Phases were too slow. Raiders lost interest and bailed to other versions of wow or other games. Then SOD was the final KO. Interested to see how cataclysm goes a few months in. Seems like a plan to keep players interested by staggering releases of different versions of the game to limit subscriber fall off during mid to late expansion.
@@Allexstrasza No it isnt, its 100% keeping people interested because if 60 was out already there would be nothing to do everyone would have done it already. 100% you complain of no content yet finish everything in less than a week.
Post-vanilla classic revealed how broken the expansion model was, and it was put in your face for 4 years. The post vanilla game is raid logging, and that doesn't hold the replay value for very long. Once you're not in the world regularly, you stop finding new things to do and are more likely to let your sub slide. IMO the difference is that the pre-bis grind in vanilla is not optimized. There aren't many serviceable items, and everyone wants them so group formation is easy and constant. I believe that's also why SoD works at 25.
Un ironically gdkps are like the only thing holding wow together I have a single toon that mostly runs gdkps it's 11/12 heroic in 25man icc and I actually enjoy the raids my other 4 toons are between 3 to 8 out of 12 from lff pugs and it is a shit show
And on my server there are like 10 non gdkps that have downed heroic lk our server first guild is a gdkp guild and every run that isn't a gdkp is either a guild or a off oug hiring a third of the raid and not downing more than 8 bosses and half the raid group disappears between saurfang and pp I loved lfg pugs ms>is and sr runs until ulduar then it was doomed
i quit when they did nothing about the bots, joined a wsg got 10 dk bots all focusing same target, even as a druid i couldnt get away from them and that was the final straw
Long story short. WotLK is by no means a bad expansion, but it has suffered the most from being "figured out". It doesn't have as strong Old School MMO feel as Classic and TBC did, nor does it have Retail's numerous QoL and busywork systems to keep people engaged outside of raids. Wrath turned out to be the awkward raid logging middle child.
Wrath just has nothing to do outside of raids and gold is so easy to get it's worthless. World content is hilariously trivialised and extremely boring. After maxing reputations you are just done outside of levelling more alts. Classic and TBC you spent plenty of time farming outside to prepare for raids.
Funny enough those sweatlords moved to SoD. And now you have groups requiring 300 ilvl, full consumes, world buffs and more for a level 25 ten man raid. That can be done in 30 mins. When the hardest part of the raid is target 1 specific totem, and interupt a cast.
This is why I. Retail don't mythic plus yes please hardcore content back day wrath like casual exampison sh aruge most friendly casually of the time my experience. So as such why always idea more casual open world content. More that yes piss hardcore people but good Chuck will stay anyway. And some casual go on become fans maybe hardcore themselves. But sorta between sweat lord and casual. Think should be more casual content. Think short might hurt game but I think long run help game rather lose raid tier pvp session. If mean casual have content( new players under this do more new players something shows lore or sum up ideas) but just me. That's play classic I try and try fucking gdkp happen discourages me if I wanted that I stay retail. Sh dad fucking back for classic I was happy haven't good few years saw gdkp just left. That's why never like hardcore people. Like respect what do but if was then casuals. I say f hardcore people casual ( not hardcore challenge people). Sorry if read all this thank you just this shit annoys me just hope better game more casual new players
I mean, maybe some groups require that, but on my server i've never seen ilvl or parse requirements. Just blackfathom buff + consumes. People tend to exaggerate the amount of gatekeeping that's going on in SoD. I've never heard of anybody who is unable to find a group because of being gatekept. I mean I get into PuGs on my frost mage (and openly tell raid leaders that i'm playing frost), which is by far the worst DPS in the game right now.
WotLK was the main expansion I played when my friends and I did WoW back in the day. My bf was very bummed when he realized we had essentially missed its classic release. We actually decided to come back to WoW at the start of January and have settled in playing retail. We're on new accounts and starting from scratch (couldn't remember the darn e-mail, lmao) and having a lot of fun.
Honestly, people just don't have the time commitment necessary anymore for what's required by WoW. Back in the day, you'd have to pretty much have a job inside of WoW to keep up with raiding expenses, farming materials, and armor upgrades. People just don't have that kind of time or patience anymore. Not to say that the friendships I made back in the day weren't meaningful; it's just a different element of video gaming these days.
The Wrath Pre-Patch and to a lesser extent phase 1 was probably the most fun I had in the Expansion as well. It's a curious case the issues with WOTLKC. More doesn't need to be said about the try-hards, but there's also a bunch of people who refuse to try hard enough as you stated in your video. Just did a partial PuG (it's hard to fill slots these days) and we wiped on Sindragosa for an hour because a third of the raid didn't know where to stand when she casts Frost Tomb and multiple people would get caught in the tombs. The titan rune dungeons completely invalidated old raids, and if you don't care about mounts, tabards or titles there's not much to do (especially if you got most of them in TBC) and people just don't seem to care in WOTLKC as much as they did in TBC in working on these rewards. Then there are the different raid difficulties, where 10 mans usually have the same dedicated groups and are generally difficult to get into and the much larger 25s easy to get into but with interest waning during Ulduar and onward, you're stuck with people who 2-3 months into the raid tier unable to do the mechanics. The expansion itself isn't that bad, the issue is largely with the people playing it. Blizzard adding the token, boosts and titan rune dungeon didn't help, but Vanilla-TBC catered to a different type of audience who valued collective accomplishment in raids and personal accomplishments with rep rewards or even pvp. The WOTLK audience seems to be more focused being the best one can be and teaming up with other people who are really good at the game and take it seriously and aren't too interested in experiencing it as an adventure like it seems to be at least on the surface. It also doesn't help that there are a bunch of people who show up casually to play the game who kind of want to tour the raid scene and consider every boss down to be a major accomplishment while doing daily's and levelling alts. It's not bad, but just different and while TBC was no fantasy land perfect world, there is a tonal difference between TBCC and WOTLKC that people who played Vanilla and TBC notice.
people forget that wotlk was peak wow because vanilla+TBC made WoW famous worldwide. Wotlk was not impressive, but a fun experience overall back in 2008, thats all. Vanilla and TBC were better and had this better "group" need that made/makes a mmo, a mmo
RWT, bots, wow token, a company not giving a shit to fix glaring issues, played sod loved it, even more bots, then realized its just going to turn into the rmt bot driven economy wrath has, quit sod. blizz isnt deserving of a monthly sub to just not work on the game.
To me it had nothing to do with the expansion itself. Blizzard didn't do shit to stop the botting and the RMT, which lead to ppl spending all their time doing GDKPs, which was by far the best money/gold/gear farm. Everything else you could do in the game (pvp, achievements, other things outside on the worldmap) became so unimportant in comparision to the reward you got out of GDKPs, everyone stopped doing those things. Guilds fell apart because of that too, because why would people raid with a guild you were not guaranteed to get your gear in guilds or at least get gold from raiding, so people just did GDKPs instead. Turns out just doing the same thing and nothing else multiple times a week with several alts is just boring, so everyone just quits ofc.
Think you've got a real strong point about GDKPs and their roll, it did take a bit of the soul and life out of reliving classic for what was meant to be a fun re-experience of some great old content.
I think there was some "hype" for cata classic before we knew were were getting SoD (classic+) People didn't want classic to end, and so they wanted SOMETHING to keep it going, even if that something was Cata. But the minute SoD was announced we all knew that was the true future of classic. Nice video :)
It was fun back in 2010, just like TBC in 2007 and Classic in 2004… but my god the gameplay is slow, boring, and raids just aren’t fun. Dungeons aren’t fun. Leveling is a grind straight up. There’s no incentive in classic leveling to get that next level because it takes hours upon hours to get half a level. So getting the next one doesn’t feel good. However, I truly believe that the reason Classic has seen a massive decrease in attention is because retail is pretty much as good as it’s ever been in the history of the game. We wanted Classic because retail was horrible, now it’s good…. So the need for Classic fades.
I had hoped for a version of Classic with Retail's more convenient changes, such as scaled leveling zones and the dungeon finder, while keeping the classic environments and story beats. The big appeal for Classic for me was being able to re-live the experiences of the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor before Cataclysm's big overhauls.
@@RainingMetal I think that’s what everyone’s initial draw was. See the original world…. But not at the original pace. I still believe classic with retail leveling speed and more buttons to hit and mounts earlier would be a very fun game.
Classic lost attention because it has incredibly limited content which is already solved and cleared by a competent competitive Retail playerbase. You level your character, grind reputations then clear raid. Then you just farm the same simple raid for months. As much as we liked to think the old games had endless entertainment, honestly we spent much of that time as kids back in the day goofing around with friends and useless pugs, doing inefficient grinds and not knowing what the heck we were doing, making clearing raids take months. That's simply not the case anymore.
What went wrong with Wrath Classic? It was blizzards plan all along to ruin the game during Wrath. They tried jumping the gun a bit with BC, and clearly decided to hold off a bit, but it was always gonna happen. Bots and wow token aside, I really disliked the long drawn out phase cycles. I usually get so bored waiting for phase 3 after waiting so long for p2 already on each xpansion that I just quit. At least there was a bit more to do outside of raiding in Vanilla and BC to keep ppl entertained, but wrath pretty much turned the game into a single player achievement grind and raid lobby simulator.
I was on a server that would have been deemed quite high pop back in original wrath. It was a pve server and i rolled on it knowing that no one could xfer off to a pvp server. Blizz opened up free transfers to a pvp server just as ToC came out. Server died over night. All community built up over 4 years wiped out in 2 days.
Coming back to a dead guild and dead server is perhaps the saddest part of the Classic experience. It's just so disposable compared to how people used to play WoW everyday like an MMO. Now people just raid log until some drama and the server dies and mass transfers occur. I've never paid for a transfer and would rather level a new character but doing that in classic is just brutal when you had lots of characters with tradeskills and hundreds of hours invested in them already. Can guarantee the playerbase would be so much healthier if we just had battlegroups, which although is antithetical to the classic experience, the playerbase doesn't care anymore.
I was too young, poor, and in school to be able to play Wrath of the Lich King when it released, as my brother owned our account, and he actually did manage to do a successful raid in Icecrown Citadel, which is a shame because I actually played Warcraft III and The Frozen Throne back in the day, so I itched to get back at Arthas, who back then seemed like an invincible (he he he) villain. I did own a character on his account and reached level 80 and did quests all up to Northrend, but I was in no condition to do any serious raiding. Time passed, Cataclysm changed everything, and I lost interest in doing WoW for over a decade. Fast forward to today, and I had long since owned my own Battle Net account to play Starcraft II. I saw advertisements for Wrath of the Lich King: Classic, as well as the current chapter of modern WoW, called Dragonflight. This was my opportunity to do what I could not do back then. However, the reality of classic WoW came rearing its ugly head, with certain classes being a slog to play through (I started with Warrior, which was ranked at the bottom of the "fun leveling" totem pole), as well as it being nigh-impossible to find groups for dungeons (I had reached level 20 on a Hunter and was hoping to do the Deadmine quests). It turns out I chose my realm poorly, a medium-populated server in which "medium" meant around a mere 2000 players. I had resorted to trying the "retail" version of WoW, in its Dragonflight phase. Leveling up there was so fast that I started seeing plaid. I don't know if I could go back to giving Wrath: Classic a try, even if I had picked the "right" server to play on, without the many conveniences modern WoW provides.
It's unfortunate you didn't get to start in TBC Classic. I levelled fresh characters in Phase 4-5 and there was still a good amount of people levelling, enough to find people to do stuff with but not enough that you'd compete with for quests. WOTLKC's levelling was comparatively dead. If a new progression triology server comes out (in 10 years), you should give it a go again.
@@theoutlander1411 Maybe if Season of Discovery expands into The Burning Crusade, I'll take it as a sign that Wrath of the Lich King will come next, and my opportunity will come then.
I did the most stupid thing with my classic char. I lvled it because i wanted some of the titles from tbc. I lvled my 8/9 tier 3 Hunter with bis weapons etc. That is the dumbest move i have done in my 17 years of wow...
Nice video, I really enjoyed it. I too played through WOTLK on release and achieved a respectable server 3rd Lich King kill. I was looking forward to classic WOTLK for years, unfortunately as a gamer I'm in a different place than 2010. Add that to the Sweat Lords, Bots, AH Manipulators and Private server crowd it was ruined for me shortly after clearing Ulduar in classic. I left never looking back with regret.
I played with my guildies, then the interest kinda died down. The guild died. And when all was said and done the only thing that was left to progress was an abbundance of GDKPs and that just slaughtered any interest in playing.
bots and gold buying gdkps retail mindset (ie. endgame and esports-garbage dungeons) and the sweatlords that revere this kind of design it's pretty simple, same things will ruin season of discovery, and cataclysm, and any other tricks they want ot pull out of their hat
SoD being released on ICC, then the cata announcement,bot infestation, store and WoW tokens and also there is like 0 community so you're paying a monthly sub to just sit in Dalaran...
@@SmoothjazGamingTV haha i just miss people being outside of stormwind or orgrimmar gates dueling or even in goldshire many memories there :') great video btw
when p2 dropped they introduced a new dungeon difficulty and no way to tell which you were in a party for. so naturally, we all quit until they added RDF in p4. by then, the game was over. also there was a ton of idiots that showed up in p2 thinking you could skip over normal dungeon content. those same idiots proceeded to wipe nearly every group for 3 months. was good times. i remember logging out for good because people in the Dalaran dungeon didn't know the mechanics
Also a big big big big factor for me is ... the playstyle of "original classic" has been totally modernised by introducing the runesystem. Making your rotation and playstyle potentially more fun than the expansions made it. That is ALL that original wow was lacking for me compared to the later expansions. So now they "fixed" it. Why even play the expansions that weren't even liked in the first place. We say wotlk was so succesful. But wotlk already declined amidst its runtime. so in other words it didnt retain people even back then.
I agree with SoD but not some of the other reasons mentioned. Wotlk Classic had bad pacing: - T7 which went on *way* too long - seriously that many months for Naxx/OS3D/EoE? The difficulty of T7 was also severely undertuned even though sure they claim they actually upped the difficulty of Naxx 10/25. It wasn't upped enough. It should have been required for you to progress through each wing slowly and methodically, eg. don't even think about doing Plague wing unless you've collected all the gear from Spider wing. - T8: Ulduar. Again, a raid that went on for far too long. Iron Council Heroic which was a horrible fight for tanks(hello Steelbreaker intermittent movement/hitbox issues). When the typical guild can assemble 3-4 Valynr maces within T8's lifecycle, that's too long. It should have been enough time for 2 legendary maces, tops. - T9: ToGC turned out that it wasn't as universally disliked as everyone thought it would be. Everyone loved how fast it was to get in and get out. I actually felt ToGC was roughly the right about of time before ICC - T10: Guilds fatigued from the game in general. HC and SoD were more fun at this point. IMO, the moment the Lich King on normal is dead, is the moment the game is over.
Wrath failed because of a few reasons. 1. Token 2. Boost and Unique Pay for Mount 3. Faction imbalance and no caps. 4. LFD implementation killed world travel and pvp again making it all feel dead, stagnant, and boring. 5. SoD was better. After SoD launch wrath fell off a cliff.
how can a activity in the game that is not even implementend by the devs ruin guilds. gdkps are made and run by humans. the community, me and you ruined guilds. and thank god, better run gdkps then beeing with such people in a guild that do them. u understand? people dont give a F about guilds, they want the pixel and cant get them alone. guilds are mostly used by jelly people that dont have RMT money for gdkps in wotlk. lets be real here.
I quit Wrath Classic when Naxxramas went on for way too long. Well, that and Ulduar honestly didn't hold me like I was expecting it to when I came back. Honestly, with the advent of Classic, TBC has cemented its place as my favourite WoW expac of all time.
Idk what caused it but private servers are booming so it is not that people dont want to play it and my conclusion is what ever it is, must be related to Blizz, my bet all those changes or maybe bots idk. People moved to private servers at one point in masses, I my self logged on to check few times on Warmane and it had more players then ever and i played there since 2010. Molten up to Warmane and left when Blizz released classic. Never before Warmane had so many people online ( not talking about numbers shown on web page those are fake and all long time players know it )
Nah, private servers aren't "Booming" like classic is/was. It's just that the players are all condensed onto a few servers. Warmane is probably still the biggest private server and at the time of writing this, their primary server has only 8k players. That's more than enough to feed a vibrant community, but it's not the kind of numbers Blizz Classic servers see. So in a way I guess you're right and it is related to Blizz in that they need to service many many times more people than private servers could even dream about, and then they refuse to merge servers as all those people eventually stop playing.
@@WingTzu343 Im not just talking from nothing, I do have some insight and it is 8k only on Icecrown server online at moment at this hour... There are bunch of new servers as well some old that also have spike in population... Like I said I do have more insight in all of this then regular player and I dont want to go in to how and why because that would open all another subject and we would go out of this point probably
@@Mishke820 A couple few thousand players isnt "booming" bro this is delusional especially if the most influx of thousands or so players are from Asia who dont speak english yet are allowed on english speaking servers because they bankrolled the recent servers. They dont interact or play with anyone else.
I've heard from a couple people that Warmane is just as bad as WOTLKC. I can imagine it might be better in terms of levelling or needing to go through the raid phases to gear for ICC but all the meta chasing and GDKPs are still present from what I've been told.
Also the death of casuals in wrath is what really happened because sod got released right after the keyboard turning dad gamers realized they couldnt be carried to a heroic lk or half the time a regular lk kill because nobody can drop defile for you or heal you through being dumb and then here come sod to make you feel like a chad again playing hunter topping dos and not casting a ability while your pet does your dps for you and the boss fights have a single mechanic and even if you do nothing it doesnt matter because 5 people can clear the 10 player raid so all the dads escaped and the sweat lords went over and started doing sod gdkps to now get kicked in the rectum its really full circle
If the issues are community based, then it has nothing to do with the game itself. I’m playing SOD and loving it, but unfortunately the average WoW player is a bot who might as well be botting software
wow token game later to combat gold buller aka the community and paid boost are also aka the community been lazy and not leveing , u can blame blizzard but the demand of gold buller comes from the ppl buying and blizzard does ban account that buy it
GKPD! That is what is killing classic. Nothing worst then having limited time to game between church kids work working out just living normal life. Logging on hoping to get into a raid and only thing being ran is GKPD and only one that has the money to buy some of them insane prices is no lifers or ppl who buy gold. And being a casual player you don’t have 20k + gold to out bid these other ppl
I my honest opinion, servers that shall not be named actually did wrath much better for years, and still do to this very day. Offical wrath was full of bots, boosts, gold farmers and sellers, hackers etc...Its just insane that some random free to play poor 5k population little server who make their money trough cosmetics can succefully deal with bots and gold sellers better than the official Blizz release and have decent authentication system... At this point if everyone is just going to buy boosts and gold, then what is the point of hating on donors at all? Its the same process without convoluted steps. And also, Blizz is shutting down wrath anyways so i just quit when i heard that.
There's nothing to do other than raid log right now on WotLK, so there's no reason to log on. ICC is at 30% and the Ruby Sanctum patch only adds 1 boss, and no content outside raiding. WotLK is in Raid Log mode, that's all it is. Meanwhile SoD just got a content release so that's where your Wrath players are. Classic is likely going to be in a cycle of one version of the game being in Raid Log Mode, while the other has fresh content. Personally i enjoyed SoD 1-25 but it's just a big gimmicky for my taste, but i know that's probably not a popular take. We as a playerbase consume the content quicker than it releases, and there will always be downtime. I didn't play Vanilla Classic, you can't sell me on it but i did play through TBC and i managed to hit Raid Log mode roughly a month into each content phase. It's been much the same in Wrath. You need time each raid tier to actually get the gear from it which means there will always end up being a raid log period where players have exausted all other methods of progression outisde of raids. Having SoD and Classic run side by side and release new content in the gaps seems like a solid strategy to keep players interested. I imagine it's intentional. WoW sort of has this thing where all paths lead to raids and at some point you've exausted everything else and the only thing left is to raid. If anything, WotLK probably suffered from being "overhyped" and the rose-tinted goggles were just a little too strong going into it. Objectively Wrath was always a tale of two halves, with Nax and Trial feeling like some of the laziest content ever released (even though there are devs that have said it would have been easier to make a new raid than try to repurpose Nax for 25 man lvl 80 content). I know a lot of players no doubt felt like Naxx was gonna be a problem going into Wrath particularly those that actually did it in Vanilla Classic, but i think a lot of people forgot about the Trial of the Crusader patch and just how little it offered. Obviously GDKP's a are a hot talking point in the classic community. They provide participants incentive to actually play well, and not just bail when the boss they wanted loot from didn't drop thier item, they got bored or the raid started to struggle. On the other hand they give gold buyers exactly what they want. I'm not really on either side of the arguement, but i can see why someone looking from the outside might view it as toxic for the community, particularly when you see things like organiser cuts but I don't think it's any different to the culture of the raid leader hard reserving the best drop from the raid. If GDKP's wern't a thing, i'd garuntee every pick up raid group would have Deathbringer's Will and Dislodged Foreign Object on hard reserve. I enjoyed Wrath, i'm still raiding once a week and enjoying having casual banter with the raid team while steam rolling ICC (Halion is ass, wcyd). I honestly don't know what world content i would be interested in at this point. Hard to say whether i prefered TBC or Wrath, both had thier highs and lows(Tier 5 and Hyjal being examples of lows for TBC). Haven't played Retail since my guild disbanded during the Covid Pandemic, maybe it's time to check that out?
Nobody wants to play a game where a percentage of the population is allowed to CHEAT through Tokens, GDKP, Boosting, Bots, and Gold Buying and Selling. Yes, it's all cheating. Cheating is not "gameplay". You can't defend it.
I hope they just merge some of the smaller servers come cata,. Megaservers vs dying servers and Blizz doing nothing about it has always been one of the biggest downfalls with classic imo and now is the time to do something about it though they probably won't because they directly benefit from it with paid faction and server transfers.
@@SmoothjazGamingTV it's a shame that they used all their good ideas like forced faction balance (though even pve servers could have used that) and banning gdkps on SoD
Saying normal icc is gate kept is also just 100% false the ammiunt of grey parsing shit lords ive seen getting into runs they shouldnt is insane and most the time get left in the run to make it worse
honestly, I'm someone that plays both, and i feel there are others like me. When vanilla and tbc classic were popular imo because retail at the time was completely dogshit. The worst its ever been, so it had a lot of disgruntled retail players like myself. When Wrath launched we had DF, which from a gameplay standpoint, was actually ok.
I mentioned this briefly in a video I just released about Shadowlands - I think you're right. Classic helped people escape retail and refresh rose-tinted glasses on "how WoW should be!". But like you say, Retail is in a decent enough state again to take those players back, and combined with Wotlk's issues (heading into Cata/SoD coming out), not much reason to stick around.
Couldn't disagree more, plenty of challenge left in heroic ICC. Wotlk is only bleeding casuals. I cant speculate on diminishing eu servers cause idc Na bis... sod was exciting for 3.5 days then everyone left. Retail is good right now fully agree but wotlk is only over for those not interested in heroic lunch king.
the developpers also realise that the original game has more sustainablility than "the expansion complication". all this might turn out to be good for wow in the end. if they put their money on developping the game in the same direction as SoD. so funny aye, how "you think you do but you dont" is coming back to bite them in the ass now.
i played a lot and enjoyed everything between the pre-patch and the like first 2 weeks after ulduar. after that the game died to me. i was on a server with a balanced population between horde and alliance and around that time people just started leaving the server and it simply died and the fact that blizz added this new difficulty for heroics that gave you naxx gear that completely killed pugs for me. i couldnt even get to level alts since EVERYBODY was doing this new difficulty requiring you RAID GS already but i didnt have it because i needed to do the normal heroics first so i got stuck there doing nothing besides doing heroics if i managed to get people from my guild that at that time was already on the plans to leave the server LOL.
I agree - at first I thought the new heroics were good fun for quick gear but realised they quickly became a double edged sword for that exact reason. I feel they also should have somehow tinkered with old Raid difficulties to give you better gear, but that's a bi-product of the new dungeon difficulties creating new problems too. Overall I found the new dungeon difficulty still quite helpful for alts on catch-up though.
Me and my bros ninja'd my guild's Val'Anyr and quit cold turkey after Ulduar. Everything went wrong with WotlK Classic. The bots, the management of content, the dead servers, faction imbalance, the devs just don't give a damn.
I find it hilarious how many times I heard "WoTLK was peak WoW" or "WoTLK was the best version of WoW". Hope those people with rose tinted goggles can finally see how big of a lie they were spreading. WoTLK was extremely overrated... Also Cata is an extremely underrated expansion.
I'm certainly interested to see how Cata turns out. I didn't like it at the time due to a lot of the social factors (i.e. lots of friends quitting) and other general changes. Now I know what's coming, I think it'll be good to revisit it without these pressures.
@@allnamesaretakenful You were clearly a baddie then. I played all the way through cata and had 10 85s and I also played all the way through wrath and had 10 80s in it. Cata was far better than wrath but you wouldn't know that because you quit. I played them both to their fullest extent.
@JoshLineberry I played both, and I still found wotlk was better. Cata was just boring. The raids/dungeons and story were boring along with the game mechanics they added. The only thing I enjoyed from cata and wish they would add to retail is Tol Borad, the world pvp event and mini raid.
not rly bad, just that's it. We are done. Also the rep farming, not rly? I had done maybe 6? On an alt. It's literally only 2x full clears for enough rep for the ring. But tbh I will say a LOT more people are huffing that "We killed the lichking" despite having never actually killed Arthus Heroic because they flat out can't. It's very raid log heavy esp since RDF. The reason they pushed it out is because of dead servers, which is a server issue NOT a lack of RDF issue. They just cemented the world is dead with RDF.
I’m late to the party so I came to endgame recently and damn. Everyone is so autistic about being meta. Kicking people out of heroic dungeons for their lower gs, being toxic to players who don’t immediately know the mechanics or the smart shortcuts they take and end up aggroing, disbanding groups after one wipe. Finally came to a point where I need to raid to get better gear because gammas don’t drop anything, just to find myself surrounded by more autistic man child that made wow their whole thing in life and don’t accept that some people are casual. None of this even feels like it matters anyways because cata is coming and the time spent grinding will be meaningless. Groupfinder made making friends in realm pretty hard amongst the other issues. My server is full but it does feels dead, PvP servers are so unbalanced it’s not even fun 😅 raids are all closed gates gdkp and /or I don’t have the time to invest in serious guild raiding requirement 😂
@@SmoothjazGamingTV Personally... I think there are different groups and waves of people (o o) Like... there genuinely are laid back guilds that are there for the game and not for the raids :,) but... I started back in 2023 summer so perhaps it gave enough time for new players to join; those who haven't played before so... as far my experience goes it feels organic ^^'
The numbers on ironforge show that while there was a drop off, Ulduar started out pretty strong. A lot of the issues with the Classic release started with Ulduar as it was released in its pre-nerf state so it wouldn't be "easy" and there were a lot of people that either couldn't keep up, chose not to keep up, or were disgusted with the elitism and high expectations that came out of the Hard Modes on a hard raid being introduced.
I think people always nostalgia praised wrath but in reality TBC was probably the best expansion it's what i heard from several people anyway not that i would know i quit wow before wrath all those years ago only came back a month ago for sod.
You kids are not any less nostalgic about TBC. Classic, TBC, Wrath all had crappy class and PVE mechanics. They had no content, only if you had an IQ of 90 or lower.
@@OMGiTzSpAnKy Because it's the first raid you go to in the expansion, and gearing up is fu. The other raids after is pretty mediocre and the 5 man dungeons gets boring fast when all you're doing is spamming heroics for badges anyways.
i went back to wrath to do one ICC even though i knew sod was better and the guild i ran with tried taking items from people that won them just so their guild members could get heroic loot
My ending was not because of expansion, but because of total disregard by company. Myself as primarily casual bg pvp player with secondary focus for rated arenas. Having 15yo bugs in game we pay premium for, sure whatever, atleast its "old school experience", but problem is... that its not. The fact that they werent able to fix for one year freaking warsong gulch to state it was in during real wotlk (nitro boots flag ehm ehm, this was fixed during tbc). They just took vanilla bg code, placed it in wotlk and bam, duck all fixes and changes made during tbc, players dont need em right..right? This coupled with absolute INSANE bot issue was enough for me, although i understand this is issue polluting any online game today, still, their stance and slowness towards it was affecting my gameplay so much that it made game unplayable to me (unability to play decent solo que battleground). I dont agree with retail, but it just my subjective view, as i stopped playing after releasing prepatch and completely messing whole ui (classic ui andy, i wasnt willing to get used to new ui, but thats more of a inner excuse to stop playing game i wasnt happy with for too many years (legion)). The point is, for money we payed for playing wotlk, it was in such a terrible state. Maybe its just me, but i feel like i could get better gameplay experience on privates, and thats huge issue.
What Went WRONG for Wrath of the Lich King Classic? - Ingame shop - Wow token - changes I didn't even play this shit since blizzard ruined classic with ingame shop in TBC, why should I? The service is shit, the changes made to a game are terrible. Vanilla was perfect, but blizzard was too greedy to keep it perfect, so fuck them, I have enough great private servers.
Back to your private where is an ingame shop,gold sellers that are chinese and devs and changes that u love because"well they are private " out of here trash
False. Tons of people want cata. Cata had more subs than all of vanilla and most of tbc and held over 10 million subs for it's entire lifespan, so to say not many want cata is straight up wrong. Mostly the trashers don't want cata.
@@JoshLineberry Cata was the end of the Vanilla experience though, the death of the old world, talent system and resource system as well as the art style, holy hell I hate the retail art style.
Wrath is kinda a shitty expansion. It was somewhat fun in its own time, the same way it was great to ride a horse 500 years ago, but I refuse to commute today via horse. It had no endgame, no solo PVE or 5 man content. The raid mechanics were meh. The raids were mostly nice though, just quite smooth brained. Arthas was a caricature of himself. Absolutely hated what they did to him outside of a few nice moments, such as his death.
I was very excited about Wrath classic, but the talent trees had been changed from original Wrath, and they announced that RDF would not be included, I left the game. I would have quit at the announcement of Cataclysm anyway
the hunter is nothing without the hunt. a lot of people don't like playing a version of WoW where the lich king is dead. the grandiosity of the world is greatly diminished when they have to invent new bad guys. the further the game stays from original game, the thinner the experience and mystique
another smooth brain take why would ppl even be exited for vanilla 2019 if everyones know how to kill everyboss same for tbc and other expac hell then private server where never good because everyone knew how to kill the boss
Now you know "we" are heading into Cata. Nope im not included in that "we" as its a terrible decision to continue doing the same thing and expect a different result. It should have been Classic+ from the very start of classic, even I know this and i was new to WoW having never played retail or any other version prior to classic launch.
smooth brains like you say classic plus but you had your classic + it tbc,wrath and foward , sod is not classic + it just vanilla with runes from cata and other expac abilities
how was it classic+ when they rolled out patches exactly like it was back in the day for "authentic experience", shut up and go back to retail lol@@juanrollel3693
Wrath was aggressively overrated by the community. And the dev team even made positive changes to give us more to do and it was still just okay. The truth is T7 and T9 were dog and ulduar lasted so long that it felt the xpac basically hinged entirely on ICC. And even then right after ICC launched we got SoD. Genuinely dont understand why anyone wants wrath era but i hope for their sake they get it. Il never play wotlk again
What is the cause of Wrath's downfall? 🤔
Phases were too slow. Raiders lost interest and bailed to other versions of wow or other games. Then SOD was the final KO. Interested to see how cataclysm goes a few months in. Seems like a plan to keep players interested by staggering releases of different versions of the game to limit subscriber fall off during mid to late expansion.
@@CastleNomos The wait for 40-50-60 will probably kill SoD too. 6-7 months for 20 levels is idiotic
Lich King killed them all and raised them as ghouls that's why.
@@Allexstrasza No it isnt, its 100% keeping people interested because if 60 was out already there would be nothing to do everyone would have done it already. 100% you complain of no content yet finish everything in less than a week.
Post-vanilla classic revealed how broken the expansion model was, and it was put in your face for 4 years. The post vanilla game is raid logging, and that doesn't hold the replay value for very long. Once you're not in the world regularly, you stop finding new things to do and are more likely to let your sub slide.
IMO the difference is that the pre-bis grind in vanilla is not optimized. There aren't many serviceable items, and everyone wants them so group formation is easy and constant. I believe that's also why SoD works at 25.
The players killed wrath.
You would see a huge boom to community in wotlk classic if gdkps were outright banned and people actually had to interact with eachother to raid.
Un ironically gdkps are like the only thing holding wow together I have a single toon that mostly runs gdkps it's 11/12 heroic in 25man icc and I actually enjoy the raids my other 4 toons are between 3 to 8 out of 12 from lff pugs and it is a shit show
And on my server there are like 10 non gdkps that have downed heroic lk our server first guild is a gdkp guild and every run that isn't a gdkp is either a guild or a off oug hiring a third of the raid and not downing more than 8 bosses and half the raid group disappears between saurfang and pp I loved lfg pugs ms>is and sr runs until ulduar then it was doomed
i quit when they did nothing about the bots, joined a wsg got 10 dk bots all focusing same target, even as a druid i couldnt get away from them and that was the final straw
That's sickening 😔
Long story short. WotLK is by no means a bad expansion, but it has suffered the most from being "figured out".
It doesn't have as strong Old School MMO feel as Classic and TBC did, nor does it have Retail's numerous QoL and busywork systems to keep people engaged outside of raids. Wrath turned out to be the awkward raid logging middle child.
Wrath just has nothing to do outside of raids and gold is so easy to get it's worthless. World content is hilariously trivialised and extremely boring. After maxing reputations you are just done outside of levelling more alts. Classic and TBC you spent plenty of time farming outside to prepare for raids.
Funny enough those sweatlords moved to SoD. And now you have groups requiring 300 ilvl, full consumes, world buffs and more for a level 25 ten man raid. That can be done in 30 mins. When the hardest part of the raid is target 1 specific totem, and interupt a cast.
Ye lmao, these neckbeards are so cringe and weird
Haha it's funny you say that - I mentioned that in a season of discovery video last week too, I find it odd just as you say
This is why I. Retail don't mythic plus yes please hardcore content back day wrath like casual exampison sh aruge most friendly casually of the time my experience. So as such why always idea more casual open world content. More that yes piss hardcore people but good Chuck will stay anyway. And some casual go on become fans maybe hardcore themselves. But sorta between sweat lord and casual. Think should be more casual content. Think short might hurt game but I think long run help game rather lose raid tier pvp session. If mean casual have content( new players under this do more new players something shows lore or sum up ideas) but just me. That's play classic I try and try fucking gdkp happen discourages me if I wanted that I stay retail. Sh dad fucking back for classic I was happy haven't good few years saw gdkp just left. That's why never like hardcore people. Like respect what do but if was then casuals. I say f hardcore people casual ( not hardcore challenge people). Sorry if read all this thank you just this shit annoys me just hope better game more casual new players
I mean, maybe some groups require that, but on my server i've never seen ilvl or parse requirements. Just blackfathom buff + consumes.
People tend to exaggerate the amount of gatekeeping that's going on in SoD. I've never heard of anybody who is unable to find a group because of being gatekept. I mean I get into PuGs on my frost mage (and openly tell raid leaders that i'm playing frost), which is by far the worst DPS in the game right now.
WotLK was the main expansion I played when my friends and I did WoW back in the day. My bf was very bummed when he realized we had essentially missed its classic release. We actually decided to come back to WoW at the start of January and have settled in playing retail. We're on new accounts and starting from scratch (couldn't remember the darn e-mail, lmao) and having a lot of fun.
Glad you guys are back & enjoying some retail wow!
Honestly, people just don't have the time commitment necessary anymore for what's required by WoW. Back in the day, you'd have to pretty much have a job inside of WoW to keep up with raiding expenses, farming materials, and armor upgrades. People just don't have that kind of time or patience anymore. Not to say that the friendships I made back in the day weren't meaningful; it's just a different element of video gaming these days.
Burning Crusade was my favorite expansion.
The Wrath Pre-Patch and to a lesser extent phase 1 was probably the most fun I had in the Expansion as well. It's a curious case the issues with WOTLKC. More doesn't need to be said about the try-hards, but there's also a bunch of people who refuse to try hard enough as you stated in your video. Just did a partial PuG (it's hard to fill slots these days) and we wiped on Sindragosa for an hour because a third of the raid didn't know where to stand when she casts Frost Tomb and multiple people would get caught in the tombs. The titan rune dungeons completely invalidated old raids, and if you don't care about mounts, tabards or titles there's not much to do (especially if you got most of them in TBC) and people just don't seem to care in WOTLKC as much as they did in TBC in working on these rewards. Then there are the different raid difficulties, where 10 mans usually have the same dedicated groups and are generally difficult to get into and the much larger 25s easy to get into but with interest waning during Ulduar and onward, you're stuck with people who 2-3 months into the raid tier unable to do the mechanics.
The expansion itself isn't that bad, the issue is largely with the people playing it. Blizzard adding the token, boosts and titan rune dungeon didn't help, but Vanilla-TBC catered to a different type of audience who valued collective accomplishment in raids and personal accomplishments with rep rewards or even pvp. The WOTLK audience seems to be more focused being the best one can be and teaming up with other people who are really good at the game and take it seriously and aren't too interested in experiencing it as an adventure like it seems to be at least on the surface. It also doesn't help that there are a bunch of people who show up casually to play the game who kind of want to tour the raid scene and consider every boss down to be a major accomplishment while doing daily's and levelling alts. It's not bad, but just different and while TBC was no fantasy land perfect world, there is a tonal difference between TBCC and WOTLKC that people who played Vanilla and TBC notice.
people forget that wotlk was peak wow because vanilla+TBC made WoW famous worldwide.
Wotlk was not impressive, but a fun experience overall back in 2008, thats all. Vanilla and TBC were better and had this better "group" need that made/makes a mmo, a mmo
I don’t think it failed. We just beat the game. Had a great time doing it too.
It was gold buying and inflation that finally made me throw in the towel. Add to that the toxic people.
RWT, bots, wow token, a company not giving a shit to fix glaring issues, played sod loved it, even more bots, then realized its just going to turn into the rmt bot driven economy wrath has, quit sod. blizz isnt deserving of a monthly sub to just not work on the game.
To me it had nothing to do with the expansion itself. Blizzard didn't do shit to stop the botting and the RMT, which lead to ppl spending all their time doing GDKPs, which was by far the best money/gold/gear farm. Everything else you could do in the game (pvp, achievements, other things outside on the worldmap) became so unimportant in comparision to the reward you got out of GDKPs, everyone stopped doing those things. Guilds fell apart because of that too, because why would people raid with a guild you were not guaranteed to get your gear in guilds or at least get gold from raiding, so people just did GDKPs instead. Turns out just doing the same thing and nothing else multiple times a week with several alts is just boring, so everyone just quits ofc.
Think you've got a real strong point about GDKPs and their roll, it did take a bit of the soul and life out of reliving classic for what was meant to be a fun re-experience of some great old content.
I think there was some "hype" for cata classic before we knew were were getting SoD (classic+)
People didn't want classic to end, and so they wanted SOMETHING to keep it going, even if that something was Cata. But the minute SoD was announced we all knew that was the true future of classic.
Nice video :)
It was fun back in 2010, just like TBC in 2007 and Classic in 2004… but my god the gameplay is slow, boring, and raids just aren’t fun. Dungeons aren’t fun. Leveling is a grind straight up. There’s no incentive in classic leveling to get that next level because it takes hours upon hours to get half a level. So getting the next one doesn’t feel good.
However, I truly believe that the reason Classic has seen a massive decrease in attention is because retail is pretty much as good as it’s ever been in the history of the game. We wanted Classic because retail was horrible, now it’s good…. So the need for Classic fades.
I had hoped for a version of Classic with Retail's more convenient changes, such as scaled leveling zones and the dungeon finder, while keeping the classic environments and story beats. The big appeal for Classic for me was being able to re-live the experiences of the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor before Cataclysm's big overhauls.
@@RainingMetal I think that’s what everyone’s initial draw was. See the original world…. But not at the original pace. I still believe classic with retail leveling speed and more buttons to hit and mounts earlier would be a very fun game.
Classic lost attention because it has incredibly limited content which is already solved and cleared by a competent competitive Retail playerbase. You level your character, grind reputations then clear raid. Then you just farm the same simple raid for months. As much as we liked to think the old games had endless entertainment, honestly we spent much of that time as kids back in the day goofing around with friends and useless pugs, doing inefficient grinds and not knowing what the heck we were doing, making clearing raids take months. That's simply not the case anymore.
Don't worry, gang. Warmane is still there for us! Our last reduct!
What went wrong with Wrath Classic? It was blizzards plan all along to ruin the game during Wrath. They tried jumping the gun a bit with BC, and clearly decided to hold off a bit, but it was always gonna happen.
Bots and wow token aside, I really disliked the long drawn out phase cycles. I usually get so bored waiting for phase 3 after waiting so long for p2 already on each xpansion that I just quit. At least there was a bit more to do outside of raiding in Vanilla and BC to keep ppl entertained, but wrath pretty much turned the game into a single player achievement grind and raid lobby simulator.
I was on a server that would have been deemed quite high pop back in original wrath. It was a pve server and i rolled on it knowing that no one could xfer off to a pvp server. Blizz opened up free transfers to a pvp server just as ToC came out. Server died over night. All community built up over 4 years wiped out in 2 days.
Coming back to a dead guild and dead server is perhaps the saddest part of the Classic experience. It's just so disposable compared to how people used to play WoW everyday like an MMO. Now people just raid log until some drama and the server dies and mass transfers occur. I've never paid for a transfer and would rather level a new character but doing that in classic is just brutal when you had lots of characters with tradeskills and hundreds of hours invested in them already. Can guarantee the playerbase would be so much healthier if we just had battlegroups, which although is antithetical to the classic experience, the playerbase doesn't care anymore.
I was too young, poor, and in school to be able to play Wrath of the Lich King when it released, as my brother owned our account, and he actually did manage to do a successful raid in Icecrown Citadel, which is a shame because I actually played Warcraft III and The Frozen Throne back in the day, so I itched to get back at Arthas, who back then seemed like an invincible (he he he) villain. I did own a character on his account and reached level 80 and did quests all up to Northrend, but I was in no condition to do any serious raiding. Time passed, Cataclysm changed everything, and I lost interest in doing WoW for over a decade.
Fast forward to today, and I had long since owned my own Battle Net account to play Starcraft II. I saw advertisements for Wrath of the Lich King: Classic, as well as the current chapter of modern WoW, called Dragonflight. This was my opportunity to do what I could not do back then. However, the reality of classic WoW came rearing its ugly head, with certain classes being a slog to play through (I started with Warrior, which was ranked at the bottom of the "fun leveling" totem pole), as well as it being nigh-impossible to find groups for dungeons (I had reached level 20 on a Hunter and was hoping to do the Deadmine quests). It turns out I chose my realm poorly, a medium-populated server in which "medium" meant around a mere 2000 players.
I had resorted to trying the "retail" version of WoW, in its Dragonflight phase. Leveling up there was so fast that I started seeing plaid. I don't know if I could go back to giving Wrath: Classic a try, even if I had picked the "right" server to play on, without the many conveniences modern WoW provides.
It's unfortunate you didn't get to start in TBC Classic. I levelled fresh characters in Phase 4-5 and there was still a good amount of people levelling, enough to find people to do stuff with but not enough that you'd compete with for quests. WOTLKC's levelling was comparatively dead. If a new progression triology server comes out (in 10 years), you should give it a go again.
@@theoutlander1411 Maybe if Season of Discovery expands into The Burning Crusade, I'll take it as a sign that Wrath of the Lich King will come next, and my opportunity will come then.
I did the most stupid thing with my classic char. I lvled it because i wanted some of the titles from tbc. I lvled my 8/9 tier 3 Hunter with bis weapons etc. That is the dumbest move i have done in my 17 years of wow...
You just nostalgia'd the wrong expansion at the wrong moment.
Nice video, I really enjoyed it. I too played through WOTLK on release and achieved a respectable server 3rd Lich King kill. I was looking forward to classic WOTLK for years, unfortunately as a gamer I'm in a different place than 2010. Add that to the Sweat Lords, Bots, AH Manipulators and Private server crowd it was ruined for me shortly after clearing Ulduar in classic. I left never looking back with regret.
I played with my guildies, then the interest kinda died down. The guild died. And when all was said and done the only thing that was left to progress was an abbundance of GDKPs and that just slaughtered any interest in playing.
bots and gold buying
gdkps
retail mindset (ie. endgame and esports-garbage dungeons) and the sweatlords that revere this kind of design
it's pretty simple, same things will ruin season of discovery, and cataclysm, and any other tricks they want ot pull out of their hat
wow token
SoD being released on ICC, then the cata announcement,bot infestation, store and WoW tokens and also there is like 0 community so you're paying a monthly sub to just sit in Dalaran...
Sitting in Dala? Hell yeah, just like the good old days bro :D
@@SmoothjazGamingTV haha i just miss people being outside of stormwind or orgrimmar gates dueling or even in goldshire many memories there :') great video btw
when p2 dropped they introduced a new dungeon difficulty and no way to tell which you were in a party for. so naturally, we all quit until they added RDF in p4. by then, the game was over. also there was a ton of idiots that showed up in p2 thinking you could skip over normal dungeon content. those same idiots proceeded to wipe nearly every group for 3 months. was good times. i remember logging out for good because people in the Dalaran dungeon didn't know the mechanics
Also a big big big big factor for me is ... the playstyle of "original classic" has been totally modernised by introducing the runesystem. Making your rotation and playstyle potentially more fun than the expansions made it. That is ALL that original wow was lacking for me compared to the later expansions. So now they "fixed" it. Why even play the expansions that weren't even liked in the first place. We say wotlk was so succesful. But wotlk already declined amidst its runtime. so in other words it didnt retain people even back then.
I agree with SoD but not some of the other reasons mentioned. Wotlk Classic had bad pacing:
- T7 which went on *way* too long - seriously that many months for Naxx/OS3D/EoE? The difficulty of T7 was also severely undertuned even though sure they claim they actually upped the difficulty of Naxx 10/25. It wasn't upped enough. It should have been required for you to progress through each wing slowly and methodically, eg. don't even think about doing Plague wing unless you've collected all the gear from Spider wing.
- T8: Ulduar. Again, a raid that went on for far too long. Iron Council Heroic which was a horrible fight for tanks(hello Steelbreaker intermittent movement/hitbox issues). When the typical guild can assemble 3-4 Valynr maces within T8's lifecycle, that's too long. It should have been enough time for 2 legendary maces, tops.
- T9: ToGC turned out that it wasn't as universally disliked as everyone thought it would be. Everyone loved how fast it was to get in and get out. I actually felt ToGC was roughly the right about of time before ICC
- T10: Guilds fatigued from the game in general. HC and SoD were more fun at this point. IMO, the moment the Lich King on normal is dead, is the moment the game is over.
Wrath failed because of a few reasons.
1. Token
2. Boost and Unique Pay for Mount
3. Faction imbalance and no caps.
4. LFD implementation killed world travel and pvp again making it all feel dead, stagnant, and boring.
5. SoD was better. After SoD launch wrath fell off a cliff.
Gdkps ruined guilds
how can a activity in the game that is not even implementend by the devs ruin guilds. gdkps are made and run by humans. the community, me and you ruined guilds. and thank god, better run gdkps then beeing with such people in a guild that do them. u understand? people dont give a F about guilds, they want the pixel and cant get them alone. guilds are mostly used by jelly people that dont have RMT money for gdkps in wotlk. lets be real here.
I quit Wrath Classic when Naxxramas went on for way too long.
Well, that and Ulduar honestly didn't hold me like I was expecting it to when I came back.
Honestly, with the advent of Classic, TBC has cemented its place as my favourite WoW expac of all time.
Idk what caused it but private servers are booming so it is not that people dont want to play it and my conclusion is what ever it is, must be related to Blizz, my bet all those changes or maybe bots idk. People moved to private servers at one point in masses, I my self logged on to check few times on Warmane and it had more players then ever and i played there since 2010. Molten up to Warmane and left when Blizz released classic. Never before Warmane had so many people online ( not talking about numbers shown on web page those are fake and all long time players know it )
Nah, private servers aren't "Booming" like classic is/was. It's just that the players are all condensed onto a few servers. Warmane is probably still the biggest private server and at the time of writing this, their primary server has only 8k players. That's more than enough to feed a vibrant community, but it's not the kind of numbers Blizz Classic servers see.
So in a way I guess you're right and it is related to Blizz in that they need to service many many times more people than private servers could even dream about, and then they refuse to merge servers as all those people eventually stop playing.
@@WingTzu343 Im not just talking from nothing, I do have some insight and it is 8k only on Icecrown server online at moment at this hour... There are bunch of new servers as well some old that also have spike in population... Like I said I do have more insight in all of this then regular player and I dont want to go in to how and why because that would open all another subject and we would go out of this point probably
@@Mishke820 A couple few thousand players isnt "booming" bro this is delusional especially if the most influx of thousands or so players are from Asia who dont speak english yet are allowed on english speaking servers because they bankrolled the recent servers. They dont interact or play with anyone else.
I've heard from a couple people that Warmane is just as bad as WOTLKC. I can imagine it might be better in terms of levelling or needing to go through the raid phases to gear for ICC but all the meta chasing and GDKPs are still present from what I've been told.
Buffed Ulduar loot ilvl, GDKPs, custom class changes, parsing was all crap which ruined Wrath
cata anticipation killed wrath, every wrath player I know went back to warmane right after the cata announcement.
Also the death of casuals in wrath is what really happened because sod got released right after the keyboard turning dad gamers realized they couldnt be carried to a heroic lk or half the time a regular lk kill because nobody can drop defile for you or heal you through being dumb and then here come sod to make you feel like a chad again playing hunter topping dos and not casting a ability while your pet does your dps for you and the boss fights have a single mechanic and even if you do nothing it doesnt matter because 5 people can clear the 10 player raid so all the dads escaped and the sweat lords went over and started doing sod gdkps to now get kicked in the rectum its really full circle
If the issues are community based, then it has nothing to do with the game itself.
I’m playing SOD and loving it, but unfortunately the average WoW player is a bot who might as well be botting software
I mean I think vanilla has proven who is the daddy of WoW.
😂😂😂
They added heirlooms, it’s ruined classic instantly
Everyone i know were farming rep after there first icc either 10 man rep after 25 or 25 man after 10
WoW tokens and Paid Boosts. People can deny, deny all they want.
wow token game later to combat gold buller aka the community and paid boost are also aka the community been lazy and not leveing , u can blame blizzard but the demand of gold buller comes from the ppl buying and blizzard does ban account that buy it
SoD is what killed it in my opinion
GKPD! That is what is killing classic. Nothing worst then having limited time to game between church kids work working out just living normal life. Logging on hoping to get into a raid and only thing being ran is GKPD and only one that has the money to buy some of them insane prices is no lifers or ppl who buy gold. And being a casual player you don’t have 20k + gold to out bid these other ppl
Yep, hope the ban them in Cata like they did SoD
I my honest opinion, servers that shall not be named actually did wrath much better for years, and still do to this very day. Offical wrath was full of bots, boosts, gold farmers and sellers, hackers etc...Its just insane that some random free to play poor 5k population little server who make their money trough cosmetics can succefully deal with bots and gold sellers better than the official Blizz release and have decent authentication system... At this point if everyone is just going to buy boosts and gold, then what is the point of hating on donors at all? Its the same process without convoluted steps. And also, Blizz is shutting down wrath anyways so i just quit when i heard that.
like vanilla and tbc it just isn't good by todays standards is what went wrong. It's nothing but raidlogging with absolutely nothing else to do
There's nothing to do other than raid log right now on WotLK, so there's no reason to log on. ICC is at 30% and the Ruby Sanctum patch only adds 1 boss, and no content outside raiding. WotLK is in Raid Log mode, that's all it is. Meanwhile SoD just got a content release so that's where your Wrath players are. Classic is likely going to be in a cycle of one version of the game being in Raid Log Mode, while the other has fresh content. Personally i enjoyed SoD 1-25 but it's just a big gimmicky for my taste, but i know that's probably not a popular take.
We as a playerbase consume the content quicker than it releases, and there will always be downtime. I didn't play Vanilla Classic, you can't sell me on it but i did play through TBC and i managed to hit Raid Log mode roughly a month into each content phase. It's been much the same in Wrath. You need time each raid tier to actually get the gear from it which means there will always end up being a raid log period where players have exausted all other methods of progression outisde of raids. Having SoD and Classic run side by side and release new content in the gaps seems like a solid strategy to keep players interested. I imagine it's intentional. WoW sort of has this thing where all paths lead to raids and at some point you've exausted everything else and the only thing left is to raid.
If anything, WotLK probably suffered from being "overhyped" and the rose-tinted goggles were just a little too strong going into it. Objectively Wrath was always a tale of two halves, with Nax and Trial feeling like some of the laziest content ever released (even though there are devs that have said it would have been easier to make a new raid than try to repurpose Nax for 25 man lvl 80 content). I know a lot of players no doubt felt like Naxx was gonna be a problem going into Wrath particularly those that actually did it in Vanilla Classic, but i think a lot of people forgot about the Trial of the Crusader patch and just how little it offered.
Obviously GDKP's a are a hot talking point in the classic community. They provide participants incentive to actually play well, and not just bail when the boss they wanted loot from didn't drop thier item, they got bored or the raid started to struggle. On the other hand they give gold buyers exactly what they want. I'm not really on either side of the arguement, but i can see why someone looking from the outside might view it as toxic for the community, particularly when you see things like organiser cuts but I don't think it's any different to the culture of the raid leader hard reserving the best drop from the raid. If GDKP's wern't a thing, i'd garuntee every pick up raid group would have Deathbringer's Will and Dislodged Foreign Object on hard reserve.
I enjoyed Wrath, i'm still raiding once a week and enjoying having casual banter with the raid team while steam rolling ICC (Halion is ass, wcyd). I honestly don't know what world content i would be interested in at this point. Hard to say whether i prefered TBC or Wrath, both had thier highs and lows(Tier 5 and Hyjal being examples of lows for TBC). Haven't played Retail since my guild disbanded during the Covid Pandemic, maybe it's time to check that out?
SOD killed my guild, i don't have anything against Cata, but I'm sticking with SOD as i'm having a good time.
Nobody wants to play a game where a percentage of the population is allowed to CHEAT through Tokens, GDKP, Boosting, Bots, and Gold Buying and Selling. Yes, it's all cheating. Cheating is not "gameplay". You can't defend it.
True, but cheating makes money for Blizz, and they welcome it, but I would guess they even participate in the shadier stuff.
I hope they just merge some of the smaller servers come cata,. Megaservers vs dying servers and Blizz doing nothing about it has always been one of the biggest downfalls with classic imo and now is the time to do something about it though they probably won't because they directly benefit from it with paid faction and server transfers.
I agree & hope they merge too - sadly it makes so much sense I doubt they’ll do it 😭😂
@@SmoothjazGamingTV it's a shame that they used all their good ideas like forced faction balance (though even pve servers could have used that) and banning gdkps on SoD
Saying normal icc is gate kept is also just 100% false the ammiunt of grey parsing shit lords ive seen getting into runs they shouldnt is insane and most the time get left in the run to make it worse
SoD happened, it killed wotlk.
honestly, I'm someone that plays both, and i feel there are others like me. When vanilla and tbc classic were popular imo because retail at the time was completely dogshit. The worst its ever been, so it had a lot of disgruntled retail players like myself. When Wrath launched we had DF, which from a gameplay standpoint, was actually ok.
I mentioned this briefly in a video I just released about Shadowlands - I think you're right. Classic helped people escape retail and refresh rose-tinted glasses on "how WoW should be!". But like you say, Retail is in a decent enough state again to take those players back, and combined with Wotlk's issues (heading into Cata/SoD coming out), not much reason to stick around.
Couldn't disagree more, plenty of challenge left in heroic ICC. Wotlk is only bleeding casuals. I cant speculate on diminishing eu servers cause idc Na bis... sod was exciting for 3.5 days then everyone left. Retail is good right now fully agree but wotlk is only over for those not interested in heroic lunch king.
the developpers also realise that the original game has more sustainablility than "the expansion complication". all this might turn out to be good for wow in the end. if they put their money on developping the game in the same direction as SoD. so funny aye, how "you think you do but you dont" is coming back to bite them in the ass now.
i played a lot and enjoyed everything between the pre-patch and the like first 2 weeks after ulduar. after that the game died to me. i was on a server with a balanced population between horde and alliance and around that time people just started leaving the server and it simply died and the fact that blizz added this new difficulty for heroics that gave you naxx gear that completely killed pugs for me. i couldnt even get to level alts since EVERYBODY was doing this new difficulty requiring you RAID GS already but i didnt have it because i needed to do the normal heroics first so i got stuck there doing nothing besides doing heroics if i managed to get people from my guild that at that time was already on the plans to leave the server LOL.
I agree - at first I thought the new heroics were good fun for quick gear but realised they quickly became a double edged sword for that exact reason. I feel they also should have somehow tinkered with old Raid difficulties to give you better gear, but that's a bi-product of the new dungeon difficulties creating new problems too. Overall I found the new dungeon difficulty still quite helpful for alts on catch-up though.
Me and my bros ninja'd my guild's Val'Anyr and quit cold turkey after Ulduar. Everything went wrong with WotlK Classic. The bots, the management of content, the dead servers, faction imbalance, the devs just don't give a damn.
ended Wotlk with a ninja heist - prime 2008 content right there
Sounds like you murdered your reputation so killed your character's future.
WoW peaked in phase 1 into phase 2 of Cataclysm.
I find it hilarious how many times I heard "WoTLK was peak WoW" or "WoTLK was the best version of WoW". Hope those people with rose tinted goggles can finally see how big of a lie they were spreading. WoTLK was extremely overrated... Also Cata is an extremely underrated expansion.
I'm certainly interested to see how Cata turns out. I didn't like it at the time due to a lot of the social factors (i.e. lots of friends quitting) and other general changes. Now I know what's coming, I think it'll be good to revisit it without these pressures.
Yep. Cata was amazing. It doesn't get enough love.
I permanently quit WoW during Cats. WoW was best during Wrath.
@@allnamesaretakenful You were clearly a baddie then. I played all the way through cata and had 10 85s and I also played all the way through wrath and had 10 80s in it. Cata was far better than wrath but you wouldn't know that because you quit. I played them both to their fullest extent.
@JoshLineberry
I played both, and I still found wotlk was better. Cata was just boring. The raids/dungeons and story were boring along with the game mechanics they added. The only thing I enjoyed from cata and wish they would add to retail is Tol Borad, the world pvp event and mini raid.
#1 they used the same patch in retail for WG also for WG in classic.
gdkp
and everyone now has the efficient try very hard mindset
not rly bad, just that's it. We are done.
Also the rep farming, not rly? I had done maybe 6? On an alt. It's literally only 2x full clears for enough rep for the ring.
But tbh I will say a LOT more people are huffing that "We killed the lichking" despite having never actually killed Arthus Heroic because they flat out can't.
It's very raid log heavy esp since RDF. The reason they pushed it out is because of dead servers, which is a server issue NOT a lack of RDF issue.
They just cemented the world is dead with RDF.
I’m late to the party so I came to endgame recently and damn. Everyone is so autistic about being meta. Kicking people out of heroic dungeons for their lower gs, being toxic to players who don’t immediately know the mechanics or the smart shortcuts they take and end up aggroing, disbanding groups after one wipe. Finally came to a point where I need to raid to get better gear because gammas don’t drop anything, just to find myself surrounded by more autistic man child that made wow their whole thing in life and don’t accept that some people are casual. None of this even feels like it matters anyways because cata is coming and the time spent grinding will be meaningless. Groupfinder made making friends in realm pretty hard amongst the other issues. My server is full but it does feels dead, PvP servers are so unbalanced it’s not even fun 😅 raids are all closed gates gdkp and /or I don’t have the time to invest in serious guild raiding requirement 😂
It's all well and going on NA o o
Jealous 😭
@@SmoothjazGamingTV Personally... I think there are different groups and waves of people (o o) Like... there genuinely are laid back guilds that are there for the game and not for the raids :,) but... I started back in 2023 summer so perhaps it gave enough time for new players to join; those who haven't played before so... as far my experience goes it feels organic ^^'
I think tier 7 being so easy and dull people dropped off before ulduar, which should have launched earlier
The numbers on ironforge show that while there was a drop off, Ulduar started out pretty strong. A lot of the issues with the Classic release started with Ulduar as it was released in its pre-nerf state so it wouldn't be "easy" and there were a lot of people that either couldn't keep up, chose not to keep up, or were disgusted with the elitism and high expectations that came out of the Hard Modes on a hard raid being introduced.
No looking for dungeon at release for me. Haven't played since
Bots ?
I think people always nostalgia praised wrath but in reality TBC was probably the best expansion it's what i heard from several people anyway not that i would know i quit wow before wrath all those years ago only came back a month ago for sod.
First 1/4 of Wrath is great. The next 3/4 is overrated as hell. TBC is and forever will be the best expansion of WoW. TBC > Vanilla > Everything else
@@Allexstrasza How is Naxx 25 great? LMAO it's an easier joke version of a raid that people already did in Vanilla.
You kids are not any less nostalgic about TBC. Classic, TBC, Wrath all had crappy class and PVE mechanics. They had no content, only if you had an IQ of 90 or lower.
@@txdmsk ohh here we go we got a 9000 IQ gamer here who decides what is fun or not fun based on peoples IQ levels.
@@OMGiTzSpAnKy Because it's the first raid you go to in the expansion, and gearing up is fu. The other raids after is pretty mediocre and the 5 man dungeons gets boring fast when all you're doing is spamming heroics for badges anyways.
this guys buddies kinda sound like cry babies about Cata TBH
i went back to wrath to do one ICC even though i knew sod was better and the guild i ran with tried taking items from people that won them just so their guild members could get heroic loot
My ending was not because of expansion, but because of total disregard by company. Myself as primarily casual bg pvp player with secondary focus for rated arenas. Having 15yo bugs in game we pay premium for, sure whatever, atleast its "old school experience", but problem is... that its not. The fact that they werent able to fix for one year freaking warsong gulch to state it was in during real wotlk (nitro boots flag ehm ehm, this was fixed during tbc). They just took vanilla bg code, placed it in wotlk and bam, duck all fixes and changes made during tbc, players dont need em right..right? This coupled with absolute INSANE bot issue was enough for me, although i understand this is issue polluting any online game today, still, their stance and slowness towards it was affecting my gameplay so much that it made game unplayable to me (unability to play decent solo que battleground).
I dont agree with retail, but it just my subjective view, as i stopped playing after releasing prepatch and completely messing whole ui (classic ui andy, i wasnt willing to get used to new ui, but thats more of a inner excuse to stop playing game i wasnt happy with for too many years (legion)). The point is, for money we payed for playing wotlk, it was in such a terrible state.
Maybe its just me, but i feel like i could get better gameplay experience on privates, and thats huge issue.
What Went WRONG for Wrath of the Lich King Classic?
- Ingame shop
- Wow token
- changes
I didn't even play this shit since blizzard ruined classic with ingame shop in TBC, why should I? The service is shit, the changes made to a game are terrible.
Vanilla was perfect, but blizzard was too greedy to keep it perfect, so fuck them, I have enough great private servers.
Back to your private where is an ingame shop,gold sellers that are chinese and devs and changes that u love because"well they are private " out of here trash
WTF would you release SoD and last phase of WotLK qt the same time ?!
Blizzard is dumb.
didnt watch but the simple answer to the titles question is cata was at the end of it and not many people wanted that
2:35 👍
False. Tons of people want cata. Cata had more subs than all of vanilla and most of tbc and held over 10 million subs for it's entire lifespan, so to say not many want cata is straight up wrong. Mostly the trashers don't want cata.
@@JoshLineberry sound like you want cata. have fun playing it with all 10 others that wanted it
@@JoshLineberry Cata was the end of the Vanilla experience though, the death of the old world, talent system and resource system as well as the art style, holy hell I hate the retail art style.
Wrath is kinda a shitty expansion. It was somewhat fun in its own time, the same way it was great to ride a horse 500 years ago, but I refuse to commute today via horse.
It had no endgame, no solo PVE or 5 man content. The raid mechanics were meh. The raids were mostly nice though, just quite smooth brained. Arthas was a caricature of himself. Absolutely hated what they did to him outside of a few nice moments, such as his death.
Bro the mass manufacture motorcar is barely over 100 years old. We been horsing around for thousands of years.
I want to play just just too busy
Sweats and time "killed" Wotlk.
the expansion was overhyped. end of discussion
I was very excited about Wrath classic, but the talent trees had been changed from original Wrath, and they announced that RDF would not be included, I left the game. I would have quit at the announcement of Cataclysm anyway
what kind of guilds were you runnin with who did rep rep runs over progression? Sounds like you targeted some shitters.
Trust me I was just as confused as you
Dude, Wrath sucks thats why ppl are leaving it. There's nothing else to it
Pretty sure SOD stole everyone :P
Definitely seems that way - it is great fun & excited for phase 2!
@@SaxonBlue5771 Questing and leveling experience 😆. You mean how everyone has questie that does the lveling for them right?
the hunter is nothing without the hunt. a lot of people don't like playing a version of WoW where the lich king is dead. the grandiosity of the world is greatly diminished when they have to invent new bad guys. the further the game stays from original game, the thinner the experience and mystique
If that's true then surely the people are excited for a villain that predates both Arthas and Illidan coming in cata right?
another smooth brain take why would ppl even be exited for vanilla 2019 if everyones know how to kill everyboss same for tbc and other expac hell then private server where never good because everyone knew how to kill the boss
Now you know "we" are heading into Cata. Nope im not included in that "we" as its a terrible decision to continue doing the same thing and expect a different result.
It should have been Classic+ from the very start of classic, even I know this and i was new to WoW having never played retail or any other version prior to classic launch.
smooth brains like you say classic plus but you had your classic + it tbc,wrath and foward , sod is not classic + it just vanilla with runes from cata and other expac abilities
how was it classic+ when they rolled out patches exactly like it was back in the day for "authentic experience", shut up and go back to retail lol@@juanrollel3693
So boring anywais repeating the same shit everyday for frost. Most boring raid also. E
Its simple, Wrath simply isnt good, and only is remembered as such because of primacy bias.
Wrath is crap
Wrath was aggressively overrated by the community. And the dev team even made positive changes to give us more to do and it was still just okay. The truth is T7 and T9 were dog and ulduar lasted so long that it felt the xpac basically hinged entirely on ICC. And even then right after ICC launched we got SoD. Genuinely dont understand why anyone wants wrath era but i hope for their sake they get it. Il never play wotlk again
People realized WOTLK SUCKED
people realised cata was next so they "got gone while the gettin' was good"
@@stfuemokid101cata was way better than wrath.
@@JoshLineberry if you say so. i didnt care for it but to each their own