The snowball effect

[Danvash]

I think they should just release Vanilla as it was, despite its flaws.

It's like going back and playing the old NES Zelda games. There are a lot of things in those games that are confusing and unfair. Dungeon entrances are in super random places that you pretty much need a walkthrough to find. Screens of bullet hell are very common, even way before you have enough health that you can take some hits before falling over dead. The fairy spell in Zelda 2 can softlock your game when used as intended.

Despite the list of problems, some of us still like to go back and play through those games and experience them as they were. If Nintendo re-released Zelda 2 but also re-balanced the game for a modern audience and added Fi in to tell you where to go, it wouldn't be Zelda 2 anymore. Fans who want to experience the original would emulate the original version instead.

I think we can all agree that there were a lot of bad ideas that made it into Classic WoW, but they still shouldn't patch those things out of the game for the sake of player convenience

[Outofmana]

The point is that you can rarely find a common ground there, person A thinks change X wouldn't impact the Vanilla experience, Person B thinks it's change Y, and so forth.

After discussing with some people I currently play vanilla with I guess I agree with you, I mean everyone wants another thing changed/nerfed and they all say it's not gamechanging to do so, just a simple QoL. I guess not changing anything at all is infinitely better than Blizzard ending up changing too much at this point. It's really hard to decide _which_ QoL would have an effect of making things less anoying (like a bit less mana on groupbuffs, again immediately you will go "but how much?") and which will fundamentally change the game, and no one wants that to happen.

I guess the only QoL stuff they might implement are things 99.9% of players would agree with, like a proper working 40y rangecheck for healers, or a groupbuff being only 100 or 200 mana less, just enough so you can actually buff 2 full groups and not 1.9, I don't see anyone that would rationally be against this. Again how to measure this though? I can't really tell.

[Deleted]

Snowball and other slippery slope arguments are fallacies for a good reason. As an example, demanding that the exact same client is used is irrational nostalgia and has no bearing on what made vanilla attractive.

[Fus Ro Yay]

It is a slippery slope, I hope we get a baseline, unmodified version of vanilla and then get access to official polls to vote things in.

this is the exact same thing that Jagex did with Oldschool RuneScape.
It leaves it up to the community to decide wich changes they want and wich ones they dont want. At least then we get to see what changes blizzard thinks we want/need and what changes the playerbase wants. the only problem i can see here is who gets to vote for it? anyone with a blizzard acc? just those who play X hours a week on classic? only characters above lvl 50?

[Count Zero]

The "absolutely zero changes" camp needs to accept that they've already stated they will fix bugs and exploits. Change is already confirmed. And considering they're saying that things like instance group size are up for discussion ... it's not going to be a snapshot of any given patch, it's going to be some mashup version of various features from various patches.

So it won't be a version that actually ever existed, and "exploits" (which could be trivial to massive) will be fixed, and it's also pretty clear that part of the conversation they have said they will have with the playerbase is on what QoL features they will implement.

I don't have any skin in this game, by the way. I'll level a character to 60 with or without changes, with or without QoL improvements. I'm just saying, for your own health - accept that it's not going to be a copy/paste of your favorite patch.

[Dianova]

I mean the snowball effect of QoL changes is what got WoW to the sad state is currently in now. I understand bug fixes no one wants to take a Reckoning Bomb to the face but QOL changes are to far.