It appears that based on the success of the first pass at WoW Classic, which was hugely successful to the point of probably saving the WoW team from more layoffs in a time when retail was just failing to hold people with Shadowlands, that the whole “special rules server” idea is here to stay.
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I won’t call them “classic” servers because people get their panties in a bunch over classic when it isn’t exactly the version of classic they want. That was always going to be an issue, I just didn’t think the winging would be so loud. Also, “classic” limits the appeal to just nostalgia which both restricts us from some ideas and… well, let’s face it, the vanilla WoW card has been played.
The vanilla card worked once because there was huge, pent up nostalgia for the old game which was no longer available from Blizzard. That nostalgia was never going to be satisfied by pirate/private servers, which were never going to cater beyond a small, self-selecting, technically adept group of indiviuals. Any plan that starts with users needing to torrent a specific version of the client automatically excludes 98% of the WoW player base.
But now that the vanilla card has been played, that pent up demand is gone. There are still vanilla servers available, but those who really wanted the experience got into it during the pandemic nearly four years ago. Nostalgia requires some level of restriction on access, and I don’t think Blizz is going to go all Disney on us and put vanilla in the vault for seven years in the hope of driving another WoW Classic frenzy.
So that leaves special rules servers to keep the retail alternative revenue stream perculating. The progression through the expansions will keep some people engaged, hardcore is having its moment still, and the Season of Discovery experiment was interesting for a bit, but they need a bit more to keep that flame alive.
And we’re not going to get new content. Classic Plus is a pipe dream. It will never happen. New content is, and will always be, the realm of retail WoW, so the classic and classic era servers, as they are called, will need to live within the content we all know and… love, hate, or just remember.
What Blizzard CAN do within that limitation is tinker with the dials for xp, difficulty, gear, and even some of the skills given what we have seen in Season of Discovery, which rides on the classic era code base.
Given all of that, which I will sum up as “no new content” and “playing with the dials and switches” I thought about what they might get up to in the classic era line.
1 – All raids have a five person group option
What if, you know, the goal wasn’t to take five person dungeons away from players to turn them into raids? I know the response in retail varies between “non-raiders should not be allowed to see raids unless they can bring 10-40 fully geared people with them” and “wait a couple of expansions and go solo some raids,” but seriously, there is some content that could be opened up to a wider audience.
This is one of those things where people who raid will say it isn’t that hard to raid without realizing the commitment it really forces on people, not to mention the cultural norms that raiders have adopted that drive people away. Go watch Why it’s Rude to Suck at WoW for a fuller take on that.
Even getting past that, there are issues. Raiding is not as hugely interesting in vanilla, where it is 59 levels away from where you start, as it is in some of the later expansions where a lot of thought went into making raids be a bit more interesting. Five person raid options in Wrath interest me more than in vanilla, though maybe that is just me.
And there is precedent for this. Blizz did go back and turn a couple of vanilla raids into five person heroic dungeons in Cataclysm, and they were really cool.
Pros: New perspective on some content
Cons: Annoys raiders and might not be a huge draw for non-raiders?
2 – All raids and dungeons have a solo option
I will call this the Tour de Azeroth option maybe, the sightseeing version of WoW Classic, where you can play through the game, seeing all the sights, without even the need for a group, much less a guild, to support you. There is a demographic for this, I know it.
Again, the 59 levels of vanilla make this hard to jump start, but it agruably gets more interesting as expansions roll on.
There is of course a whole “how do I tune this to even work for all classes and specs?” aspect to this. Maybe the whole follower dungeon idea from retail could be borrowed, so you declare your role and you get the other two roles filled in?
There are also some social dynamics to play with in this. What if you turned it into silent WoW? No chat, no emotes, no guilds, no groups, no auction house, just you and a bunch of others silently co-existing in a strange new Azeroth.
Or maybe not. That might be too much, but there are things to play with in this idea.
Pros: Really the only way some people are ever going to see raid content. Some possible interesting side paths.
Cons: You think tuning raids for groups will be bad? Raiders now incandescent with rage. Are we beyond the WoW audience with this?
3 – All content requires a group
And, having done the “make everything easier” route, let’s go the other way and make every mob outside to the initial tutorial elite. This is a world where you can’t kill your ten rats without a tank, healer, and DPS around to support your effort.
Pros: You want people to group up, this will make people group up!
Cons: The appeal of WoW was being able to make some progress while your friends were not around, so what happens when that is gone?
4 – Cataclysm vanilla fresh start
What if we all started fresh in Cataclysm era WoW?
No, seriously, hear me out.
I know “we hates it” because it destroyed our childhood or whatever, but there is an argument to be made about the quality of the 1-60 zones in that era. This was supposed to be the re-do that would fix things and make them more focused, include stories, and simply be less chaotic and more playable.
Yes, there is the problem that a good portion of the story lines are predicated on something that happened in vanilla, and they would have to adjust the xp gain to make sure you were not out-leveling every zone before you hit the halfway point. But it could be something. I am not sure I would let it go beyond level 60… Outland and Northrend don’t change… but it might be interesting. Maybe?
And there are aspects that could be played with here, making it an achievements race or some of the other things that the Daybreak crew has done with EverQuest and EverQuest II special servers.
Pros: A never before seen new server starting point!
Cons: Does anybody care? Is our resentment too strong to embrace this?
5 – Open world, full loot PvP option
I love this idea and I hate this idea. And I only love it because I believe it would prove the point that nobody really wants this as an option. So yeah, what if we had Darkfall rules in a WoW Classic context?
My prediction is that the whole thing would collapse within two weeks, but it would bring me joy when it does even if all the forum trolls who always demand this sort of garbage idea will 100% go “Well akshully..” and explain that it failed due to some irrelevent detail.
Pros: Might prove to some that this is almost always a bad idea
Cons: It won’t prove it to the people who need to hear it the most
Anyway, those are a few idea. What else could they try?
The Ancient Gaming Noob 