What is this?
In this post, I will be making the case that Blizzard should make quality of life, content and balancing changes to the vanilla game in Classic WoW. I am writing this from the perspective of someone who has spent a significant amount of time playing vanilla over the past few years and was previously opposed to any changes at all. I have had a change of heart for a number of reasons so I have decided to write this FAQ to make my case. I think this position has rightly been mocked by some so I will use this post to respond to some of their best objections.
Why do you want changes made to the original game?
Vanilla World of Warcraft was a great game and it launched something that is still successful 14 years later. It succeeded where its predecessors failed and managed to make MMOs a mainstream genre. That said, it has clear faults. Faults that its designers would have fixed at the time if they could have. Many of what they perceived as faults were "fixed" in subsequent expansion packs with varying levels of success. This is why class balance, itemization, end game content (honor system and raids) and leveling content among other things, are so radically different in the Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King despite being released within relatively short periods of time from one another. Classic is a second chance that very few games actually get to become even better and I think that not changing the game might be squandering this opportunity.
What changes do you want made to the game?
I largely leave this up to Blizzard's designers who are professionals that seem to understand their audience quite well for this game. I am also not an expert or a game designer, I just know what problems vanilla has firsthand because of my experience with it. Blizzard is very often accused by their playerbases for all of their games for being out of touch. This was the case in Starcraft 2 between 2012 and 2014 when the community begged for the addition of community features, cosmetic items and additional content to stop the game from being killed off by other major eSports like Dota 2, League of Legends and CS:GO. Blizzard eventually added these things but most argued it was too little too late. I have another hypothesis. The thing that killed Starcraft 2 was Starcraft 2 and the fact that the entire RTS genre is for the time being, commercially dead. Gaming today moves through genres and trends. The MOBAs that seemed so dominant and untouchable just a few years ago are now losing their playerbases to Battle Royale shooters which is something no one could have prognosticated. To summarize, I don't think changes to a game are what make or break it. What makes or breaks a game is if it happens to be what audiences want to be playing at a particular time.
Assuming that changes will not have a major effect on the success of Classic WoW, why should they happen anyway?
Because the game would be much better with them in certain areas. Assuming that I am correct and changes won't have an effect on the success of the game, the sole reason to make changes is so that the players have a more enjoyable time playing the game. Take class balance for instance.
This is a link to a popular leveling guide for vanilla players that is up-to-date with the current "metagame" of vanilla (1.12.1) as it has developed over the past decade since retail vanilla ended. I would draw your attention to a few key details. First, class viability is extremely limited. There is little variance in which classes and specs succeed in certain areas and assuming the game follows a linear progression of vanilla content, which classes succeed in certain areas is entirely predictable for each raid and PvP instance. This presents some serious problems. When retail vanilla was released, class balance was poorly understood by the playerbase. This is the case when every game comes out. Another key thing was different: no one knew what the future held. This meant that players had no more incentive to roll one class over another. But now it is entirely understood which classes are the best in each exact raid and what premade class combos are the best for ranking. Even something as simple as race/class combo is predetermined for competitive players now because of how racials were balanced. This means that class diversity is skewed now at every level of the game because players are entirely aware of what classes to roll and what not to roll. The same goes for raids where top guilds can clear Molten Core in under half an hour with raid members in questing gear (look up the guild Dreamstate for example) because they know exactly what gear is pre-BiS and have perfected every strategy for each boss. This is entirely contradictory to the history of raiding progression in WoW where top guilds ended up on top because they were the most creative and skilled in figuring out strategies to kill bosses. The top guilds in a no-changes classic will be the ones that are the best at following pre-written private server guides and grinding the full game before it even comes out. These are just a few examples of how "knowing what will come beforehand" has terrible consequences on the state of the game and how it can be extended to other areas as well.
I may come back to this post to add why I think the ranking system is bad in greater detail but no experienced vanilla player, not even the ones who spend a few months of their lives grinding to rank 14, will argue that it is more skill based than time based. On private servers, the ranking system suffers from win-trading, premades stomping regular teams and harsh penalties for leaving battlegrounds where defeat is inevitable. There is no reason to expect these problem to fix themselves in Classic and it is more likely they will simply be amplified.
Won't allowing changes lead to a slippery slope?
No, because Blizzard knows who they are developing the game for. A common diagnosis for the state of retail WoW, specifically why it has been so unpopular since Cataclysm is that Blizzard started changing things they should not have. I agree with this but the reason is because of the playerbase. Don't believe me? Sites like this one illustrate this perfectly as retail players generally seem fine with the direction of the game. As someone who has read and posted here since "things started going wrong", I have seen first hand that changes which are hugely unpopular among former players like LFR, phasing, CRZ, etc. are generally accepted among retail players who flood to sites that Blizzard reads like this one and the official WoW forums while people who object don't care to voice their opinions long enough over time because they simply lose interest in a game they no longer play or have any stake in. So to summarize, I don't think a slippery slope of awful changes is inevitable because Blizzard knows what the playerbase is not willing to accept but ideally, they should be a little smarter than to cater to their every demand for the reasons given in the section above.
Won't quality of life and gameplay changes ruin the community aspect of the game?
Let's take an example like respec costs in vanilla. It worked like this: The respec cost increased each time you did it and eventually capped at 50g. Many players believe this is too harsh because some players who both raid and PvP need to respec every week. No-change defenders argue that the necessity to farm gold for this respec cost makes players go out in the world and experience the game as it was intended to be played so lowering this cost gives players one more reason to sit in IF or Org instead of going out in the world. No-change defenders then argue that too many changes like this will lead Classic WoW to where retail is today, a game where you sit in a city, never talk to anyone and access it through queues. The "no-changer" is presented with two problems here. The first is that no-changes implicitly makes the game easier and less time consuming than it otherwise might be (for the reasons given above) so splitting hairs over respec costs seems beside the point. The second is the assumption that meeting players in game is as important as it was in vanilla. The majority of players going into Classic are ones who have played the game before and will be playing with people they know. Sure, most players will probably meet people in game too and that's fine but once every player is in a guild, they will join the guild Discord or equivalent which gives far better methods of making friends than WoW ever had in or out of the game back in 2004-2006. The community aspect of the game, as with every other game, has been outsourced to platforms that do it better so ensuring that players are spending as much time in the world as possible is an antiquated goal.
As I said, I will likely add to this post more in the future but I think this is a good starting point.
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