to be born. But it is being kept alive against its will by the ruling overlords afraid to let go of their power.
To be fair, all I want is 1 PvP "trilogy" realm that goes from Vanilla into TBC and end with WotLK. After Wrath, the realm resets and starts over with a fresh Vanilla again..... and it does this over and over and over again forever. Once Blizz makes this, idc what else they do. That's just me personally. Also, I wouldn't mind Blizz making a few changes to WotLK to make it more in line with Vanilla & TBC. I think that'd be super cool, but that would just be the cherry on top.
What if level 70 and TBC's content were inaccesible until Ragnaros killed by a 60 raid group, and level 80 and WotLK's content were inaccessible until Kil'jaeden is killed by a level 70 raid group?
@@TimJBucci Why would you ever want that? Do you not understand how fast the top guilds finish these raids? As in day 1 they are released? Final TBC raid drops. Cleared in less than 4 hours. Oh, guess wotlk is out now.........wtf????
@@TimJBuccinah it should be on a timer to give everyone a chance to raid before we all move forward.
And I like a whole lot of Classic players Don't Want World PvP at all. That is one of the reason the HC servers have been so popular... no World PvP.
As long as they don't touch the era realms i don't mind. I am in what seems to be the minority of players who don't want to constantly relevel and have progress erased.
The solution is so simple.
Stop buying games that aren't respectful of your time and arent worth the purchase price.
I'm sorry to tell you this, but there is less than zero chance 2025 Blizzard is remotely capable of creating anything today even close to the quality of the original 3 WoW expansions. Be careful what you wish for.
Why would they put more efford in if they can just make money with basically no efford by just re-releasing classic?
Why do people go back to classic fresh every time even though its the same shit ? Because at least we know its good and the devs won't probably ruin it. A lot of people wants Classic+. But a classic+ in the same vein as Turtle Wow or OSRS, not the retail plagued shit that was SoD.
Same way people still play chess, its still fun for some.
Classic + is the stupidest sht I've ever heard of in gaming history. It means nothing and you guys all act like it exists and that you all are in making this "+" right now. Ya'll are delusional and need to do your role irl and stay out of creativity and ideas which are usually 100% terrible ideas
@@rainretribute9852 No one is forcing you to play anything mate, we're just hoping for something akin to osrs.
I appreciate the content and the hard work you went through making the video, but I honestly don’t agree with the sentiment. I started playing wow entirely as a brand new player when ICC dropped in WOTLK classic. Leveled a character up to 80, ground out thousands of dungeons to gear up, got into my first raid, leveled a second character and then a third and just played the content over and over and had a real enjoyment that I haven’t had from an MMO in years.
I was sad that I didn’t get the chance to experience classic and TBC, but when the anniversary realms came out I realized this is my chance to get to run through those old raids and experience the dungeons and raids that drew people to the game in the first place. I’m excited to take part in it. I wish there was a slightly faster leveling experience to the original vanilla, but I’m currently at level 50 and plan on leveling multiple characters and trying to get them all ready to run through back to the first raid I ever took part in.
When cataclysm dropped after WOTLK classic, I did a 24 hour stream of getting to level 85 and getting the cataclysm lore master, and I raided the first tier with BWD and TO4W and the third one but honestly I didn’t enjoy the game as much. A lot of the mechanics were too hard to grasp for a lot of the players coming from WOTLK. I had in my down time started playing retail in dragonflight and got AOTC and keystone master so it wasn’t a huge deal to me, but I realized that that was the shift that everyone was talking about.
So at the end of the day, to me, starting fresh servers and progressing through gives players like me who don’t wanna be sweatlords on retail a chance to play a much more relaxed version of the game. Cataclysm started more advanced rotations and tougher raiding experiences and unless you were known well enough to get into a high tier guild, you had to pug for a nefarion kill which was almost impossible for the first 2 weeks.
When I get on wow, I wanna relax and enjoy the game. I enjoy retail, but I don’t like having to do some 100000 APM and if one person messes up the entire raid wipes and just constantly stressing about it. The relaxed pace makes it so I can take in the world around me as someone going through it the first time. And the progressing through TBC and WOTLK is a bonus. And when the prepatch for anniversary Cataclysm drops, I hope they start another set of progression servers, and I’ll play some different classes to experience the game through some of them. Maybe I’ll even switch to the Horde! Lmao
My wife and I started playing WoW in the early 2000's, through Cataclysm. We played quite a bit and it took a LOOOOOONG time for us to get our main characters to first, L60 when that was the cap and then from 60-70 (which really took about as long as it took to get from 1-60). We played for years. We were not hardcore raiders but we had a small guild that would do dungeons, regular and heroic when we had enough L60/70 members. We helped each other max out or talents, shared loot and gave it to guild members who's class the loot matched instead of selling it in the AH...It was a fun time. FF to 2024, my wife and I had a bunch of kids, had not played WoW since 2013 or so and say the Ads for the new version of the game. Our kids are old enough now that we can nerd out for a few hours here and there and play and we missed the game, so I got her Blizz account up to date and bought her the newest expansion. They had knocked her L70 characters down to like 30 or so I think but within a month of playing maybe 3-4 days a week, 1-2 hours a day she had already maxed out in level. Part of the fun of the OG WoW was how long it took you to get to 60 or 70. It was a real achievement. I remember when both my main characters hit 70 to this day. Random people would congratulate you in the chat because they knew what kind of dedication that took. Now, it's like it is just given to you. And since we did not Raid much on the old WoW, we are not really into the raiding that goes on now. Our server has very few other people on it (you may see MAYBE 10 other players in capitol cities and the AH is empty). It is depressing. Never the less, it is fun to be in that world again, even if they did kind of ruin things.
I went out of my way to do the quests that were 'too out of the way' for my normal leveling path. I didn't do more than 5 dungeons before hitting 60. Maxed cooking and fishing before 40. It was completely inefficient, and I had as much fun as I did my very first character 20 years ago.
Damn, you really hit me in the feels at the end... I keep coming back to WoW hoping it gives me that feeling I experienced as a kid playing with all my friends, but sadly its not there anymore. It's the same hope I believe that gets people excited, but ultimately let down.
Phase 1 of SoD was fun while it lasted.
idk what's wrong with having different formats akin to a TCG/CCG - a server cluster each for vanilla, TBC, WotLK, etc - with the ability to mono-directionally "graduate" from one version of the game to the next at level cap.
Why not? There's no downside on player nor dev nor publisher side. win/win/win for oldhead casuals like me.
*Solution*
->Make Classic Burning Crusade Realm_
->Male Classic Wrath of the Lich King Realm._
*Allow players to import their characters after completing each Expansion*
Exactly! This is what i thought they were going to do when they lauched classic back in 2019. I even thought they were going to do more expainsions... Why not? I would play some Legion right now. I dont really understand why they took this route.
Great points of view, I think many of the old players feel the same way. Thank you for putting it out loud, expressing what many of us think!!
the CEO just wont fund any more innovation, he rather pocket everything for himself, he already did.
Not how businesses work but whatever makes you sleep at night
Excellent video man, the same questions I'm asking to myself aswell. A mystery to me there is no one left in blizzard with sufficient influence sharing this kind of reflexion on the state of the game today
This sounds a lot like how Magic the Gathering is now! Is WoW also like 5 times as much money to play? And everything that came before is power creeped out of existence? And the original story is dead now they bring in Lord of the Rings SpongeBob Godzilla Transformers and SpiderMan??
If the veterans who still worked at Blizzard in the past were still around, we would have probably seen both Starcraft 3 and Warcraft 4 by now. With the release of Warcraft 4, World of Warcraft would have gained a ton of new lore to play off, which would have significantly increased its lifespan.
only way to save the current lore abomination is to set a new game 1000+ years in the future after a massive ice age that reset most of the world, and do that with a good lore building wc4
@@snuffeldjuret Most players would probably take that really badly. Rightfully so, mind you, because that idea in itself is rather bad.
those still shots were beautiful - completely captured the vibes. good eye bro. completely agree with you.
Turtle wow is peak right now
Except for class changes make the game worse. The entire game is way too easy now.
man turtle sux lolll
At this point these comments need to be posted ironically
@@dannyp9210 I mean, the sheer number of gravestones from HC characters and dead bodies from regular characters would tend to disagree... admittedly, I'm still low level, but I've seen a whole lot of death on Turtle just this weekend alone.
Terrible client, unsafe and greedy owners too, they run a private server mafia.
Not to mention the custom content is incredibly doodoo fart and amateur-ish. Just try the Kharazhan Crypts dungeon, it’s god awful.
you nailed it. I have been saying all this for years! makes sense to me they have not made these changed and taken these steps.
makes NO sense*
At what point do you just move on and play a different game?
When we die! You might not agree but MILLIONS of people just favor this game over any that has ever been created. It’s just the best. lol
I will be playing classic WoW when I'm in the nursing home
when one releases that's better. it's been 20 years. don't blame people for not holding their breath
I was expecting more draenei type characters after I saw them.
Itd be so cool to explore something like that.
More races that are otherworldly and unique.
I know void elves was kinda like this, but to me it's like "the lore is there, but it feels like another elf character"
I guess i just kinda want to see new zones, new lands, and new adventures with the same mechanics as before.
Vanilla ice cream is good cause its simple. You can use add-ons if its too simple to dpice it up. You can make it whatever you want, throw in mods to change graphics even.
Let's face it. We have wow classic. That's as good as it gets.
I genuinely just want the same game I had in '04-06, forever left alone and in it's original state.
I don't even need graphical overhauls. I always felt the artistic style of the game made it timeless. I've seen some really cool fan-made overhauls of the older models and textures that I feel nail it and are still faithful to the original art style of the game but at this point I don't trust Blizzard with much in the way of innovation. They are kings of, "if you take an inch they will go a mile," among game developers.
I don't want retcons to reflect the current lore, not so much as an easter egg. I just want a space to play and RP in with my friends in the setting we all loved with the game we all enjoy with no rush to progress. Most of us are people with jobs, families, lives, other communities we've become invested in. I speak for most of us when we say we just want a chance to go back to the game we all loved and experience it unsullied. Most of us RPers aren't even Min-Maxxers; we knowingly handicap ourselves, trying our best to avoid addons and Googling solutions, making unique builds (I don't care how non-optimal fury warriors are, I think the class fantasy is pog; I don't care how slow paladins are to level or if it is a two-button rotation most of the time, it's the class fantasy and being the god-tier WC3 support hero serving all believers) while taking our time to savor the world.
Play Conquest of Azeroth that's in Alpha right now. 21 new classes with most having 4 specs based on 3.3.5 version of wow. It starts in vanilla and will progress through Wrath and they are planning to create new encounters and are adding new mechanics to the old raids. Different ways to level. Scalable mobs, etc... the same company, Ascension, is also working on a classic version that's actually difficult and has all the same quality increase to content in the works.
A game that I loved and played for years. Played all the expansions but I can only say I loved vanilla and the 1st 3 expansions. For a working person, time is not on my side to raid as before, so I am always left behind because I am slow in gearing due to work commitments. Retail doesn't give me the joy that vanilla gave. I am still subbed for the love of the game hoping blizzard will do something better for us, but my patience is wearing thin. I just find retail too grindy especially for gears and professions. For gold making there is bots to deal with. Too much for me to take. Now I seldom logon to play. It's so Sad that this game has fallen from grace.
I quit around mop and play classic era now. Leveling all classes. No main. Could be 60 by now, but I'm 27,24,18,14,12,10,6,1
What do I care if minmaxers world first anything.
I world last or whenever the time comes.
I still love playing the game but they made to many changes and made so cermercial. Back in the day, when we played WoW, or EverQuest, and so on, That was real vintage. We had to figure out how to beat the boss on our own and not follow some guide book that was conciderd cheating i feel. We might be stuck on a boss for days but we figured it out eventually. We did not have all these add ons and what not to make the game easier, we had play the game raw, like how real life is. We shouldnt have to go on a website and just buy as much gold as we want with real money because where is the challage in that. I feel like a rich person cutting corners. Lol
Make or earn gold in the game!! And im old school, when they first introduced getting gold with REAL MONEY! i said NoWay!!!!!!
As mush as I love Blizzard, its getting to crazy. I think ill go back playing simplier games.
Midevil Sims sounds nice. Lol
The War Within Saga has a good potential to be the "end" of Azeroth as we know it, sorta like the FF14 Realm Reborn reset. Void lords successfully takeover Azeroth and the soul is transferred to a new world to grow, becoming WoW 2. Updated graphics, engines and addressing the problems all previous games have had
Nah, its good as it is, no idea why people keep parroting this realm reborn nonsense.
WoW's engine is not actually that bad. It's being upgraded all the time. It's not UE5 but i'd say it does the job well.
Ill enjoy messing around on mop because i enjoyed pvp a ton during that expansion and the raids as well as the inital kit of the mistweaver monk. But if i could choose between that or a true Classic + I would choose classic. Idk what it would look like, I think its different for everyone, but I hope to see it one day.
As far as the leveling aspect. I think a happy median could be met. 100-300 hours to hit max level is way to much now adays. However 5 hours to max is also crazy. I think a good 30-60 hours would be a solid pace.
Things I would enjoy seeing, more spec viability but still feeling like classic. For example, boomkins spriest ret paladins sin rogues. Removing the 10 debuff limit. Moderate skill tweaks that remove worthless skills or talents.
End game class quests that either unlock a special talent based on spec or unique weapon etc.
AH wipes or gold wipes. I know a lot would hate it but think it would assist in inflation and gold buyers.
The only thing I can say with certainty is that classic vanilla is still the best experience for me gameplay and social wise. Met a lot of cool people on there because I was forced to do so. It's the way the game was made.
I've been playing Turtle WoW. U find it to be a breath of fresh air❤
Same. Started recently, been having a blast... seems to be really bursting with activity too - all the starter zones are packed.
Same here. I started a month ago with a friend. It got that adventeurous feeling to it.
Buddy classic fresh exists right now for people who have missed the OG classic release like me, and honestly i have been having a blast playing it
The other complaints can be summurized in one thing go play SoD if you want something new i dont want anything new, classic exists for people who dont like retail and all it stands for
A very interesting video with lots of truth to be sure. In my experience, being an older player who plays solo and doesn't have time to raid, I find that the Retail version was overwhelming as far as trying to keep up with all the changes. Also around the time that Heirlooms came out, the game was getting too easy for my taste. WOW Classic has let me relive the "good ole days" when gaming was hard and you walked everywhere until level 40, a rare drop off a random mob was like hitting the lottery. For over 5 years now I have paid my monthly subscription to play a "free" version and have not touched Retail since Shadowlands. Just my two cents worth...
Some of us loves to play classic (or real vanilla actually) forever and ever. I played vanilla for over 15 years (10 years on private servers) plus when it came out in 2004, and will never get tired of it
everyone loves fresh, Im trying to play through a dirffenent class this time and love it so much now. I love retail but its so fun finding groups for scholo and just running it
its pretty sad when private servers come up with more fresh and new innovations and yet blizz still won't even just copy them, much less come up with their own ideas.
The best thing for Classic would be the same zones and classes but with new quests and raids. No Add Ons permitted.
I was a beta tester for over a year prerelease the game was completely broken when they launched "warlocks didn't even have a 3rd talent tree yet" but Blizz was burning through money and pushed it out they promised us testers that we wouldn't be deleted again then at launch they deleted all of us FOUNDERS saying it would be unfair to all the new players having a community full of end game geared players.
2 things that cata did was remove talent trees and remove iconic quest lines. They finally brought back talent trees. Some of the vanilla versions of quests and areas are there behind quests to unlock which is nostalgically cool. The biggest economical problem that blizzard did was the game time token i litterally watched it flood and inflate the market. I have only used it twice and only for transmogs and mounts but there are some people who have a disposable income and buy gold legally regularly, i dont agree with that cause that gets into the concept of pay to win which is so very wrong.
Ironically, what people would love would be making useless specs work in classic (not OP, not sod-retail like. Just make them work. Like giving bear tanks real threat and upgrading paths), some QoL adjustments (like working meeting stones. Everyone just pay warlocks for this anyway).
Some gear adjustments, a bit of class balance, some bug fixes and thats it.
No real need for drastic changes or hard effort, just a couple easy changes. But they are too lazy because people will play regardless anyway.
People already love classic. Just spice it up a bit.
They could even finish some unreleased content that fits the mood, but that would be asking too much if they just cant deliver the previous things.
I feel like blizzard should do what Jagex did with OSRS. After TBC have the game go it's own way and split off what happen to something new. Hell maybe even do it at the end of vanilla. Re-balance things(classes) make new dungeons, new raids, new this, new that, and make the story go a different way.
If Blizzard had to really work on something similar than classic, they probably would have to create entirely new game from technical point of view. That game would have to fight with retail and that's something they won't ever invest in. Why would they bother if they can put a 2 week of work of 5 people team and make another 90$ mount...
People who wanted to have a real wow experience already had it on plenty of private servers way before Blizzard finally released classic servers.
The problem is twofold. One, as others have noted, the Blizzard of today isn't the Blizzard of yesteryear. The current iteration of Blizzard doesn't grasp what made the original game so captivating to us years ago. This has been made apparent with Season of Discovery and their attempt to reimagine the game.
Second, the players now are different, as you said. Even if Blizzard could pull off the perfect continuation of the journey we all loved, the players would ruin it. The problem is that what players want from a game isn't the same as it once was. People don't want to learn, discover, and explore. They want to be spoon-fed rotations, mechanics, and find the fastest way from point A to point B. Again, look at SoD. How long did the "discovery" part of that last? One person figures it out, shares it to Wowhead, and everyone else goes looking for the answer.
I'm afraid we'll never get what we want. The gaming culture on both sides has changed too much to ever get the sequel we crave.
I want to die to mobs on retail, that just doesnt happen...
In vanilla, you pull 3 things and it becomes a serious problem of CC'ing management, or running away
That for me is the number 1 difference
It never meant any sense to release expansions for wow classic. If they want to add to it, they could develop new areas based on classic graphics and gameplay.
People are just looking for that nostalgic "wow" feel of those early days (when EQ and DAOC had pretty much been the "best" up to that point) and Blizzard seemed to be doing everything right. WOW was like a refreshing dip in a spring after spending years in the desert. For me it was those early pvp days when no one had legacy gear and a 10th level noob casual player could actually compete. Those days are long dead and will never be back though...and neither will I.
Main point is the sheer laziness Blizzard has shown towards classic. No sign of Classic+, everything is rereleased & recycled. They’ve given up on class design in SoD.
And i think a lot of the player base would absolute LOVE to replay the story all over again with massive graphics and engine improvement, something like the nowadays AAA games. Not all of us tho, but a lot of us yes lol
The issue is that the player base today are all focused on min/max and all of the content has been farmed for years, so there’s no real challenge outside of world firsts or speed runs. It’s not even fun anymore
6:00 No Changes was a Lie. They made LOTS of changes in 2019 and the later releases and in the new "Fresh" Anniversary realms. I guess you don't play them did you?
Activision killed it and you need to bring back the founding coders, who had that inspiration.
This video is incredibly accurate. Unfortunately, as much as we love WoW, we end up playing any version just to get our fix. The harsh reality is that Blizzard seems like a poorly run company with uncreative and lackluster leadership. Re-releasing MOP feels like a sign of the times-just another example of how things have gone downhill.
Im so glad they released classic anniversary. I fucking love this game
It's a joke
"Why can't blizzard..." because they lazy and do the bare minimum just to keep the servers up. We basically just play a puppet of a game rather than something that is actively being worked on and improved, at least for Classic.
I loved how difficult 2008 Warcraft was. It forced me to become better.
I totally agree with all that was said in this video and I'm glad that other people think the same. I was shocked by the hype that came with the launch of Anniversary servers. Personaly, I was thinking : "A new classic release... Again ?! There's no way players can keep going with that trend". Boy, I was wrong... The day of the release, my server was almost empty so no more PvP rank grinding for me... It was the same 2 years ago when my previous server was also deserted for the new classic expansion release... I was naive and thinking people couldn't take that much time to exp and grind a character, stuff, professions, etc... And just throw it away to do the exact same thing. Facts prove me wrong but like the creator of this video I'm really tired of this loop and stomped that players keep resetting over and over with minor changes and for what ? A 1 year experience before the server dies ? No thank you, I think I'll pass this time, maybe I'll come back in a year or so to see if I can finish my PvP grinding on my original server but I won't level another character again and again and again, sick of this ....
Good job on the video though 👍
Turtle Wow proves a classic plus experience can work and if your looking for one that's probably your best bet (Although I wish they had put in the High Elf capital and starting zones... they recreated a smaller version of it off the coast which I guess is ok) I'm really looking forward to the engine revamp to unreal, looks awesome. There is also Wow Acension which somehow has ads on youtube but isn't Blizzard approved. I haven't tried it but it messes with classes in such a way I can't really call it Wow anymore outside visuals. I've heard Blizzard has given a blind eye to both of these technically pirate game versions of wow and that Turtle wow might be something they are looking at for any version of classic plus they might try in the future.
I played Star Wars Galaxies in 2003, it was my first MMO and you could rearrange the Interface. When i got into WoW, 2 years later, i was wondering why the Interface was nailed in place. Been at it, on and off and still doing solo questing. No raiding, no boosts, no farming, no gold buying EVER, just playing it as i did 20 years ago. And they should stop at Cataclysm and not go into Pandaria, that'll be retail AGAIN.
Well put. I've been teetering on playing again (over the past several months) but I recall the last few times I have played and the 'community' just wasn't there.. Everyone is so focused on endgame that they haven't stopped to just play the game.
Blizzard has been forced to lay off lots of people. They've lost all the leadership that put games first. And most of all, they have other properties, that are cheaper and easier to develop, that brings in more ROI. They are not working on Classic+. They don't have anyone on their payroll that have the vision or drive to undertake such a project. And WoW 2? Hah! They've already scrapped several mmo projects that has cost them hundreds of millions of dollars. Blizzard is like a ship adrift at sea at the moment. The people with the power to make decisions don't understand games, nor do they care about anything other than ROI. And the people who potentially could make something good either have absolutely no say on the matter, or they have already left due to frustration with the management. For anyone who thinks that Blizzard of 2025 is the same company that made World of Warcraft... Think again. It's the same in name only.
It's possible for Blizzard to do all the things you mention, but they are risk averse. Better to rerelease over and over again, and make a little bit of money, than take a risk, and perhaps lose a lot of money.
This video better deserve a title this dramatic.
Edit: It didn't. Though I interpreted the title to mean that Blizzard has done something reprehensible with the game when it actually meant "WoW has STRAYED too far". Similar wordings but completely different meanings. Seeing as I wouldn't have clicked on the video had it been called that though I still feel clickbaited.
I love them releasing fresh servers. It’s what gets me playing again honestly.
Fantastic video!
Good video. I think that's why WoW Classic Hardcore is the solution. It slows things down for most players and focuses on the leveling process a lot.
If I were to go back into wow for the classic, Naxxrammis is the only thing on my list that I haven't done. But the grind to get there is not going to be fun for me to where I want to go back in. The grind to get gear to be acceptable by the guild/group to raid aq40 every week and then get on their main group that will start naxx when ready and continue grinding to get my gear and mats. Start the runs with instant wipes and more grind more and more and more and more grinding. Oh, and did I mention, I am one of the poor soles in Ret Paladin damnation.
Cata is to WoW what Luclin (or better yet, PoP) was to EQ. The metagame of the game changed completely. The system that you learned to play and thrive in the game, changed.
Blizzard is a business. At the end of the day hands-down that is their ultimate goal is to make money and profit. The Avenue by which they take to achieve that may not be in alignment with all World of Warcraft players. The problem is this. Even if specifically the content creator of this video gets every single thing that he wants and is asking for somebody else will just complain about it. There is no making everyone happy. So blizzard has to just keep doing what blizzard does. Run a company and make money. Make one player happy? Piss another one off. That’s how it will always be. Comes with the territory.
Classic was a stroke of accidental genius if you ask me, it's not easy to recreate. And yea pre-patch tbc is definitely where the game takes a major different direction.
Sorry to say, some of the problems will still exist even if blizzard is creating a classic wow like you ask for. People will still do all these things you say. I dont play classic, but I am myself "guilty" of farm raw in alot of expansions and now war within. I do that by clearing old raids on 14 characters, I ofc also makes by other things, like selling mats and transmog and battle pets etc. I also do other things than gold farm, I also do delves, open world content, farm transmog, battle pets etc to my own collecting. I play war within (newes expansions), because I would getting tired of do the same thing over and over again, thats also why I do different things when I play.
Just play TurtleWOW 😉
I’m honestly feeling like I will just move to a vanilla only server once classic anniversary gets to wrath or onward, I just don’t care for the other stuff. The classes no longer have the RP flavor in retail
New Blizzard can't even compete with Old Blizzard. New Blizzard will just milk the classics until they dry out.
You can't recapture "the past" because we lived through it and you can't erase the knowledge we have gained.
The best thing I can hope for is that they don't fuck up the old classic.
The way Blizzard started making the player the saviour of the universe feels so patronising. "There you go, subscriber who pays us money, here you have all the validation you want."
So your point is literally like what Activision does with Call of Duty of which who also has their hands in Blizzard. so.... the issue is a corporate money grubbing company who wants nothing more then companies to pump games and content so they can make money. The old Blizzard was a group of gamers making a game for gamers that actually had real love in it and wasn't monetized to the point of just pure stupidity. So honestly everything your complaining about you can blame ACTIVISION since they got their grubby hands into it.
Bro... this is my thought EXACTLY.
what is the point of classic if it's just going to expand into the expansions.
They need to just keep Classic Era but do gradually updates that doesn't take away game experience.
I'm glad you said it. people gloss over Wrath being the beginning of the end. I like wrath but It's not the pinnacle like people say
sometimes i feel like chasing my first high when playing classic. but the moment to moment gameplay is just sth i really enjoy
Honestly.. I was just kinda waiting for Pandaria Classic after the first Classic happened.
I want classic + also. I will say i don’t know why nobody remembers what blizzards plan was when they decided to start classic. They had plans to rerelease classic multiple times over a period of 15 years. It’s not lazy, it’s planned. And these devs suck compared to the talent of OG devs
Amazing video. Great take on the current situation. I have 7 days left on my sub and I have been flipping back and forth from classic and SoD trying to understand if I like it. It requires so many addons to do what retail has default now and classic should have quality of life improvements. If you want the crap OG then have that as well. They clearly can do multiple things at once
So basically this guy is saying; "you think you want it but you don't."
Man I am lvl 40 on my shaman in anniversary realms and I'm imagining if they actually released a classic plus or something, by that time I'd already be too burnt out of wow to start ANOTHER leveling journey