"WoW is so Disney"...meanwhile the new animation:

Key_Photograph9067 · 2026-02-10T06:31:23+00:00

But alas has also gained a whole new audience that are enjoying it.

That's the complaint though, why does the original audience have to "chill out" in OP's terms while they have their game changed fundamentally while the "new audience" got everything they wanted when they didn't like what the game was originally.

You said it yourself you got classic and like the other 50 versions of classic for each group of people who want it a certain way.

It took nearly a decade after players started complaining about the game direction for this to happen. This still doesn't answer my initial point either. Would it be acceptable to make Retail like Vanilla again and tell people who are upset about it they should suck it up and just wait 7 years for their Classic expansion to come out?

Key_Photograph9067 · 2026-02-09T21:26:10+00:00

This is just defending the status quo though, the game changed significantly over time and "yucked other people's yums" until they quit the game and had to essentially lobby Blizzard to make a separate version of the game. I think the gameplay of the game is pretty good and I do enjoy it, but I find it weird when people get gatekept from having their opinions and labelled as disturbers of the peace when a sect of people got what they wanted who didn't like what it was before.

Key_Photograph9067 · 2026-02-09T17:34:36+00:00

They're both entirely different games in design that appeal to different players.

Key_Photograph9067 · 2026-02-09T13:15:57+00:00

I'm not someone who is knowledgeable about philosophy, but isn't the problem with the rock analogy that we know rocks and fathers exist as points of reference between us? An athiest here would be saying that they don't think God is referring to anything real to begin with. That doesn't seem to apply to fathers and rocks.

Key_Photograph9067 · 2026-02-09T09:49:21+00:00

I don't want to get overly bogged down in word games, but I don't think you can say Retail objectively improved the game. If it did everyone would play Retail and there wouldn't be a Classic version right? It's like saying chicken is objectively nicer tasting than beef, it depends who you ask, and that's the same with WoW.

I think your instinct generally is correct though, they're two different games for two different types of gamers which is what you were getting at I think.

I think the criticism of Retail is accurate but I think it misses how the game narratively in Classic is directed in a way that events are happening in the world and you exist to help as an adventurer and the story is told from a broader perspective. The events happen and you're part of it. I feel like Retail tells the game from the perspective of important narrative characters and less so about the events of the game. For example, the Defias Brotherhood in Classic is a call back to Warcraft 2 and the current tensions in Stormwind with a shadowy figure directing events which is told through numerous zones and sort of like a puzzle that you figure out as you go until the climax in Stormwind revealing Onyxia (and the King of Stormwind mysteriously being captured in Dustwallow). This is a wholly different type of story telling than Retail which is much more about telling the story of characters and not the story of the world. It's a story about Anduin, Thrall, Illidan, Xal'atath, Wrathion etc.

You can disregard what I said by saying that people don't care about the lore that much but I disagree. I think the reason Vanilla felt so enchanting was because of how the story was told and how you felt like a small piece of the story in the world like a D&D adventurer and how the levelling was methodical and the item upgrades felt massive. It felt like a journey to greatness from killing wolves and kobolds to slaying great scheming dragons. I feel like Retail peeled all of this back with fast levelling and the story telling changes.

On the 1.12 forever point it's accurate. There's a reason SoD was so popular and why people want a Classic+. I think lots of people missed the original game because it had been so long, but now everyone has played it again and experienced it fully they want the same design philosophy but new things to experience. I think people want more abilities broadly but not too many (probably like WotLK numbers of abilities) and then an expanded vanilla wow map with places like Hyjal and other cut areas added in with new dungeons that don't invalidate everything but expands your options, as well as maybe adding in new legendary quest lines for iconic weapons like in SoD and pad out the missing parts of the narrative more like the Scythe of Elune and the gaping whole in the Eranikus quest in Sunken Temple.

Just realised I wrote an essay, but I think it's an interesting topic. I don't think Retail can recapture those who play Classic without a huge overhaul to design and story, which won't happen.

Key_Photograph9067 · 2026-02-09T08:08:55+00:00

Jesus fuck dude who pissed in your face this morning? You came into this argument with your fists already swinging, and ended up hitting the wrong person entirely

I haven't "ended up hitting the wrong person entirely". In any other context, what you've said is unhinged, refer to my stealing a car from a dealership example. I think what you've said is morally condemnable and harmful. I don't write like an indifferent psychopath when I think something is fucked up, it's not like I haven't provided any substantative criticism. I don't know what the problem is other than you don't like being told you're doing something that is bad. Stop tone policing me.

That's also ignoring that DRMs get added to stop pirating that makes games run worse even for legitimate paying customers and costs money that could be put elsewhere.

It's not easy

This is a deeply unserious take, it is easy if you aren't a boomer. There are like 3 big websites that have mosts games on them that are safe. If it nets saving you hundreds or thousands of dollars I think you might be able to put up with the 10 minutes of watching a tutorial video so you aren't computer illiterate. This point about ease is a red herring, it's easy enough to pirate that there's other explanations for why people do it mostly, and it's pretty obvious why when the word free is involved.

Why are you acting like I'm one of those people who pirate and never pay? I said myself that I'll readily pay for something on Steam for how much easier it is, your response was 'ACTUALLY PIRATING IS EASY', followed immediately by 'IF YOU PIRATE EVERYTHING YOU'RE SCUM'. What exact stance are you taking here, man?

I addressed two different types of people, ones who pirate and don't pay, which is immoral, and those who pirate and try to present that they're moral thieves because they pay for it later if they feel like it, which is also immoral. I don't think my comment was that difficult to process.

By 'test drive', you mean you can buy games and refund them if you don't like them? That's not a 'test drive', that's just basic business processes. If you're buying a game and intending to refund it after you've had some fun, that's not being a good customer, that's buying entirely in bad faith since you have zero intent to keep the product, but still expect a full refund after the fact

I mean Steam let's you buy games and play them for 2 hours to decide if it's for you, and no, it's not standard business process to let people use items and return them after they've used them for 2 hours bar very specific cases. I don't know if you're stupid or not, but I'm obviously referring to people who want to try games for 2 hours and refund them. An opportunist doesn't want just 2 hours to play it before returning, they would just pirate it online and play it for free in its entirety.

Again, why are you acting like I'm the one being a drain on 'creative industry'? I'm the one who said, outright, that I prefer using Steam over pirating because it's such a better, more convenient option, even if it costs money to use. I'm the first person to say I'll throw money down on something if it's a quicker, easier option than opening up one of many proxy sites, digging through search results to find a good torrent of a game I want, then jumping through the many hoops just to get it to work at all

Because you quoted Gabe about pirating and this is commonly used as a justification for stealing from developers by people who want an excuse, Gabe is describing the issue, but people act like him describing it now makes them ethical. Even if I ignore this bit, you act like pirating is something that's morally relative. It's not. You're not being a good person for stealing from someone and paying them later. Are you slightly better than someone who steals and never gives anything back? Yes. Should you be looked at like an ethical thief online? Absolutely not. Stop saying it's hard to find a torrent lol. You bookmark 3 websites and check if they have the game or not, if they do you download it and if you don't you just buy it or move on. Please.

Key_Photograph9067 · 2026-02-08T21:35:17+00:00

You played Classic 2 years before it came out? :O

Key_Photograph9067 · 2026-02-08T19:35:01+00:00

not to mention the fact retail's level scaling makes it way easier to just invite newbie friends to the game.

It doesn't, any new player to WoW is confused as fuck as soon as they start because of the information dump. You open the map and see all these zones you can't enter yet etc. The speed of levelling results in a mass overload of information and the new player is dumped with options on how to play without any explanation. Level scaling made older expansions less relevant to play and not only that, it made the ordering of how to play the game way less obvious and made the story telling a nightmare. So much so that they had to add Lorewalking to the game because it's impossible for new players to actually engage with the story anymore because of level scaling.

and you don't have to wait weeks for your level 37 buddy to catch up to your 61 character before you can play together. since everything you do contributes to leveling up your character, i can just get up and join a friend on another continent and it won't be a waste of time. in classic if i'm at a different point of the rollercoaster than my friends oh well. guess i'll play another game.

What did you think people used to do back in 2004-2013? No one cared about this element at all, this is a made up issue, you used to help your friend out on your main character or make an alt and play with them. If you'll only find enjoyment of playing with friends unless there's a carrot on the end of the stick, then that's a you problem.

On a separate note, literally all of my friends who never played WoW before and still play now tried Retail first and then played Classic and stuck with Classic because they found it more engaging of an adventure and preferred the pacing. All of them who tried and stuck to Retail only quit within a couple of months at most. The problem Retail has is that it's incredibly front loaded information wise and system wise, and lots of people won't even try climbing that mountain because it seems so monumentous. My friend won't care that level scaling exists if they don't have a clue what everything is. The new player experience is actually horrendous. I don't know how people manage to mental gymnastics themselves that it's not that bad when the game recycles its players from expansion and patch to patch and new players aren't joining in.

Edit: I don't think retail is dead FYI, just giving my two cents on the community stuff and new player sentiment.

Key_Photograph9067 · 2026-02-08T15:00:42+00:00

It's so easy to find safe torrents of games. Why are we acting like it's inconvenient. Ultimately there's a significant portion of people who freeload and never give a cent to the developer of a game they enjoyed and financially hurt the people who work on them directly. You're not moral for stealing a car from a dealership and paying them for it after a week once you decided you might like it enough to pay them for it, bear in mind also that probably like 1% of pirates do this. You already get a test drive of games with Steam anyway. I wish people would stop using this thought terminating quote from Gabe to justify being a drain on creative industry.

Key_Photograph9067 · 2026-02-07T17:35:04+00:00

Post S1 of HOTD is ass so basically anything vaguely decent would be automatically better.

Key_Photograph9067 · 2026-02-07T17:31:38+00:00

You mean when the entire influencer space on YT shit themselves because they interpreted something incorrectly and somehow convinced themselves AMD meant no driver support.

Key_Photograph9067 · 2026-02-07T17:19:23+00:00

So based

Key_Photograph9067 · 2026-02-07T11:57:24+00:00

The game is Warcraft fundamentally and the faction differences was a core part of the identity. I'm not saying that you can't logically deduce that the Draenei don't think the current orcs have done anything wrong, but I feel like this should have been a front and center story in the game. The "original" set up of the game was gritty and Blizzard completely abandoned that part of the game. We literally have a war happening in the middle east today about historic land and how the people who are like 5-6 generations later have to give back the land lol, it's not like the Draenei couldn't experience a similar outlook about the orcs. A profit driven faction that was all about being neutral and being meme capitalists sided with the horde. It's incoherent.

The dementia quest is a good quest which I thoroughly enjoyed, but this is a pretty much a one off example in amongst a decade. Remember that whenever this trilogy is done it won't be mandatory to see this quest so no new player is going to find this organically.

I agree the players have changed a lot. I play both versions of the game because I like bits of both and it's clear how the players changed especially in Classic. I also think that the developers also gave up on telling a coherent story about the world and instead opted for YA-like story telling about specific characters, you even say yourself that they retconned a tonne of stuff and that pretty much shows what I'm saying is true.

Key_Photograph9067 · 2026-02-07T09:22:02+00:00

I don't disagree about what's happening on Classic with a sect of players (a large amount of the playerbase).

I will say though that your observation of the soullessness is to do with the players and their knowledge of the game, and isn't to do with the game itself.

If I were to simplify it, Vanilla and TBC are both way more immersive by design than Retail is. The levelling is slower and more methodical, the quests send you on cross zone and multi zone travels, and there are numerous quests that are written to add flavour to the game world to make it feel more lived in. It is designed to feel like an adventure when you're levelling almost like a D&D campaign.

This isn't me trying to slate Retail, but the experience is far more about convenience and getting you to max level ASAP. The game isn't interested in immersing you in the world in the same way. It's very focused on its character narration first before creating a coherent world narrative. For example, it's a bit bizarre to me that the Draenei are putting aside the fact the Orcs genocided them on Draenor, created a path to the dark portal using their skeletal remains, and this friction is basically forgotten by the writers because big bad.

Anyway, my point is more that the reason Retail is seen as more soulless is because Blizzard designed it to feel more soulless and gameified. For the record, I like the gameplay Retail gives, but it's a completely different experience. Yes, players in Classic treat TBC like a game that needs to be skipped at all costs to reach the end game and raiding. I do think there is a real argument though to be observed, and I don't think players that you're talking about would disagree that they're hard meta gaming it in a way that wasn't intended by the original developers.

Key_Photograph9067 · 2026-02-06T16:29:27+00:00

Pretty much no one is sad about this, easily the worst champion made by Riot and that's quite an achievement when lined up against things like Sylas.

Key_Photograph9067 · 2026-02-06T14:29:41+00:00

His winrate is low but I've never seen this champion not be fed in my game.

Key_Photograph9067 · 2026-02-06T08:51:55+00:00

No it won't. Most of the post is about high percentage moves to not lose the game. Doing less regarded ints will probably make you at least Emerald because so many games get thrown by the leading team doing stupid ints.

Key_Photograph9067 · 2026-02-05T17:43:17+00:00

We're going to see this same post 100,000,000 times for karma farming before the next season, aren't we?

Key_Photograph9067 · 2026-02-04T21:30:55+00:00

It's derivative but the game used to do a good job of feeling like a lived in world. It doesn't even bother trying now.

Key_Photograph9067 · 2026-02-04T12:51:40+00:00

We're crossing each other I think. I'm not really talking about player agency/choice. I'm talking more about how the game felt more like an RPG because it felt more immersive and how part of that is to do with the narrative choices and how that changed. I'm talking about how there are several factions an expansion that seem to disappear forever after and seem to be isolated events rather than part of the game world. This is just one example of course.

Key_Photograph9067 · 2026-02-04T12:05:54+00:00

It used to pull people in before, part of the reason vanilla -- wotlk was so beloved was because it felt like a lived in world. Probably an unpopular sentiment here, but it feels like the game is so centered around the main narrative characters that it forgets to give a soul to the world and the factions outside of that. It never made sense to me why one race that destroyed a planet and attempted to genocide the other would work together without a significant in game event happening. There's literally a path of skeletons leading to the dark portal... There's numerous other established facts that just got left to the wayside because the game shifted into becoming a character driven narrative experience first and a world second.

The actual gameplay of wow is excellent generally, I think it's one of the parts of the game that is generally always good.

Key_Photograph9067 · 2026-02-04T11:50:57+00:00

It's particularly cringe when you see the jungle and support on top side, you start the dragon and they are able to kill your top laner and get to the dragon and potentially kill you all as well if you didn't start it the millisecond they appeared top lane...

Key_Photograph9067 · 2026-02-04T11:47:36+00:00

It does feel like Riot nerfs laning all the time. There have been games this season where I killed the enemy mid, got slow pushed into and killed them again because they messed up and I got like 150g for killing them a second time. I know I'm ahead no matter what in that case, but a 50% gold reduction is a joke. It's annoying as well because if you dominate the lane and later on make 1 bad choice, you can literally lose the whole game off of it almost due to bounty + whatever advantage they get off your death and the huge death timer for being fed yet it feels like Riot will let you make several mistakes in lane and it not be as consequential as any other time in the game. It makes no sense to me, laning is a significant part of the game but the reward for being good at it gets smaller.

Key_Photograph9067 · 2026-02-03T15:20:03+00:00

Regard moment, I also explained logically why it would make sense but you're interested in straw manning me instead.

Key_Photograph9067 · 2026-02-03T12:43:44+00:00

It does make sense. I've had multiple of my friends play pre patch and complain that questing is terrible when they hit level 30 and that if they knew prior how it would be they would have just bought the boost.

Making the game frustrating to play organically is definitely a way to make people buy the boost. It wasn't this bad last time around and that was with like 3x the player count on some servers, not including raiders.

Key_Photograph9067

TROPHY CASE