Opinions on classic WoW?

[Darkon331]

Anyone here looking forward to classic or have memories/stories worth sharing? Hard pressed to find someone who doesn't want to try it but wouldn't mind hearing opinions too on if we should push them for 1.13 or just go to BC after we kill KT in naxx 40

[b00tyclapper]

classic wow is really grindy. even more so than modern WOW. also getting gold is hard.

[Damian Cunliffe]

My opinion of classic WoW is... hard to describe. I played WoW from 2005 until I quit for good during WotLK in 2009, which means I played in classic WoW for around 1 year and a few months before Burning Crusade released. I'm not even joking when I say it was probably the best year of my life - not because I've had a crappy life but because classic WoW was amazing.

I can remember my first day perfectly. I got out of the starter zone of Northshire Abbey and began questing in Elwynn Forest and thought it was great how the map was so big and had so many other people in it to meet, make friends with and work with to kill tough enemies. Then I went to Stormwind and was amazed at how big the city was, all the NPC's and big buildings and stuff. I went into the Cathedral of Light to see the paladin trainer and get a quest and it was great how it didn't just look like a cathedral, it FELT like a cathedral, with the holy music and everything. Made me really feel like a knight.

Eventually I finished all the quests in Elwynn Forest and was told to go to Westfall and I went over this bridge and into a totally new zone with no loading screen and once again, I was amazed. This time I was amazed by the music, which really set the mood for Westfall. The moment I set foot in that zone the music began to tell me a story. Just the music! It told me that this used to be a beautiful place with thriving farms and happy families, but something terrible happened and that was all gone. I stood on a hill and looked at the size of Westfall and realized it was as huge as Elwynn Forest was. This was the moment when I learned you could right-click when you opened the map to zoom out and see the whole continent. A whole continent with like 20 zones, all as big (or bigger, or almost as big) as Elwynn Forest and Westfall. Amazing. Later I learned you could right-click again and there was a SECOND continent, with even bigger provinces!

Honestly, the pure fun I had in this game is completely impossible to describe. World of Warcraft actually wasn't a game back then, it was a huge world with a real community. You could be running through a zone to get somewhere, and you'd see someone running toward you going on the same road but in the opposite direction, and you'd recognize them as that person you quested with 3 months ago, and you'd talk to them and have a pleasant conversation with an old companion you did stuff with. It was excellent. The world was huge and dangerous and you had to make friends to get things done. My favourite memory was when me and a friend were questing in Westfall and we saw a dark foggy spooky looking zone across the river. We spent a few minutes trying to decide if we should go there or not, both agreeing we would probably just get horribly killed by whatever was over there since we didn't have a quest to go there yet which probably meant we weren't the right level. We crossed the river and entered this dark and spooky zone, the whole atmosphere changed and we saw our first enemy with a skull instead of a level. We tried to fight it and it killed us in 2 or 3 hits.

I loved Burning Crusade too - I might even have enjoyed it more than classic but in a different way. I loved classic for its world and its community. The whole game overall, in general, was perfect. Even just logging in and taking a ride around my favourite province to see if any newbies needed help was fun. I loved Burning Crusade for its endgame content and raids. Wrath of the Lich King was where I noticed WoW becoming something I didn't recognize anymore. Even if I went back to the old zones of the Eastern Kingdom, Kalimdor or Outland it wasn't the same anymore. Everything was so easy now. Mobs that used to be elite weren't elite anymore. The world didn't feel dangerous anymore. Everything was now about rushing to the maximum level to get purples and achievements. It wasn't the same, and so I quit.

I came back for like 3 days when Warlords of Draenor released and saw what an absolute horror show WoW had become. Sat in my garrison clicking buttons to generate gold and experience. So boring.

None of these memories are just nostalgia either - I tried a private server in 2016 and entered the world of classic WoW for the first time in like 10-years. I did this as an experiment - I wanted to know, once and for all, if my memories of how good classic WoW was were just nostalgia, or if it really was that good. I decided I would play it for a couple of days to see. You know what happened? I spent 6 months completely addicted to it once again. I got to level 60 in that time and along the way I did every dungeon I could get a group for. All my old favourites - Deadmines, Stockades, Shadowfang Keep, Blackrock Depths, Sunken Temple... and I had a great big grin on my face the entire time. For me it was like the feeling you get when you've been away from home for a while, and when you get back you feel all cosy in the safety and familiarity of where you live. That's what classic WoW is to me. I log in and it's like "Ah, it's so good to be home".

So you can bet I'll be playing classic WoW when it releases officially (unless they ruin it with sharding, cross-realm and an in-game store, which, let's face it, it's Blizzard, so they probably will find a way to ruin it, in which case I'll just find a private server again).

[Dumbstep]

I'm afraid it'll have too many "quality of life" changes in the final release but I'll be checking it out for sure, even tho my expectations are lowered a bit, it can never be the same game it was back then, since it's gonna be mostly people playing for nostalgia sake and hardcore veterans. Hoping I'm wrong tho heh.

[JLD]

At first, I get really excited about Classic WoW because of the great memories...but then I remind myself it wasn't so much about the gameplay as it was the community. I'm an old fart, and I got into WoW late, when it was exploding and Doomhammer had a two-hour wait to login. There were so many new/casual players like me in the playerbase that it was just simple fun, even though it was grindy and crowded. But when last I tried WoW most of the old friends were gone and the new community was pretty toxic. A lot of the content was so quick and random that the playerbase felt more like a FPS lobby than a MMO. That has killed my interest. Maybe that's not fair to Classic WoW but it is how I feel.

[Huzzinda]

Classic WoW, is something worth looking forward to, on paper. I remember having tons of fun playing even though parts of it were extremely grueling IE 8 hour AVs I only disliked that because I wanted the bonus honor from the end of the AV I didn't actually mind the struggle to win, even the struggle leading to a loss was enjoyable for the most part. I think cross realm, DAILY QUESTS and LFR are the biggest mistakes Blizzard made by far. I am in no way a NO CHANGES guy when it comes to classic I think many good ideas and changes based on better technology would be a great implementation I would love to see zones change and NPCs move around as you progressed through some storylines especially when thinking about important quests like class quests being, WoW has always had this weird story relationship with players that each character was seemingly the ONLY hero/person to do any given quest no NPC has ever been helped and I think in WotLK when they released the phasing of zones based on story personal story progression I never felt so motivated to do so many quests in classic Dailies did not exist so it would be even more fun to grind up that gold doing all the quests around also progression the phasing and stories in the zones. As much as I think WoW Classic is needed more for the modern dev team to really understand what made the game good, they have a ton of room for error, and most importantly I think it will not be the savior or be long-term reinvigorating for the game.

For me, a long-term fix that I think would make players happier longer would be something in the realm of seasonal servers, think Diablo season, not weather season.

[Ryukinshin]

I started playing WoW about a week after it launched, I can recall that I had a really good first impression. My opinion these days is far more cynical. A lot of people are experiencing nostalgia and looking back on it with rose-tinted goggles I think, it actually did have a large number of problems. Some people liked some of the things that I'd consider to be problems, like having to spam a channel to find a group, and then physically travel to the location of the dungeon or raid and summon everyone else (or they all just run there too.) But other things I'd think you'd have to be crazy to remember in a good light, like the PvP system, which literally required that you have no life whatsoever in order to get anywhere. It had 14 ranks which required an honorable kill quota that doubled with each rank and if you fell under a certain amount of kills for the week you'd actually lose rank, the quota got absolutely ridiculous once you got up to rank 10 or so and you'd lose weeks of progress if you tried to take a break from it. As a result, you couldn't really strive for the highest ranks in PvP and still raid too, it was choose one or the other.

Battlegrounds took sometimes up to 2 or more hours to queue as cross-realm wasn't a thing and a match of Alterac Valley could go on for several days or even weeks. In a way, I kind of liked the cross realm because I'd grow familiar with seeing the same people all the time, even on the enemy side. I can even recall that I made an alt on the opposite faction just to talk to them because I played against them on a regular basis.

Don't get me wrong, I haven't played WoW in at least three years because of how bad it had become over time, classic is leaps and bounds better than the game was when I quit, and probably better than it is now (I wouldn't know.) If there was one thing classic WoW had, it was a damn good community. I can also recall that dungeons and raids required a lot more thought and preparation, you couldn't just face roll your way through them like you can now, you actually had to play your role and use crowd controls, and be super careful not to pull anything extra. Loot felt better too, Epics were just that... epic, one didn't simply grind to max level and load up on epics, when you got one, it was a really good feeling... and legendary's? Shit, people would spam the chat for an hour at the mere mention. "Did someone say [Thunderfury, blessed blade of the windseeker]?" Hell, it's a meme these days.

Overall, not everything about it was great and some of the changes made were a major improvement, such as adding arena in BC. I'm sure I'll catch a lot of flak for suggesting that group finder was a good feature, but that's my opinion, bite me. I feel like a lot of people are just remembering the noob magic. (That feeling you get when you play a new game and everything is new and exciting and things keep surprising you in a pleasant way.) and they want to feel that again. Unfortunately you only get it once per game.

[Huzzinda]

you bring up some good points on how unforgiving the PvP system was, but yes the BG PvP scene was basically made as a separate game because people played it as a separate game I raided and did some BGs and I enjoyed both but I wouldn't want to do just one of those activities, a lot of people had wow subs just for PvP and didn't PvE at all the introduction of battle groups and the ability to queue for a BG and not stand at the portal was convenient but those things ultimately take away from the game. There was something special about same server BG and being able to see those same alliance at a dungeon or raid door and fight them again or gank someone and have them swap over to that main you have seen many times in BGs I have made friends (as seemingly you have) with players from the other faction because we played against each other so many times in BGs There is something special when you see a familiar enemy and you wait for them to finish his fight so you can square off in your own 1v1 rare but actually special moments.

LFG is another system that removed another aspect of world PvP and actual Player Reputation amongst the fellow player base. YES it could be annoying to spam in cities trying to fill a group to me, it was worse having to fill the group and travel to the dungeon that could be 30 mins alone. imagine a world with dungeon summoning stones (not meeting stones) and those stones would allow one person to summon another and being near any stone would put you in the LFG channel attached to all major cities.

Many aspects of the game are diminished by convenience my first major raiding guild I got accepted because I had played with members previously and they remembered me being competent in the dungeons we did MONTHS before applying to the guild having a good reputation as a good player and a decent person would allow guilds to accept people that maybe didn't have the experience or item level that would be required today. now all you can do is base your recruitment off of "achievements" and item level with no idea if the player is competent or intelligent as all of those accolades are earned in group environments.

[Ryukinshin]

It's a trade-off for sure. Some people think it's worth it, some don't. I like a few quality of life improvements that were added to make it a bit less grindy or tedious to do certain things but some things are indeed just straight up holding your hand and walking you through things. Wrath of the Lich King was a good example, for how popular it was as an expansion, it was the first time a tank could pull whole rooms in a dungeon while you just AOE them down.

[Vanitas Remnant]

As a Vanilla WoW Player, I would rather pull out my teeth one by one with plyers than go back to Classic WoW

[Lars]

Played vanilla since day one. Loved every minute of it. Stopped playing after I don't know which expansion, when they had dumbed down pretty much everything step by step. Tried playing vanilla on pservers, no rose tint here, still love it.

What I like about it is the commitment you make, that the world is a world and if you're not careful it will kill you. I love that by knowing the game, you will get an advantage and when you loot that piece of gear you know it will make a difference. Everyone can find their niche in the economy, skill wise or socially for that matter. Basically a game where there is no hand holding, you character is useless initially, you start with a blank slate and it's all up to you as a player. But yeah, I can understand it's not for everyone.