Classic is in a weird spot

[mmocfd1b0ab5a3]

Lol TBC is even more raid loggy than Classic. People clamoring for that are going to be in for an even bigger disappointment than Classic.

At least in TBC there is something to do outside of raids.

In classic it costs me ~50g to buy potions/elixirs for raid night and I loot 60-70g from bosses alone.

[czarek]

There are almost no big streamer , not to say there is none.

Almost no new youtube content.

It gets harder and harder, if not impossible to find groups for quests / dungeons while leveling

Many raid guilds seem to have just vanished or disbanded

People dont seem to talk much in all chat outside of the same ones again and again.

forums seem to be mostly empty/ some outrage over a blue post but not over the game

Is there any hope for classic to get popular again? maybe with naxx ? or is it better to just accept for now that until tbc it will be a little more quite?

Dunno. Maybe on ur server. On mine pugs and guilds goin every night into zg/mc/ony/bwl. Im in raiding guild we raid 3-4 days a week. MC BWL 2XZG. Im doin alt atm there is no problem to grp for instance or smth else :P

[Ragnarohk]

what i found most alarming, that they used forum posts and then streamers to indoctrinate the players by telling them, they were younger and less skilled so the classic experience they had were "more challenging" due to their age. an easy excuse

and if you try to adress this, you get full hate from mmoc (my experience)

I mean, it's still a valid argument. I remember that I started the game in TBC when I was 13. I would just spam a random rotation and have really bad gear/talents. Clearing ZG at lvl 70 "felt" like an accomplishment.

[Moonsorrow]

Blizzard used to focus on the average players. The guys doing T4-5 content during Sunwell. The guys doing Normal mode while top guilds did Heroic mode.

If you still play retail, you're either a Mythic raider or someone that just plays this game like a mobile game (transmogs, world quests, etc.)

The 8+ million players they lose in the past 6 years were for the most part the average player that didn't care about mobile game mechanics or ultra sweaty mythics.

And conveniently, the ultra sweaty nerds and the mobile farmers are probably big spenders in the cash shop / tokens. So they make more money catering to them than making a good game for the masses.

Whatever makes you feel good and sleep at night. Anything else will be considered fake news or whiteknighting for Blizz anyway.

Believe it or not there are players in retail that don't raid mythic and also do not just farm transmog. There are still "average" players that only do normal or heroic. but Blizz realized that it does not make sense to put money into raid to have only a minority of the raiders, which are by themselves a minority, see all of them. Therefore everyone is playing the current tier and no one is doing T4-T5 content while the hardcore raiders are in sunwell.

[Nak88]

My server is medium-low pop and there are 35-40 Horde guilds which clear BWL on a weekly basis, 9 months after Classic release. My server is bigger than any original Vanilla server, so imagine how Firemaw, Shazzrah, Golemagg or Gehennas might look like, just insane. Classic is not in a weird spot, it has already been a massive success despite what you may say. Yeah, a lot of people have quit, there are too many bots (same problem Retail has btw), that's undeniable, but the game is pretty much alive despite being a 15-year-old game and having zero advertising from Blizzard/Activision.

Can't wait for AQ release and TBC announcement though.

[Seranthor]

There are almost no big streamer , not to say there is none.

Almost no new youtube content.

It gets harder and harder, if not impossible to find groups for quests / dungeons while leveling

Many raid guilds seem to have just vanished or disbanded

People dont seem to talk much in all chat outside of the same ones again and again.

forums seem to be mostly empty/ some outrage over a blue post but not over the game

Is there any hope for classic to get popular again? maybe with naxx ? or is it better to just accept for now that until tbc it will be a little more quite?

Classic needs a hero... Will you step up and be their YT Hero?

[Tsyplenk]

Let's just pretend op isn't talking complete crap lmao. My server and pretty much all of them that aren't the 2 low ones are doing fine and are still active. It's going to drop off a bit at any stage at the current time due to being near the end of the patch, and being summer.

Just another retail player mad that Classic is more popular than the dead ghost town :/

- - - Updated - - -

My server is medium-low pop and there are 35-40 Horde guilds which clear BWL on a weekly basis, 9 months after Classic release. My server is bigger than any original Vanilla server, so imagine how Firemaw, Shazzrah, Golemagg or Gehennas might look like, just insane. Classic is not in a weird spot, it has already been a massive success despite what you may say. Yeah, a lot of people have quit, there are too many bots (same problem Retail has btw), that's undeniable, but the game is pretty much alive despite being a 15-year-old game and having zero advertising from Blizzard/Activision.

Can't wait for AQ release and TBC announcement though.

Na, I play retail so I'm obliged to say you're lying and delusional m8

[Azerox]

Wow just like vanilla near the end.

[klaps_05]

After all the crying about how retail is "play patch week and you are done", that is exactly what Classic has become.

[McNeil]

I'll never understand why retail players seem to get triggered by classic so much. maybe its an mmo champion thing.

I only see this happening on MMO-C, all other WoW forums seem to be a lot more in harmony when it comes to both games.

Retail players don't ever talk about Classic because they don't care. The people that are critical of Classic are the players who play both.

Classic players on the other hand seem to have a very unhealthy hate against retail.

Simply not true. Plenty of retail players who have vowed never to even play the game have been shitting on it since the very beginning. Just look at the old Nost megathread, but you can simply look about anywhere here on the board. What I would describe an unhealthy hatred is when retail players deliberately come to a Classic subforum and tell Classic players that their game is bad and that they should not be enjoying it.

[Paulosio]

lolwut? No ones talking about subscriptions..

I think you are missing the point. Why is retail named retail by some people? What does the word retail mean ?

to sell goods to the public in shops, on the internet, etc

Classic is on the same sub and costs the same ammount to play.... it is therefore by definition a retail product.

Retail was / is used almost as a word to disparage the latest version of the game.... It's like calling it a sellout, corporate version. Like when a great band changes it's musical style and dumbs it's stuff down to appeal to the masses but basically loses its soul. I disagree that this is the case.

To me classic was great back in 2005 when I started playing it originally. I've probably never had as much fun in wow as I did back then even if looking back objectively now it had a lot of flaws. If the modern style of the game came out back in 2005 as a new thing I would love that even more than I loved classic. If the game went from the WOW we have today and morphed into the style of game that classic was there would be far more hate for it than the current modern game gets today including from people who profess how superior they find classic to be. I honestly don't believe that if the game went from what the game is now (but back in 2005) to what the game was in 2005 (in the present day) that anyone would be happy.

Classic is a game that has already been seen and done. We knnow about all the mysteries etc so it will never have the magic it did. I could never wonder about what's behind that large gate in Tanaris, what is the deal with the caverns of time, fight my way up the hill in Wetlands towards Grim Batol and wonder what is inside (and go online to read up about it and try and learn more). I could never be excited for a new raid and be excited to see what the inside looks like, what bosses there will be or what cool items will be available from it.

P.S. I haven't played classic since it was originally other than for a handful 30 minute sessions here and there (on both official and unofficial servers) when I tried and failed to get back into it.... I don't play The latest version of WOW either so I have no horse in this race. Just stating a few facts and a bunch of opinions.

People are different too. It's predictable that once the new sheen wore off the "community" wouldn't be the same as it was back in 2005. People don't have the same tolerance of people who aren't as good or as knowledgeable about something when they know it all themselves already.

[jba252]

After all the crying about how retail is "play patch week and you are done", that is exactly what Classic has become.

Its as I said

Classic is Retail

same sub, built off of legion architecture

basically what happened is that blizzard granted amnesty to illegals so we can tax them ($14.99)

Welcome to retail

[Kralljin]

After all the crying about how retail is "play patch week and you are done", that is exactly what Classic has become.

You play through things faster on your second playthrough, who would have figured that out.

That aside, "Play the patch" describes the behavior that the current patch essentially replaces any previous patch, MC is still relevant, BWL will also be relevant once AQ comes out.

Matter of fact, it will be a problem for a lot of guilds once AQ is out to clear all content on a single day, because your average guild won't clear AQ in <1 hour, then do BWL & MC as well ZG.
So they might have to turn MC / ZG into a "not requirement activity", despite people still needing items from there - or add another day of raiding.

Furthermore, certain upgrades aren't the effort worth to some people, especially looking at PvP here.
Sure, a Warrior could get AB Exalted for those Shoulders (or Rank 10) but that represents Months of effort unless you're in a decent Pre made group, so most people just hope they get the ones from BWL.

Lastly, you also have to measure how much time people have dumped into Classic to reach the point of raidlogging, especially during P1 / P2, once you hit 60, you started off with a bucketlist of things to do that kept people busy for weeks.

[pinkz]

Classic simply lacks challenging content and would feel much better if it was on an accelerated progression cycle of 1 year instead of 2 years.
Outside of raids, there's really not much to do besides leveling alts and farming gold, both of which are really not that popular. PvP is a shitshow because premade meta has made casual pvp a nightmare.

But that was to be expected. In fact, I see so many players blaming Blizzard and pointing to private servers as if we're experiencing something new. We aren't. In fact, Classic is holding much better than most private servers. The average private server would already be in AQ and Naxx would be coming out by the end of the summer. And do you know what happens with these servers the moment Naxx comes out? People clear it and quit because they finished the game.

TBC has redeeming qualities in that :

• Raids take more than 60 minutes per week
• Raids are slightly more challenging
• There's a reason to revisit Heroic dungeons once badges come out
• Isles of QD is the best iteration of World PvP ever made
• Arenas is an infinite time sink in-between raid nights
• Casual PvP is back since there are no more sweaty premades
• Consumables and World Buffs are for the most part gone/inexpensive

at that point blizzard had servers grouped into battlegroups, but there were still factions that dominated, during BC, and WOTLK, on the battlegroup i was on, the horde to win AVs, they had to premade or they did yolo AVs to lose fast.

in TBC i had a level 61 rogue (alliance), i rolled into AV at random to level 70. which was 61-70 back then (yes rather unfair bracket) honor was capped at the time to 75000, but you could buy PVP gear above your level, at 70 i had full head to toe, all slots filled with PVP gear sitting in the bank. i took a break from WOW, for a few months.i told a friend about it, so he did the same, but at 70 he had 3-4 or less pieces, he was mad and pissed, did not understand, he had rolled horde

of course other battlegroups situations were reversed

[clevin]

You play through things faster on your second playthrough, who would have figured that out.

That aside, "Play the patch" describes the behavior that the current patch essentially replaces any previous patch, MC is still relevant, BWL will also be relevant once AQ comes out.

Matter of fact, it will be a problem for a lot of guilds once AQ is out to clear all content on a single day, because your average guild won't clear AQ in <1 hour, then do BWL & MC as well ZG.
So they might have to turn MC / ZG into a "not requirement activity", despite people still needing items from there - or add another day of raiding..

The guild I'm in has two groups that clear BWL in one night. One of those also does MC and Ony that night (they're faster), the other tacks on Mc/Ony on a second night. We had a 3rd MC but it's seen a decline in attendance to about 25 so.. eh. We were running ~4-6 ZG groups a week but that's calmed down and it's kind of on demand now.

When AQ drops I imagine MC will go to one group with the folks who either are new 60s needing loot or the handful who need a second binding.Mostly I'd imagine we'll do a night of BWL and another of AQ with the odd ZG here and there for Idols, mounts, etc.

[Lurker1]

Classic was always temporary imho and blizzard knows people will be back for shadowlands and there old expansions for while repeat the process then go back to the new expansion that year ext never ending cycle of a MMOrpg.

[InfernalDark]

Blizz just fucked up with things like bringing the worst version of AV, introducing layering and so on. Really killed my mood to play classic.

[Mosha]

Classic vanilla is fun, but there is nothing set in place to stay logged in once raid is done. Tbc will change this slightly but it will still be just the same once content dries up. At the very least arena and dailies and heroics and such keep people interested during times like this.

[Steelangel]

100% true.

Private Projects did a better job in re-creating the vanilla experience by far.

People wanted #nochanges.
They got #nochanges.

- - - Updated - - -

If you still play retail, you're either a Mythic raider or someone that just plays this game like a mobile game (transmogs, world quests, etc.)

There's a lot of 'casual' players who play retail.Maybe for a bit of PvP, maybe for just hanging out working on professions. Auction house trading, alts.. Maybe you should look harder.

[Boricha]

I've been playing classic a lot recently. I don't know about all servers, but mine seems pretty healthy. There's always groups lfm and guilds recruiting, as well as boost runs. I see plenty of players out in the world.