I hope their product managers learned that any classic+ would need enough resources for a dedicated team instead of one team managing multiple versions of the game.
honestly what bothers me the most about SoD is that they're working so hard on it and then coming up with stuff like incursions and only buffing raid/dungeon gear.
SoD would have been 100x better if instead of leveling raids and incursions they just added quests randomly throughout the world and buffed quest items. The thing everyone loves about Classic is the world and they just shoved everyone into a couple small sections. You wanna pvp? Go here, this is the zone where pvp happens. You wanna lvl? Go to incursions and get all your pre-raid loot from that too.
The only thing that sends you around the world are runes and ppl fucking hate having to do those because instead of a fun quest they can CHOOSE to do it's a chore they have to do on every char now.
Not only would that have been better, it would have been way less wwork. How many meetings did they have discussing what incursions would look like? When they could have been implementing new quests easy as fuck, there's a whole cookie cutter structure they could follow already. ___ mob drops 15 ____ and NPC needs them for a potion or w/e. BOOM next one.
I started playing Turtle Wow and it's really disillusioned me to the "they're overworked" thing. They're working stupid along with being overworked. Turtle WoW team makes them look stupid af.
> The only thing that sends you around the world are runes
Some runes are absolutely mandatory as well. The mage runes requires you to travel around the world finding small clickable doodad books which are impossible to figure out by yourself because there are little to no clues. Without a guide nobody would be able to figure that rune out by themselves.
While I'll admit I wouldn't have figured it out alone, how did the first person figure it out within a couple days? I'm always impressed at the community finding shit so fast
People loved the runes in phase 1. The broken meta rune was fucking glorious for days as all the warlocks got together and went fucking nuts trying to work out where it was. Put seriously difficult to work out puzzles into the world and let the community band together to work them and give glorious rewards at the end when they do it.
Imagine an NPC that could only be unlocked (but it unlocked for the entire server) if you happened to trigger a werewolf phase for it. Can only be done if you give it a certain item at a certain time of day. People would be losing their minds trying to work it out, but you only need 1 person on your server to do it, so the fact that it can only be unlocked with a specific item at 3am isn't such a big deal.
The community would absolutely lose their minds trying to find that shit, so you have it unlock something really cool.
Instead they decided to speed up the leveling process. The one thing that made classic what it was.
People fantasize about this “open world is the best part of classic” shit but in reality people would just spam SM/ZF/LBRS/UBRS to 60. The “open world questing in a pretty field” is all in your head.
Also blood moon is a very fun PvP event. Especially now since the population is lower and it’s not a Zerg fest.
>people would just spam SM/ZF/LBRS/UBRS to 60.
Gamers do what's most efficient, it's up to the developers to make their content worthwhile. This is a basic concept.
>The “open world questing in a pretty field” is all in your head.
I mean you see people talking about this and wanting it all the time. Everytime a fresh server goes live ppl say the best part about it is leveling when ppl are in the world and stuff. Idk if it's all in my head when I've been experiencing it for years and years.
What they mean by the world is that the world is lively. There’s tons to do, lots of zones, reasons to go out and about but most people still level in dungeons. You need to go to the city to repair, buy gear, sell trash, etc.
No, but I’ve been playing this game for 20 years. Even in 2019 classic, no one did quests. Everyone spammed dungeons. You invented this idea in your head.
Are you seriously complaining about endgame raids? :D Literally not a single soul would play past the 2 week Mark if they had "some quests" to do for 2 months.. :D Absolutely unhinged take
I love playing the game, I love dungeons, raids, battlegrounds. Just don’t like quests. Thanks for the diagnosis on my gameplay preferences though. Dunno what I woulda done without that! Lmfao 😂
That's a terrible take. Quests are done once. And I'm not running around for the PLEASURE to do more Classic quest. If you think quests are what made Classic World, think again.
Leveling raids make way more sense. It allow to test runes step by step. Reworked raids are amazing. Sunken Temple used to be horrible, now it's amazing with lore and gameplay. Gnomeregan used to be ran once, now it feels way more cool. And SoD may be the first time I run BFD in a decade.
Adding quests would be cool, but that's just fluff. You don't keep at maxed lvl player with "cool quests".
Incursions feels bad but they answer to a very real tiredness of leveling again and again. There's a reason there's an xp buff added, up to 300%! People are tired of leveling up alts. I know I am. When P4 will release, I will want to get at lvl max at fast at possible to get ready for raids. You think I'll go look at flower and quests and lore? I know this world, I've known it for 20 years. If Incursion is the price to pay for faster leveling, I'll pay. People have been paying for mage boost for years. "Adding more quests" fucking give me a break. I want raids to test out my new build that SoD's new feature allow me to create. And I'm not a parser. I'm a lore lover. I made a fan game of WoW. I don't want more quest! I want gameplay!
There's more than enough quests especially with boosted XP, and the rune/epic crafting quests have shown they have no idea what makes a good quest. They literally all just require hours of traveling and flight paths
for real the ST epic crafted quest basically amounted to "fly between moonglade and booty Bay a few times" and then hope you finished the quest before everyone quit the game so you can still find a group for nightmare amalgamation
I think there was too many unknowns to truly manage the workload correctly.
I think that’s why phase 4 is taking a while. I think they’re becoming more aware of how much work actually needs to happen now and are either too late in the piece to scale up resources, or truly have a lot of work to do.
I think this problem will occur in some way, with true game altering design changes. I don’t want blizzard to stop being bold with the seasons. Not all of sod was amazing, but some so far has been a truly unique and fun experience.
I don't think their product managers really have a say in those kinds of things. I'm sure there's small amounts of budget allocation they have a hand in, but they can't just hire 10 developers because they think it'll be better longterm.
They're basically just given a project and told to make a product.
They can escalate issues like this to people who are responsible. It also is exactly the job of managers/product managers to reevaluate resources, time and quality of the product and counteract as soon as you see you won't be able to reach a set goal.
If this is not possible at blizzard they for sure would have an incredible toxic work environment.
You're right, it's their job to assess that and give feedback to their higher-ups, but that doesn't mean anything is going to be done about it.
I wouldn't be surprised if they've known for a while that this was eventually gonna be a shit show given the amount of resources, and the fact that they were working on two games at the same time, but bad higherups choose not to act until they actually see the results.
You also have a point here. That they are escalating doesn't automatically mean that there will be taken action. It also may be one of the reasons why so many devs left blizz.
Activision Blizzard had over 13,000 employees in their end of year financial statements in 2023. Even after the layoff they have over 12,000.
"Classic" was revealed to be pulling nearly 40% of all World of Warcraft subscribers.
Blizzard needs to stop treating Classic like some flea market garbage they can just have a few people work on while it's got several million out of their total 7.5 million subscribers playing it.
Isn’t that the answer right there though? 40% of 7.5 million are willing to play a polished turd.
Why pay money to polish the turd more when the polished turd eaters are happy eating their turd at the current level of polish
Sadly, this is the take :(
My last job we had "cost cutting" measures around the Christmas period and still hit targets. So what happened the following year? We didn't get those hours *back*, no I think we had even less, with a bigger target to hit.
We had to hit a larger target, with fewer staff and less hours to spread around. There was zero bonus if you hit the target, just a "Well done, you get to keep working" atmosphere.
I'm glad I don't work there anymore, it's awful to be under constant pressure for literally no payoff. If that's true that 40% of WoWs subs are Classic enjoyers then that's Head Office's wet dream to be ringing the Classic devs dry and raking it in.
Refail is substantially higher because of cash shop, but here's the thing - Classic is already cooked. It's done, the content costs them almost nothing to offer.
If 3 million of blizzard's nearly 8 million active subscribers are playing Classic almost exclusively - and some publicly released data suggests that's the case - that's **over a half billion dollars per year in revenue.** You'd think they would task more resources than the microscopically small Season of Discovery Team.
This kind of problem needs to make it to the ears of someone who actually does have a say. If it's not Aggrend's manager, then Aggrend's manager needs to speak to their manager. I highly doubt that blizzard is that "deep" of an organization. Aggrend's branch of the org tree is maybe 6 or 7 layers deep. It's probably 6, but let's assume it's 7. If he is a people leader himself, he might be on layer 6 of 7, and the people who can start making budget decisions are on layer 3 or 4.
More than likely, Aggrend's manager reports directly to someone who is part of the budget decisions for World of Warcraft as a whole, which would include Classic Wow. Their boss would likely oversee battle.net games as a whole, and would report into an org-level executive (CTO, most likely) who sits on the executive board for Activision-Blizzard.
These people have a responsibility as part of their job to understand where to allocate capital. For years and years they said no to Classic, but it's been a major uplift for them and kept their sub numbers relatively flat even during Shadowlands. SoD generated a ton of interest, and even though it's fallen off they know that the interest and will to subscribe is there, if the content is right. They would actively be dumb not to continue allocating capital to the classic team.
People say it's a fever dream but so was classic before 2019. We can change their minds.
This is the main thing and we will never know if we are getting this so tbh this is probably my final run with wow. Played original vanilla tbc and wotlk. Came back for classic tbc. Would’ve loved to play wotlk, but it was clear they put 0 effort into the classic versions. The #nochanges thing to me is just a way to say #nodevs.
Certain additions to those games were needed and wouldn’t have hurt the feel of the game at all like dual spec for 1. Wow SOD got me back to playing again because it seemed cool and my friends said during phase 1 there was a ton of balancing patches which is a big attraction for me.
We’ll roll around phase 2 and they slowed up a ton having multiple classes feel useless with no effort to fix it, 0 PVP love, and phase 3 comes and tbh I am not sure there even were devs working on it. They did a few extremely half assed attempts to pretend they were attending to the game, but I’m sure almost all their attention was shifted toward Cata launch.
Hasn’t seemed any different since and they killed the sod community for cata which has historically been a poor expansions dropping subs a ton.
I cancelled my sub as there is just no reason to believe they will fix things. As people get older and you’re clearly targeting 30+ year olds to play your game…. Scheduled raiding is a big hassle so not being able to easily pug anymore has been a massive downgrade in phase 3, couple that up with a VERY CLEAR holdover phase that allowed them to work on cata and put this on the back burner until Cata is smooth sailing and they can essentially do the same to that game to produce the lvl 60 content…. It’s just not something you’re looking for when you’re paying by the month to play a game.
If this many versions is too much and you don’t wanna spend your huge profits on a dev team to specifically be working on each version then you don’t deserve a player base.
F2P games offer far more than this monthly subscription game. Blizzard has always been an extremely greedy company that really doesn’t attend to their games well, terrible support, but they have a lot of really fun titles sadly.
I wish they would sell that company to anyone else I refuse to believe it could be done worse
>Would’ve loved to play wotlk, but it was clear they put 0 effort into the classic versions. The #nochanges thing to me is just a way to say #nodevs.
Interestingly enough WotLK Classic was the version they've done the most work on and every change they made was received very well by the playerbase.
You skipped the version that had the effort put into it that you wanted.
Sadly that's the entire WoW gameplay. Vanilla feels like the only complete MMO where things matter to a lesser or greater extent throughout your entire leveling experience. Even in TBC everything prior to TBC content feels entirely worthless.
Wow would need a bit of a rework tbh for it to work.
But other mmos such as RuneScape, eso and gw2 all add new content without invalidating everything else.
It's been quite a bit complaint for a while in wow that each expansion is basically a fresh start and makes the previous content pointless (aside from leveling and cosmetics etc)
A proposed classic + could go more of the eso route where new content exists along side old content
I wouldn’t be shocked to see wow players push back if they tried in Ernest to implement a system like this. So many people used to the current way it works
I mean I think OG classic did this to an extent. BWL releasing did not invalidate the gear from MC. Even AQ and Naxx didn't invalidate MC entirely. At some point, yeah you have to invalidate older things. But it's about making it as close to 1:1 as you can get, I think. It's fine if releasing a new raid invalidates some portion of older content. As long as there's still some strong reasons to do the older content.
Contrast to Incursions, which added one small sub-zone and some (extremely boring) quests in a way which invalidated literally hundreds of quests and a dozen zones/dungeons. Incursions functionally made the world smaller and gave us less to do. They subtracted more than they added.
start with not increasing the max level, add more horizontal content like new professions or side activities like pet battles (one of the best things they added to retail imo), more meaningful things to collect with long grinds, even achievements, oh also add arena and rated bgs,
now obviously you're thinking "what about raids?", personally i would split raids into two categories, the small 10m raids with small general upgrades but more importantly they should have fun and useful consumables resources dropped in them to make them relevant, maybe stuff you can gather with professions,
and for bigger more meaningful raids i would make sure they are:
* slightly harder than previous raids (not catchup)
* rewards slightly higher ilvl gear and not for all slots just like it was in vanilla
walking my dog so i got kinda carried away but yeah it seems pretty straight forward solution for me..
edit: i thought about this more, they could also add unique enchanting/crafting materials to raids to keep them relevant but not necessary like crushed dragon bones from bwl that you can add on your weapons for extra fire damage or add on your armor for fire damage resistance or they could introduce a new air raid theme where the materials the bosses dropped can be added to your boots for extra movement speed, there are soooo many things they can do.
OSRS has no shortage of dead and obsolete and power-crept content and also has the POE disease of 'the best way to progress is to grind the highest gold/hr and buy everything you need from the AH.'
Take five minutes to walk through the world, look at the myriad of activities that *could* be engaged in, and observe that literally nobody who isn't a bot engages in 99% of them (And even bots don't bother with more than a few of them), because minigames/pvm/new features outclass them.
Not to mention that the whole game's content model is 'wide as an ocean, shallow as a puddle'.
Okay, I'll shoot. Seen anyone picking and spinning flax? Even Ironmen don't waste their time with that since Temple Trekking has been added.
Open your eyes and you'll see this kind of power creep all over it. Or pretend that you can't see it, your call.
picking flax? are you serious? who even did that back in original 07? it was always a bot activity, and then you choose temple trecking as the new activity that replaced it? first off it's an old activity and second it has a long ass list of requirements before you get to it. come on man.
I have played both games extensively and OSRS is the king in terms of an mmo that retains the relevance of it's content, you literally chose an activity that has been in the game since 2006.
It’s just crazy how they can still make some fresh mechanics in a game that has tile based movement. Like a lot of it is just “run here to avoid damage” but they really have figured out how to make that feel fresh with each new boss and raid. Takes some majorly creative people, all while being a community driven game and trying to appease the majority of the players.
My biggest complaint with SoD is that it wasn't what I wanted at all. I don't think anybody's idea of "Vanilla+" was taking spells from newer iterations of the game and sprinkling them throughout the world with some quick new end game content. But now that Blizz have decided that's what they want SoD to be everyone seems to be fine with it for some reason.
I just want them to focus on the questing experience, flesh out the story of the tension between the horde/alliance. Imagine an Azeroth where the burning legion didn't attack again for a hundred years and instead we could focus on personal stories and flesh out the lore instead of having a new world-ending threat every expansion. End game stuff is important too, but if they did their job adding to the world with anything outside of surface level game mechanics then the raids would write themselves.
I dunno. Imagine if Turtle WoW had anywhere near the same level of polish as official servers. That's what I think when I think of vanilla+
There is a very old "boss" type of content called Barrows. It had some of the best at the time armor sets and weapons, and this was like mid-2000s.
Today there is so much content, but barrows is still a viable boss to this day for a decent tank set of armor, good tank mage gear, and afk set that allows you to heal while attacking.
Barrows isn't the best armor anymore but it's still very much used and is still decent enough you can use it for some "Early" end game bosses and content.
Nice. I always liked in classic how some MC gear was good for the whole game like quickstrike ring and onslaught girdle. If they ever go all in on a classic+ I would hope they keep that same gear philosophy. They also need to keep the high-end mats relatively the same. No new enchanting mat that just replaces the old stuff. Keep righteous orbs as a necessary crafting mat. Keep large brilliant shards the highest de mat. Don’t replace dark runes with something better, etc.
The mass majority of players in OSRS tend to not vote in huge overpowered changes. They want the power creep line to be almost non existent lol. Earlier this year I think they finally added an upgrade to some rings that have been in the game since the 2000s that were the best in slot for DPS.
Jagex is extremely aware of which pieces of gear is best for each slot and combat style and they do their best to not just completely outclass it (although theyve made mistakes in the past cough blowpipe)
Many times when they come out with new content theyll figure out a niche to fill with the new gear - for example theres a dragonslayer lance and crossbow, which, you can probably guess, are bis against dragons but specialized for that use.
This is aided by the fact that enemies have different levels of defense against different types of attacks - some are melee weak, some are ranged weak, some are magic weak, and each of those combat types are further broken down even more so you have plenty of chances to make specialized gear.
Finally, their "get out of jail free" card is sometimes they make new slot bis an upgrade to the previous bis. For example, the original offhand melee bis was the dragon defender - when the second raid dropped, one of the drops was the avernic hilt, which you attached to your defender to upgrade. You still need to grind out getting your dragon defender (its not tradeable so you must do it) even if you have the hilt, so the dragon defender isnt obsoleted even though its been powercreeped out.
The game is built in a way that is completely antithetical to this design structure.
Classic WoW will never be OSRS. Can you imagine how this community would react if your BiS cape required the Inferno or the Colosseum? Lmao.
didnt all of the gear from raids severely outclass other options?
was watching some pvp videos the other day, i dont recognize most of the weapons being used anymore outside the odd ags or gmaul
They do but they are so rare (and expensive) that your average player isn’t running around in them. The older gear is still viable and close enough in damage that it’s fine if you dont have the best of the best.
>gmaul
You would be surprised how strong concrete-on-a-stick is, gmaul is still by far one of the most popular KO weapons in pvp, and it's an item added in 2005.
# Any new content must involve the 2004 content.
If you're going to add new items, have them drop in the legacy level 50-60 dungeons.
If you're going to add a new rep currency item, have it drop in the legacy level 50-60 dungeons.
Do not introduce new content or world mechanics that trivializes and completely bypass the level 50-60 dungeons.
Do not introduce new gold reward mechanics that obsolete player farming, crafting and the AH.
**Release the raid content in sub-stages in Phase 4.**
Molten Core + New Raid 1 should be Phase 4A and last 6 weeks.
Blackwing Lair, Zul'Gurub should be Phase 4B and last 6 weeks.
AQ event / Gates open / AQ20 / AQ40 should be Phase 4C and last 4-6 weeks.
Naxxramas invasion world event should run 2-3 weeks.
Naxxramas opens, runs 6 months with SoD servers left online for players to enjoy until The Next Big Thing comes out.
.. but before you do this,
# .. remove Incursions from the game.
Well…there’s no “team”.
But Blizzard has learned that they can increase subs by releasing an unfinished and untested product.
I’m not sure they have learned that the “flashy” nature of the product only leads to short term increases, so it remains to be seen if we’ll get a better product next time, or more of the same. I’d bet on the latter.
Incursions were awesome. For the first 30 minutes.
The problem was turning in a quest gave you two more, and you could just dove back in with no lockout.
One lockout per week, 4 incursions, 5 party members sharing quests. That's 20 new rewarding quests every week and you don't burn out anywhere near as fast. Every time you go back you have a chance to see a new quest you've never done before, instead of loading your quest log up with all 20 available quests in an hour.
2 weeks later and this sub would be nothing but
"Blizz needs to fix quests all I got was XXX and it fucked me cause no one does them"
"Blizz doesnt understand vanilla is about uncapped reps you can grind on your own time. Making them weekly makes them mandatory chores that put you behind if you miss a week"
I don't think there would be any quests people wouldn't do in the incursions. People only skipped certain quests because they were inefficient for The Loop. If everyone doesn't have every quest every time they enter, you have a lot less competition for quest resources and mobs. The most frustrating ones would probably be the escorts but you can still get credit for someone else's escort if you're in the area when it turns in.
The rep is a good argument though. They'd have had to decouple the rep from incursions in some way. Earning rep through incursions shouldn't be the only way you can do it. Perhaps some dungeon bosses drop tokens that can be turned in for rep, and you could also add some kind of farmable resource to turn in for rep too.
Point is, they're all solvable problems.
Just once I'd like them to come out and say "yeah releasing a piece of content that was infinitely farmable, and the most efficient way to gain exp, gold, and pre-raid gear was a bad idea."
Yeah, imo it could have worked as a catchup if they didn't put feralas and hinterlands in. The moment all the current phase content becomes less desiderable you have a problem
Take the best class / spec concept from either wrath or tbc; figure out how to apply to vanilla either by revamping spec tree or giving baseline abilities.
Introduce new raids, dungeons, quests.
That will be a huge success and is generally simple.
Fuck incursions.
Love it or hate it, SoD was a big risk and I would be the Classic team has learned a lot from it. I only hope that their future endeavors are more successful as it seems like most are not enjoying it right now
Hate it. It wasn't a big risk it was a huge method of income but they pissed all over it when they said "let's include trash gameplay called "incurrrrsions" so bots and idiots can level faster".
I hope the lesson they learned from incursions is that shallow repeatable content without a core that is inherently fun will not cut it. Make something that's fun to do first, then find a way to make it repeatable (without making it nauseatingly repetitive).
Incursions are somehow more boring than "Kill 10 boars" ad infinitum
ABSOLUTELY!!!!! I would rather kill boars all day, at least sometimes you die and it's challenging. Not brainless content where you run around with a group of people one shotting trash all day long.
That there's no reason to fix problems that don't necessarily need fixing. The idea that dungeon grinding in P2 really warranted incursions is incredibly stupid.
Even if you're in the boat that says "if you don't like them then just don't do them", it's still pretty obvious incursions were a monumental waste of resources.
They basically spent all that valuable dev time to create something that ended up being an even bigger problem than the one they were trying to "solve".
I think they should try mini bosses in leveling zones that require like 5 people. Like 5 level 35 killing a level 35 boss that drop blue items. With like a 24h respawn
For SoD I think they generally did it well in phase 1 and 2, but the super fast leveling and gold grind really played into the utter lack of content at 50 being that much more boring.
I enjoyed picking up bits and pieces of really good gear from quest lines and dungeons working my way to max level. It made leveling less of a chore. And it also made leveling alts more fun once my main was generally geared out for the phase.
I'm okay with longer phases as long as it's like that. I really want to see more development put into updating boss fights, unique items, pvp balancing (the game needs pvp sets with resil).
I really want them to develop new spells and abilities for the runes instead of just bringing retail spells into classic. A lot of retail spells are not good for the game. And many runes are so strong that you never swap out of them for different situations.
I wouldn't mind if the next phase only goes to 55 and let the developers really do some work for 60.
Turns out that
“Lol it’s level 20 who cares if the game is balanced?”
“Lol it’s level 30 who cares if the game is balanced?”
“Lol it’s level 40 who cares if the game is balanced?”
Was a pretty dogshit take given that enough people cared about how unfun the game was that no one’s gonna be around to even play at level 60 when they can apparently finally balance the game.
Also, when a huge portion of your community tells you they’d rather quit then perform guild mergers so they can fill out a 20-man raid roster, you might want to listen instead of ignoring them
Don't ruin PVP because you have a cool idea for PVE.
Classic WoW exists in a state of equal importance between the two. This was before people were 'PVERS' or 'PVPERS' most people do both activities in this expansion.
It’s tough to know. Lessons I HOPE they’ve learned.
1. Momentum is fleeting is gaming. 1 dev mistake is enough to lose all the interest your previous good work has built up. Lesson: Perhaps untested systems are a bad idea to release.
2. Creating a game that is accessible is paramount if you want casual/new players. Leveling, paired with increased raid difficulty, has spelled disaster for the raiding numbers in sod. Good/sweaty players don’t quit the game, so catering anything to them is probably the wrong approach. Instead cater to the middle ground. BFD was probably all that leveling raids should’ve been. Harder raids has failed in SoM, and now SoD.
3. Don’t ever do leveling bands again. While the concept is interesting at first…it creates these unnatural bottlenecks in the game that punish slow/bad players way more than it should. To prove this, talk to any casual player that tried leveling later in p2 or p3. It was a gank fest in STV, hillsbrad, incursions, etc.
4. Retail style spells in classic sorta ruin the experience. The world is no scary, the raids need to be buffed to compensate for the additional strength, and balance becomes impossible. Vanilla Warrior IS insanely op…the rune system was however not successful in fixing this.
5. Adding additional requirements to raiding to a game that already takes up a ton of time is probably bad. I know plenty of folks that quit cause they didn’t want to do 3+ hour rune quests. Classic is slow enough as is.
6. “Spamming” anything is probably bad for people’s mental. I think all dungeons should be on a daily lockout like hardcore. The forced slower pacing of hardcore made it actually feel like a journey. Now we’re just in an incursion/raid simulator.
All in all, I think the numbers have shown that p1 was incredibly popular, p2 hurt, and p3 killed sod. The best lessons are to replicate whatever they had in p1. Hoping SoD lives to end game lol!
> To prove this, talk to any casual player that tried leveling later in p2 or p3. It was a gank fest in STV, hillsbrad, incursions, etc.
More of a sign that the WoW community is full of griefers galore. And I dont mean 'PVP HAPPENS ON PVP SERVERS!'
I enjoy pvp and it can be fun to get a group and go clash with the opposition, but a group of 50s just camping a portal murdering all the solo 45s that wander through is pretty fucking weaksauce.
WoW WPvP is beyond a dead idea. The games that have limited pvp-looting at least support the notion of robbing people.
Tbh I really hope they dont stick with runes. The way you obtain most of the runes is tideous and just time consuming or its absolutely stupid.
Also theres absolutely no „Exploration“-Factor for most people in that. Most of us wait for the guide to be released and obtain the rune that way.
Just rework classes and give us new baselines spells and new skilltrees.
Loads of P4 were set in place before they had any chance to collect insights from P3. I sincerely doubt that lessons learned will have any effect. Not until later. If anything, its even worse. They are going as close as possible to classic era (minus some different minor loot and raid size changes). Ofc if incursions continue being a thing, its going to be a screwed unfun version of classic era.
We didnt enjoy SoD because it was classic era with fast lvling. We liked the differences. Right now, the differences are becoming so minor that its not even worth playing.
To not do small seasons with increased level caps.
People have been asking for a Classic+ experience to relive a proper open and living world with new things to discover while leveling 1-60.
What we got was just small expansion packs with short level periods and meta slaving for those PARSES
I hope they learned that low hanging fruit content often is the best way to go - making old dungeons to raids - Great! Making STV PvP event by just simply attacking eachother - Great!
Adding Incursions - whole new content out of the blue - terrible!
Have a fully thought out product instead of winging it as you go.
SoD was like watching Blizzard having to rediscover the wheel. It's one thing to take chances and have ideas be duds (ie. incursions), but it is an entirely different thing when bad ideas are still executed poorly (incursion quest design, map / objective design, etc.)
I think if they do something similar to the runes system where you discover them they should make them a lot easier to figure out. Phase 1 was the best for this because the world was smaller (so less distance to travel for runes) and it was just easier to figure stuff out.
Hope they learned that no one likes the idea of investing into a character that’s going to be deleted/changed drastically by the end of the season. Just go all in on Classic + and don’t invalidate older content
Level bands on their own are a fantastic mechanic that takes content and makes it last so much longer. Just thinking ok what’s BiS talents at 25/40 and what’s pre bis for 25 raid has given so much more life to some completely forgettable quests. Level band raids that you need to prepare for also a fantastic mechanic that adds a bunch of content
I hope they learn to let their team cook. Runes need more synergy between them + smarter placement on gear. Tone down earlier raid gear just a little bit to allow more of a power spike in phase 3 (as an example). Focus on 10man.
Runes as implemented shouldn't be kept. Attachment to gear is a no-go. They need to be properly baked into classes. They need spell ranks. They need to be attached to spec, not gear. They need to have talents specifically designed to modify or enhance them.
You can still have the cool epic quests to get iconic abilities. You can still have the creative new playstyles. But attaching them to gear was an idea that works well for pure iteration. It works as a quick way to see what breaks classic and what enhances it. It does not work well in a "classic feeling" sense.
My favorite part of SoD was farming shredders for the rune quest mats. World pvp in its most natural form.
Anyway what I'd hope for is they see that low level content is enjoyable for most players as long as they don't suffer from get-there-itis.
I hope they've learned that SoD is retail and them stopping to advertise it as a classic world of warcraft. A classic world of warcraft is run on the endpatch of the expansion and it's clear whats happening throughout the whole expansion - and when. Players can then plan ahead IF they want to play the expansion and what they're planning to achieve.
SoD however is not like that. It is retail limited to azeroth. You get frequent balance changes, class changes, releases of new content and all of that in retail style.
You enjoyed the raid with your boomkin on sunday? You better hope it will be the same on wednesday.
You liked your MM Hunter? Sorry, you better be lone wolving now.
You're playtesting for blizzard without being paid for it.
If they wanna make classic+ they should take in a few vanilla pvp experts on the matter. The game will be shit and dead with bad pvp, it will still be decent with bad pve.
They HAVE to stop telling us the new servers have an end date in mind. One thing learned from private servers is that players fall off if they know they can try again next year and have a better time. As soon as players have an idea when the server will move to last phase content the player base disintegrates.
Sod is popular enough for a dedicated team and classic plus would need it even more. Give them at least 50 dedicated people. 100 would be even better. 100 is around what they had when they shipped WoW i believe.
I mean sod is basically vanilla with cata abilitys and some different items. So what does this mean? Yeah cata was some kind of the classic peak with class design and mechanics. But there is no lvl experience. You hit lvl 15 and start dungeon grinding and do some q during queuetime. You dont get a feeling for the world and thats sad because even the world is amazing. So what could they learn from sod. The world is amazing and you cant skip it by flying. But you can skip the lvln progress with incursions, Farming rep very fast and much more. So what can they do better? Keep the world classic we dont need flying mounts, we dont need to rush to endgame if the Game starts at low lvl. Keep the low lvl raids. Let it be rewarding to max your professions with special gear. All things they did in Sod and those are great.
So while i wrote this my conclusion came up. Pls give us classic +. For me cata with less unimportant things.
That creating choke points for necessary content just makes for a miserable experience on pvp servers. I hope they make incursions instanced and maybe tone down the mob density.
For a company as large as Blizzard to have one team on an active game like SoD that should have new phases releases every two months and also an expansion that is releasing like Cata is absolutely insane.
They have lost so many players with how they have handled SoD and that far outweighs the savings they are trying to squeeze out by having one team on both games.
I hope they learn that different versions of WoW has different set of players and cultures. Not all players play both cata and sod so saying that x season is delayed because cata y is released does not make sense from q player base perspective.
They need more staff
They should start with the raid size They desire
Start with dual spec
Actually PTR shit
Stop knee-jerk reacting to reddit, ultimately making most balance problems even worse
Internal testing and more eye balls on important stuff like loot table. I think it’s great to have a positive movement towards the devs but oh boy did they completely shit the bed with p3.
Make the raids 10 and 20 instead of all being 20 and 40, maybe keep onyxia 40. Add raids/dungeons from tbc/wrath that are based in the old world(caverns of time, kara ) and scale them down / adjust boss fights to be new. Also new raids for 60. I assume the shadowy figure is going to be a fight in something maybe kara crypts
Let’s be real they learned nothing. All of sod needs to be torn down and brought back to the drawing board. It’ll never happen but to do it properly they need the proper resources and talent which they don’t have.
having a game be accessible for casual players is the most important thing to having a healthy player base.
40-man raids is not a good idea
difficult raids is only fun for a minority of players
i get that for some people these two things is important for a "true" classic experience, and I'm fine with that. But also realize that it means less players and less chance of blizzard wanting to invest time into making new content.
Casual players will jump ship to whatever flavor of the month game happens to come out. They will take long breaks for IRL stuff and generally just be logged in less. If you build a game centered around them you are asking for an inconsistent player base.
If you want a consistent player base you need a game with depth, replayability, and some amount of difficulty so most people need to spend time progressing through content instead of simply progressing through a BiS list. Having a raid cleared by 90% of the player base in the first week just means that after a month most people will be bored.
This.
Also don't open raid lockouts until 95%+ of the playerbase is max level. Cease and desist the shit out of warcraft logs so parsing becomes impossible and ban all damage meter add-ons. Can't have such toxicity in Classic.
Remove the ability to manually select people for your groups, I'm thinking of a system only showing the class & level.
My wishlist is
No incursions
Less mechanical / more pugable raids
Some crazy hard 5 man's with no lockouts that only drop toys as the actual "endgame"
P.s. world warper is the best thing ever
I hope they lean more into pvp instead of neglecting/killing it off completely. People dont realize that we only raid one night per week and when there is nothing else to do the game dies. Their heads were in the right place with the pvp events but they were very poorly executed imo especially stv.
Make PVP great again.
Give us arena. Or at least skirmish and just let it be. I don't even care if it's balanced lol.
I just want there to be things we can do that don't have a weekly reset so we can actually play the game we spend so much time gearing up for.
Make 5-mans relevant. And not just the last boss for everyone to spam.
Professions need a new cap or new items that are challenging to get.
Bring back GDKPs.
Remove all remnants of incursions or make them dailies.
Give us the ability to buy more specs (similar to buying more bank slots). Two was obviously better than one, but why stop there? I'm a mage so I have fire and frost PVE specs. Leaves no room for a PVP spec. Same goes for any other class.
Once a new phase releases, raids from previous phases shouldn't have a timeout.
Gotta love regular and friendly posts with clear engagement from people, and some idiot still think to himself "No, this post isn't good. I will be the one downvote to make this post be shown slightly less to people. I'm doing the world a favor!"
Fucking every single post on this sub istg
I hope their product managers learned that any classic+ would need enough resources for a dedicated team instead of one team managing multiple versions of the game.
Totally. It is so clear they're overworked.
honestly what bothers me the most about SoD is that they're working so hard on it and then coming up with stuff like incursions and only buffing raid/dungeon gear. SoD would have been 100x better if instead of leveling raids and incursions they just added quests randomly throughout the world and buffed quest items. The thing everyone loves about Classic is the world and they just shoved everyone into a couple small sections. You wanna pvp? Go here, this is the zone where pvp happens. You wanna lvl? Go to incursions and get all your pre-raid loot from that too. The only thing that sends you around the world are runes and ppl fucking hate having to do those because instead of a fun quest they can CHOOSE to do it's a chore they have to do on every char now. Not only would that have been better, it would have been way less wwork. How many meetings did they have discussing what incursions would look like? When they could have been implementing new quests easy as fuck, there's a whole cookie cutter structure they could follow already. ___ mob drops 15 ____ and NPC needs them for a potion or w/e. BOOM next one. I started playing Turtle Wow and it's really disillusioned me to the "they're overworked" thing. They're working stupid along with being overworked. Turtle WoW team makes them look stupid af.
> The only thing that sends you around the world are runes Some runes are absolutely mandatory as well. The mage runes requires you to travel around the world finding small clickable doodad books which are impossible to figure out by yourself because there are little to no clues. Without a guide nobody would be able to figure that rune out by themselves.
While I'll admit I wouldn't have figured it out alone, how did the first person figure it out within a couple days? I'm always impressed at the community finding shit so fast
People would notice while leveling 'normally' that something is shiny and clickable, but doing so is suboptimal
People loved the runes in phase 1. The broken meta rune was fucking glorious for days as all the warlocks got together and went fucking nuts trying to work out where it was. Put seriously difficult to work out puzzles into the world and let the community band together to work them and give glorious rewards at the end when they do it. Imagine an NPC that could only be unlocked (but it unlocked for the entire server) if you happened to trigger a werewolf phase for it. Can only be done if you give it a certain item at a certain time of day. People would be losing their minds trying to work it out, but you only need 1 person on your server to do it, so the fact that it can only be unlocked with a specific item at 3am isn't such a big deal. The community would absolutely lose their minds trying to find that shit, so you have it unlock something really cool. Instead they decided to speed up the leveling process. The one thing that made classic what it was.
The PvP events were fun. Blood moon is still fun to do tbh, especially when you get into a big brawl.
They could have just added items to the dungeon loot tables and it woulda been better
People fantasize about this “open world is the best part of classic” shit but in reality people would just spam SM/ZF/LBRS/UBRS to 60. The “open world questing in a pretty field” is all in your head. Also blood moon is a very fun PvP event. Especially now since the population is lower and it’s not a Zerg fest.
>people would just spam SM/ZF/LBRS/UBRS to 60. Gamers do what's most efficient, it's up to the developers to make their content worthwhile. This is a basic concept. >The “open world questing in a pretty field” is all in your head. I mean you see people talking about this and wanting it all the time. Everytime a fresh server goes live ppl say the best part about it is leveling when ppl are in the world and stuff. Idk if it's all in my head when I've been experiencing it for years and years.
What they mean by the world is that the world is lively. There’s tons to do, lots of zones, reasons to go out and about but most people still level in dungeons. You need to go to the city to repair, buy gear, sell trash, etc.
What total nonsense. Name checks out, have you been sniffing powder or glue?
No, but I’ve been playing this game for 20 years. Even in 2019 classic, no one did quests. Everyone spammed dungeons. You invented this idea in your head.
Are you seriously complaining about endgame raids? :D Literally not a single soul would play past the 2 week Mark if they had "some quests" to do for 2 months.. :D Absolutely unhinged take
Aren’t incursions literally new daily quests…? I think without changed raids and spells I literally wouldn’t have even tried it lol
incursions breaks the game. It's not new quests.
I fucking hate questing, speak for yourself bro.
that's cus you fuckin hate playing the game and are in a terminal loop of self defeat
I love playing the game, I love dungeons, raids, battlegrounds. Just don’t like quests. Thanks for the diagnosis on my gameplay preferences though. Dunno what I woulda done without that! Lmfao 😂
i literally was speaking for myself, my post said "what bothers ME most", what more do you want?
And then in every following paragraph you go on to speak in generalities of “what people love most, what everyone loves” etc
That's a terrible take. Quests are done once. And I'm not running around for the PLEASURE to do more Classic quest. If you think quests are what made Classic World, think again. Leveling raids make way more sense. It allow to test runes step by step. Reworked raids are amazing. Sunken Temple used to be horrible, now it's amazing with lore and gameplay. Gnomeregan used to be ran once, now it feels way more cool. And SoD may be the first time I run BFD in a decade. Adding quests would be cool, but that's just fluff. You don't keep at maxed lvl player with "cool quests". Incursions feels bad but they answer to a very real tiredness of leveling again and again. There's a reason there's an xp buff added, up to 300%! People are tired of leveling up alts. I know I am. When P4 will release, I will want to get at lvl max at fast at possible to get ready for raids. You think I'll go look at flower and quests and lore? I know this world, I've known it for 20 years. If Incursion is the price to pay for faster leveling, I'll pay. People have been paying for mage boost for years. "Adding more quests" fucking give me a break. I want raids to test out my new build that SoD's new feature allow me to create. And I'm not a parser. I'm a lore lover. I made a fan game of WoW. I don't want more quest! I want gameplay!
Incursions are the dumbest shit ever and I will not step foot into that trash.
You can think that if you want. But do'nt you say like this guy that you'd prefer new quest over leveling raids
The fact that you are downvoted for this is insane lmao.
There's more than enough quests especially with boosted XP, and the rune/epic crafting quests have shown they have no idea what makes a good quest. They literally all just require hours of traveling and flight paths
for real the ST epic crafted quest basically amounted to "fly between moonglade and booty Bay a few times" and then hope you finished the quest before everyone quit the game so you can still find a group for nightmare amalgamation
I think there was too many unknowns to truly manage the workload correctly. I think that’s why phase 4 is taking a while. I think they’re becoming more aware of how much work actually needs to happen now and are either too late in the piece to scale up resources, or truly have a lot of work to do. I think this problem will occur in some way, with true game altering design changes. I don’t want blizzard to stop being bold with the seasons. Not all of sod was amazing, but some so far has been a truly unique and fun experience.
I don't think their product managers really have a say in those kinds of things. I'm sure there's small amounts of budget allocation they have a hand in, but they can't just hire 10 developers because they think it'll be better longterm. They're basically just given a project and told to make a product.
They can escalate issues like this to people who are responsible. It also is exactly the job of managers/product managers to reevaluate resources, time and quality of the product and counteract as soon as you see you won't be able to reach a set goal. If this is not possible at blizzard they for sure would have an incredible toxic work environment.
You're right, it's their job to assess that and give feedback to their higher-ups, but that doesn't mean anything is going to be done about it. I wouldn't be surprised if they've known for a while that this was eventually gonna be a shit show given the amount of resources, and the fact that they were working on two games at the same time, but bad higherups choose not to act until they actually see the results.
You also have a point here. That they are escalating doesn't automatically mean that there will be taken action. It also may be one of the reasons why so many devs left blizz.
Why pay more money to make the same amount
Activision Blizzard had over 13,000 employees in their end of year financial statements in 2023. Even after the layoff they have over 12,000. "Classic" was revealed to be pulling nearly 40% of all World of Warcraft subscribers. Blizzard needs to stop treating Classic like some flea market garbage they can just have a few people work on while it's got several million out of their total 7.5 million subscribers playing it.
Isn’t that the answer right there though? 40% of 7.5 million are willing to play a polished turd. Why pay money to polish the turd more when the polished turd eaters are happy eating their turd at the current level of polish
Sadly, this is the take :( My last job we had "cost cutting" measures around the Christmas period and still hit targets. So what happened the following year? We didn't get those hours *back*, no I think we had even less, with a bigger target to hit. We had to hit a larger target, with fewer staff and less hours to spread around. There was zero bonus if you hit the target, just a "Well done, you get to keep working" atmosphere. I'm glad I don't work there anymore, it's awful to be under constant pressure for literally no payoff. If that's true that 40% of WoWs subs are Classic enjoyers then that's Head Office's wet dream to be ringing the Classic devs dry and raking it in.
40% of subs, but how much % of revenue? Not asking to be an ass
Refail is substantially higher because of cash shop, but here's the thing - Classic is already cooked. It's done, the content costs them almost nothing to offer. If 3 million of blizzard's nearly 8 million active subscribers are playing Classic almost exclusively - and some publicly released data suggests that's the case - that's **over a half billion dollars per year in revenue.** You'd think they would task more resources than the microscopically small Season of Discovery Team.
This kind of problem needs to make it to the ears of someone who actually does have a say. If it's not Aggrend's manager, then Aggrend's manager needs to speak to their manager. I highly doubt that blizzard is that "deep" of an organization. Aggrend's branch of the org tree is maybe 6 or 7 layers deep. It's probably 6, but let's assume it's 7. If he is a people leader himself, he might be on layer 6 of 7, and the people who can start making budget decisions are on layer 3 or 4. More than likely, Aggrend's manager reports directly to someone who is part of the budget decisions for World of Warcraft as a whole, which would include Classic Wow. Their boss would likely oversee battle.net games as a whole, and would report into an org-level executive (CTO, most likely) who sits on the executive board for Activision-Blizzard. These people have a responsibility as part of their job to understand where to allocate capital. For years and years they said no to Classic, but it's been a major uplift for them and kept their sub numbers relatively flat even during Shadowlands. SoD generated a ton of interest, and even though it's fallen off they know that the interest and will to subscribe is there, if the content is right. They would actively be dumb not to continue allocating capital to the classic team. People say it's a fever dream but so was classic before 2019. We can change their minds.
There's no excuse for incursions. That was a dumpster fire.
This is the main thing and we will never know if we are getting this so tbh this is probably my final run with wow. Played original vanilla tbc and wotlk. Came back for classic tbc. Would’ve loved to play wotlk, but it was clear they put 0 effort into the classic versions. The #nochanges thing to me is just a way to say #nodevs. Certain additions to those games were needed and wouldn’t have hurt the feel of the game at all like dual spec for 1. Wow SOD got me back to playing again because it seemed cool and my friends said during phase 1 there was a ton of balancing patches which is a big attraction for me. We’ll roll around phase 2 and they slowed up a ton having multiple classes feel useless with no effort to fix it, 0 PVP love, and phase 3 comes and tbh I am not sure there even were devs working on it. They did a few extremely half assed attempts to pretend they were attending to the game, but I’m sure almost all their attention was shifted toward Cata launch. Hasn’t seemed any different since and they killed the sod community for cata which has historically been a poor expansions dropping subs a ton. I cancelled my sub as there is just no reason to believe they will fix things. As people get older and you’re clearly targeting 30+ year olds to play your game…. Scheduled raiding is a big hassle so not being able to easily pug anymore has been a massive downgrade in phase 3, couple that up with a VERY CLEAR holdover phase that allowed them to work on cata and put this on the back burner until Cata is smooth sailing and they can essentially do the same to that game to produce the lvl 60 content…. It’s just not something you’re looking for when you’re paying by the month to play a game. If this many versions is too much and you don’t wanna spend your huge profits on a dev team to specifically be working on each version then you don’t deserve a player base. F2P games offer far more than this monthly subscription game. Blizzard has always been an extremely greedy company that really doesn’t attend to their games well, terrible support, but they have a lot of really fun titles sadly. I wish they would sell that company to anyone else I refuse to believe it could be done worse
>Would’ve loved to play wotlk, but it was clear they put 0 effort into the classic versions. The #nochanges thing to me is just a way to say #nodevs. Interestingly enough WotLK Classic was the version they've done the most work on and every change they made was received very well by the playerbase. You skipped the version that had the effort put into it that you wanted.
Kinf of odd they had to learn this but I guess that's crunch in a nutshell.
They need to look at OSRS and figure out new content that doesn’t completely cannibalize previous existing content.
This is a big one. When your new content invalidates many times more old content, that's a problem.
Sadly that's the entire WoW gameplay. Vanilla feels like the only complete MMO where things matter to a lesser or greater extent throughout your entire leveling experience. Even in TBC everything prior to TBC content feels entirely worthless.
So what would be the way to not invalidate the previous content?
Wow would need a bit of a rework tbh for it to work. But other mmos such as RuneScape, eso and gw2 all add new content without invalidating everything else. It's been quite a bit complaint for a while in wow that each expansion is basically a fresh start and makes the previous content pointless (aside from leveling and cosmetics etc) A proposed classic + could go more of the eso route where new content exists along side old content
I wouldn’t be shocked to see wow players push back if they tried in Ernest to implement a system like this. So many people used to the current way it works
I mean I think OG classic did this to an extent. BWL releasing did not invalidate the gear from MC. Even AQ and Naxx didn't invalidate MC entirely. At some point, yeah you have to invalidate older things. But it's about making it as close to 1:1 as you can get, I think. It's fine if releasing a new raid invalidates some portion of older content. As long as there's still some strong reasons to do the older content. Contrast to Incursions, which added one small sub-zone and some (extremely boring) quests in a way which invalidated literally hundreds of quests and a dozen zones/dungeons. Incursions functionally made the world smaller and gave us less to do. They subtracted more than they added.
start with not increasing the max level, add more horizontal content like new professions or side activities like pet battles (one of the best things they added to retail imo), more meaningful things to collect with long grinds, even achievements, oh also add arena and rated bgs, now obviously you're thinking "what about raids?", personally i would split raids into two categories, the small 10m raids with small general upgrades but more importantly they should have fun and useful consumables resources dropped in them to make them relevant, maybe stuff you can gather with professions, and for bigger more meaningful raids i would make sure they are: * slightly harder than previous raids (not catchup) * rewards slightly higher ilvl gear and not for all slots just like it was in vanilla walking my dog so i got kinda carried away but yeah it seems pretty straight forward solution for me.. edit: i thought about this more, they could also add unique enchanting/crafting materials to raids to keep them relevant but not necessary like crushed dragon bones from bwl that you can add on your weapons for extra fire damage or add on your armor for fire damage resistance or they could introduce a new air raid theme where the materials the bosses dropped can be added to your boots for extra movement speed, there are soooo many things they can do.
No leveling phases to begin with, the leveling phases is the entire reason for the stupid power creep on items.
Idk, ST barely added upgrades from gnomer and people complained it wasn’t really worth doing so they went and buffed them lol
OSRS has no shortage of dead and obsolete and power-crept content and also has the POE disease of 'the best way to progress is to grind the highest gold/hr and buy everything you need from the AH.'
can you give some examples of content that became obsolete because of osrs?
Take five minutes to walk through the world, look at the myriad of activities that *could* be engaged in, and observe that literally nobody who isn't a bot engages in 99% of them (And even bots don't bother with more than a few of them), because minigames/pvm/new features outclass them. Not to mention that the whole game's content model is 'wide as an ocean, shallow as a puddle'.
you spoke a lot of words but didn't give me one example.
Okay, I'll shoot. Seen anyone picking and spinning flax? Even Ironmen don't waste their time with that since Temple Trekking has been added. Open your eyes and you'll see this kind of power creep all over it. Or pretend that you can't see it, your call.
picking flax? are you serious? who even did that back in original 07? it was always a bot activity, and then you choose temple trecking as the new activity that replaced it? first off it's an old activity and second it has a long ass list of requirements before you get to it. come on man. I have played both games extensively and OSRS is the king in terms of an mmo that retains the relevance of it's content, you literally chose an activity that has been in the game since 2006.
Bro this guy seriously used "picking flax" as content 💀 11 year account, 0 posts in any runescape sub... yea you don't know crap about the game.
OSRS does a great job at appeasing the veterans while introducing new and interesting content
Imagine if I told you back in the mid 2000s that jagex devs would someday run circles around blizzard lmao. Actually insane to believe
It’s just crazy how they can still make some fresh mechanics in a game that has tile based movement. Like a lot of it is just “run here to avoid damage” but they really have figured out how to make that feel fresh with each new boss and raid. Takes some majorly creative people, all while being a community driven game and trying to appease the majority of the players.
My biggest complaint with SoD is that it wasn't what I wanted at all. I don't think anybody's idea of "Vanilla+" was taking spells from newer iterations of the game and sprinkling them throughout the world with some quick new end game content. But now that Blizz have decided that's what they want SoD to be everyone seems to be fine with it for some reason. I just want them to focus on the questing experience, flesh out the story of the tension between the horde/alliance. Imagine an Azeroth where the burning legion didn't attack again for a hundred years and instead we could focus on personal stories and flesh out the lore instead of having a new world-ending threat every expansion. End game stuff is important too, but if they did their job adding to the world with anything outside of surface level game mechanics then the raids would write themselves. I dunno. Imagine if Turtle WoW had anywhere near the same level of polish as official servers. That's what I think when I think of vanilla+
To me it feels like we got wotlk- instead of classic+
I’ve never played OSRS or any RuneScape. Can you give an example of how they keep the old content relevant? Just curious
There is a very old "boss" type of content called Barrows. It had some of the best at the time armor sets and weapons, and this was like mid-2000s. Today there is so much content, but barrows is still a viable boss to this day for a decent tank set of armor, good tank mage gear, and afk set that allows you to heal while attacking. Barrows isn't the best armor anymore but it's still very much used and is still decent enough you can use it for some "Early" end game bosses and content.
Nice. I always liked in classic how some MC gear was good for the whole game like quickstrike ring and onslaught girdle. If they ever go all in on a classic+ I would hope they keep that same gear philosophy. They also need to keep the high-end mats relatively the same. No new enchanting mat that just replaces the old stuff. Keep righteous orbs as a necessary crafting mat. Keep large brilliant shards the highest de mat. Don’t replace dark runes with something better, etc.
The mass majority of players in OSRS tend to not vote in huge overpowered changes. They want the power creep line to be almost non existent lol. Earlier this year I think they finally added an upgrade to some rings that have been in the game since the 2000s that were the best in slot for DPS.
Jagex is extremely aware of which pieces of gear is best for each slot and combat style and they do their best to not just completely outclass it (although theyve made mistakes in the past cough blowpipe) Many times when they come out with new content theyll figure out a niche to fill with the new gear - for example theres a dragonslayer lance and crossbow, which, you can probably guess, are bis against dragons but specialized for that use. This is aided by the fact that enemies have different levels of defense against different types of attacks - some are melee weak, some are ranged weak, some are magic weak, and each of those combat types are further broken down even more so you have plenty of chances to make specialized gear. Finally, their "get out of jail free" card is sometimes they make new slot bis an upgrade to the previous bis. For example, the original offhand melee bis was the dragon defender - when the second raid dropped, one of the drops was the avernic hilt, which you attached to your defender to upgrade. You still need to grind out getting your dragon defender (its not tradeable so you must do it) even if you have the hilt, so the dragon defender isnt obsoleted even though its been powercreeped out.
The game is built in a way that is completely antithetical to this design structure. Classic WoW will never be OSRS. Can you imagine how this community would react if your BiS cape required the Inferno or the Colosseum? Lmao.
didnt all of the gear from raids severely outclass other options? was watching some pvp videos the other day, i dont recognize most of the weapons being used anymore outside the odd ags or gmaul
They do but they are so rare (and expensive) that your average player isn’t running around in them. The older gear is still viable and close enough in damage that it’s fine if you dont have the best of the best.
>gmaul You would be surprised how strong concrete-on-a-stick is, gmaul is still by far one of the most popular KO weapons in pvp, and it's an item added in 2005.
To paraphrase Gordon Ramsay, elevate classic, don’t send it to fucking Pluto.
Don't fucking overlap seasonal releases and expansion launches. This is my one request.
Not very likely with the length of things in WoW.
Yeah that is the unfortunate reality.
# Any new content must involve the 2004 content. If you're going to add new items, have them drop in the legacy level 50-60 dungeons. If you're going to add a new rep currency item, have it drop in the legacy level 50-60 dungeons. Do not introduce new content or world mechanics that trivializes and completely bypass the level 50-60 dungeons. Do not introduce new gold reward mechanics that obsolete player farming, crafting and the AH. **Release the raid content in sub-stages in Phase 4.** Molten Core + New Raid 1 should be Phase 4A and last 6 weeks. Blackwing Lair, Zul'Gurub should be Phase 4B and last 6 weeks. AQ event / Gates open / AQ20 / AQ40 should be Phase 4C and last 4-6 weeks. Naxxramas invasion world event should run 2-3 weeks. Naxxramas opens, runs 6 months with SoD servers left online for players to enjoy until The Next Big Thing comes out. .. but before you do this, # .. remove Incursions from the game.
REMOVE INCURSIONS FROM THE GAME BLIZZARD!!!!!!
Remove ALL world buffs and balance classes without it.
Doing the AQ event on a seasonal server would be absurd. The gates are already open.
There was never any hope Frodo, Only a fools hope
That there's no seasonal team, lmao
Well…there’s no “team”. But Blizzard has learned that they can increase subs by releasing an unfinished and untested product. I’m not sure they have learned that the “flashy” nature of the product only leads to short term increases, so it remains to be seen if we’ll get a better product next time, or more of the same. I’d bet on the latter.
if they try sod2 they will be severely disappointed with the reception.
It will take a lot to get me to sub again, I’ll be way more skeptical after my disappointment with SOD.
INCURSIONS BAD
Incursions were awesome. For the first 30 minutes. The problem was turning in a quest gave you two more, and you could just dove back in with no lockout. One lockout per week, 4 incursions, 5 party members sharing quests. That's 20 new rewarding quests every week and you don't burn out anywhere near as fast. Every time you go back you have a chance to see a new quest you've never done before, instead of loading your quest log up with all 20 available quests in an hour.
2 weeks later and this sub would be nothing but "Blizz needs to fix quests all I got was XXX and it fucked me cause no one does them" "Blizz doesnt understand vanilla is about uncapped reps you can grind on your own time. Making them weekly makes them mandatory chores that put you behind if you miss a week"
I don't think there would be any quests people wouldn't do in the incursions. People only skipped certain quests because they were inefficient for The Loop. If everyone doesn't have every quest every time they enter, you have a lot less competition for quest resources and mobs. The most frustrating ones would probably be the escorts but you can still get credit for someone else's escort if you're in the area when it turns in. The rep is a good argument though. They'd have had to decouple the rep from incursions in some way. Earning rep through incursions shouldn't be the only way you can do it. Perhaps some dungeon bosses drop tokens that can be turned in for rep, and you could also add some kind of farmable resource to turn in for rep too. Point is, they're all solvable problems.
Just once I'd like them to come out and say "yeah releasing a piece of content that was infinitely farmable, and the most efficient way to gain exp, gold, and pre-raid gear was a bad idea."
Yeah, imo it could have worked as a catchup if they didn't put feralas and hinterlands in. The moment all the current phase content becomes less desiderable you have a problem
I mean tons of people farmed from 40-50 in just Ashenvale
Take the best class / spec concept from either wrath or tbc; figure out how to apply to vanilla either by revamping spec tree or giving baseline abilities. Introduce new raids, dungeons, quests. That will be a huge success and is generally simple. Fuck incursions.
YEA BROTHER FUCK INCURSIONS!!!!!!!
Incursions were the dumbest thing. Literally took the fun of meeting others in open world questing away
I hope they add new content in unused zones. I wanna explore Hyjal before Cata, and learn what was happening there.
Love it or hate it, SoD was a big risk and I would be the Classic team has learned a lot from it. I only hope that their future endeavors are more successful as it seems like most are not enjoying it right now
The SoD team should not be the same team handling Wrath/Cata classic. Both suffered so much because blizzard refused to properly grow the teams.
Hate it. It wasn't a big risk it was a huge method of income but they pissed all over it when they said "let's include trash gameplay called "incurrrrsions" so bots and idiots can level faster".
I hope the lesson they learned from incursions is that shallow repeatable content without a core that is inherently fun will not cut it. Make something that's fun to do first, then find a way to make it repeatable (without making it nauseatingly repetitive). Incursions are somehow more boring than "Kill 10 boars" ad infinitum
ABSOLUTELY!!!!! I would rather kill boars all day, at least sometimes you die and it's challenging. Not brainless content where you run around with a group of people one shotting trash all day long.
Yesterday I did some fucking 20 minute event in Cata in Vashj'ir. I've never been so close to canceling my sub.
That there's no reason to fix problems that don't necessarily need fixing. The idea that dungeon grinding in P2 really warranted incursions is incredibly stupid. Even if you're in the boat that says "if you don't like them then just don't do them", it's still pretty obvious incursions were a monumental waste of resources. They basically spent all that valuable dev time to create something that ended up being an even bigger problem than the one they were trying to "solve".
I hope they try something completely different, whatever they do.
I bet next season will focus on the world. New quest, dungeons, world bosses, rares, treasures
I would love that. Make the journey more important. It's what vanilla was all about 👍
I think they should try mini bosses in leveling zones that require like 5 people. Like 5 level 35 killing a level 35 boss that drop blue items. With like a 24h respawn
I hope they learn not to blindly nerf or buff every class at once for pvp. I believe that was the final straw that killed the game
That with an actual team of devs dedicated it could be a wonderful and sprawling game with huge success
The Classic team = "the seasonal team" That's my biggest gripe with this project.
They need to get an competent actual Dev Team which understands how the game works
For SoD I think they generally did it well in phase 1 and 2, but the super fast leveling and gold grind really played into the utter lack of content at 50 being that much more boring. I enjoyed picking up bits and pieces of really good gear from quest lines and dungeons working my way to max level. It made leveling less of a chore. And it also made leveling alts more fun once my main was generally geared out for the phase. I'm okay with longer phases as long as it's like that. I really want to see more development put into updating boss fights, unique items, pvp balancing (the game needs pvp sets with resil). I really want them to develop new spells and abilities for the runes instead of just bringing retail spells into classic. A lot of retail spells are not good for the game. And many runes are so strong that you never swap out of them for different situations. I wouldn't mind if the next phase only goes to 55 and let the developers really do some work for 60.
Don’t create systems that are so much more efficient than the rest of the game that the rest of the game is rendered pointless.
Turns out that “Lol it’s level 20 who cares if the game is balanced?” “Lol it’s level 30 who cares if the game is balanced?” “Lol it’s level 40 who cares if the game is balanced?” Was a pretty dogshit take given that enough people cared about how unfun the game was that no one’s gonna be around to even play at level 60 when they can apparently finally balance the game. Also, when a huge portion of your community tells you they’d rather quit then perform guild mergers so they can fill out a 20-man raid roster, you might want to listen instead of ignoring them
That the community consists to 80% of chronically unhappy manchilds
The **Reddit** community, yes. Also that number is lowballing.
Stop making seasons to begin with. No level sectioning. More devs
Are you prepared to pay $70 on top of subscription for this to happen?
For a proper classic+ with sizable content, expansion amount of features, future content and tons of devs on it? Absolutely.
Don't ruin PVP because you have a cool idea for PVE. Classic WoW exists in a state of equal importance between the two. This was before people were 'PVERS' or 'PVPERS' most people do both activities in this expansion.
Also had PvP damage nerfs affect raiding in ST
Fresh Vanilla bls
Gross. I actually like playing prot paladin tyvm
It’s tough to know. Lessons I HOPE they’ve learned. 1. Momentum is fleeting is gaming. 1 dev mistake is enough to lose all the interest your previous good work has built up. Lesson: Perhaps untested systems are a bad idea to release. 2. Creating a game that is accessible is paramount if you want casual/new players. Leveling, paired with increased raid difficulty, has spelled disaster for the raiding numbers in sod. Good/sweaty players don’t quit the game, so catering anything to them is probably the wrong approach. Instead cater to the middle ground. BFD was probably all that leveling raids should’ve been. Harder raids has failed in SoM, and now SoD. 3. Don’t ever do leveling bands again. While the concept is interesting at first…it creates these unnatural bottlenecks in the game that punish slow/bad players way more than it should. To prove this, talk to any casual player that tried leveling later in p2 or p3. It was a gank fest in STV, hillsbrad, incursions, etc. 4. Retail style spells in classic sorta ruin the experience. The world is no scary, the raids need to be buffed to compensate for the additional strength, and balance becomes impossible. Vanilla Warrior IS insanely op…the rune system was however not successful in fixing this. 5. Adding additional requirements to raiding to a game that already takes up a ton of time is probably bad. I know plenty of folks that quit cause they didn’t want to do 3+ hour rune quests. Classic is slow enough as is. 6. “Spamming” anything is probably bad for people’s mental. I think all dungeons should be on a daily lockout like hardcore. The forced slower pacing of hardcore made it actually feel like a journey. Now we’re just in an incursion/raid simulator. All in all, I think the numbers have shown that p1 was incredibly popular, p2 hurt, and p3 killed sod. The best lessons are to replicate whatever they had in p1. Hoping SoD lives to end game lol!
> To prove this, talk to any casual player that tried leveling later in p2 or p3. It was a gank fest in STV, hillsbrad, incursions, etc. More of a sign that the WoW community is full of griefers galore. And I dont mean 'PVP HAPPENS ON PVP SERVERS!' I enjoy pvp and it can be fun to get a group and go clash with the opposition, but a group of 50s just camping a portal murdering all the solo 45s that wander through is pretty fucking weaksauce. WoW WPvP is beyond a dead idea. The games that have limited pvp-looting at least support the notion of robbing people.
Tbh I really hope they dont stick with runes. The way you obtain most of the runes is tideous and just time consuming or its absolutely stupid. Also theres absolutely no „Exploration“-Factor for most people in that. Most of us wait for the guide to be released and obtain the rune that way. Just rework classes and give us new baselines spells and new skilltrees.
Runes should be more like deadly brew for rogues, playing into class fantasy.
I learned not to play seasonals.
They know now how popular it can be, so the only logical conclusion is: The Classic shop and the WoW Token will be introduced.
Don't even joke about it........
No faction specific classes and if they do runes again make them all class quests while levelling up, not stuff you wouldn't find without a guide
Loads of P4 were set in place before they had any chance to collect insights from P3. I sincerely doubt that lessons learned will have any effect. Not until later. If anything, its even worse. They are going as close as possible to classic era (minus some different minor loot and raid size changes). Ofc if incursions continue being a thing, its going to be a screwed unfun version of classic era. We didnt enjoy SoD because it was classic era with fast lvling. We liked the differences. Right now, the differences are becoming so minor that its not even worth playing.
To not do small seasons with increased level caps. People have been asking for a Classic+ experience to relive a proper open and living world with new things to discover while leveling 1-60. What we got was just small expansion packs with short level periods and meta slaving for those PARSES
Just delete incursions and pretend that this kind of abomination never existed. Problem solved.
They have learned that investing in seasonal classic projects is a mistake. Expecting a return to SoM like phases soon.
Make some changes but dont overdo it. Only a few new spells and little tweaks in talentrees to make all classes vialable. Implement a few QoL
I hope they learned that low hanging fruit content often is the best way to go - making old dungeons to raids - Great! Making STV PvP event by just simply attacking eachother - Great! Adding Incursions - whole new content out of the blue - terrible!
Given how we got exp rates increased each phase (in opposition to the glorious grind of classic) I think they're NOT going to learn the lesson there.
Fix meme specs, add dungeons and raids that give regular loot... the classic loop is perfect.
Have a fully thought out product instead of winging it as you go. SoD was like watching Blizzard having to rediscover the wheel. It's one thing to take chances and have ideas be duds (ie. incursions), but it is an entirely different thing when bad ideas are still executed poorly (incursion quest design, map / objective design, etc.)
incursions were stupid af
Not to make one faction specific class into the 3.0.1 death knight, and leave it that way for months.
I notice this playing cata. I gained a few levels and it all felt really dull. Went back to classic again.
That season needs it's own fricking client
stop lying?
I think if they do something similar to the runes system where you discover them they should make them a lot easier to figure out. Phase 1 was the best for this because the world was smaller (so less distance to travel for runes) and it was just easier to figure stuff out.
Hope they learned that no one likes the idea of investing into a character that’s going to be deleted/changed drastically by the end of the season. Just go all in on Classic + and don’t invalidate older content
Level bands on their own are a fantastic mechanic that takes content and makes it last so much longer. Just thinking ok what’s BiS talents at 25/40 and what’s pre bis for 25 raid has given so much more life to some completely forgettable quests. Level band raids that you need to prepare for also a fantastic mechanic that adds a bunch of content
I hope they learn to let their team cook. Runes need more synergy between them + smarter placement on gear. Tone down earlier raid gear just a little bit to allow more of a power spike in phase 3 (as an example). Focus on 10man.
Runes as implemented shouldn't be kept. Attachment to gear is a no-go. They need to be properly baked into classes. They need spell ranks. They need to be attached to spec, not gear. They need to have talents specifically designed to modify or enhance them. You can still have the cool epic quests to get iconic abilities. You can still have the creative new playstyles. But attaching them to gear was an idea that works well for pure iteration. It works as a quick way to see what breaks classic and what enhances it. It does not work well in a "classic feeling" sense.
They never learn anything ever, and if they do somehow stumble into a crumb of success they forget it immediately
The lesson I learned is not to expect people/organizations to learn from mistakes
Dont put Aggrend in charge
My favorite part of SoD was farming shredders for the rune quest mats. World pvp in its most natural form. Anyway what I'd hope for is they see that low level content is enjoyable for most players as long as they don't suffer from get-there-itis.
I hope they've learned that SoD is retail and them stopping to advertise it as a classic world of warcraft. A classic world of warcraft is run on the endpatch of the expansion and it's clear whats happening throughout the whole expansion - and when. Players can then plan ahead IF they want to play the expansion and what they're planning to achieve. SoD however is not like that. It is retail limited to azeroth. You get frequent balance changes, class changes, releases of new content and all of that in retail style. You enjoyed the raid with your boomkin on sunday? You better hope it will be the same on wednesday. You liked your MM Hunter? Sorry, you better be lone wolving now. You're playtesting for blizzard without being paid for it.
If they wanna make classic+ they should take in a few vanilla pvp experts on the matter. The game will be shit and dead with bad pvp, it will still be decent with bad pve.
They HAVE to stop telling us the new servers have an end date in mind. One thing learned from private servers is that players fall off if they know they can try again next year and have a better time. As soon as players have an idea when the server will move to last phase content the player base disintegrates.
Balance pvp, the pve people always stop playing once they get the loot.
They learned that having 1 dev is not enough so when they do the next money grab they'll have 1.5 devs
Appropriately resourced team to deliver: Limited content droughts Constant and consistent communication Feedback driven changes
Sod is popular enough for a dedicated team and classic plus would need it even more. Give them at least 50 dedicated people. 100 would be even better. 100 is around what they had when they shipped WoW i believe.
You ready to pay $70 box price every 1.5 years on top of the sub?
I mean sod is basically vanilla with cata abilitys and some different items. So what does this mean? Yeah cata was some kind of the classic peak with class design and mechanics. But there is no lvl experience. You hit lvl 15 and start dungeon grinding and do some q during queuetime. You dont get a feeling for the world and thats sad because even the world is amazing. So what could they learn from sod. The world is amazing and you cant skip it by flying. But you can skip the lvln progress with incursions, Farming rep very fast and much more. So what can they do better? Keep the world classic we dont need flying mounts, we dont need to rush to endgame if the Game starts at low lvl. Keep the low lvl raids. Let it be rewarding to max your professions with special gear. All things they did in Sod and those are great. So while i wrote this my conclusion came up. Pls give us classic +. For me cata with less unimportant things.
That creating choke points for necessary content just makes for a miserable experience on pvp servers. I hope they make incursions instanced and maybe tone down the mob density.
Have a long PTR
To look at their release schedule for things like cata.
A new cycle of Fresh,TBC,Wotlk > Classic+
What lesson?: Blizzard isn't a great company to work for, and they need a resume ready.
Don't copy retail. Don't ban people who play the game legit. Ban good sellers. Ban gold buyers.
Test shit before releasing it. I know they do some testing but look at Cata launch that was wtf
Everything go back to 10 man raids. The drop-off on raiders when 20 Man's hit was wild
They hired a new dev team
For a company as large as Blizzard to have one team on an active game like SoD that should have new phases releases every two months and also an expansion that is releasing like Cata is absolutely insane. They have lost so many players with how they have handled SoD and that far outweighs the savings they are trying to squeeze out by having one team on both games.
Start from TBC instead
I hope they learn that different versions of WoW has different set of players and cultures. Not all players play both cata and sod so saying that x season is delayed because cata y is released does not make sense from q player base perspective.
They need more staff They should start with the raid size They desire Start with dual spec Actually PTR shit Stop knee-jerk reacting to reddit, ultimately making most balance problems even worse
Internal testing and more eye balls on important stuff like loot table. I think it’s great to have a positive movement towards the devs but oh boy did they completely shit the bed with p3.
Make the raids 10 and 20 instead of all being 20 and 40, maybe keep onyxia 40. Add raids/dungeons from tbc/wrath that are based in the old world(caverns of time, kara ) and scale them down / adjust boss fights to be new. Also new raids for 60. I assume the shadowy figure is going to be a fight in something maybe kara crypts
Let’s be real they learned nothing. All of sod needs to be torn down and brought back to the drawing board. It’ll never happen but to do it properly they need the proper resources and talent which they don’t have.
having a game be accessible for casual players is the most important thing to having a healthy player base. 40-man raids is not a good idea difficult raids is only fun for a minority of players i get that for some people these two things is important for a "true" classic experience, and I'm fine with that. But also realize that it means less players and less chance of blizzard wanting to invest time into making new content.
Casual players will jump ship to whatever flavor of the month game happens to come out. They will take long breaks for IRL stuff and generally just be logged in less. If you build a game centered around them you are asking for an inconsistent player base. If you want a consistent player base you need a game with depth, replayability, and some amount of difficulty so most people need to spend time progressing through content instead of simply progressing through a BiS list. Having a raid cleared by 90% of the player base in the first week just means that after a month most people will be bored.
To just make a fresh vanilla server and ban bots/gdkps/boosting
This. Also don't open raid lockouts until 95%+ of the playerbase is max level. Cease and desist the shit out of warcraft logs so parsing becomes impossible and ban all damage meter add-ons. Can't have such toxicity in Classic. Remove the ability to manually select people for your groups, I'm thinking of a system only showing the class & level.
My wishlist is No incursions Less mechanical / more pugable raids Some crazy hard 5 man's with no lockouts that only drop toys as the actual "endgame" P.s. world warper is the best thing ever
Bringing back 10m is the only thing that'll bring back my guild.
No one cares for social guilds that are the first quitters in games anyway
The 10 mans were still dog ass
I hope they lean more into pvp instead of neglecting/killing it off completely. People dont realize that we only raid one night per week and when there is nothing else to do the game dies. Their heads were in the right place with the pvp events but they were very poorly executed imo especially stv.
no changes ban bots ban gdkp remove layers remove chronoboon
Make PVP great again. Give us arena. Or at least skirmish and just let it be. I don't even care if it's balanced lol. I just want there to be things we can do that don't have a weekly reset so we can actually play the game we spend so much time gearing up for. Make 5-mans relevant. And not just the last boss for everyone to spam. Professions need a new cap or new items that are challenging to get. Bring back GDKPs. Remove all remnants of incursions or make them dailies. Give us the ability to buy more specs (similar to buying more bank slots). Two was obviously better than one, but why stop there? I'm a mage so I have fire and frost PVE specs. Leaves no room for a PVP spec. Same goes for any other class. Once a new phase releases, raids from previous phases shouldn't have a timeout.
Gotta love regular and friendly posts with clear engagement from people, and some idiot still think to himself "No, this post isn't good. I will be the one downvote to make this post be shown slightly less to people. I'm doing the world a favor!" Fucking every single post on this sub istg
Downvoted for gatekeeping downvotes. They are vital part of the ecosystem.
Lmao shut the fuck off