While I agree that the dynamic of ‘community feel’ has changed, it had to. If you are on a Stormrage-like server, there are 700k characters or whatever. You don’t know all of them, so while you may find bonds with a select few it is hardly the same as ‘knowing everyone in the neighborhood’.
Conversely, if you chose a server that died out for whatever reason, sure - you have a great community. Of 10. Sorry about that economy, or those 20man raids or whatever. Most MMOs solve this by reducing number of servers, Blizzard did it by cross-realm stuff. Or heaven forbid, pay through the nose to move servers which isn’t a great solution.
Either one changes community dynamic. But in an MMO, even if you don’t personally interact with many others, seeing those other people around makes a big difference. Flying into a well populated Orgrimmar is way more exciting than flying into what seems like an abandoned city.
If you need a community feel, you join a guild. That can be easier said than done.
Personally, I’m probably going to dive back in having been gone since WoD, but NOT because of classic. I’m looking forward to the level scaling of zones coming in the next patch. I feel I’m the demographic they’ve been shooting for all these years with the various QoL changes - WoW grew with me. 2004 WoW was awesome. In 2004. That feeling will not come back because they open up old servers with broken mechanics, old graphics, and time-sucking raids.
I like playing old games generally. I still replay Unreal, Half Life, early Ultimas, etc., on a regular basis. I welcome the opportunity to be able to replay one of my very favorite ‘old’ games as it was when I played it the most. Whether it’s because the design ‘holds up’ or whether it’s just a nostalgia trip, or some combination of the two, I’m much more interested at this point in revisiting an old game that I loved than in playing the current iterations which lost me years ago.
That said, I don’t expect to put a lot of time into WoW Classic even if I do sub, because frankly I don’t have a lot of time for gaming, much less unpausable multiplayer gaming. But the odd Scarlet Monastery PUG for old time’s sake? Sure, maybe.
Yeah, exactly. The big thing that’s changed now is that there isn’t really any content you can’t at least sample on your own. People lucky enough to have access to enough competent friends to do organized raiding and challenge dungeons and enough time to regularly commit to those things, etc can still get to that. You’re probably not going to be able to stumble into that situation and maybe you could have in the past (though that wasn’t my experience at all), but it’s still viable. Meantime, the rest of us can at least see the training wheels version.
I am not sure I will try this again, but these classic/progression? servers can be very rewarding, especially when they are combined with newer QoL features. If they are successful enough to bring in a sufficient player base to build a living community, the experience can be very enjoyable.
I went through two of the recent new Everquest progression server startups, and the experience of playing from 1 to 50 with a brand new community of players that really seem to appreciate the gameplay is better than I would have imagined. Sure, you get your fair share of idiots as with any group, but building new friendships through grouping, joining a guild, and possibly raiding are hard to beat if you like this sort of thing.
One huge improvement that Everquest did was to drastically reduce your time commitment to get to the good stuff. Leveling was vastly improved along with many QoL features including no corpse runs, pet summons that never die while zoning, instanced dungeon/zone (picks) that automatically spawn when there are too many people in the zone, out of combat fast regen of health and mana, etc. The last server ruleset even put in NPCs that would spawn your own raid target zone each locking time period so every guild that wants to raid, can and doesn’t have to compete with spawns being up or zones being populated. With the accelerated character progression, focused community, and knowledge of game systems being known for so long, you can accomplish all of this within weeks, and well within the 3 month or so period even if you are a focused casual player.
I haven’t read up on the WoW strategy here, or if it has even been publicized, but there can definitely be potential here if you liked the game at the time and want a streamlined visit down that path again.
Anyone else have the Demo for this? Looks like they are limiting playtime to 60 mins, then you have to cooldown for 30 mins before being allowed back on.
First Impressions:
This a lot harder than current WoW! Easy to die if you pull more than 1 mob. Gonna have to use ALL of my abilities to survive multi Mob pulls, similar to a PVP fight…
Weapon skills! yay I missed those, and am also missing my hits a lot…
It looks very nice!
Damnit! they wont let me leave westfall, So much for my Dwarven pilgrimage to IronForge…
Gonna jump back on in about 30 mins, hit me up on my wifes account (She won a virtual ticket), Nixee#1902, If you want a partner. Horde need not apply.
I really do not need a demo. I played the private servers not too long ago and remember the difficulty quite well. Things like skill and aggro management will be factors again. Yay!
Yes, it’s Classic WoW running on the modern engine. So there are a few things still there in the demo that won’t be in the shipping product, but generally a good representation of Classic.
Which I’m not a fan of after 15 years. I’ll stick to retail.
15 years ago, when EQ was the only ‘real’ alternative.
When I was younger, and had time for 6-8months to level to 60, and then to participate in 40man raids.
I still play retail, but I have no need to go back even if there are some parts that I enjoyed. If I need something more/better/different from today’s WoW, there are other alternatives.
There’s a core of people who enjoyed playing vanilla on private servers and they’ll love it. BUT. So many people are going to try this out and bounce right off. We all forget just how primitive WoW was in 2004.
Which is why I think it is pretty smart to lump this in with the regular WoW subscription.
Though, having played on some private servers, and put a good chunk of hours 40+, there is a certain charm to Vanilla WoW that is missing from the game, it is so much more brutal and slow. Which makes it a really fun podcast listening game. It is much more of a grind than current WoW, but not so much of a grind to be off-putting.
Either way, I will be subbed day one when this is available.
I didn’t join until WotLK, but a lot of the old mechanics and quests were still in there. I do kind of miss things like an epic, world-spanning quest to forge a key to get into a certain part of BRD. Or running across a lone quest-giver unconnected to anything hanging out in a chasm nobody is really supposed to be, asking for help to survive several waves of enemies. Post-Cataclysm, it’s far more like a theme park than a virtual world.
From a pure cost vs revenue type calculation, they’re almost certainly going to lose money on WoW Classic. They’re putting real effort into it and I would be downright shocked if it held on to 50k players three months after release.
