World of Warcraft: Classic

Typic

BoozeCube said:

I feel like they fucked themselves by hyping this up too soon. They guys after 15 years and shitting on one of the most successful Emu servers to the point we had to shut it down and pissed away more community good will, we have decided to do Classic.. just wait another 3 years for it. We were excited but now even if it’s coming out soon there is little to no hype anymore.

Click to expand...

This is the irony of the whole project and the mindset at blizzard. They would have made bank if they released a change with limited changes from live a year and a half ago. All you really needed was to revert to the old talent tree and get the world changed back. Keep that server rolling through tbc and release the truer classic server this summer.

But blizz is obsessed with accuracy and being perfect for no reason so we will wait 2 years from the announcement so they can get a perfect true to classic release even though only a tiny fraction of neckbeard losers actually care about it being a perfect recreation

Creslin said:

Typic
This is the irony of the whole project and the mindset at blizzard. They would have made bank if they released a change with limited changes from live a year and a half ago. All you really needed was to revert to the old talent tree and get the world changed back. Keep that server rolling through tbc and release the truer classic server this summer.

But blizz is obsessed with accuracy and being perfect for no reason so we will wait 2 years from the announcement so they can get a perfect true to classic release even though only a tiny fraction of neckbeard losers actually care about it being a perfect recreation

Click to expand...

What kind of nonsense is this?

nisser said:

When I started wow in 2004, I started on Illidan (PVP) and never really tried a PvE server. It was a long time ago, I had a lot more free time and maybe I just don't remember things well but I don't recall world-PVP/griefing bothering me all that much. I was also in a high-end guild so most of my playtime was spent raiding and the few world encounters was made up of grouped-play (ex. tuber farming in Feralas)

Having played on multiple private servers in the last few years, I was more annoyed by the PVP aspect than anything. On paper, I loved the suspense of being gankable or getting into fights in the world but in practice, most PVP was a combination of:
-being initiated at low HP +/- while fighting mobs
-being killed by someone that outlevels you by a far margin
-being corpse camped
-killed/farmed on a way to instance by another group when all I want to do is just start the dungeon (or another group mate being farmed and waiting on them)

Almost never was it a fight that was on an equal footing. I also realized I'm not the one to initiate a fight, unless it's someone I recognize (from a previous unfair fight) and want to exact revenge.

Having said that I'm seriously contemplating playing on a PVE server but I'm reluctant as I'm not sure what I may be missing at the end by doing so. I'm also cognizant that in practice (at least in original WOW) most PvE servers seemed to be behind both in the raiding and pvp scene. Anyone have any experience they can share? I figure if I want to PvP I can always just flag myself even on a PVE server.

Click to expand...

So any thoughts from people that have experienced both sides?

PVP is a niche the same way that hardcore modes are a niche, they appeal to some people but not the majority. 100% always on PVP servers or sandbox games with griefing and everything that comes with it will always turn off a large part of the gamer population. However, you can coax and incentivize some PVE aligned players into limited PVP via battlegrounds or even open world areas like Wintergrasp. Assuming it is balanced and favors skill rather than time sinking for niche "PVP gear" that completely dominates people without it.

Ossoi said:

I wasn't referring to individual raids/dungeons - what I meant was there was a lot of content released after I was already ahead of that content e.g Maraudon, Dire Maul, ZG - I remember doing ZG once, have no memory of ever setting foot in AQ20.

Plus it's not just about those raids - I obviously never got ZG rep for the enchants or the trinket. Likewise the Silithus/Cenarion Circle content - summoning Lords for epic gear, grinding CC rep for more gear. All these "minigames" that I never knew existed.

Yeah, the whole notion of "prebis" and "BIS" gear was new to me. In retail we were downing bosses in MC by January 05, entering MC without even 40x level 60s, and our gear progression was Dungeon Set -> T1 -> T2. Whereas now there's Dire Maul items that are better than T1, plus ZG gear.

The point I'm making is that 14 years of knowledge and an accelerated patch timeline make a radically different game for someone who started at the US launch.

I'm not 100% sure if it's Blizzlike - but private server raid guilds are popping every world buff possible (Heart of Hakkar, Ony/Nef head, Songflower, Dire Maul Tribute) before raids. When I compare the buffs we had for our first kill of Nef it's laughable how underprepared we were in comparison.

In Stormwind on a private server with US/EU/China players the Ony buff is dished out constantly. Was there a delay/respawn between each turnin of the Ony head on Blizz servers?

Click to expand...

What kind of raid guild didn’t run ZG or AQ20 lol. You did not outgear ZG when it launched because there were quite a few items there that were better than BWL loot. And you needed AQ20 for buffed spell ranks that were major upgrades.

Chanur said:

A lot of the EMU types will never pay to play.

Click to expand...

I’ve played a lot of private servers over the years in many different guilds and for the US playerbase this isn’t true. Some of the South American or Asian players will probably stick with free servers though. Another consideration for a lot of them is having a computer that runs modern games vs 2005 games.

%.01 reporting in.

Look at how fucking stupid that fight was haha

Dinadass said:

What kind of raid guild didn’t run ZG or AQ20 lol. You did not outgear ZG when it launched because there were quite a few items there that were better than BWL loot.

Click to expand...

Patch 1.7.0 - 13 September 2005

That's almost a year after the game was released. Looking back at my guilds webarchive that overlaps almost exactly with our BWL progression. BWL progression and competing for server firsts > ZG loot. I don't remember the specifics but it certainly feels like we were 40 man raiding most of the week in order to progress - Beating the encounters was all that mattered back then, that was the only prestige that counted, it's why a lot of people are on this forum to begin with lol.

Of course it's easy to look back with 14 years of knowledge and say some ZG items > BWL loot, and yes I've already said that I didn't even know ZG enchants were a thing, same with +50 stamina/spirit consumables, and yes the difference between retail players and private servers in terms of knowledge/prep is hilarious. But were loot tables fully mapped out back then anyway?

Factor in as well the slow pace of content patches during retail, and it's easy to understand why "raid logging" became a thing. Hitting 60 on a private server after BWL is already out/on farm and AQ is a month away was a lot different to my retail experience - now there was so much content waiting for me with more around the corner, back then it was clear MC, kill Onyxia and do what for the rest of the week?

Maybe a c i d.f l y can give more insight into our raid schedules and what people did outside of 40mans, but I don't remember doing ZG more than once. By AQ I was back at University and quit shortly after AQ40, maybe I got the spell books maybe I didn't, but I definitely had zero recollection of AQ20 after zoning into it recently

[QUOTE="a c i d.f l y, post: 2747849, member: 1549"
I wouldn't trade the AQ gates opening on a pvp server for anything. And with latency/server power/PC power being 100x what it was in 2006, that's going to be an even more interesting event to look forward to.[/QUOTE]

Did it a few weeks ago on a private server, there were multiple Alliance/Horde 40 man groups farming the elites that spawn for rep. Server handled it fine. On a megapopulation 10k peak pvp private server then it's normal for players to leave each other alone, same with the raid groups. There were some flashpoints but everyone just wants to get on with the rep farming

a c i d.f l y said:

ZG didn't matter by the time it came out. Barely wasted time in there farming rep for shoulder enchants or whatever. We did it once or twice just to do it. Rep farming became 100x easier by the time Nax came around, which is when most folks bothered having nothing else to do when you could clear mc/BWL one night, AQ40/Ony the next... It was always the filler raid for smaller guilds, so players weren't completely useless when applying to larger guilds further along.

Click to expand...

Yeah, what I thought. Although admittedly the ZG head/leg enchants are very good - Druids get 100hp, 100mp and +24 healing in both slots. My pvt server character is probably better geared than my retail Druid after 2 months of raiding, but that's not a fair comparison at all. It's easy to look back and think "if only we had been doing this" but you can't compare the retail environment to the private server one, they aren't comparable at all.

Do you remember what our raid schedules were like? I remember sleeping from 7pm GMT to Midnight, and raiding Midnight-4/5am, it feels like we were raiding every day but I could be wrong.

ZG mattered if you were a competitive raiding guild

Yeah some Hakkar loot plus a few random one-offs from other bosses were used into Naxx. I was in a top 50 guild and we absolutely cleared ZG weekly.

How are elemental shamans? Garbage in raiding?

Chanur said:

Watching this. The buff changes on private servers made raiding much much easier than on live.

Click to expand...

You can’t really apply a lot of these to all private servers though, many of them have fixed shit like loot tables and most don’t have ridiculously fast lotus spawns or ezmode Vael for example.

I do think it’ll be interesting to see how blizz handles Dire Maul farming, and ZG aoe farming. There are actually several classes that can farm DM lashers for 60+ gold an hour and hunters flooding the market with large brilliant shards and potions can really fuck the economy up.