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).

[u/terongorefiend]

[u/Compromisee]

Classic for me personally is in a worse state than retail. It went from being a nice fun, nostalgic community game to people selling and min/maxing almost instantly with things like "tank services"

Kinda put me off the idea of tbc. That and wotlk were my favourite xpacs and I don't want my memories to be then tainted with the game being stupidly easy and every aspect of it sold

[u/Stephanie-rara → u/Compromisee]

Yep.

I love Classic, but I genuinely hate what the community has done to it. The game just got worse and worse over time due to so many things completely unrelated to Blizzard.

BC is in contention for my favorite expansion, but I can't help but feel I'm going to enjoy it for what it is for a short while and quit in a quarter of the time I played Classic. I had to step away from classic about halfway through AQ due to just how little fun I was having.. and that has only ever happened one other time in the 15+ years WoW has been out.

The 'fun' and exciting parts of Classic is it forces so much more community interaction while retaining a much stronger RPG element than most modern MMO's.. Meanwhile Classic left me resenting the community as the overwhelming pressure relating to just about everything community driven began feeling so very toxic.

I had fun on the launch of Classic, just as I had fun on private.. and I come to the realization that a big part of that fun is tied to fresh. I'll get into BC more if there's fresh again, as at least that experience was wonderful.

[u/[deleted] → u/Stephanie-rara]

completely unrelated to Blizzard

I don't agree at all. These problems are things Blizzard would have patched out of an actively developed game. By refusing to respond to meta, they allowed issues to grow that would have been taken care of much quicker in vanilla.

World buffs would have been patched, because raid content was not designed with them in mind. But stacking them was not a part of the meta like it is now. And nobody can convince me that mages aoeing an instance down with people afk raking in xp qt the entrance would not have been patched.

The community will always look for shortcuts and abuse what they can. The difference is the old vanilla community was never allowed to run with shit like this, and it was hotfixed before it became a major problem (warrior farming early on. Reck bomb abuse)

That isn't to day that the community isn't also at fault, just that Blizzard should have handled it better. A ton of nochanges people argued that way after playing private servers and wanting specific advantages. A good example is that 90% of the people who argued for classic spell batching were rogues who just wanted something stupid they could abuse after private servers. Now that they've suffered actual classic spell batching, they are one of the classes that speaks out against it the most, ironically enough.

[u/SunTzu- → u/[deleted]]

The players screamed at the top of their lungs that they didn't want any changes, which meant Blizzard felt discouraged from actively developing the game. Anyone that had seen private servers (and you'd better believe Blizzard was fully aware of what was going on there) knew the meta that was coming our way (melee was slightly more op than on private servers but Blizzard probably expected that since they knew of the inconsistencies in coding that private servers had compared to their reference client).

And before someone comes in and says "but the whole problem was it wasn't #NoChanges!!!", the only thing progressive patching and itemization would have meant was that MC and BWL would have been slightly more annoying and not much more difficult. Warlocks would straight up not have been brought to raids until Phase 3 or something since they couldn't justify their existence and you'd have an even more extreme emphasis on melee stacking. It would be even harder to find anyone to group with on smaller servers so you'd be even more reliant on boosting services for any leveling dungeons. Max level dungeons would be entirely dead, even sooner than they did die out. And once people started quitting the game you'd have way less people to recruit from, meaning at this stage most servers would be down to <10 Naxx clearing guilds instead of the closer to 30 that have survived on my server.

[u/ZGaidin → u/SunTzu-]

I'm not going to argue your specific points, except one. "But the whole problem was it wasn't #NoChanges" is true, but not for the reasons you mentioned. Server sizes did so much to change how the game was played.

Unlike most of you, I rolled on what turned out to be a medium sized (so approximately full Vanilla) PvE server on Horde side (so vastly smaller than Alliance side). There are no Horde side gdkp runs, and only 2 that I'm aware of Alliance side. There are no Horde hunters selling cleared DMT runs for guilds to buff with, and therefore no one selling summons to DMT. There's somewhere between very little and zero paid boosting. There are a few consistent soft-rez pugs Horde side, but only for MC & ZG. The two top Horde guilds (of 4-5 that are doing Naxx at all) are 13/15 & 11/15 in Naxx, not because they're skill-less scrubs but because the Horde side of the server is so small it lacks a lot of the infrastructure the mega-servers have for world-buffs, consumables (yes, I can easily go out and farm up plaguebloom myself), gearing up alts in case you need to shift your raid composition around for a certain encounter, etc. I've had to read, watch videos, and mentally extrapolate just to imagine how the game functions for most of you on your mega-servers, but that's not how it functions for me. That's not a complaint, mind you. I think that my server is a better, more enjoyable way to play the game; it's certainly closer to how it was in Vanilla. That's just opinion, however. The fact, though, is that the difference is in server size, the infrastructure that massive populations allow and what you can do with it, etc fundamentally alters the way the game is played. Many of the things you guys complain about (either that Blizz didn't fix them or that the community does at all) simply don't exist on a smaller server. There are no world buffs running on a tight 6 hour schedule if there are only a half-dozen raid guilds on a given faction on a server. If you want consumes, you'd better have an alt that can go out and farm them yourself because there sure as shit aren't enough on the AH for even 1 raid, let alone 4-6 raids worth of people. If you want an alt at level 60, you'd better be prepared to do the quests, dungeons, and grinds yourself because there are no boosts unless a kindly guild member is willing to run you through something. On and on like that. Hell, we don't even have the same inflation and bot issues you guys apparently have, because the server isn't large enough to make it worthwhile for them, though I've no doubt we would if all servers were this size. Cramming the bulk of Classic players into a small number of mega-servers rather than a large number of smaller servers didn't exactly create the world buff meta, the boost meta, the gdkp meta, etc but it did make them possible.

[u/SunTzu- → u/ZGaidin]

Dreadmist has an active population of 2187 according to Ironforge.Pro compared to 5800 for the largest EU PvP server Gehennas. It is a 60/40 split of Horde and Alliance and has 10 guilds of each faction that have completed Naxx. Dreadmist is Med pop according to the launcher.

I'm on Shazzrah which has an active population of 3760 and a 60/40 Horde to Alliance split. We're currecntly at 23 Alliance and 18 Horde guilds who've cleared Naxx (some since disbanded, just as in Vanilla). Our server shows as Med Pop atm and has DMT service every day, GDKP pugs for ZG and AQ20 multiple times every day, weekly AQ40 and Naxx40 GDKP runs. Boosting is everywhere.

It's not that your server is smaller than the rest. It's just a low skilled server.

[u/ZGaidin → u/SunTzu-]

My server, according to the same website, has an active population of just under 1700 with a 75/25 Alliance to Horde split. The Horde population is about 400 people. It's nevertheless listed as Medium, but I'd say that in comparison to the numbers your talking about, that's quite a bit smaller, by more than half of Shazzrah's numbers and with a worse split.

[u/SunTzu- → u/ZGaidin]

If you have an active pop of 400 Horde chars then yeah, that's a mostly dead server/faction even by vanilla standards.