Honey, Your Changes Are Showing

I've mentioned before that Classic era is in a somewhat unusual situation, being an MMO that isn't supposed to receive updates and changes, yet that due to the fact that it shares a client and code base with other versions of WoW sometimes experiences a degree of "feature bleedthrough" as bugs. It's not ideal, but bugs happen in any game, and I guess when you're playing what's probably the least popular of all the current versions of WoW, you're not in a position to complain too much about stuff like that.

When last week's patch for phase four of Season of Discovery landed and brought some strangeness to era once again, I think most of us figured initially that it was just going to be one of those days, however a post on the official forums by community manager Kaivax quickly raised both eyebrows and hackles, as it highlighted several changes to era as intentional:

• The Guilds user interface has been updated to provide more ease of Guild management.
• Alliance players now have access to the Might of Stormwind, to a version of the Warchief’s Blessing world buff effect. This new buff is gained for turning in a new quest “End of the Dark Horde” in Stormwind and is mutually exclusive with Warchief’s Blessing.
• The Songflower Serenade and Dire Maul Tribute buffs can no longer be dispelled by enemy players.
• Druids can now train and use polearms.

The new guild UI was the most glaring and obvious change, and I've got to admit my own reaction was very much "thanks, I hate it". There's already an addon to at least partially revert to the old one, but I haven't seen an option to banish the new one from the quick bar entirely.

You see, the Vanilla user interface was very basic, but it understood what's important to people. If I'm in a guild and actually looking to interact with other players, the first thing I'll want to know after coming online is who else is online, what classes they play, what level they are and what they are up to right now (as in, whether they are already busy with something else or whether we might be able to do something together).

At the bottom you also had the box for the guild message of the day, in case there was something the guild wanted to immediately communicate to you.

In comparison, the new UI that's supposed to "provide more ease of Guild management" is dominated by guild chat, which you can already read in the chat window anyway, with the list of people who are online being relegated to a narrow column on the side that doesn't show you what level the characters are or what content they are doing. For that information, you have to go to a second tab, and the guild info hides behind yet another tab. It's cluttered and ugly and I hate it.

In retail, I've at least got some use for the fact that the guild chat in the guild window contains historical information showing chats from before you came online, as I'm in a small guild with friends there and it can be interesting to see who's been about when you haven't logged in for a couple of days. But in a large guild like I'm in on Classic era, I really don't need a backlog of people saying hi and bye, discussing trades and announcing world buffs.

Last year during the patch before the launch of hardcore, Blizzard also updated the settings UI to retail's new look and I grumbled about that, but ultimately I've got to admit I didn't mind that one too much. There were some new accessibility features in there which are obviously not a bad thing, and ultimately the game settings are not something I look at very often. The guild window is a very different matter however, as that's something I and I'm sure many other Classic era players interact with every day, if not multiple times a day, and having to deal with this new abomination is... off-putting.

I feel like user interface changes are one of those ways in which you can boil a frog, because one small change is just so easy to justify. It doesn't change the game! You can always get an addon to modify it! I didn't see anyone shed any tears over the fact that Classic launched with WoW's modern raid frame UI for example, instead of the horrible old one from original Vanilla. But this? This just hurts, man.

What about the other changes?

Adding a new quest and a new world buff for Alliance is easily the biggest change of the lot, but ironically I think that both of the world buff related changes might not have been too badly received if they had been communicated properly. Blizzard also revamped the way the PvP system works on era last year, and from what I've seen, those changes were overall pretty well received. Yes, we want era to be the museum piece, but people are not entirely blind to the fact that things are not the same now as they were in Vanilla, and that there are times when it might be a good idea to tweak something. Just not like this.

To add some more context for the world buff changes for those not in the know: people care a lot about world buffs for raiding, and Horde actually had one more world buff than Alliance. Some Alliance players would go out of their way to get it by getting themselves mind-controlled at the Crossroads via a friend or second account whenever the Horde dropped the buff, but my impression has been that this was both very niche and not all that popular. So I don't think many Alliance players are actually going to be upset about getting easier access to the buff themselves... plus from my understanding they'll still have to do UBRS for it, just like the Horde does now.

And as for the dispelling issue, apparently this has been a form of "PvP" on the PvP servers since the launch of Classic, though I've never heard of it happening on PvE. I think the problem was that people were doing it basically just to grief. If you're a shaman hanging out in Stormwind as a ghost, just to revive and spam purge on someone after world buffs drop, before you get killed again by the guards, you're not really PvPing in the classic sense - you're not winning a fight in any meaningful way; you're just eating a repair bill to make someone feel bad. So again, I can't see most people making a big deal about this. Just some context from Blizzard's end and a heads-up would've been nice.

Now, the druid change is simultaneously the least meaningful and the most worrying part of those patch notes. It's the least meaningful because I've been told by druid mains that it has zero effect on their meta. Personally I vaguely recall an occasion while levelling early in Classic, where either I or someone else was on a druid in Razorfen Kraul, and when Armor Piercer dropped, I was a little disappointed when I realised that it couldn't be used by druids in Classic. So yay for a couple more weapon options for feral druids while levelling?

The problem is that this is a class change, something that's completely unheard of on era, and one that nobody asked for. Up until now, the Classic devs have been pretty good about taking care of era even though it wasn't the most popular mode, and being respectful of the community that plays there wanting to enjoy the game in its original state. I can't blame people for being worried about the team suddenly setting a precedent for implementing random changes in era that nobody asked for, presumably just because it was more convenient to copy and paste the same settings from SoD. I hope they'll hear the loud and clear feedback that this is not something players want or take lightly.

EDIT: OMG, it's like someone is reading my blog! They actually reverted the druid change and the Alliance Rend buff, as well as apologising for the way the whole thing was handled. You can read the blue post here.