---
title: 'World of Warcraft Classic And What We Left Behind'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=0RxQRswLAmI'
video_id: '0RxQRswLAmI'
date: 2026-09-15
duration_sec: 2438
channel: 'Folding Ideas'
---

# World of Warcraft Classic And What We Left Behind

> Source: [World of Warcraft Classic And What We Left Behind](https://youtube.com/watch?v=0RxQRswLAmI)

## Summary

This video essay explores the experience of returning to World of Warcraft Classic, contrasting it with the modern Battle for Azeroth expansion. The creator, a long-time WoW player, examines the game's historical context, its flaws, and the philosophical shifts in game design over 15 years, ultimately arguing that Classic's appeal lies in its self-directed freedom and the illusion of a vast world.

### Key Points

- **Author's Credentials** [00:00] — The creator establishes their bona fides as a long-time WoW player, mentioning achievements like the Ivory Raptor, a 10-year subscription statuette, and server-first raiding.
- **WoW Classic's Recreation** [01:10] — Blizzard launched WoW Classic in August 2019, recreating the game as it existed in 2006, with small deviations like the in-game clock and period-authentic spell batching.
- **Classic's Flaws and Strengths** [02:22] — Returning to Classic reveals both its strengths and flaws; it's fun but also 'kinda bad' by modern standards, with hostile, unintuitive, and obnoxious elements.
- **Humps for Modern Players** [05:00] — Modern players face several 'humps' in Classic, but adapting to them reveals an interesting and rewarding game, and it's easier to adjust to now than in 2004.
- **Context of EverQuest** [05:42] — WoW was designed as the 'friendly' version of EverQuest, and many of Classic's exhausting elements were actually indulgent compared to its predecessor.
- **Incomplete Content** [07:22] — WoW was pushed out early, leading to quality disparities between Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, with examples like the rough draft area around Blackfathom Deeps and the empty zone of Azshara.
- **Paladin Talent Trees** [08:36] — The Paladin talent trees were a last-minute rush job, with the Holy tree's talents like Improved Lay On Hands and Revelation being poorly designed.
- **Massive Multiplayer Limitations** [09:38] — WoW wasn't built for many players in the same area; quest areas support only 3-8 players, leading to over-competition and a paradox of seeking solitude in an MMO.
- **Enchanting Experience** [11:24] — Despite flaws, Classic is enchanting, with a cartoonish aesthetic that holds up and a well-framed entrance to Orgrimmar that sparks imagination.
- **Cataclysm's Revamp** [12:50] — The Cataclysm expansion revamped the old world, but the changes were self-referential and alienated new players, focusing on nostalgia for old ones.
- **Values and Criticism** [16:12] — The 'goodness' or 'badness' of changes comes down to values, not morality; preferences for solo play or social dependency are not superior or inferior.
- **Outrage Merchants** [17:07] — The clamour for Classic is controversial, with high-profile personalities known for toxicity, arguing that modern WoW is bad, a claim that has been made for over a decade.
- **Performance in Conversations** [19:35] — Public conversations about WoW are skewed by performance, with people giving answers they believe are correct rather than true, leading to hot nonsense like 'Classic is hard'.
- **Classic's Difficulty** [20:16] — Classic isn't hard in execution; it's a test of patience and endurance, punishing mistakes with time costs, not reflex or precision.
- **Syllogism of Nostalgia** [22:07] — The argument 'I liked WoW in 2006, I like good games, therefore WoW was good and hard' is a syllogism based on flawed assumptions about why we like things.
- **Philosophical Changes** [23:02] — WoW has changed philosophically, with shifts in what makes good content, and while nostalgia is potent, it's not the whole story.
- **Battle for Azeroth's Busyness** [24:28] — Battle for Azeroth is a busy game with a tremendous array of content, most completable in 10-20 minute chunks, catering to social solo players.
- **Classic's Narrow Channel** [25:58] — Classic has relatively little variety, with a narrow channel from questing to dungeons to raids, requiring 40 players and a pool of 60-80, creating a corporate environment.
- **Problems with Raiding** [27:30] — Raiding requirements create social power imbalances, toxicity, and a death spiral for failing guilds, making it hard for casual players to participate.
- **Social Dependency** [29:49] — Social dependency is a deliberate design choice, but it means players are at the mercy of others and relies on a healthy population, which dwindles over time.
- **Classic's Sweet Spot** [31:03] — In the first months, Classic is fun because players are spread across levels, but as the population caps, lower-level zones become empty, breaking social dependency.
- **Changes Address Real Problems** [32:26] — Changes to speed up leveling and reduce social dependency address real problems that emerge as MMOs mature, like dead servers and exclusion from group play.
- **Too Much to Do** [33:09] — Battle for Azeroth can feel overwhelming with too many parallel choices, turning options into obligations with daily and weekly resets.
- **Classic's Unexpected Strength** [34:18] — Classic's lack of structure offers freedom to self-direct, with grinding as the purest form of self-directed play, providing a meditative experience.
- **Paradox of More Content** [36:35] — Adding more structured activities can make it feel like there are fewer options, as the emotional value of self-direction goes down.
- **Illusion of Openness** [37:18] — Classic delivers the illusion of a wide-open world, which modern WoW has discarded for honesty, but that honesty is mutually exclusive with mystery.
- **Freedom in Lack of Options** [38:45] — There's a kind of freedom in the lack of structured options; anything you choose is about as good as anything else, offering simplicity and clarity.
- **Aimless Play Wears Out** [39:14] — The aimless, self-directed play of Classic is cute but wears out quickly, and waiting for party members becomes frustrating after repeated times.

### Conclusion

WoW Classic offers a unique freedom through its lack of structure, but this appeal wears thin for most players. The video ultimately argues that the changes in modern WoW address real problems, but Classic's illusion of openness and self-direction remains a valuable, if niche, experience.

## Transcript

and as these things go I’ve gotta lay down my bona fides. I have been playing World of Warcraft a lot since launch.
I have the Ivory Raptor, which involved farming up one thousand gold within the first six months the game was out, and I did that in, like, three. A few years ago Blizzard sent me this nice little statuette commemorating ten years of
unbroken subscription to the game, which means that this is a cute little gesture from a company that made a game I really like, but also kinda yikes. I have this in-game windrider pet because it came with this windrider plush doll
I’ve done server-first raiding, I helped three people grind to High Warlord, I have my Brawler’s Guild rewards, Mage Tower rewards, Swift Flight Form, and even the absurd Realm First Illustrious Jewelcrafter.
Why did I get this? Why did I do what needed to be done to get this?! Point is, yes, I have played a lot of World of Warcraft. ♪♪
In August 2019 Blizzard Entertainment launched World of Warcraft: Classic, a re-creation of World of Warcraft more or less as it existed in 2006, towards the end of the vanilla game’s lifespan,
after all the new content was released, but before any expansions were added. While not a pure recreation the deviations are small and few, most being concessions to the fact that WoW itself changed dramatically over the course of its first year.
For example one of the more dramatic anachronistic changes is the inclusion of the in-game clock, a feature that originally wasn’t added to the game until June 2008, almost four years after launch.
Care has even been taken to recreate period-authentic inconvenience, such as the bespoke recreation of spell batching originally designed to work within the limits of dial-up internet, which will, in turn lead to things like cancelling an ability only for the ability to cast anyway,
or being well out of range of monsters while they continue to hit you in the back of the head. But returning to the Azeroth-that-was fifteen years later is an interesting experience. It lays bare all the strengths and flaws of the game and really calls attention
to the fact that World of Warcraft was kinda bad. "Alright I'm gonna just try to..." "Are you stuck?"
[Laughing] "Are you fucking kidding me?!" I mean, it’s still a lot of fun, but it’s also pretty garbage. Here, since I’m already in this hole let me dig my way out.
I really like to revisit old computer role playing games. The genre has, through most of the history of electronic gaming, found itself at the locus of gaming technology, pushing both graphical capabilities and systems complexity. They were, in their heyday,
and what a video game could even be. This, however, also means that they’re often quite experimental, which in turn brings with it a lot of compromises that modern players need to make in order to engage.
Controls are typically unusual, frustrating, unintuitive, or unresponsive, and it’s likely there’s at least one vital game system that is utterly inscrutable, the game assuming you have the time, patience, and inclination to devise its operation through brute trial and error.
Ultima Underworld is the first retail game with a fully 3D environment, but the underlying systems for character movement are pretty immature. It’s not very precise with how facing translates to direction, leading to a lot of times where the player character
is walking forwards, but at a kind of slanted angle. Dungeon Master 2 has a magic system revolving around combinations of symbols representing abstract concepts, with no guidance on what anything actually does. The manual gives a
bit of help by at least telling you that the first set of symbols indicate power level, but at the end straight up tells the player to literally trial and error their way through. Most of these games will allow you to just casually soft lock all progression by
throwing away something vital, either on purpose or by accident. But it’s not impossible for a modern audience to submerge themselves in the games, and once you’re over the hump it’s generally pretty rewarding to see what originally sold players
on Lands of Lore, Ultima Underworld, or Elder Scrolls: Arena, to peek into the history of modern games and see the genesis of ideas, systems, controls, and vocabulary that persist to this day.
Just, you know... maybe keep a walk through or strategy guide handy. This is much of the WoW Classic experience. There’s several distinct humps for a modern player to get over, things that are, by today’s standards, hostile, unintuitive, and obnoxious,
but adapt to them and there’s an interesting and rewarding game on the other side. I have also found that it’s actually easier to adjust to now than it was in 2004 specifically
While Blizzard hasn’t activated all the content that Classic will contain, we know what all of it is, which has the odd effect of making it feel a lot more self-contained and easier to accept the jank
Just before we jump deeper into the jank of Classic, I do think it bears mentioning that WoW itself exists in the context of the game it was meant to compete with
but ultimately all but crushed: Everquest. WoW was, from conception onwards, meant to be the “friendly” version of Everquest, and elements of Classic that feel exhausting today, such as
the relatively small number of quick travel flight points scattered around the world, were positively indulgent compared to Everquest. "You mean you can just fly all the way across the world? Let me go get my monocle and top hat!
Oh, you think there aren’t enough spiders in Dustwallow, that it’s going to take forever Yeah, well, out here in Crescent Reach there are three snakes!
Three snakes! Sure, by modern standards it feels like a pointless waste of time to make the player return to a class trainer and spend silver in order to acquire new abilities and improve old ones,
but when you put it in the context of EverQuest where buying spells and learning spells were two different things, and it was possible to buy a spell you couldn’t learn, and also some spells you needed to find as drops from random monsters,
World of Warcraft was very much the “noob friendly” approach. Why, look, you can even see all the spells that you’ll eventually be able to learn! Game, please, please game, I just, I just want to buy my raptor!
That’s not to say that all the humps are contextual improvements over EverQuest. Some of it is just bad on its own or obviously incomplete.
World of Warcraft was pushed out the door probably a good six months early leading to a pretty substantial and well-documented disparity in quality between the stuff the developers had been working on the longest, namely Eastern Kingdoms and the Alliance starting zones,
and the stuff they had been working on the least, Kalimdor and the Horde starting zones. There’s a few standout examples, like the area around Blackfathom Deeps in western Ashenvale being little more than a rough draft, which maybe looks just kinda old and junky at first glance,
but is a stark contrast when compared to areas like Shadowfang Keep or The Wailing Caverns. The entire zone of Azshara is largely devoid of quests, not completely empty but hardly the number or density that you would expect from a zone of its size.
staged with furniture and flags, but never populated. and, oh god, this character is too low to be here, oh god! Oh no! Oh no!
The Paladin talent trees weren’t implemented until the game finally launched, and were clearly a last minute rush job, with notable highlights being the Holy tree, ostensibly a single-target healing specialization.
The first tier contains Improved Lay On Hands, which adds a small 1 minute armour buff to an emergency heal with an hour long cooldown, the second tier has Revelation which reduces
the cooldown of Lay on Hands by up to 20 minutes, giving it a mere 40 minute cooldown. The third tier begins the chain of talents leading to the tree’s capstone ability, and those three talents are a damage boost to a single ability, an aura that increases holy damage dealt by
your party, and the capstone ability Holy Shock, an instant cast, medium range damage spell. There was a lot of stuff like this floating around, some of it easier to change than others,
and in a lot of ways the first year of World of Warcraft’s life was spent just kinda Some of the abrasive moments really just come down to different expectations. The “massive” in “Massively Multiplayer” was always a lot smaller than it ever felt, most of the
heavy lifting being done by clever design pressing players into interactions that felt more substantial than they really were. WoW just wasn’t actually built to have that many players doing something in the same area at the same time. Single quest areas can typically
only support three to eight players at a time. Any more than that and it quickly leads to over-competition, with players standing around just waiting for more opponents to spawn. While this encourages grouping up, it only does so to a point. You can’t get credit
for most quests if there are more than five players in your group, and a second full group is enough to strip a quest area bare like locusts, so paradoxically there’s a lot of time in the Massively Multiplayer game spent looking for places to play alone.
"Holy crap." "See like that right there..." "There's the line! That's, that's the line!"
"I wanna die. This is..."
All that said, returning to WoW as it used to be is also an enchanting experience in many ways. It reveals the flaws, yes, but also the things that have held up surprisingly well.
The cartoonish, exaggerated aesthetic of the Warcraft universe, always praised as a strength of the series, continues to shine. Even the chunky, blatantly low-poly assets have their own charm, and after a few minutes of play quickly blend into the scenery.
frame to guide the player’s view, that remain stellar. because it was replaced in the changes to the game over the years.
The opening hours of the Orc and Troll quest lines lead the player out of the Valley of Trials, down the road to Razor Hill, through the pass in Drygulch Ravine, culminating in their entrance to Orgimmar, the capital city of the Horde. The path leading into the city
leads the player to this frame at the threshold, the wide open space of the Valley of Honor with the bank, flight tower, and zeppelin framed against the sky. Evocative, fantastical, it’s a moment that really strikes the imagination
and makes the world feel so much bigger than you ever thought it would be. The version of this moment, as it exists now, was put into the game in 2010 with the Cataclysm expansion.
A huge portion of that expansion was dedicated to revamping the original world’s content, since most of it was at least six years old, with some art assets being as old as 2003 or even 2002. The resolution disparity between launch content and stuff from the
second and upcoming third expansions was stark, and it was a gulf that was only likely Additionally players had been clamouring for freeform flight to be added to the original continents,
a much loved feature integral to both The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King expansions, but the original environments had never been designed for freeform flight. The old world ultimately consisted of a series of valleys scooped out of a giant mass,
with questing areas joined by large blocks of featureless terrain, carefully hidden behind impassable rocks and hills. The flight paths all wound through hand-crafted vistas, designed to make
the world look fully formed and sculpted while obscuring the giant empty spaces in between. It was very much an amusement park facade, and while some players enjoyed taking a peek behind the scenery, the out-of-bounds areas weren’t acceptable if it was going to be
something all players could access just by flying up over the tops of the hills. A revamp was, in a lot of ways, needed, but a lot of what they revamped things to Cataclysm, as a whole, is not a fondly remembered expansion,
and a big part of that is in the details of the decisions that were made. Blizzard decided that rather than merely updating the terrain and cities to look more cohesive with newer, higher-resolution content and rather than just filling the voids between
zones in a way that would look boring but presentable when flying, they would instead dramatically alter the world itself in a massive cataclysm and advance the timeline so that the state of the entire main world was concurrent with the end game content.
By advancing the timeline many of the new zones were now sequels to their original versions, following up on the storylines that played out before the Cataclysm. But these new storylines
only made sense if you were already familiar with the previous story, This kind of self-referential storytelling is ultimately the blood of Cataclysm, with a lot of moments in the expansion being retreads of older moments from WoW’s history,
delivered with a cheeky smile and a wink to the camera. "Mortals that fancy themselves heroes have entered the broken hall. Oh I do hope this "raid" will amuse me."
In this regard the new entrance to Orgimmar is no longer intended to welcome new players to a wide open world, no longer framed to spark the imagination, but a blunt shock for
old players, an overhaul of layout and aesthetic signalling the change in leadership from Thrall to Garrosh, a mulletted electric guitar solo screaming “this ain’t your daddy’s Horde”.
It is incredibly trivial, but it is emblematic of a fair criticism of how the game has evolved over a decade and a half: increasingly focusing inwards.
I’m not even sure I should be saying “criticism” though, because it’s not even critical World of Warcraft has undeniably changed over the years, but the “goodness” or “badness”
of most of the changes really comes down to a question of values: what do the players and creators like in the game, what do they want out of the game, and what does an ideal evening of play look like?
They’re not really questions with right and wrong answers, and no matter what answer you pick it probably doesn’t have some moral implication underneath. You’re not a bad person if you want to quietly solo queue for dungeons and go through the game with an absolute
minimum of social friction. Likewise it’s not a superior tier of gaming to prefer a game with aggressive social dependency and time-sink gatekeeping. This is where I feel I need to acknowledge that lot of the clamour for WoW Classic
has been controversial, fraught with ego and drama, as a number of the high-profile personalities leading the charge are known for their toxicity and vitriol, having made something of a career
in the very small, but highly competitive, niche of complaining about World of Warcraft. "...the game. They wanna make it different, they want to do things just a little bit different! Oh, maybe I just want group finder, hey my gear doesn't match maybe I'll just transmog this helmet,
fuck you! You're going to wear that pink helmet and you're gonna like it. Those chromatic boots looking like a goddamn clown with your DPS warrior? That's you! Your fuckin' face? It's a square! Alright? Eight pixels? You're gonna love it. It's gonna be the exact same.
We're not gonna give up, we're not gonna stop. No changes!" The basic argument from these outrage merchants is that WoW as it currently exists, is bad And I really need to point out that this argument has been working for over a decade.
It is not a new phenomenon by any means. "Why having badges be given by every single frikkin' instance in the entire game is an absolutely awful idea. Possibly, in fact, the worst idea I have ever seen Blizzard come
up with in their entire history. Alright? this goes beyond everything. This goes beyond putting Naxx version 2 in the game. This goes beyond every stupid thing they have ever done. I mean, really. This goes beyond the whole "hey let's give 'em some Black Temple level
epics for running Kharazan." No it goes beyond that. It's incredibly, pants-on-head-r* There’s no consensus on when that peak was, when WoW was truly the best,
but it’s generally agreed by that community to be somewhere during the first three phases of the game, This has created an environment where WoW Classic has been positioned explicitly
in contrast to Battle for Azeroth as “the real World of Warcraft”. The pure experience, spiritually untainted, the mythological prelapsarian version. An experience so perfect
that it will restore World of Warcraft to the position of cultural relevance that it held when seemingly everyone and their dog had a subscription. It’s effectively a church schism in video game form.
That level of intensity in the conversation can make productive analysis somewhat difficult, A big hitch in these kinds of public conversations is that there’s a performance angle,
and people tend to skew towards the answers that they believe are correct, or the answers that they believe the audience wants to hear. The opinion that you’re supposed to have,
rather than the answers that are true. They tend to lean really heavily on value statements, appeals to the things that the wider social group believe are superior qualities, which can lead to some hot nonsense like saying
that World of Warcraft was best when it was hardest back in Classic which is a comical statement because Classic just isn’t very hard. Now I do want to walk a fine line here because when it comes to talking about video games
and difficulty the conversation turns into a swamp super fast because the language that we use to talk about the systems and interactions isn’t particularly well developed,
so people end up just shouting the same words at each other with different implicit meanings Mainstream video games bias towards tests of reflexes or the ability to execute a complex
pattern consistently or with precision, and this is a thing that you’re supposed to The vast majority of the challenge in World of Warcraft Classic, however, is extremely
simple from an execution standpoint, and is really more of a test of patience. Tests of endurance, tests of patience, are a form of difficulty.
It is a skill that is being tested, but it’s still not what people are typically referring to when they say “hard games.” WoW Classic is a very slow game, and it punishes mistakes with heavy time costs, but even then
it’s not exactly as taxing as a marathon, most of the content can be trivialized, the vast majority of it is not particularly difficult to execute, there’s no requirement to do it in a single sitting or a tight timespan, and it is certainly not more difficult to
execute than basically anything that came afterwards. All the difficulty is piled into a willingness to wait, to be cautious, to spend time recovering after every. Single. Fight. And a failure of patience is typically met
So there’s this syllogism at play where we take three suppositions: A) hard games are good, B) I liked World of Warcraft in 2006, C) I like good games.
I liked World of Warcraft and I like good games, therefore World of Warcraft was good, and good games are hard games, therefore World of Warcraft must have been hard, because I like it and I like good games.
This isn’t really that weird, people do tend to be pretty bad at figuring out why they like the things they like, so they just assume that their stated values And yes, to bring this back around, World of Warcraft has undeniably changed over the years,
and the changes have collectively been dramatic. Not just changes in terms of graphical updates, large swaths of new content, or the world overhaul of Cataclysm, but philosophically.
The ideas answering questions like “what makes good content” have shifted and morphed over the years, often subtly, sometimes drastically. I want to remove the outrage merchants from the equation and contrast some of these changes
honestly, because while, on a personal level, I think a lot of people have been hoodwinked by outrage merchants into parroting bad, syllogistic arguments, I don’t think people are being
disingenuous when they say they enjoyed WoW more in the past than they do in the present Nostalgia is, of course, an important part of the overall picture: World of Warcraft
landed at a really formative time for a lot of people, a time when they were in high school or college and had a lot of free time, and all their friends had a lot of free time, and their life meshed well with the pace of the game and the game became their shared social space.
That is a potent element, but it’s not the whole story. The Hashtag No Changes crowd has an entire warehouse of rose coloured glasses, but that doesn't mean classic is devoid of value if you aren't wearing them.
We can’t un-cross a river, but if we walk through this we can maybe put together a reasonable portrait of the differences and understand why some players justifiably feel like they’ve been left behind by the changes over the years and in turn what Classic has to offer.
World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth is a very busy game. There is a lot to do and the game has a tremendous array of content for players of all stripes, ranging from player versus player competition to skill-testing group content to trivial minigames
With fifteen years of iteration there are very few styles of play that aren’t accounted for, in particular if you are in the majority of players that prefer a social solo experience, meaning that you like having other people around,
you like the multiplayer elements being seamlessly integrated and not a separate game mode, but you still prefer to spend the majority of your time playing alone. You don’t want to have to coordinate multiple schedules just to play the game.
Not only is there a lot to do, but most of it can be completed in ten to twenty minute chunks, with group activities taking bigger commitments of around 30-45 minutes in the case of dungeons or a couple hours in the case of raids, so it’s an environment
where depending on how much time you have to play there’s almost certainly something to do Island expeditions, arena, battlegrounds, mythic dungeons, raiding, pet battles,
world quests, professions, achievements, collections, special events, oh my. In contrast WoW Classic has relatively little variety when it comes to structured tasks. There’s dungeons, there’s quests, there’s professions, there’s raids, and eventually
there will be PvP battlegrounds. Though, once you get to max level, well, quests are a finite resource, it’s not even super difficult to complete every possible high level quest in the game. There is a very narrow, and deliberate channel that players find themselves in:
questing leads to dungeons, and dungeons lead to raids, and raids in Classic mostly require 40 players, so they’re not exactly the kind of thing you just casually toss together with the lads.
In fact, really, in order to field a raid of 40 players you need a pool of 60 to 80 players, minimum, people who can be there on Tuesday and Thursday, but not Wednesday, people who aren’t part
of the core group but are basically the supply line for the raid, So there’s this pretty self-evident contrast: between the game as it used to exist, with relatively few defined activities, and the game as it currently exists, awash in things to do.
But that’s just a surface level analysis, and this is where I think things get interesting, All of that content, all the different tasks and parallel progression streams,
they have been added bit by bit over the years to free players up so that they don't feel trapped in that narrow channel of progression where you either found a group of people you could raid with, or you kind of ran out of things to do. That’s good, because there are absolutely
things about that arrangement that really, really suck. The requirements in terms of time, players, and materials, effectively creates a corporate environment, where guilds that have the resources to raid accrue a lot of social power.
Back in 2006 it wasn’t really that unusual for a given server to only be able to support [Dan, voiceover] Actually, in 2005 the server hardware itself literally couldn’t support more than one raid
engaging Nefarion at the same time, and groups would need to coordinate across factions and if three or more pulled the instance server would crash. which meant that you needed to bend to their schedule and maybe needed to put up with a
lot of toxicity and harassment just to play a video game. Because of the way that the various mechanics interact, success one week sets players up for more success next week, so guilds that are doing well tend to attract more players than they actually need,
while failure can quickly lead to a social death spiral as experienced and geared players quit or leave, increasing the odds of further failure. Given that these raids represent a huge time commitment it’s not unusual for guilds
to focus on hedging their bets and playing it safe, only bringing the best geared players with the most optimal classes. This can make it difficult, if not impossible, for players coming in late, who don’t already have the best gear and only have a few hours per week
to play, to even get an invite to a group. So there are very good reasons for a lot of the changes, in particular providing comparable progression tracks for players who want to play mostly alone or just with a small group
of four, nine, ten friends instead of listening to thirty nine assholes screaming [screaming] "The next idiot fuck who goes and aggros something they ain't supposed to is not getting any
fucking item for the next two fucking weeks not to mention 200 minus fucking DKP! Is that enough fucking motivation for you to fucking play proper?!!!!"
This toxicity is actually a deliberate design choice, in a sense. EverQuest, and World of Warcraft were built on a concept of social dependency, hostile to solo play and that it was basically impossible for a player to be truly self-sustaining.
World of Warcraft, as the friendlier version of EverQuest, tempered that a lot, you can get through most of the game solo, but it’s definitely still there. Questing with one or two other people is substantially faster, and much safer.
Since characters often provide a force-multiplying factor to one another With a friend you can do higher level quests a lot earlier, which reduces the amount of
time spent moving between questing zones and makes it a little less likely that you’ll have to resort to grinding just to be able to move on to a new area. This social dependency is kinda compelling and interesting in its own right, but it has
a few big weaknesses, namely that it means players are essentially at the mercy of other players, who may or may not be nice people, and it relies on there being other players
Right now, in the first months after release, WoW Classic is a lot of fun to level through because it’s in the sweet spot where there’s a lot of players all kind of spread throughout
the whole level range, so no matter what level you’re at or which stage of a quest chain you’re on there’s probably someone else nearby who’s either at the exact same spot If you need help with an elite opponent that you can’t take on solo then during
prime time it’s probably only going to take a few minutes or so before someone else But as time goes on more and more players accumulate at the level cap, and while some
players compulsively level new characters over and over, most players focus on a single character. The result is that as the overall population caps out the local population
in the lower and mid-level zones drops dramatically, and social dependency only works if there’s other players around to be dependent on. Back in 2006 it wasn’t even particularly weird to be literally the only player in Stonetalon
So it definitely needs to be kept in mind that while a lot of changes have been made to speed up leveling, to reduce social dependency, these changes have been made to address
real problems that emerge as MMOs mature, and a lot of these problems So Blizzard has added all of this other stuff to provide more dynamic alternatives, to widen
the ranges that characters can quest together, to speed up the journey from level 1 to level 120, and to ensure that players at level cap aren’t trapped on a dead server or held hostage
by the only assholes with a raiding guild or simply excluded entirely from group play because they chose a class that is less optimal than another. But with all of that added stuff, it is possible to reach a point where there’s simply
too much to do, where there’s so many parallel choices, all of which are at least somewhat comparable in terms of their worth, that it becomes paralyzing and difficult to focus.
You can get a decent amount done even if you only have twenty to thirty minutes to play, but that also means that over the course of an hour you might be rapidly pinballing between a dozen small tasks, and the line between variety and chaos is a fine one.
What’s more, if everything is meaningful, if it’s all significant content that provides a reward of appropriate value, and they’re all on daily or weekly reset timers, well,
at a certain point it stops feeling like options and starts to feel like an obligation. You’re running low on runes, you should really do your Looking For Raid runs for the week. Gotta get at least a +10 in for the weekly cache. [overlapping] Don’t forget your island expeditions.
Trial of Style ends at midnight. [overlapping] Mythic raid Tuesday Wednesday, Heroic alt run on Thursday Here’s where Classic has an unexpected strength: if there’s nothing to do,
if nothing is “meaningful”, then you are free to self-direct. "Oh okay, so GravyCast wants to know: what is grinding? Well. WoW slang with Crystal!
So, grinding is when you keep killing the same mobs in a particular area just over and Oh... that didn't work out well."
Grinding is something of a hallmark of early MMOs. It was pretty much taken for granted that at some point in playing the game you would find yourself standing in a field, killing the same enemies over and over and over again. Just an endless, rhythmic process that only
ends when your bags are full and you decide “yeah, I guess I should head back to town”. If you needed money to buy skills or a mount or new equipment, this wasn’t the most efficient
"Wahhh! I just want my raptor!" If a questing area was too competitive, if there were line-ups for a quest target, maybe it was a better idea to just go over to the less popular spot with no quests
"Oh my god!" [laughing] Grinding isn’t something that anyone would really describe as compelling gameplay. It’s not very dynamic. It is, by definition, repetitive.
everyone feels is kinda bad in a game because while it’s not truly pointless But that aimlessness is maybe not all bad.
Grinding is, in essence, the purest distillation of self-directed play. There’s no diegetic authority telling the player what to do or how to do it, there’s just a vague incentive and the player’s own discretion about how to get there.
Now, this is the same incentive set that led to the addition of all those other tasks and options to the game, and in a sense players in 2019 have far, far more freedom in So at present players have more structured
options to engage with, but what we find in the comparison between Classic and Battle for Azeroth is that paradoxically adding more content, more structured activities,
can make it feel like there are fewer options. This happens because as you add more direction, more structure, the emotional value of self-direction goes down, and even if self-directed, freeform play boils down to only a few viable options,
the fact that there’s nothing telling you to do it, well that does a lot for the illusion of openness. And I should say that I’m not using “illusion” here as a pejorative. I love illusions.
I crave a well-crafted illusion, and Classic delivers them in spades. At some point in the last 15 years, gradually, bit by bit, the game has discarded most of
these illusions, in a lot of ways because the players grew past them. Spend enough time with an illusion and you start to see through it, you figure it out, and at a certain point you just want it to be honest with you.
And that honesty, laying out mechanics, revealing the nuts and bolts of how it all works, just telling players where the quests are and how to complete them, providing a dozen alternate ways to level, letting them fly over every hill, it’s not a bad approach,
but it’s mutually exclusive with mystery and the illusion of a wide-open world. You can, in Battle for Azeroth, level up by running around in circles endlessly killing murlocs,
but the whole time that you do it there’s the overhanging knowledge that there’s so many better, more efficient, structured, organized, sanctioned, fun ways of doing it,
In Classic, well, everything sucks, so… you’re free: do whatever you want. Generally no, buuuuuuut… it’s not that much worse, either.
There is a kind of freedom in the lack of structured options. Anything you choose to do is about as good as anything else. There’s a simplicity to that, a clarity that the game has definitely moved away from.
And, again, that’s not bad. Leveling in Battle for Azeroth is a lot more dynamic and less punishing, but it’s also a lot more dense, more noisy, and less meditative. It’s a rush to get to level cap, because that’s where all the players are.
And the thing is that for most players, that’s what they want. The aimless, self-directed play of Classic is cute and interesting, but wears out quickly. There’s only so many times you can grief Alliance at Marris Stead before you’re just
The first time you have to wait thirty minutes for a party member to get to the dungeon, because they were on the other side of the world and it just takes that long to get anywhere, it’s a drinking game style moment.
But, by the third or fourth time you just really, really wish However, for players who not only enjoy that illusion of open ended freedom and the pace
that comes with it, but prefer it, it makes sense that they maybe feel like the game has [dramatic music]
"Horse doovres" [laughs] [folksy music]