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.