Blizzard Relents to Years of Fan Pressure with World of Warcraft Classic

Megalith

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After countless shutdowns, arguments, and meetings over the past few years, along with petitions begging the company to make a paid version of what they wanted, Blizzard is finally relenting with its own official take on the concept of "vanilla" WoW servers, which will allow players to experience earlier, pre-expansion versions of the MMO.
 
I follow /r/wowservers, already they are having arguments how Vanilla will be implemented by Blizzard. Im glad Blizzard has decided to do something many people really want to see, but Im glad not to be one making the decisions on how to implement it. Assuming Blizzard is doing this to make money, they are gonna have to balance the wishes for "purity" of Vanilla vs the need to make a game that will be considered "successful" (whatever benchmark that is, are they looking for the revival of WoW's heyday? Are they content to break even on costs? Are they thinking of 2007 Runescape? and etc etc.)

Will people really go for the "purity" of Vanilla? Or maybe thats truly nostalgia talking and Blizzard will find themselves in an dead end down the road with low player numbers. Or maybe its what everyone truly wanted, and we see a popular Vanilla WoW overtaking retail WoW. How far should they take it? Frozen in time balance or a evolving balance between classes? Truly, its a pandora's box they are opening, and no matter what they decide, they are gonna get flank for every decision they make.

I hope everything goes well for Blizzard and the majority of players on Classic WoW. Hopefully this will satisfy their long held wishes for the old days.
 
I like the way EQ did legacy servers.

Hopefully Blizzard does a good job with this.
 
I am excite!

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I would so play it. Just don't know if i miss the 40 raids. Hated that cluster so much. Think 20 man is enough even for vanilla.
 
Alterac Valley for days.

There was something special about duking it out and actually doing the quests in the battleground for a little nudge in PVP.

I don't know what it's like now, battlegrounds, but good times. I might have to dust off my two Rank 14s and between that cinematic. It's got my jimmies triggered.
 
Interestingly enough Vanilla was the one version of WoW I absolutely hated. It was basically EZ mode raiding for all the scrubs who couldn't hack top tier EQ raiding at the time. It wasn't until several expansions later where Blizzard really got their scripting refined and WoW's raids became absolutely more technically complex than EQ and ultimately far surpassed. Memory might be a little fuzzy but that was around Planes of Power Era for EQ when Raids still required 72 people in nearly maxed out gear to even have a chance.
 
Wow is the only mmo game I have played. Was not easy mode for us. I loved waiting a couple hours on friday nights talking in vent a trying to get all 40 guild members to become ready. Sometimes we had to many and other times we had to wait. Then trying to make it past all the hord to actually get in the dungeon. It was a fight old school pvp before we even got in to the raid....loved it all. hated it at the time but grew to miss all the fun. Not just about raids . The world pvp was fun. Dark shore fights and such.
 
Interestingly enough Vanilla was the one version of WoW I absolutely hated. It was basically EZ mode raiding for all the scrubs who couldn't hack top tier EQ raiding at the time. It wasn't until several expansions later where Blizzard really got their scripting refined and WoW's raids became absolutely more technically complex than EQ and ultimately far surpassed. Memory might be a little fuzzy but that was around Planes of Power Era for EQ when Raids still required 72 people in nearly maxed out gear to even have a chance.
Really? Because BC and some of the wotlk stuff was a bit more... interesting in what needed to be done to complete the raid but there was always a lot of "don't stand in the fire/circle/water/death beam" and add-ons were making it so easy that you didn't even have to pay much attention to where the boss even was unless you were a tank, just watch for the raid warnings on screen.

Then there was the matter of, if you weren't in one of the top worldwide progression guilds, you know everyone was just watching tankspot/curse/youtube/whatever for every possible perspective of every boss fight so it's not as if people were really having to learn strategies.

That said, I agree with you that Vanilla wow was pretty terrible for a variety of reasons. 15-20 hours of farming between weekly raids(supposed to be a game, not a 2nd job), god awful pvp(battlegrounds got old fast, and the arena mode they eventually added would basically eliminate half the classes from ever being viable in it anyway), world pvp that was an unbalanced mess, and so on.

Personally what I miss from vanilla wow, was that it was a long journey for my original 40 man raid guild to weed out the idiots and become the top raiding guild on our server acting as a well oiled machine in raids, and everyone actually getting along with eachother outside of raids with almost no drama, that basically went out the window when Blizzard decided to keep changing how many people a raid was in BC and beyond.
 
Everyone remembers the "good old days" but nobody would be very happy going back most likely.

WoW evolves for a reason.. added gameplay, features, and most people like and expect those.

Nevertheless, I think classic servers are a great idea if only to remind people where we've come from.

I'm sure a few hardcore people will stick around but I expect most will move on very quickly.
 
Everyone remembers the "good old days" but nobody would be very happy going back most likely.

Except the huge number of players on unofficial vanilla WoW servers before Blizzard nuked them, that is.
 
Except the huge number of players on unofficial vanilla WoW servers before Blizzard nuked them, that is.

There was a certain novelty to them because they weren’t official and were using an ancient game client. When Blizzard brings it back in an official capacity, they may unintentionally ruin it by trying to “fix” it. Even doing simple shit like adding the Dungeon Finder can ruin the overall appeal of the old “find groups yourself” system.
 
Really? Because BC and some of the wotlk stuff was a bit more... interesting in what needed to be done to complete the raid but there was always a lot of "don't stand in the fire/circle/water/death beam" and add-ons were making it so easy that you didn't even have to pay much attention to where the boss even was unless you were a tank, just watch for the raid warnings on screen.

Then there was the matter of, if you weren't in one of the top worldwide progression guilds, you know everyone was just watching tankspot/curse/youtube/whatever for every possible perspective of every boss fight so it's not as if people were really having to learn strategies.

That said, I agree with you that Vanilla wow was pretty terrible for a variety of reasons. 15-20 hours of farming between weekly raids(supposed to be a game, not a 2nd job), god awful pvp(battlegrounds got old fast, and the arena mode they eventually added would basically eliminate half the classes from ever being viable in it anyway), world pvp that was an unbalanced mess, and so on.

Personally what I miss from vanilla wow, was that it was a long journey for my original 40 man raid guild to weed out the idiots and become the top raiding guild on our server acting as a well oiled machine in raids, and everyone actually getting along with eachother outside of raids with almost no drama, that basically went out the window when Blizzard decided to keep changing how many people a raid was in BC and beyond.

It is why I specifically used the phrase "more Technically complex" and not Harder/better. Harder and or better are really subjective terms and difficult to really state especially since difficulty had a great deal more to do with the people you raided with. I mean over the years I've seen people who could make group content seem difficult.
 
There was a certain novelty to them because they weren’t official and were using an ancient game client. When Blizzard brings it back in an official capacity, they may unintentionally ruin it by trying to “fix” it. Even doing simple shit like adding the Dungeon Finder can ruin the overall appeal of the old “find groups yourself” system.

http://www.pcgamer.com/this-is-how-blizzard-plans-to-finally-bring-back-vanilla-wow-servers/

Not a direct quote so who knows if PC Gamer is just paraphrasing or putting words into Brack's mouth,

There won’t be cross-realm servers or Looking For Raid and Dungeon Finder automatic party matchmaking. There’s still a lot of questions about how the team will tackle it, but Brack says they’re committed to recreating an authentic Vanilla World of Warcraft experience. "One of the tenets of Classic WoW is none of the cross-server realms and different [server] sharding options that we have available to us today. There’s a lot of desire on part of the community that this is something that they don’t want."

With that said, until they actually near release, im not be surprised at what they choose to do. This sounds like early stages of development, and that not much has been decided beyond its possible and they are committed to doing it.
 
I just want EQ to be released as a private server with moddable game assets on steam. They can still sell their own private made content and and servers separately just sell us the option to do what we want with them give us liberty or give us death touch.
 
I’m glad I played Vanilla when it was all there was - it was fun and I have a lot of fond memories.

I also have a lot of not-so-fond memories. I may not like all the changes that have been made to the game, and to the genre as a whole, but I sure as shit don’t care to regress backwards to the start either. So many quality of life improvements since then that I don’t even really care to touch it.

Honestly, with MMOs, it’s less about the game itself and more about who you play them with. If a bunch of my friends called and wanted to get the band back together, then yeah - I would jump back in that shit show, complain loudly about how BS the game is (but have fun because it’s with my friends), and fork over my subscription fee for months on end (again).
 
I play on a vanilla private server. Super pumped for it to come to official blizz crap.
 
I'm curious how this is going to work over the longer term. Will there be new content added eventually, up to and including expansions unique to the vanilla server? If not, how long could it hold anyone's interest knowing that no new content is ever coming?
 
A number of things to think about.

#1 They just announced it, they don't have anything working or even worked on. So it'll be a year or so before they have something working.
#2 They're using WoW 8.0 engine which probably means a lot of macros and addons used for Vanilla won't work on their 8.0 engine.
#3 They know less about classic than the community, so expect Blizzard to either copy the communities work or just fuck it up worse.
#4 The announcement was probably meant to get everyone excited for WoW in general since the new expansion is coming out as well.
#5 If and when they're ready to release Vanilla servers is when they have a lul in players.

Just saying, be ready to be disappointed. As someone who plays on a private server, I'm already bored of Vanilla and want to play TBC. By the time they release Vanilla I will be bored of TBC and wanting WOTLK.
 
I'm curious how this is going to work over the longer term. Will there be new content added eventually, up to and including expansions unique to the vanilla server? If not, how long could it hold anyone's interest knowing that no new content is ever coming?
If they do it like private servers, they should release it patch by patch. They should start with 1.2 and finish with 1.12. After that, TBC, WOTLK, and etc. Though personall WOTLK is where I stop since everyone knows WoW went to shit when Cata was released.
 
Are they going to add the 1000 person queues to get in like at launch? I've played off an on since Beta and I prefer many of the new features they have added over the years. Sitting for 30 mins waiting at a raid entrance or having a warlock portal people in was a pain.

I love the dungeon and raid finder system.
 
Are they going to add the 1000 person queues to get in like at launch? I've played off an on since Beta and I prefer many of the new features they have added over the years. Sitting for 30 mins waiting at a raid entrance or having a warlock portal people in was a pain.

I love the dungeon and raid finder system.

In that case just stay on the regular servers. I'll never understand why some people like Design1 get so butthurt about options that aren't the default.
 
i do hope they make some adjustments for this so its not completely old school, like the dungeon finder, smaller raid sizes, little faster leveling experience, be interesting to see how they implement talents

but i did enjoy the 10 man UBRS back in the day
 
My favorite part of Vanilla was the Corrupted Blood epidemic. While I greatly enjoyed all of it, dealing with the epidemic was a fascinating dynamic, though unintentional

100% agree - that was an amazing experience, an unintentional social experiment that showcased how disease spreads in real time.

As for Vanilla, you are talking to someone who grinded out a Warlord title. I don't miss vanilla at all one bit, what people want is the nostalgia of the experience they had of what was many' first MMO. Mine was Ultima Online... after they wrecked it with Trammel... I tried player run servers for years and never really got that fuzzy feeling I was desperately seeking. You cannot go back in time and relive those moments. They are memories for a reason and should stay that way. You can only move forward. There will be another MMO one day that will make us all have those fuzzies. For instance, I got the fuzzies during the beta of Rift, that only really lasted a week before I got bored and realized I was just grinding out a polished WoW clone.

Something else, revolutionary in it's own right, will hit again one day... it will topple WoW. We will all love it, lose sleep over it, gain weight and potentially lose relationships and or jobs... that game will grow and change and become something we no longer recognize. We will lament the loss of the game we once loved and will harken for the past with a "classic sever". What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
 
Still not going back to WoW until I can start the game, create a private sever and play alone or only invite just a few close friends. I play games to get away from everyone else and Destiny 2 reminds me of why I feel that way, every single time I try a raid or trials.
 
Still not going back to WoW until I can start the game, create a private sever and play alone or only invite just a few close friends. I play games to get away from everyone else and Destiny 2 reminds me of why I feel that way, every single time I try a raid or trials.
Foreveralone
 
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Still not going back to WoW until I can start the game, create a private sever and play alone or only invite just a few close friends. I play games to get away from everyone else and Destiny 2 reminds me of why I feel that way, every single time I try a raid or trials.
Sounds like you shouldn't bother playing multiplayer focused games then. If you can't even get a couple friends together in a game like destiny 2 where a group is a whopping 3 people... just quit trying.
 
In that case just stay on the regular servers. I'll never understand why some people like Design1 get so butthurt about options that aren't the default.

I never said a classic server offended me in the least. Merely that if people wanted a true vanilla server experience then by all means bring back the full 1000 person queue, having to run everywhere for a flight path and everything else.

I personally won't be using a classic server as I feel the game has progressed a great deal since vanilla. I had good times back then but I think many look on that time with rose tinted glasses. I doubt there will be long term server pops on classic servers. Its a couple month nostalgia hit and then they will unsub.
 
I never said a classic server offended me in the least. Merely that if people wanted a true vanilla server experience then by all means bring back the full 1000 person queue, having to run everywhere for a flight path and everything else.

I personally won't be using a classic server as I feel the game has progressed a great deal since vanilla. I had good times back then but I think many look on that time with rose tinted glasses. I doubt there will be long term server pops on classic servers. Its a couple month nostalgia hit and then they will unsub.
I agree. The devs already said they're going to have all of that. The private servers I checked out years ago all had XP multipliers, fast travel systems, and bugs galore. That and they were free, which is what I think the real draw is to a huge proportion of people clamoring for vanilla servers. A couple months is generous, imo.
 
I'm not sure anyone outside of the nostalgia crew will appreciate vanilla WoW. The instant reward and play for reward gamers of today may be pretty shocked at the amount of grinding in vanilla... grinding to get cap, grinding to get enough raid materials to raid, grinding through all the trash in Molten Core, grinding for PvP titles, grinding for thorium. At the time there were a lot of grindy games, but now there's nothing like that at all.
 
I'm not sure anyone outside of the nostalgia crew will appreciate vanilla WoW. The instant reward and play for reward gamers of today may be pretty shocked at the amount of grinding in vanilla... grinding to get cap, grinding to get enough raid materials to raid, grinding through all the trash in Molten Core, grinding for PvP titles, grinding for thorium. At the time there were a lot of grindy games, but now there's nothing like that at all.

It may come to a surprise to you, but the grinding in vanilla was what some of us such as myself miss the most. People are different and enjoy different things, hence different kinds if servers that cater to varying playstyles such as Roleplay servers and player vs. environment servers. Remember, people are different and this new realm wasn't created for you, but others.
 
For me I am excited they are looking into this, but also there are some things I didnt like about classic. The biggest thing for me back then was it was all new, so people were always talking to each other, sharing information, being social for a lack of a better term. Now its where can I find X look up up on wowhead noob, delete your char, etc. All the things have been found and there is little do to other than grind out the old stuff. I think people want it to experience and try to grab that old feeling but i am afraid it wont be there. I know I read places some of the private servers had up to 500k subs or something like that, which is nice. I think about half were doing it because it was familiar and free. If they have to pay blizzard for it I think the numbers will be less over all. probably see a spike at first then over a few months people leave. So many questions still remain and until they start to formalize their plans people will just speculate constantly.
 
I just want to experience the story since I didn't get into MMO's until into WOW's story was pretty far advanced so at that point i felt like i was too far behind.
 
Sounds like you shouldn't bother playing multiplayer focused games then. If you can't even get a couple friends together in a game like destiny 2 where a group is a whopping 3 people... just quit trying.

Thanks for reminding me why I rarely do try games like that.
 
Thanks for reminding me why I rarely do try games like that.
Why, because I pointed out the obvious? I generally don't play MP games either unless I've got friends also playing them these days. The difference is that I'm not going to complain about being unable to play an MMO by myself of all things.
 
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