WoW Classic Survey

Some people have taken it upon themselves to try and collate some actually useful information on what players would like from WoW Classic by starting to post informal surveys on the subject, using tools such as Google Forms and Surveymonkey. Last week my attention was drawn to what probably must have been the biggest survey of this kind so far, one that managed to gather nearly 34k responses despite of only taking submissions for a few days. (By the time I had found it, the option to vote had already closed.) You can see the poll's results here.

Unfortunately, instead of providing a clear guideline, I think it only highlighted once again what a tricky proposition WoW Classic is going to be. The only clear threads were that nobody wants blatantly "modern" changes like flying or a dungeon finder and that the later raids shouldn't be released right away.

However, there was a surprisingly high amount of support for implementing certain changes that didn't really come until Burning Crusade, such as guild banks, arenas, lower costs for changing your spec, being able to summon via meeting stones or making more classes viable as tanks in raids. I can actually sympathise with this one in so far as I started playing Vanilla relatively late, so about a third of my "Vanilla time" was spent with certain Burning Crusade changes already implemented, even though the actual expansion wasn't out yet. For example I was initially kind of confused when I learned on Kronos that summoning stones didn't actually gain their summoning functionality until the 2.0 patch.

Many features that existed in more than one version throughout Vanilla, such as single-server battlegrounds vs. battlegroups, 5-man vs. 10-man Stratholme or a single faction auction house vs. one in every city also have the community pretty split. I wonder if some sort of ranking for your answers or an "I don't care" option could help paint a clearer picture here. For example I personally don't care much about Vanilla PvP as I found it pretty dire whenever I tried it, but in a poll like that you'd have to express an opinion on all kinds of aspects of PvP anyway, even if you have no interest in actually participating in it.

Finally, I was surprised that the survey included questions about "classic expansions" (aka going the Runescape route of adding to the old game while sticking to the classic style) and how many people responded positively to them. For me this is something that sounds intriguing, but at the same time it seems to me that it's way too early to even think about it. Let's see how this whole "recreating the Vanilla experience" thing goes first and how well it is received.

Classic Videos

While people continue to speculate on just how much of the love for Vanilla WoW is nostalgia and how much isn't, let's have some actual nostalgia - in video form!



This was one of the first WoW videos I ever saw. Set to a popular Weird Al song, it's full of visual gags and I remember watching it over and over and over again. Weird Al being represented by a troll also seemed strangely apt.



I think this was the first WoW video with a parody song that I ever saw. I was just blown away by the cleverness of the lyrics and how well it was all done. It's no coincidence that the guy who made the video, Terran Gregory, went on to make cinematics for Blizzard themselves and has been with them for over ten years now...



This one was fun for all the jokes about class clichés. At least some of them were definitely accurate.



This one I didn't actually find until much later, but it also hails from that era at least.

If you got any fun, old-school favourites of your own, feel free to share!

Flaw or Feature?

It's barely been two weeks since WoW Classic was announced, and already the forum wars are raging about how exactly it should work. There is an official WoW Classic forum now after all! I've also had a lot of videos on the subject pop up on my YouTube feed.

Personally I firmly fall into the camp of wanting to see as little change as possible. It's not that I couldn't imagine some changes that would make the game a little nicer for me personally, but as I once wrote in a previous blog post, Vanilla WoW appealed to different groups of people for very different reasons. There were people who enjoyed the levelling and the world and cared little about endgame, and there were those for whom endgame was all that mattered. If you asked either group how the game could have been improved, they probably would have told you to do away with all the stuff that was just dragging them down... but which was someone else's main reason to play in the first place. So while it will be impossible to re-create the experience we had back then 100%, trying to stick as close to it as possible should definitely be the goal. Any sort of changes would just cause the pendulum to swing in a bad direction for one target audience or the other.

I think a lot of this sort of discussion comes from people still not understanding the appeal of Vanilla WoW. It was just an entirely different game. I saw one YouTuber compare it to a survival game, which I thought was really interesting... no, you weren't going to die from not eating or drinking enough within a certain amount of time, but the world was dangerous and you could find yourself in all kinds of unpleasant situations if you just strolled out into the wilderness unprepared.

Let's take hunter arrows for example. Blizzard eventually took the approach of considering the act of buying and restocking ammo pointless busywork that might as well be removed. And if you only ever log in to raid and test yourself against mighty big bosses, there is some truth to that! However, for the newly minted hunter who is only just learning how to survive in the world, you essentially just took away a part of their game. It's like looking at a survival game and going: "Gosh, all this collecting wood and stuff before you can build anything is just pointless busywork! People should be allowed to just have unlimited resources and build whatever they want." Building whatever you want is a valid activity to have in a game, but then you're not creating a survival game anymore.

Vanilla WoW was also much more about roleplaying than gaming in the modern sense. Sure, things like imbalanced classes and expensive respecs may have been issues from a gaming point of view, but they also helped define your character's role. What meaning does it have to "be" a holy priest if they are something that effectively only exists inside of instances because in the open world everyone respecs to shadow? Most classes and specs were better in some situations than in others and this was something that you just accepted as part of the character you chose. You could choose to be someone who had to rely on others a lot, someone who went at it alone most of the time, or a jack-of-all-trades who was flexible and could do multiple things but wasn't as good at any of them.

You can disagree with that, and maybe even consider it a bit inane to prioritise roleplaying over having a smooth dps rotation or a viable tanking spec. However, the point is that there is already a version of the game that has its priorities the other way round. I'm still amazed that Blizzard is finally acknowledging that players who don't prefer that way of doing things actually exist and might even be worth catering to. Right now it looks like it might actually be the player base for whom it will take some time to sink in that not everyone likes the same things and that other ways of playing the game might be valid too.

Classic WoW in a Modern World

The more I think about the notion of classic WoW becoming official, the more problems I foresee Blizzard facing - beyond the question of which exact set of features should be included and at what level, that is.

Server Merges

Blizzard are probably pretty proud of having successfully avoided the spectre of official server merges despite of the game having experienced some pretty dramatic population drops over the years. First there were linked servers, then cross-realm zones. It may all be a bit convoluted, but they effectively managed to transfer their game to a single-server model of the type that more modern MMOs have without ever having to deal with the dreaded matter of officially having to shut anything down.

Since Blizzard has also already stated that WoW Classic won't have these features, I can't help but wonder how it's going to work. Regardless of how successful you think this experiment is going to be in the long run, it seems pretty obvious that there'll be a considerable launch rush as everyone sticks their nose in just to see what it's like. Are they going to limit the number of servers and let people wait in queues for that old-school feeling? If they open more servers to accommodate the masses, what happens to the ones that go quiet once the initial excitement wears off?

Old Game vs. New Player Base

I may be wrong about this, but it seems to me that World of Warcraft's player base has gone through some heavy churn, and that the majority of people who are playing today are not the same ones that played Blizzard games ten, fifteen years ago. The company caters to different tastes now.

So what's going to happen when "WoW Classic" suddenly shows up on the Blizzard launcher as a new option? Lots of people are going to play it just to see what it's like and will likely come away from it thinking the experience terrible and outdated (even if that's the point). This could produce some pretty bad PR for Blizzard. They will probably need to put up some sort of disclaimer when people first opt to download the game, that if they want fast and streamlined, current WoW is right over there.

Ignorance Is Bliss

I often hear claims that people only enjoyed Vanilla WoW because of the circumstances and that it's actually a pretty terrible game underneath. I strongly disagree with that, but circumstances have certainly made a difference. In Vanilla WoW, we were all bad at the game, and there was little help available. Sure, fan sites and databases like Thottbot did start to pop up over time, but they were woefully incomplete compared to what people are used to today, where everything is datamined, categorised and published on multiple websites often before it's even released. The game was a mystery, and since we were all clueless we didn't expect as much from our fellow players.

As an example, people like to cite Alterac Valley matches that ran for hours or even days - yet after re-experiencing the vanilla version of that battleground on Kronos, I couldn't help but think that this would simply be impossible nowadays. AV used to take days because too many people didn't know what they were doing, got distracted by quests and randomly hunting for kills. If most of the team knows the objectives and actually tries to capture them, there's just no way that things can stall for that long, not unless the two sides are insanely evenly matched or incredibly organised.

Or remember all those stories about half the raid in Molten Core getting away with being AFK or just hitting one button? You could get away with that because the content wasn't as demanding, but people also didn't know any better. Not everyone had damage meters or even any idea of concepts such as min-maxing their gear or having the correct rotation. Yet can you imagine anyone being admitted into a raiding guild and consistently being allowed to just tag along like that these days, with how performance-anxious many MMO players and WoW players in particular have become?

We'll see just how people's attitudes shake out, but it's definitely something to be a little wary of.

BlizzCon News - Official Vanilla Servers Inc.!

I'll admit that even though I haven't (officially) played a Blizzard game in years, I still like hearing the news coming out of BlizzCon. Blizzard knows how to put on a good show, and the trailers are often neat to watch even if I don't play the game they are for. However, this year, something was actually of interest to me.

First off, as expected, they announced the next WoW expansion. That wasn't what interested me, but I wanted to say something about it anyway.



"Battle for Azeroth" is probably the most uninspired theme for an expansion they've come up with to date. Pretty much anything people were speculating about before the announcement would have been more interesting.

It also made me think about just why I find it so uninteresting. I often see people complain that factions are an outdated concept and should just be done away with, and I always disagree. I love factions as a narrative device. When I rolled my first Horde character back in the day, it was literally like a whole new world. The other faction presented a totally different culture that was so at odds with the Alliance way of doing things that they pretty much couldn't help being hostile to each other.

Yet at the same time, they weren't openly at war. There were areas where open fighting was happening, such as Ashenvale, but at the same time there were also groups/personalities that were striving towards peace, such as Thrall and Jaina. It struck me as realistic that attitudes towards the other side weren't unified, and it made for an interesting environment that was always on the edge of war, yet not quite. It's like "will they or won't they" in romance. The tension is what's interesting, and never quite knowing which way any given situation might swing. Open war, with people just bashing each other's heads in while shouting "For the Horde!" or "For the Alliance!" is not.

That said, going by the YouTube comments on the trailer, there seem to be a lot of people for whom this is exactly their idea of a good time. Good for them, I say.

No, what really interested me was this:



Yes, Blizzard has actually committed to creating their own Vanilla servers! I once said that I couldn't ever see them doing this, but I'm absolutely thrilled to be wrong, even more so after my recent disenchantment with the private server community. I will definitely be playing this when it opens. I don't mind playing a sub and will be happy that Blizzard is finally offering something again that I'm interested in paying for.

As for how long it will last? We'll see. If I end up playing it the same way I have been playing on private servers in the past few years, on and off for a couple of months throughout the year, it will feel like a good deal. I'm not looking to go back to "no-lifing" it.

That said, it's advisable not to get too hyped just yet. We don't have a release date yet and they said that they want to take their time to get it right. While they won't have to come up with content and art assets, which should save a lot of time compared to an actual new expansion, getting the coding just right will certainly be a challenge. I won't be at all surprised if we won't see this for another year or even longer. Not that I mind - gives me more time to "forget" my recent experiences and dive in fresh when the time comes.

The other big caveat is of course: "What is Vanilla WoW?" In the private server community, the most common model seems to run on patch 1.12 mechanically while introducing content such as dungeons and raids slowly over time, but there's nothing to guarantee that Blizzard will emulate that. Not to mention that there will probably be a certain temptation on their part to meddle with "quality of life features", for example by using the new character models or bringing in achievements, which could be disappointing for those of us who don't like these things. We'll just have to wait and see. It's still hugely positive news.