Why I'm Not Playing as Much Classic Anymore

The launch of WoW Classic five years ago rekindled my interest in WoW in a way I didn't think was possible, and was also the event that truly revived this blog after it had more or less lain fallow for several years. That's why I added (Classic) to the blog title at the time, and updated the header to feature images of what I loved most about Vanilla... the beautiful world (and specifically parts of it that the Cataclysm had destroyed).

I had no interest in retail at the time and didn't think I was ever going to play it again, and I did stick strictly to Classic for about a year. Then I decided to at least dip my toes into BfA (when that expansion became part of the standard subscription with the Shadowlands pre-patch) and found that it was alright as something to play with the husband on a very casual level (since Classic sadly hadn't appealed to him at all).

I continued dabbling in retail throughout Shadowlands while at the same time ignoring huge swathes of the game, which is why many of the complaints people had about that expansion largely passed me by. However, then Dragonflight came out and... it was really fun! So my retail play time went up, and at some point last year the scales tipped to the point that I ended up actually spending more time in retail than in Classic.

While some of that has been due to retail improving, part of it has also been my interest in Classic decreasing a lot, and I wanted to talk a bit about why that is, and where I see my relationship with Classic going in the future.

Since there are several different versions of Classic, let's split things up by "mode":

Vanilla / Classic era

I'm inluding hardcore in this, because while permadeath changes the feel of the game considerably, it's still the same world with the same quests and the same gameplay. Either way, I think this version of the game is great and I do still love it. This is honestly what I wanted out of Classic when it was first announced: a place I can go back to whenever I feel nostalgic for the original World of Warcraft.

However, a side effect of this version's unchanging nature is that... at some point you're just kind of done. I've seen this a lot in my Classic era guild, where even the most devoted players (she had a freaking real-life tattoo of Atiesh!) eventually reach a point where they've achieved everything they wanted to achieve and want to move on to other things. And I think that's fine.

The few that stick around for years regardless usually seem to do so because of strong social ties and/or a deeper involvement with guild business, which again, makes complete sense to me. However, I'm just not in that place myself anymore. I actually do still log into Classic era almost daily, but I don't really play much and I just generally feel like I've kind of seen it all. Not literally of course, but... I was really deep into Classic for two years on Alliance side, and then again on Horde side when I moved to the era servers, so it feels like everything about the zones and dungeons is honestly still quite fresh on my mind and I'll need some time away before I'll get the itch again.

Progressive Classic

Progressive Classic ceased to be of interest to me when it was first announced that all BC Classic characters would have to transition into Wrath of the Lich King, since that was the expansion where I personally felt that things started to go downhill, and while I did have some good times in original Wrath, I tend to think of those days as the kind of experience that was good once but that I'd rather not go through again.

Cata Classic was similarly uninteresting to me, even if I feel that people tend to be a bit too harsh on that expansion. (For me it was quite similar to Wrath in that it had both good and bad aspects.) Personally I don't think that Blizzard will actually continue to ride the expansion train until Classic catches up with retail, but until they tell as otherwise it's fair to assume that they will, and when I look at the line-up of what's to come next, I don't really see much reason to get re-invested into progressive Classic either.

Mists of Pandaria: If they do make a MoP Classic, I have exactly one plan for it: to level a character high enough at the start of the expansion to see the Vale of Eternal Blossoms in its original state. I was intrigued by seeing both in-game NPCs and actual players talk about its beauty back when the expansion was current, but by the time I went to check out Mists in late 2013, the zone had already been changed to its permanently destroyed state to accommodate the entrance to the Siege of Orgrimmar raid.

That is literally all a Mists Classic could offer me though. I just spent several months levelling characters through MoP Remix earlier this year, so in terms of Pandaria quests, dungeons and raids, I've had my fill of that content recently.

Warlords of Draenor: I'm actually kind of curious what garrisons were like when they were the focus of the game, but from my understanding a lot of their appeal came from the fact that they were competely broken in terms of how much gold and resources they generated, which is something that Blizzard later nerfed, and somehow I can't see them putting them into Classic in their broken state again, so yeah... I just don't see much of interest here.

Legion: I didn't play during Legion but people mostly seemed to love that expansion, and even while playing through the content years later I could kind of see why. Still, all that content is still in the game, with the only things missing being the temporary systems like the artifact weapon grind and the randomly dropping legendaries. I wouldn't see the point in reliving a classic version just for those.

BfA: This one doesn't actually seem that long ago and I did play through that content in retail... plus again, it's still there for you to play through right now, just minus the systems that everyone hated, like Azerite power. I just don't see the point of a Classic version.

Seasonal servers / Classic+

I'm lumping these two together even though they're not exactly the same, but they are the same for my purposes.

If Blizzard were to actually release a Classic+, I would check it out for sure, but I'm not hopeful that it would appeal to me in the long term. Back in 2016 (during my private server days) I wrote a post called "Nostalgia and Other Reasons to Play Vanilla" in which I noted that people loved some very different if not outright contradictory things about original World of Warcraft. In a similar vein, after Classic was first announced, I wrote a post called "Flaw or Feature?" in which I also noted that taking away an aspect of the game that one group of players dislikes to make things smoother for them is just as likely to break the game for somebody else.

In a nutshell, I feel that this is exactly what Blizzard has done with some of their "twists" on Classic, and I don't think it's something on which they will change direction either as it seems to appeal to the people who keep the lights on on the current Classic servers. To be more specific, I cannot get over how they've merged everything into big megaservers (because players demanded it!) because those are absolutely antithetical to the Classic experience for me and playing on one just tends to sap all my enjoyment out of the game after a few weeks/months.

I'm pretty sure I'm in a minority on this as well, so again, I don't expect things to change, but the point remains that both the Classic dev team and the current community seem to want the game to go in a direction that ultimately doesn't appeal to me, so I'm not hopeful that anything that comes out of these efforts will have lasting appeal to me personally.

I will of course continue to keep an eye out for new developments and I suppose one should never say never, but as it stands, I simply need a break from Classic era and don't see the other modes of Classic producing anything that will manage to enthrall me anywhere close to the way the vanilla game did and still does.