I'm fully aware about that stuff and was talking about the actually difficulty of the raids. The things u are talking about are tedious for sure and it's not that easy to get 40+ man doing the grind fast but the moment a new raid tier releases it will be cleared within a very short amount of time, the first tiers even with less then 40 man. The difficulty of the raids is just not comparable to todays mythic raiding, espacially for private server guys who are clearing that stuff for many years.
Blizzard is going to release classic vanilla then milk the shit out of this franchise and release a "classic" version of every expansion following their original timelines. In 14 years from now we'll be sitting here on the cusp of Classic Legion patch 7.3.5 having another discussion about wanting classic vanilla again.
Ofc it is. Theorycrafting and correct gearing alone makes a whole lot of a difference, you would be amazed how badly even players who did naxx back then were at handling this. The knowledge about the right gearing decisions just wasn't there at the time.
It was also quite common to have like 10 people who did basically nothing even in a naxx raiding team. Other factors were bad pc's (hello 10 fps) & internet connections (constant dc's thanks to dialup..), all gone today. Not even talking about knowing tactics for every encounter. Private servers may not be 100% the same tuning like retail in 2006 was but it isn't far away and maybe even harder at some bosses.
I did clear naxx multiple times up to sapphiron back then and killed him and KT a single time after a guild fusion which kinda removed the 10 "bad" players, it was amazing how much easier stuff seemed to be with 40 good people but still not optimized gear, shitty pc's and connections. Now just imagine how it would be with 40 good people, 60fps+, stable connections, encounter and theorycrafting knowledge.
This hasn't improved at all. I've raided and pvp'd on several private servers, the biggest area of evolution is in PvP. Watch a PvP movie and you will see a huge change in the way duels take place, they heavily revolve around potion usage and engineering. PvE Theorycrafting is not more advanced at all. In 2005/6 a large portion of the more hardcore endgame raiding community worked on a knowledge base for people to utilize called Elitist Jerks, it had hundreds of pages of resources. This same knowledge base doesn't exist today, we have BiS lists and hit cap for the modern player who just wants the immediate and easy to understand answer.
I say again, it's not possible to do significantly more dmg today that back in 2006, Frostbolt still takes 2.5 seconds to cast, today Rogues regenerate energy at the exact same rate as they did in 2006. The only difference is like you said, technology improving. But I haven't seen any new strats for killing bosses from these guilds clearing farming Naxx to convince me that have a much better understanding of the content. From my experience players are still referring to old guides and any resources they can dig up from 2006.
My gear was full Grand Marshal with a few pieces AQ40 and Naxx. :3
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They probably did, but after 10+ years there's a good chance they culled the CVS to save space.
The game might have gotten up to build 2xxxx but there are likely hundreds of thousands of revisions to get those 20,000 builds, those revisions take up an awful lot of space, not just on the repository server but also the developers PCs.
Especially when vast amounts of the data is binary resources which can't be diffed easily by verson control software.
Dragonflight: Grand Marshal Hottage
PC Specs: Ryzen 7 7800X3D | ASUS ROG STRIX B650E-I | 32GB 6000Mhz DDR5 | NZXT Kraken 120
Inno3D RTX 4080 iChill | Samsung 970 EVO Plus 2TB | NZXT H200 | Corsair SF750 | Windows 11 Pro
Razer Basilisk Ultimate | Razer Blackwidow V3 | ViewSonic XG2730 | Steam Deck 1TB OLED
First months: Massive interest
6 months->1 year: Declining interest
1 year->: Vanilla enthusiasts (if standard sub is required, a lot of these will still pay private servers for free instead)
Mother pus bucket!
The source control systems changed over the last 15 years. For example VSS -> TFS -> Perforce -> GIT. Migrating from one to another source systems means you lose the change histories and branches. So basically you can't go back back to the time before the current versioning system. And even if they have an old VSS backup, the whole build system might not exists anymore or are still used for the current build, so they need to recreate the complete buildsystem.
Then you need to backport all those exploit fixes, crawling through thousands of changes in the 2.0+ builds, maybe even over different versioning systems. This is a huge task, especially if those fixes rely on changes that are post 2.0+
On the infrastructure site, you can't use the current environments, since the retail is still using them. So you need to adjust the complete networks and build a shadow battle.net/login servers since all those servers don't understand the clients from 1.x anymore. Nost and other servers used a different architecture since the whole server is a re-coded emulation.
Well while I know EJ existed back then most people I raided with didn't use that stuff, even late into naxx. Maybe this was a language issue and native english speaking guilds did handle this better, idk. Today u will have way more spread information and as u said, easy solutions like BiS lists everyone will follow. This contributes highly in getting 40 well itemized people together which I think we all agree on was and will be the hardest part about raiding.
Even when we were progressing in Naxxramas, we still did 10-15man Molten Core runs to get people their Binding of the Windseekers, Eye of Sulfuras' and bind on equip T1 items to auction.
Blackwing Lair runs were also still on the cards for Elementium Ore and gold farming as well.
Dragonflight: Grand Marshal Hottage
PC Specs: Ryzen 7 7800X3D | ASUS ROG STRIX B650E-I | 32GB 6000Mhz DDR5 | NZXT Kraken 120
Inno3D RTX 4080 iChill | Samsung 970 EVO Plus 2TB | NZXT H200 | Corsair SF750 | Windows 11 Pro
Razer Basilisk Ultimate | Razer Blackwidow V3 | ViewSonic XG2730 | Steam Deck 1TB OLED
I hope we get a TBC server eventually.
As a warrior nothing will quite match tanking Illidan for me. Watching for those crashes, being ready for shear in what was one of the best raid bosses ever (we won't talk about early BT) but he was great.
Plus, warrior T5/T6 still turn me on.