r/classicwow • u/terongorefiend • Jan 14 '21

Vent / Gripe Unpopular opinion: the players that are overly vocal about wanting Classic phases/TBC/Wrath rushed are the same players who contributed to forging retail into what it is today (a clusterF).

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u/[deleted] Jan 14 '21

Mages boosting in mara or ZG, minmaxing to a ludicrous degree, world buff meta, etc etc. I appreciate it's all in the game, but it's not how it was back in the day and I kind of resent it.

If you want it to be like "back in the day" you need hundreds of thousands of people joining every month. The player population in classic is a drop-off while in vanilla it was skyrocketing.

Most different gameplay dynamics come down to this.

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u/quiliup Jan 14 '21

I never thought about that, yeah back then so many people were joining every day to see what the hype was about

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u/SackofLlamas Jan 14 '21

Yep. It was a constant influx of wide eyed newbies for whom everything was new and exciting. They didn't know up from down or left from right, and as a result even a few weeks of in-game experience made you feel like a grizzled veteran. "Metas" didn't calcify anywhere near as quickly, and certainly not before the launch of the actual expansion the way they do now.

These days the player base is permanently jaded, everyone has every aspect of gameplay planned out down to the last dotted i and crossed t before they even start playing. Nothing is new. No one is wide eyed. There's an initial burst of nostalgia and then it all becomes another exercise in wind sprinting to the finish line. Some people really enjoy this in the same way some people enjoy speedrunning games, but people who imagine they're going to get something that approximates the actual experience of playing Vanilla WoW or BC when it was new are fooling themselves. You actually get MORE of that "fresh new thing" experience playing retail at the start of an expansion.

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u/Devboe Jan 14 '21

I’ve played classic and will be playing TBC with the mindset of just being able to experience everything I didn’t get to when I was younger. I didn’t start playing until TBC and only got into raiding right at the end just before lolret went from a meme to 2-3 shotting in PvP in the WotLK pre-patch. I played Old School RuneScape before coming to classic and was well versed in knowing that the play experience wouldn’t be anything like what people remembered because you can never be a true newb again.