What happened to all of the Vanilla purists?

[starstationprofm]

Classic doesn’t have auto sharding either or atleast it didn’t when I played, it was something they turned on at big events like launch but wasn’t always on.

As far as stableness goes I had far more crashes getting to 40 on Nostalrius and far worse lag then I did getting to 55 on classic, can’t speak for lvl1 world pvp through.

Sharding was definitely on for a long time, not just launch.


And I played Classic until the end of the BWL phase, never had some proper world pvp cause it was laggy af.

[kail]

I'm sure almost all of the Classic player base wants to play BCC and have an active character in Vanilla servers. Unfortunately, Blizzard charged per character so that would naturally hurt the Vanilla population. I am curious as to how many characters took a one-way trip to Classic.

[Lord Pebbleton]

Former Vanilla purist here.

With regard to playing the actual game, I got my fix by raiding Molten Core after hitting 60 and getting the tier epic helm. I had a ton of fun which stopped altogether at that point. I am not going to play a game I don't enjoy in the slightest. The biggest factors were the pitifully small quest log and the absurd raid lockout system that effectively prevented me from raiding for the rest of the week after a bad pug.

With regard to being a purist, I stopped caring. Having a "pure" game meant having no changes whatsoever and I realised I couldn't win that fight, because people will always ask for quality of life improvements, and Vanilla got so many changes during its lifetime that to be rigorously purist would mean cycling through all the fixes and stupid bugs on a schedule instead of fixing things at the start.

Now I just lol at the Viridian Phase-Hunter mount, and I am more than happy to let others enjoy TBC. I am not even going to try there, to me it sounds more like a punishment than enjoyment. No idea if there are any purists left. It wouldn't make sense if some were still around at this point.

[Queendom]

Vanilla purists don't want a server stuck on the last patch. Vanilla has 4 design pillars: Sense of world, sense of community, great combat, and a constant stream of content.

Era realms are not vanilla.

Constant stream of content for the game that has not been in development for 15 years?

[Makabreska]

Tbf, even the biggest public "purists" waxing lyrical about the leveling experince and the TRUE MMORPG FEEL, ended up getting boosted to 60/Dungeon grinding to 60.

All the shouts about Vanilla superiority ended the moment Apes cleared MC 4-5 days after the launch with not a full lvl 60 team. I am not even exaggerating. Soon after all my guilldies got bored and dropped Classic completely. Reality simply verified all the expectations. But TBC should have much better staying power.

And regarding "purism", I think Diablo 2 Resurrected devs have a right approach. They are opened to changes/new features (and implemented some of them already), and ask the community about their opinion on the matter. Like, they asked about the possibility of skills tuning, something that was supposed to be a no-brainer but for some reason was unthinkable for some Vanilla players.

[Sentynel]

Vanilla is like a graveyard now. This after years and years of people either playing illegally on private servers (because it was so much more fun than retail) and/or demanding that Vanilla be re-released. I for sure thought they would play Vanilla forever. I guess 2 years was enough to satisfy the decade-long controversy.

Playing on a pserver is not illegal by any means.

Making profit from hosting a pserver on the other hand...

[spasut]

Playing on a pserver is not illegal by any means.

Making profit from hosting a pserver on the other hand...

currently the only way if you want to experience the real tbc. I played on so many pservers because I love playing old content and will do it in the future. Try to stop me.

I have an active sub when a new x-pac comes out, playing it for 3 months till it gets boring and then 2 years later the same. That's how I roll since 2010 and I am not the only one by far. Blizzard is just a bunch of mannequins since the takeover by activision.

edit: I would play classic tbc when there would be a fresh server. enable boosting and transfers after 3 months, that's fine, but make it #fresh.

[Shaetha]

The difference is that pieces from the previous raid are still relevant and not completely invalidated.
People still have an incentive to visit the previous raid and the catchup (if it even exists) doesn't just allow you to completely ignore previous tiers.

This is the big difference, when people say "seasonal" they (or at least myself) mean that the game is set up in a way that you can effectively ignore anything from the previous tier, which is not the case in Classic or TBC, there are still pieces from Heroics / T4 very relevant in T5.

Gear is only relevant until you can get something better. If there is something better in the new raid your gear is no longer relevant. At least this has to be true to have parity with your assertation about seasonal content. If your argument doesn't use this point of view you have no point.

And they cherry pick just a few items because outside vanilla, when they didn't even really know what items wanted to be, the next tier of items has always been better outside a select few items. This will be true almost every time they make a really gimmicky trinket. Otherwise, it's because the options are poor. It was even true the previous raid tier to the current one in retail, or the trinket from the first tier of Legion that was relevant to one spec for the entire expansion. By and large, the game has always wanted you to replace your gear each tier. Blizzard just made a lot more shitty items in vanilla.

[ClassicPeon]

They where always a vocal minority

[Kralljin]

And they cherry pick just a few items because outside vanilla, when they didn't even really know what items wanted to be, the next tier of items has always been better outside a select few items.

BiS list for T5 Ele has like 5 Items from T4.

Simply because you can only think of DST when people talk about this, doesn't mean it's the only item where this applies.

This will be true almost every time they make a really gimmicky trinket. Otherwise, it's because the options are poor. It was even true the previous raid tier to the current one in retail, or the trinket from the first tier of Legion that was relevant to one spec for the entire expansion. By and large, the game has always wanted you to replace your gear each tier. Blizzard just made a lot more shitty items in vanilla.

This is such a blatant generalization, especially because certain Tiers do_not_even drop items for a given role / spec.

Take Onslaught Belt from Rag for example, you replace this belt not until Naxx, not only because it's extremely well itemized for Fury Warrs, but also because there are frankly no Dps Plate belts until Naxx.
Another example are the BWL Trinkets (Neltharions Tear, Rejuv Gem & DFT), you frankly_cannot_replace them in AQ40 because the raid doesn't even drop two trinkets for a respective role (or at least ones that clearly do not mix due to being on use).

Heck, there are even items from catchup raids such ZG / AQ20 that sometimes easily stand up to [current] raid equivalent items, not because the items from the current raid are bad, the others are just slightly better.

I could go on with other examples, but frankly there are more than enough of them where it's not only because some items in Classic are poorly itemized, but because the current raid does not drop items for a given spec / class on that slot, or they're still worse (which doesn't necessarily mean they're poorly itemized).

If the intent was to replace every single item even in Vanilla already, they should at the very least put in Items into a new raid that cover every single slot, which is frankly not true.

Equating this to Legions Arcanocrystal (which, mind you, had to Titanforge to be BiS for a long time) because Blizzard admittedly fucked up the secondary stat scaling is just plain ignorance.

[Lashiec]

The harsh reality is that the popularity of private servers is caused by the fact that they are....free to play. The reason why people mostly play Vanilla private servers is because this is the version of the game most worked on by the private server pirates and most playable on those servers. It gives you free taste of the game.

Were you in a cave the last two years? Blizzard just got an ass-ton of people paying $15/month to play Classic vanilla.

[Farora]

OP really doesn't understand that forever phase 6 doesn't make vanilla fans happy? Has to be trollin'.

Though I have to admit, I could have played it for another year probably, but not with everyone leaving.

[Mister K]

exept in the case of private servers tbc has been among the least popular of the pre cata ones,some people rly dislike flying or the feel of outlands,they like azeroth etc,no the issue is that the classic andys ADORE resets/fresh,so if vanila isnt getting a reset,then tbc is the next best thing for them

WotLK is MVP and everyone knows it. Servers, history of AT and game itself. Can't bloody wait!

[Queen of Hamsters]

exept in the case of private servers tbc has been among the least popular of the pre cata ones,some people rly dislike flying or the feel of outlands,they like azeroth etc,no the issue is that the classic andys ADORE resets/fresh,so if vanila isnt getting a reset,then tbc is the next best thing for them

Where has WOTLK ranked on the Private Server popularity, so-to-speak? o.o

[MrLachyG]

Its more just chasing fresh servers. They tend to die after AQ40 patch and then everyone jumps to another private server to do it all over.

As far as if they will recover I think once BC gets into farm phase which will be fairly fast they might recover. A MMO that doesn't update isn't much fun. If blizz releases fresh servers themselves after BC has been out for awhile they most likely would do well.

I don’t get the whole fresh server argument. Do people expect Blizz to make new fresh servers every 2 years?

[Thundering]

if classic+ content would have come i would choice it over tbc, the main issue is content.

[Farora]

if classic+ content would have come i would choice it over tbc, the main issue is content.

2021 Blizzard would have to make classic+.... no thank you.

[Selvari7]

They went back to private servers. Classic being stuck at naxx patch with everyone in teir 3 is boring.

Wasn't Naxx the most hyped part of Classic? The raid which so few got to see?

[arkanon]

Before announcement, I vividly remember many, many people saying they would gladly pay huge money to play Vanilla wow for many, many years. I guess im not the only one confused by why so many people are clamoring for newer and newer versions of wow. Right now, so many people are talking about classic WOTLK, and TBC hasnt even launched yet.

[RobertMugabe]

They went back to private servers. Classic being stuck at naxx patch with everyone in teir 3 is boring.

vanilla private servers are dead af and probably forever. And like 90% of their players are people who don't want to sub or cannot afford it