Addressing concerns with Classic.

[Saranae]

World of Warcraft Classic has brought both bliss to a lot of fans, and anger it seems to other fans.

Some of the most raised concerns so far is about the gameplay, graphics, content difficulty, and QoL features.
It's important that disagreements are constructively discussed in terms of how a change affects the you, and most importantly the gameplay.

Gameplay
What you all should be aware of is that you couldn't so simply change your character name (player identity) back then, so your actions within the game and community had consequence, where you couldn't simply just be a general a-hole or ninja loot and expect a serious guild to accept you.
You were punished for unethical behavior and actions not by the system, but by other players, and you would get nowhere by being so. Greetings and general kindness is part and parcel of such a community, and still is to today within those communities.

The general gameplay was a big time investment (emotional investment) in itself, figuring out the abilites and the type of character you wanted to be, reading through a quest and finding its objectives in the world, travelling and discovering new places, forming a collective group to run a dungeon.

Classes
There were a lot of player abilities you didn't use, but they were there to enrich the aspect of an RPG. The old talent tree were confusing for a bunch of people, but the freedom of those talents allowed you to mentally shape your character. You actually had to learn the game, about the abilities, what were the core abilities you used, what were the talents, and how do I figure out the best one. Both the abilities and talents were later streamlined for a more linear action-game style, and the previous freedoms of defining your character continued to distort with each new iteration of the talent system.

Quests
the intricate design voiced by Jeff Kaplan was that each play session was about finishing quests, sharing experiences with your friends, instead of the focus on your level and how much time it will get to get to max. If you don't have the patience be it because you're solely focusing on max level and you only have 30 mins a day to play, or you find the story-telling boring, that's completely fine.

No quest tracking meant you would read through the quest and try to figure it out, you used a lot of mental processing in your adventuring, leading to more and stronger memories of playing vanilla. Oh, people absolutely would turn to Thottbot if they just couldn't figure something out, and some people used it by default regardless. But this implemented Quest tracker, where you don't read or learn of the stories of NPCs or the world is quite sad, and you become this sort of Bot that solely follows the instruction in the screen.

There were no elements that could allow you to travel far distance quickly, but if that's how it is, why bother with a big game world if you can effortlessly and so quickly travel to one end to the other. If people do get lost, it causes frustration to a lot of people, but speaks to just how much bigger and mysterious the world will feel, although it's not the type of game where you venture the beaten path and find some hidden treasure like Elder Scrolls.
You had to invest your time, planning a route, the travels, it was all more meaningful, and you would have interactions along the way.

PvP Balance
Vanilla isn't balanced, because it is counter-balanced. Critical strikes, and Engineering which has enormous impact on PvP interactions is the counter-balances. How boring would it be if you were just absolutely doomed to die as an undergeared Rogue versus a geared Warrior?

Counter-balance is outplayability regardless of what class, spec, or playstyle you possess.

PvE Role
The individual role and rotations were dull, but it was all about the collective, and that all those frost bolts from yourself and fellow mages continuously weakened Ragnaros and led to his banish from our realm.
There's a charm, but I agree there should be more individual rotations in play.

Graphics
World of Warcraft has had different iterations of art directions.
Vanilla had the dominant style of cartoon, but it also had a tone of realism, of a more rugged and rustic atmosphere. Blizzard eventually grew to abandon that tone of realism for a more bright and warm graphical atmosphere.
This is clearly visible with the updated character model of Tauren, where the old has an a lot more intimidating and realistic appearance of a large Ox humanoid, compared to the updated innocent and sometimes cute looking appearance.

The new direction is definitely more hopeful and inviting with its bright and warmness, but is that the tone appropriate for Warcraft?

Content Difficulty
Vanilla content is argued to be easy solely due to a low level of mechanics.
If in fact the content was then it wouldn't be so slow-paced, a mere dungeon in vanilla like Scholomance would take an hour and potentially more, you couldn't pull an entire room and expect to survive, you had to focus on packs, and even then required CC to ease the stress upon the tank and healer. If you messed up and pulled an extra pack, you would be extremely unlikely to survive unless you outgeared the content significantly.

Raids were mostly about the prepping of consumables and resistance gear for 40 and more people, organizing everyone, so when the raiding night finally came, everyone were already very emotionally invested into the run and the collective effort.
You didn't even need a full-stacked 40 good men, but could bring a long 10 players who necessarily weren't good at the game, but were a blast to have accompany in the social atmosphere enhancing the raiding experience and player morale.

Vanilla raid content has a lacking in mechanics, absolutely, but the focus towards more competitive and mechanics intensive content came at a great cost.

Quality of Life
Vanilla doesn't have the QoL features that present WoW players are used to, would Vanilla benefit from those QoL changes?
I listen, but I don't cave in to people if their opinions are entirely subjective, because it's all about how such features affect the gameplay.
Are the present WoW's QoL features good or bad, and how can they better be executed.

In vanilla you have to click the mount buff to dismount, and I don't think anyone will protest if it changed to auto-dismount on actions.

However, a feature like the current iteration of Group Finder has dramatic effect on the gameplay, where you're automatically matchmaked with other players and instantly teleported to the dungeon itself. This eliminates a lot of the effort and social investments previously required for such an activity, and in a very bad way where mentally or emotionally you didn't really have to go through a lot, so you're not all that invested into the collective effort and remain passive about what happens.

If the tuning of group finder content was hard, then it would be very easy for people to bail on the group, wait 30 minutes to queue again while praying to be matchmaked with more geared or competent random players.
This is why all group finder content is easy, in fact so easy that the cases of downtime, frustration of wiping, and satisfaction of defeating an encounter has shrunken to either complete passiveness or a Titanforged upgrade following a sigh of relief.

Conclusion
How the game is played should be maintained as it is, having to learn about your class, abilities, talents, and what have you.
But how the game is experienced should absolutely be improved, in terms of visuals and audio with the original direction of more realism, a more dynamic world with more content, encounters, and other activities, and more engaging story-telling.

To say the current World of Warcraft is far superior than the old because it's newer, or it's superior because of subjective opinions, and everyone who disagrees is a wearer of rose-tinted goggles is narrow-minded at best.

The philosophies and principles of the old Game Design that games like Vanilla, Everquest, Ultima Online, RuneScape, etc, with strong RPG and Social elements has been forgotten in favor of a more story-telling action-game.

I'm not saying vanilla should be how it is, there's a lot of room for improvements and optimizations, but there has the be good design principles behind them.
Address your concerns, and please do your best to remain civilized.

[MoanaLisa]

This got bumped into the moderation queue for a while so I'm going to bump it to have a chance at the top of the forum thread list.

[dwarven]

If a certain feature existed at any point in the game before the BC patch came out, it should be fair game. This includes things like meeting stones, battlegrounds etc... If a feature entered the game during BC or later, it should absolutely never be in WoW Classic (unless they decide to progress to BC content).

[parcus]

Moderation queue? What is that?

[MoanaLisa]

Moderation queue? What is that?

Where suspected spam goes. This isn't spam.

[MMKing]

I think the OP got deleted?

[draigo]

If a certain feature existed at any point in the game before the BC patch came out, it should be fair game. This includes things like meeting stones, battlegrounds etc... If a feature entered the game during BC or later, it should absolutely never be in WoW Classic (unless they decide to progress to BC content).

I just want to say thank you, completely agree

[Heathy]

what about simple additions, i know there is a lot of contention around a LFG tool but most ppl agreed a long time ago that staring at reems of scrolling text hoping to find a group is not really a very effective way of getting things done. i'm all for manually creating groups but there has to be a sorting function a way to see wtf is happening at any given moment, without needing to stare at the chat and try to compile a mental image from watching scolling text for 10 minutes to x amount of hours.

like wise accidentally master looting bop items to ppl meant that you had to message a gm to get the item transferred that 2hr trade timer didn't come in till way later.

i'm sure there are a boat load of little niggles/issues and small changes that would either make the game more fun to play, should have been there anyway, or in terms of things like high res models and updated spell effects and animations, maybe that could be client side.

[Saranae]

Original thread by me: Deleted for some reason...

Vanilla isn't balanced, because it is counter-balanced. Critical strikes, and Engineering which has enormous impact on PvP interactions is the counter-balances. How boring would it be if you were just absolutely doomed to die as an undergeared Rogue versus a geared Warrior?

Counter-balance is outplayability regardless of what class, spec, or playstyle you possess.

PvE Role
The individual role and rotations were dull, but it was all about the collective, and that all those frost bolts from yourself and fellow mages continuously weakened Ragnaros and led to his banish from our realm.
There's a charm, but I agree there should be more individual rotations in play.

"The Grind"
Some people like to mention how "grindy" vanilla is, although it doesn't contain the daily quests were used to today, or artificial longevity like Artifact Power.
What is grindy about vanilla? The leveling is slow-paced, sure, farming reputations took awhile, farming professions and materials took a while, but that grind was a means to an end, it faded into the background, because the aspiration of reaching a goal was the driving force.
Finally reaching level 60 alone or with a bunch of fellow players you socially networked with while leveling up. Finally getting engineering high enough for the mind control cap to dominate in PvP. Finally reaching exalted with the Stormpike Guard or Frostwolf Clan for that sweet Unstoppable Force.

Graphics
World of Warcraft has had different iterations of art directions.
Vanilla had the dominant style of cartoon, but it also had a tone of realism, of a more rugged and rustic atmosphere. Blizzard eventually grew to abandon that tone of realism for a more bright and warm graphical atmosphere.
This is clearly visible with the updated character model of Tauren, where the old has an a lot more intimidating and realistic appearance of a large Ox humanoid, compared to the updated innocent and sometimes cute looking appearance.

The new direction is definitely more hopeful and inviting with its bright and warmness, but is that the tone appropriate for Warcraft?

Content Difficulty
Vanilla content is argued to be easy solely due to a low level of mechanics.
If in fact the content was then it wouldn't be so slow-paced, a mere dungeon in vanilla like Scholomance would take an hour and potentially more, you couldn't pull an entire room and expect to survive, you had to focus on packs, and even then required CC to ease the stress upon the tank and healer. If you messed up and pulled an extra pack, you would be extremely unlikely to survive unless you outgeared the content significantly.

Raids were mostly about the prepping of consumables and resistance gear for 40 and more people, organizing everyone, so when the raiding night finally came, everyone were already very emotionally invested into the run and the collective effort.
You didn't even need a full-stacked 40 good men, but could bring a long 10 players who necessarily weren't good at the game, but were a blast to have accompany in the social atmosphere enhancing the raiding experience and player morale.

Vanilla raid content has a lacking in mechanics, absolutely, but the focus towards more competitive and mechanics intensive content came at a great cost.

Quality of Life
Vanilla doesn't have the QoL features that present WoW players are used to, would Vanilla benefit from those QoL changes?
I listen, but I don't cave in to people if their opinions are entirely subjective, because it's all about how such features affect the gameplay.
Are the present WoW's QoL features good or bad, and how can they better be executed.

In vanilla you have to click the mount buff to dismount, and I don't think anyone will protest if it changed to auto-dismount on actions.

However, a feature like the current iteration of Group Finder has dramatic effect on the gameplay, where you're automatically matchmaked with other players and instantly teleported to the dungeon itself. This eliminates a lot of the effort and social investments previously required for such an activity, and in a very bad way where mentally or emotionally you didn't really have to go through a lot, so you're not all that invested into the collective effort and remain passive about what happens.

If the tuning of group finder content was hard, then it would be very easy for people to bail on the group, wait 30 minutes to queue again while praying to be matchmaked with more geared or competent random players.
This is why all group finder content is easy, in fact so easy that the cases of downtime, frustration of wiping, and satisfaction of defeating an encounter has shrunken to either complete passiveness or a Titanforged upgrade following a sigh of relief.

Or Transmogrifications. Tier sets and epics in general carried a lot of associations, some required endurance in battleground farming, collective skill in raids, patience with farming in dungeons and the world. If you saw someone in Classic epic pvp gear you would be dazzled, because of the enormous effort that player had to go through to achieve that, or you saw a Paladin in Tier 2 Judgement that look amazing. Items and their visual appearance meant something.

Players would then develop very powerful aspirations to get into an organized PvP guild, or into a serious raiding guild in order to achieve the same. And if they do accomplish that aspiration, their long-term effort will come to fruition, they will be in bliss of satisfaction, glory, powerful emotional attachment to their character, and the game that enabled them to create such mental ambitions to strive for and achieve.

Conclusion
How the game is played should be maintained as it is, having to learn about your class, abilities, talents, and what have you.
But how the game is experienced should absolutely be improved, in terms of visuals and audio with the original direction of more realism, a more dynamic world with more content, encounters, and other activities, and more engaging story-telling.

To say the current World of Warcraft is far superior than the old because it's newer, or it's superior because of subjective opinions, and everyone who disagrees is a wearer of rose-tinted goggles is narrow-minded at best.

The philosophies and principles of the old Game Design that games like Vanilla, Everquest, Ultima Online, RuneScape, etc, with strong RPG and Social elements has been forgotten in favor of a more story-telling action-game.

I'm not saying vanilla should be how it is, there's a lot of room for improvements and optimizations, but there has the be good design principles behind them.
Address your concerns, and please do your best to remain civilized.

[deniter]

I think you hit the nail on the head. Very well put.

That being said, i wouldn't mind seeing some minor improvements in certain areas as long as the design philosophy remains faithful to the original game. That auto-dismount, for example, could at least be in options menu for a player to select. Auction house could work a little better, although there are some addons that can do the trick, etc.

In general, i would be very cautious with any deviations from the original game. The exceptions should be few and well-considered.

[Deleted]

Or Transmogrifications. Tier sets and epics in general carried a lot of associations, some required endurance in battleground farming, collective skill in raids, patience with farming in dungeons and the world. If you saw someone in Classic epic pvp gear you would be dazzled, because of the enormous effort that player had to go through to achieve that, or you saw a Paladin in Tier 2 Judgement that look amazing. Items and their visual appearance meant something.

Players would then develop very powerful aspirations to get into an organized PvP guild, or into a serious raiding guild in order to achieve the same. And if they do accomplish that aspiration, their long-term effort will come to fruition, they will be in bliss of satisfaction, glory, powerful emotional attachment to their character, and the game that enabled them to create such mental ambitions to strive for and achieve.

While I don't care that much if we have transmog or not, this isn't really a good justification for not having transmog. Yes, your shiny T2 Judgement set represents your work, dedication and skill... aaand then you go into Naxxramas, you get Redemption Pants and you look dumb. Why is this better?

They could use the pre-wardrobe Transmog system where you'd have to physically own all the gear you could transmog on that character, so you couldn't put your level 30 Paladin in a full Judgement set, but you could maintain a sensible look as you got better gear in harder raids.

As I was saying in another thread, this was a tech issue, this is a thing that just wasn't possible in Vanilla, if it was possible and they'd have time to include it, it would've been in 100%. Why would Blizzard want you to look like a clown? It doesn't really make sense.

I raided Naxx as a Priest and I never got my T3 robe, but I did have all the other pieces. I was lucky enough that my T2 robe was a pretty good fit. Along with a matching cape from AQ40, I looked great. A lot of people didn't. They looked stupid. It was purely coincidental that I didn't happen to get a better robe like the AQ40 T2.5 ones, if I did I would've looked like a complete clown instead of something you might actually see in artwork.

Oh, and I'd also want to see Blizzard incentivize people from Retail to play on Classic by adding armor that isn't obtainable anymore to your Retail Transmog wardrobe when you obtain it on Classic. For instance I have this robe from Naxx that's great for a Warlock/Shadow Priest/Scourge Inspired transmog. There are other things I'd like though. Almost certainly will not see this but I can dream.

[AeneasBK]

Original thread by me: Deleted for some reason...

Vanilla isn't balanced, because it is counter-balanced. Critical strikes, and Engineering which has enormous impact on PvP interactions is the counter-balances. How boring would it be if you were just absolutely doomed to die as an undergeared Rogue versus a geared Warrior?

The PvP system was awful and should be re-implemented now they have more available tech to reward the most skillful PvPers on the server more rapidly than the less skillful so that it requires less of a time investment for the skilled; and isn't a reserve of the no lifers or account sharing exploiters. This is my biggest and only real concern (the PvE content is too easy to worry about spec/class balances too much frankly).

That and sending 12 items per mail instead of single items each mail :P Otherwise I'm happy that they leave everything "as is" until at least Naxx has been out for ages.

If they chose too and it was popular and deserved the resources I'm sure they could add another tier "3.5" and do another raid; maybe even tie in some Lore that got retconned. Did the Runescape devs release "fresh" content for their classic realms at all?

[Trollfat]

While I don't care that much if we have transmog or not, this isn't really a good justification for not having transmog. Yes, your shiny T2 Judgement set represents your work, dedication and skill... aaand then you go into Naxxramas, you get Redemption Pants and you look dumb. Why is this better?

They could use the pre-wardrobe Transmog system where you'd have to physically own all the gear you could transmog on that character, so you couldn't put your level 30 Paladin in a full Judgement set, but you could maintain a sensible look as you got better gear in harder raids.

As I was saying in another thread, this was a tech issue, this is a thing that just wasn't possible in Vanilla, if it was possible and they'd have time to include it, it would've been in 100%. Why would Blizzard want you to look like a clown? It doesn't really make sense.

I raided Naxx as a Priest and I never got my T3 robe, but I did have all the other pieces. I was lucky enough that my T2 robe was a pretty good fit. Along with a matching cape from AQ40, I looked great. A lot of people didn't. They looked stupid. It was purely coincidental that I didn't happen to get a better robe like the AQ40 T2.5 ones, if I did I would've looked like a complete clown instead of something you might actually see in artwork.

Oh, and I'd also want to see Blizzard incentivize people from Retail to play on Classic by adding armor that isn't obtainable anymore to your Retail Transmog wardrobe when you obtain it on Classic. For instance I have this robe from Naxx that's great for a Warlock/Shadow Priest/Scourge Inspired transmog. There are other things I'd like though. Almost certainly will not see this but I can dream.

The better argument is that with the limited amount of end game armor sets available in vanilla, with Transmog everybody would look the same. The mis-matching of gear was often what differentiated players from each other in raids and such, and it can be argued that there was a certain charm to it. If players wanted to look cool, they could do so outside of combat.

[Keltas]

The PvP system was awful and should be re-implemented now they have more available tech to reward the most skillful PvPers on the server more rapidly than the less skillful so that it requires less of a time investment for the skilled; and isn't a reserve of the no lifers or account sharing exploiters. This is my biggest and only real concern (the PvE content is too easy to worry about spec/class balances too much frankly).

That and sending 12 items per mail instead of single items each mail :P Otherwise I'm happy that they leave everything "as is" until at least Naxx has been out for ages.

If they chose too and it was popular and deserved the resources I'm sure they could add another tier "3.5" and do another raid; maybe even tie in some Lore that got retconned. Did the Runescape devs release "fresh" content for their classic realms at all?

Yes, oldschool runescape gets updates pretty much every week and is completely different from the "Actual" old school experience now. It was the same for about a year, but a lot of people hate that they went so far away by basically constantly dropping new updates.

I like what they did personally and think vanilla could work well with that if they keep the "vanilla feel" like runescape does, but it's really easy to fuck up.

[deniter]

While I don't care that much if we have transmog or not, this isn't really a good justification for not having transmog. Yes, your shiny T2 Judgement set represents your work, dedication and skill... aaand then you go into Naxxramas, you get Redemption Pants and you look dumb. Why is this better?

They could use the pre-wardrobe Transmog system where you'd have to physically own all the gear you could transmog on that character, so you couldn't put your level 30 Paladin in a full Judgement set, but you could maintain a sensible look as you got better gear in harder raids.

As I was saying in another thread, this was a tech issue, this is a thing that just wasn't possible in Vanilla, if it was possible and they'd have time to include it, it would've been in 100%. Why would Blizzard want you to look like a clown? It doesn't really make sense.

I raided Naxx as a Priest and I never got my T3 robe, but I did have all the other pieces. I was lucky enough that my T2 robe was a pretty good fit. Along with a matching cape from AQ40, I looked great. A lot of people didn't. They looked stupid. It was purely coincidental that I didn't happen to get a better robe like the AQ40 T2.5 ones, if I did I would've looked like a complete clown instead of something you might actually see in artwork.

Oh, and I'd also want to see Blizzard incentivize people from Retail to play on Classic by adding armor that isn't obtainable anymore to your Retail Transmog wardrobe when you obtain it on Classic. For instance I have this robe from Naxx that's great for a Warlock/Shadow Priest/Scourge Inspired transmog. There are other things I'd like though. Almost certainly will not see this but I can dream.

My point of view for transmog is that it waters down the whole purpose of gearing up. The gear that a character wears is your showcase to other players, just like guild halls that has been talked about of lately, which your guild could decorate with trophys acquired from slain raid bosses etc.

I also think Blizzard did a very good job in various gear sets. You can combine them very freely and not look like a clown, unlike in TBC where you looked like a billboard most of the time. In Wotlk they took a safer route with all black gear mostly because of DK class, so you didn't have to worry about mismatching gear. That was pretty smart but lazy move. There could have been a better option for that, like designing all gear sets as usual but making them look a lot darker if worn by a DK.

A feature like transmogrification doesn't belong to an MMORPG. It suits better for cloths designers and kids playing with dollhouses.

[Mormolyce]

IMO, it's a combination - some changes to WoW over the years have been a result of the evolution in gaming away from traditional RPGs as they were initially adapted into early MMOs like Everquest and Ultima Online into more streamlined, faster paced actiony RPGs. Much of that evolution was a result of WoW itself in fact.

Others are just plain improvements. Blizzard learned a lot in making WoW and got better at it.

Also, even by the standards of the day WoW's base UI left a lot to be desired... especially maps, they straight up sucked...

[Rogalicus]

This got bumped into the moderation queue for a while so I'm going to bump it to have a chance at the top of the forum thread list.

Can we also get BfA and Classic forum filters for 'Recent Forum Posts' window on main page?

[Blezius]

i feel like everyone will agree about the minor changes that won't affect the classic experience, but things like transmog or group finder has a lot of people against it, even if the majority are with changes like this they should never be implemented. The idea is that the advantage should always go to what was already implemented in classic, what i mean by that is if there is a feature that pretty much everyone wants, then yeah sure. But if there is a feature that is argued often, it should never be implemented as long as it wasn't there in classic. Its a classic server after all.

[Heathy]

a group finder can vary wildly though, there is the group finder we have today with match making, or a group finder like one of the first iterations of the group finder, where you can simply list a group with a description and the ability for ppl to wisp you. transmog to me only really made sense later on its entire purpose was to bring back old appearances it would allow a few more combinations but it not as if there was a vast array of gear to choose from to create a unique looking mog.

[MoanaLisa]

Can we also get BfA and Classic forum filters for 'Recent Forum Posts' window on main page?

That's been addressed in the Suggestions & Feedback forum and those will be available in the next couple of days. Please stay on topic. PM me, check Suggestions & Feedback or send a PM to a global moderator.