Time is not after you but nor does it wait for you.
If you knew the candle was fire then the meal was cooked a long time ago.
I should be more specific in what I mean by 'gameplay.' It's not an argument that later versions of the game offer increased numbers of game play modes and ways to enjoy the game. I'm specifically talking about the way your character plays in combat, whether small or large scale pve/pvp. The way you played your character in Vanilla was entirely different because a completely different set of choices were presented to you. Your path, whether you ran around with your entire character planned or not, would certainly look different from the path you would take now.
Believe it or not, I agree that there are things about the live version play experience which are better than in Vanilla. But at the same time, the things that made vanilla good, Wow popular, and Blizzard massively successful from Wow in the first place, are noticeably absent in Live right now. Despite all they've done to simplify and streamline the game. The efforts made every expansion to deliver something new and shiny to consume, displaced the value in all the previous content.
You have to see that, right? It's why you don't just go jump into a raid and clear 10m ulduar every week. If you raid, it's current teir or you belong to some niche community that actually does the content at level for valuable rewards. I actually preferred MoP to most other expansions, too. But, like all other expansions before and since, it's content was displaced by new shiny disposable content.
Most people don't like being told how to enjoy their game. When you drop something that compels people to participate, they will always burn out at some point before your game content upholds the expected value that probably came before to veteran players who experience it. Like I stated before, there's a lot more people who have played Wow (over 100m) than there are currently playing it. These aren't trial numbers who just decided to stop playing before buying, these are subs that actually bought the game in some form and subbed for at least one month.
That's a lot of money, a lot of people, and a lot of time invested into a company for such a small concurrent player base. Classic appeals to most people who are tired of the disposable nature and soul-less game play experience that is live Wow. Sure, live looks better than Wow ever has, plays smoothy, gives you easy access to the game by expediting or automating things you would have to spend legitimate chunks of time doing in Vanilla. That's the missing soul I'm talking about. RPG players loved Wow (the original intended audience) because it was very closely designed to be like the games they have played before. Talents, abilities that you train up to get stronger. having a road map to plan your character. Taking a moment to make an actual choice about how your character will play - a choice that will ultimately last until you decide to cough up enough coin to respec...
Do you see yet? People honestly want a simple online RPG experience. Live Wow is anything but that. It's not a grumpy old man thing. I've spent enough money on this game to have put a down payment on a car or a house. It's honestly too much for me to continue to invest in, and even classic Wow is a difficult choice for me RN. Not to stray too far from the point, live Wow lacks very little in the meaningful choices department. Sure, there are lots of choices and ways to play the game.
Very few of them are actually meaningful for anything longer than just a few months. This is what has killed the game.
My Gaming Rig: Intel Core 2 quad q9650|ASUS P5G41-T M|2x4GB Supertalent DDR3 1333Mhz|Samsung 840 Evo 250GB|Fractal Design Integra R2 500w Bronze|ASUS Strix GTX 960 4GB|2x AOC e2770s 27" (one portrait, one landscape)|Bitfeenix Phenom Micro ATX
Don't hate my rig, there's nothing quite like the classics.
You are correct, Classic is really relaxing and chilled, compared to modern WoW theres no hassle anywhere. So cool.
Sometimes I think I'd like to see OG Naxx and then I remember what it'd take to get there. I'll watch videos. :P When my first character hit 60 back in vanilla I felt like that was the end of the game then too, so I'm content to quit there. The only legacy server I could see myself playing at length would be Wrath, I adored that expansion.
I was going to say this. Someone told me once that the Wintersaber grind was the worst rep grind in the game. Not even close. I've done it 3x; twice for myself (before account wide mounts) and once for someone else. I can get that mount in under a week, it's not a big deal. There's no way to do that for modern reps. It took me 3 weeks to get WoD flying solely because of the limited Tanaan dailies.
I often think dailies are the worst thing WoW ever did to reputations. Every day I don't feel like doing them I start doing the math in my head of how far it's going to delay my progress and then I begrudgingly end up doing them. Even just changing it to weeklies would make such a huge difference, I could bang them all out in a night and not have to worry about it for the next 6 days.
I hate limited/one-time-only events. They are my Achilles' heel. When Rift first came out and they had a new world event every 6 weeks with RNG drops that, at the time, you could not get any other way. I burned myself out to the point of quitting. I didn't want to miss out on anything, but I couldn't keep up with them.
I resubbed for the mage tower because of the exclusive skins they offered. How could I not want a flail on my paladin? Unfortunately, there wasn't enough time for me to get them all, which will probably nag at me forever. :P I would gladly give up the "prestige" I have for the ones I did get for them all to still be available.
"We must now recognize that the greatest threat of freedom for us all is if we go back to eating ourselves out from within." - John Anderson
classic is certainly more pretty than retail, in terms of colors chosen. classic stranglethorn at night is much more pretty than any weirdly crafted new zones, it shows that they have new artists that didn't capture the wow essence.
It really isn’t, but I’ll be nice since you obviously suffer from a moderate cognitive deficiency. Likely the result of some neurological disability.
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I’m not the humorless tool here. So perhaps you might want to try it yourself.
WoW Tokens are already in retail which shares a subscription with WoW Classic. I've already seen people selling WoW tokens in my server trade chat for gold.