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.