Looking Back at My Classic BC Experience

With Classic Wrath launching in two months, and Red writing about his conflicted feelings about it considering his experiences in Classic BC, I wanted to jot down a few final thoughts about my (less than a) year of Classic BC as well.

I've been going back and forth about how to approach this topic and structure this post, but in a nutshell I can say that Classic BC has been a big disappointment for me. Don't get me wrong, there were some good things about it, which I shall list first:

• The world and the content were pretty much as enjoyable as I remembered them to be. I loved farming in Nagrand, raiding in a plethora of colourful environments, and running dungeons over and over again because they were just plain fun. The class changes from Vanilla/Classic were also great and massively improved balance while still maintaining each class's unique flavour.
• There were times when I did feel some of the old love for and connection to friends and guildies, mostly when we were running heroics for the sheer fun of it and after the guild contracted a bit during tier five.

However... that's already where it ends. Meanwhile, the following issues marred the experience for me:

• The switch to the smaller raid sizes changed the general attitude in the guild I was in from one of inclusion (to make up the numbers) to one of exclusion and competitiveness (fighting for raid spots, constantly trying to out-do each other, expressing joy about getting rid of certain players).
• Increased access to powerful rewards for the solo player and small groups meant that people cared less about the guild as a whole and more about going through their personal checklists on their own time (which usually seemed to mean as fast as possible).
• While I could still appreciate the quality of the content, I did find it somewhat disillusioning and disappointing to see raids that I remembered as these epic battles in original BC be demoted to a level where they were considered a trivial farm.
• Players and Blizzard pushing for mega-servers for easier trade and random group-finding destroyed server communities and made it harder to exist in the open world (insane competition for spawns, people increasingly wanting to avoid the opposite faction, rarely seeing the same people around).

For all that, I don't think my opinion about original Burning Crusade being my favourite expansion has changed. It's just that what I remember so fondly about it still had a lot of "Vanilla influences" to it, with the old world not getting nerfed until quite late in the expansion and most players still approaching the content with curiosity and a sense of wonder.

Classic has definitely been ruined for me though, at least the "progressive" version of it (not counting era). I suppose it's still possible to enjoy it if you just stick to yourself and mostly stay away from endgame, or if you have a tight-knit group of friends that creates its own fun, but if you participate in the wider community there is definitely a trend towards rushing and solipsism that's hard to ignore. If you're someone who's planning to do group content in Classic Wrath, I can only wish you good luck.