Classic+ would require alot more money and time from Blizzard, so doubt it will happen. I'm fine with TBC as long as they remove flying.
and that is my point. i wouldn't want to leave it up to a popular vote at all. even if it required a level 60. with a combined sub it wouldn't be hard for retail players to level a hunter or mage or lock to 60 to be able to vote.
lets put it this way - imagine the vote comes up for LFD the classic community is split 50/50 on it (which would mean no), but the retail players troll the vote and get it passed.
or on the other end.
blizzard puts forward the idea of releasing a level 60 version of karazhan - very popular raid. very popular suggestion for "post naxx content" throughout the pro classic + community.
retail players troll the vote and get it denied.
Not popular vote. A 75% supermajority would be required to get anything done. And potentially you'd only let people into the vote who have either high level characters or a high amount of time /played in classic to keep griefers from outside influencing the game. I'd only want input from people actually invested in classic to be able to vote on what they want to get developed into a Classic+.
Getting to level 60 in classic is an investment. I can imagine a few players trying to be funny by getting to 60 and voting for stupid shit, but not many. That's some dedication to the craft of trolling. And even then, it's hard to get 75% of people to agree on anything. It's a pretty high bar to pass.
ask yourself this - do you want modern wow players, the same players who asked for all those changes that ruined the current game, to be voting for changes?
I think we're going to see a lot of tourists that are front loaded. Lots of people will swing by from retail and give it a shot. It's going to be a pretty big filter. People who don't like classic are going to slide back into retail and probably stay there.
I wouldn't even start voting on new ideas for another year or two. By then, I think that a majority of people still playing classic will be the people who are there for the classic gameplay, and people like ourselves will be the majority of players left. And I think the majority of players by then will be fairly united against the changes that ruined retail in the first place.
Like I mentioned, you can already see some pretty terrible suggestions for new game features and stuff here on our own forums. But how many of those have ever gotten traction and picked up as a good idea? I mean besides this one, since you're obviously not for this particular change :lol:
doesn't matter. even if they waited two years to implement it, would be easy for them to level up a character by then to cap and vote for changes just to troll.
and as said before - people have already said they would do as such.
Classic+ would require alot more money and time from Blizzard, so doubt it will happen. I'm fine with TBC as long as they remove flying.
Sadly I think you're right and this is definitely the path of least resistance for them. And if I remember there are some zones in TBC which pretty much require flying mounts... you'd have to redesign TBC to remove them. So that's not happening either.
But that's part of why we'd need to start making noise now to push for Classic+. I think Gensei is right, it takes things like this a long time to get done and now is the time when they're going to start checking the waters for what to do next. The decision for Classic+ or TBC or stop all classic development outright is probably going to be made over the next 6 months or so. They'd probably need to know what they're going to do next by early next year if they're going to have something ready for us a year and a half or two after the launch of classic.
and that is my point. i wouldn't want to leave it up to a popular vote at all. even if it required a level 60. with a combined sub it wouldn't be hard for retail players to level a hunter or mage or lock to 60 to be able to vote.
lets put it this way - imagine the vote comes up for LFD the classic community is split 50/50 on it (which would mean no), but the retail players troll the vote and get it passed.
or on the other end.
blizzard puts forward the idea of releasing a level 60 version of karazhan - very popular raid. very popular suggestion for "post naxx content" throughout the pro classic + community.
retail players troll the vote and get it denied.
Not popular vote. A 75% supermajority would be required to get anything done. And potentially you'd only let people into the vote who have either high level characters or a high amount of time /played in classic to keep griefers from outside influencing the game. I'd only want input from people actually invested in classic to be able to vote on what they want to get developed into a Classic+.
Getting to level 60 in classic is an investment. I can imagine a few players trying to be funny by getting to 60 and voting for stupid shit, but not many. That's some dedication to the craft of trolling. And even then, it's hard to get 75% of people to agree on anything. It's a pretty high bar to pass.
you haven't been paying attention the beta, its faster then it was in vanilla. people were logging much faster time then Joana to level 40.
and its not just about the 75%. you also have to look at it the other way.
say there is something the classic+ community Actually WANTS. like Karazhan at 60. all you need to do is troll the vote enough that the minority who aren't interested in it get enough votes to deny it.
so yeah. heavily against voted changes.
especially considering some of the changes Jagx "Forced" through on OSRS despite player voting no.
doesn't matter. even if they waited two years to implement it, would be easy for them to level up a character by then to cap and vote for changes just to troll.
and as said before - people have already said they would do as such.
If the playerbase of Classic is large enough for Blizzard to consider sustaining it with new content releases then the amount of players that would have to spend hundreds of hours of their lives to participate in trolling a content devlopment patch poll in any meaningful amount would be very significant. A hundred guys in a discord channel organizing cleave groups to get some 60's to join a poll isn't going to matter if you've got a playerbase with 100,000+ players.
you haven't been paying attention the beta, its faster then it was in vanilla. people were logging much faster time then Joana to level 40.
and its not just about the 75%. you also have to look at it the other way.
say there is something the classic+ community Actually WANTS. like Karazhan at 60. all you need to do is troll the vote enough that the minority who aren't interested in it get enough votes to deny it.
so yeah. heavily against voted changes.
especially considering some of the changes Jagx "Forced" through on OSRS despite player voting no.
You're still looking at the neighborhood of 100 hours to get to 60. For a very fast /played time to 60. That's some serious commitment. I'm sure there would be some that would do it anyway. I grew up on /b/. I get trolling raids, they're fun. But again, the amount of people who would have to commit to this to have any substantial impact on a vote to a playerbase large enough for Blizzard to consider adding content seems unrealistic.
you haven't been paying attention the beta, its faster then it was in vanilla. people were logging much faster time then Joana to level 40.
and its not just about the 75%. you also have to look at it the other way.
say there is something the classic+ community Actually WANTS. like Karazhan at 60. all you need to do is troll the vote enough that the minority who aren't interested in it get enough votes to deny it.
so yeah. heavily against voted changes.
especially considering some of the changes Jagx "Forced" through on OSRS despite player voting no.
You're still looking at the neighborhood of 100 hours to get to 60. For a very fast /played time to 60. That's some serious commitment. I'm sure there would be some that would do it anyway. I grew up on /b/. I get trolling raids, they're fun. But again, the amount of people who would have to commit to this to have any substantial impact on a vote to a playerbase large enough for Blizzard to consider adding content seems unrealistic.
100 hours isn't much by mmo standards...heck it isn't much by some rpg standards.
ask yourself this - do you want modern wow players, the same players who asked for all those changes that ruined the current game, to be voting for changes?
I mean there are questions about the administration of such a vote. Like if some dude has a level 10 on Classic but spends 99% of his time in retail, can he vote? There are issues on this front. But I don't think it's necessarily a bad approach. I am hesitant to leave things up to a popular vote. Thus far, we've not been particularly disappointed by Blizzard making executive decisions while surveying different avenues of community feedback. But maybe this dynamic of adding new content requires a different approach, something more akin to OSRS.
I don't think anyone mentioned it, but in OSRS you can only vote if you're a member with a total level of 300 or above and with a minimum total play-time of 25 hours can participate. That way people who aren't really playing osrs much can vote.
100 hours isn't much by mmo standards...heck it isn't much by some rpg standards.
Which is why I agree there will be some people who do it. But again, Blizzard wouldn't consider doing any future development for Classic unless the playerbase was large enough to support it. The amount of people who would have to commit to a 100+ hour troll job for the lulz to impact our content supermajority votes in any meaningful manner would be enormous.
100 hours isn't much by mmo standards...heck it isn't much by some rpg standards.
Which is why I agree there will be some people who do it. But again, Blizzard wouldn't consider doing any future development for Classic unless the playerbase was large enough to support it. The amount of people who would have to commit to a 100+ hour troll job for the lulz to impact our content supermajority votes in any meaningful manner would be enormous.
100 hours is a lot to troll up just for a single vote.
Make it 50 hours in the past month instead of 100 total ever, and you have a perfectly workable solution.
TL;DR
Taking flying out of TBC is basically just classic+ anyways, and people aren't dedicated enough to troll votes for 100+ hours, take it from a lifelong troll.
far as i'm concerned you can have classic +. on separate servers.
especially if it's going the OSRS style some want. if they change classic servers to classic + OSRS and don't leave us plain old classic i'll quit.
This mindset assumes that enough people agree with you that there will still be enough people to have a populated server post phase 6, that those people won't get bored 2 or more years out of the same content, and when the population begins to die off due to lack of new content at that time you will then have a high enough population to keep it entertaining.
You immediately have to begin to look at what damage splitting the game's population will do.
100 hours isn't much by mmo standards...heck it isn't much by some rpg standards.
reading all of this about 'trolling votes', just look at what already exists! Old school runescape and current runescape are totally different. Yet current runescape players don't play old school just to fuck with people and votes, and even if some do, how many people are that dedicated to trolling? Why would someone who likes retail play a game for hundreds of hours just to 'troll'? At that point, if they've played hundreds of hours, they've played more than many casual players! They're literally just players at that point, and their vote, by my estimation, becomes as valid as mine or yours regardless of viewpoint.
Classic+ would require alot more money and time from Blizzard, so doubt it will happen. I'm fine with TBC as long as they remove flying.
Which leads to this! So let's say they split Classic into Classic and Classic+. TBC Comes out and there's a whole other section we have to cut from our existing group of players to populate that server. We can't afford to just assume that if they release a server, it will have a great long term population. Numbers from classic right now indicate we're going to have a ton of people, but if you want a game to last it's a different story.
So! What am I rambling about?
If you take flying out of BC, and you keep the level cap the same and scale down gear to appropriate levels find some other way of keeping getting new gear interesting (looking at games like gw2 or other mmos with a level cap that doesn't rise every expansion for inspiration), it's just a new zone. Heck, make it a level 40 leveling zone for people to go to and make it worth level 60's time to do the content and it's just that, new content. Which is what most Classic+ people are asking for!
I'm not trying to say that Classic as it exists is bad, far from it! I loved classic then and I'll love it now. Is there a place in this world for a purely 1.12 vanilla server with absolutely no changes never ever cross my heart and hope to die? Absolutely, and the same could be said for TBC, WOTLK, what have you.
Does that mean that Classic+ couldn't take existing content and use it in such a way that it is appropriately scaled and doesn't break the most important part of WoW, a shared, persistent world? It can definitely be done!
"But Blizzard is mostly Activision now, they'll fuck it up!"
"Cash shops!"
Great arguments, which is why we need to put agency in the player's hands! It's not perfect, but neither is any form of democracy! It does have the potential, however, to produce a truly unique and magical experience that can last for as long as we want to play it.
Is there a universal definition of 'classic+' ?
I can surmise what you guys mean but Im curious.
I mean it's vague because different people have different notions. But essentially, I think it boils down in its most basic form:
Raid content beyond Naxx, both 20 and 40 man raids. It would be cool to have a progression path exclusively for a small, 20 man guild. Would likely repurpose areas that were intended to be in Vanilla but got scrapped or held off for later, for example: Karazhan, Grim Batol, Dragon Isles. Even things that were added in later expansions probably had inital designs or concepts that ultimately went unused. In the case of Kara, Blizzard made three versions of it and used the 3rd for BC. It'd be cool to see what Grim Batol or whatever else would look like in the lore context and in the spirit of Vanilla, and it would be entirely unlike its Cata iteration. Same thing with Uldum, which was originally intended as a raid, likely similar to Uldaman. There's a giant door to it in southern Tanaris.
Super minor class changes, likely not heavily impacting things on the high end, bleeding edge, but giving more options for casual and semi-casual players, like for elemental shaman, just a talent that helps with mana management and add Nature damage to Curse of Elements (which is dumb that it's not the case already considering the name). Part of the motivation for this is that Blizzard was sitting on many changes they wanted to make for the classes but held off so more stuff would ship with BC and the BC patch. Kevin Jordan said that if there was more time/patches in vanilla, most really PvE non-viable specs would have seen some kind of small buffs, and fury warrior dps would have been nerfed a bit. They were not intended to be higher dps than rogues.
Really (and this is where my personal philosophizing comes in) vanilla was originally a living, breathing game that had changes along the way. Classic, as we're getting it, is a game frozen in time at patch 1.12. Like the mosquito in amber in Jurassic Park. And I think it is reasonable to stay that way until we have access to all the original content. But I think it's also reasonable, after it's been long enough, to let the game start to be alive again and change a tiny bit, while very, very astutely maintaining the spirit and essence of vanilla.
That's it. Those are the two pillars of the typical players notion of Classic+. Just more to do in the same magical game world and more ways to do it.
TL;DR - more PvE content, and minor class changes to make a lot of the unviable specs better for casual-oriented guilds. The king classes/specs would still likely reign among the top raiding guilds. More life breathed into the old world and more variety in the class composition of your typical raid. But nothing rocking the boat.
Is there a universal definition of 'classic+' ?
I can surmise what you guys mean but Im curious.
I mean it's vague because different people have different notions. But essentially, I think it boils down in its most basic form:
Raid content beyond Naxx, perhaps even another one or two 20 man raids, so that you have a progression path if you have a guild that just wants a 20 man raid team. Would likely repurpose areas that were intended to be in Vanilla but got scrapped or held off for later, for example: Karazhan, Grim Batol, Dragon Isles. Even things that were added in later expansions probably had inital designs or concepts that ultimately went unused, it'd be cool to see what Grim Batol or whatever would look like in the lore context of Vanilla, and it would be entirely unlike its Cata iteration. Same thing with Uldum, which was originally intended as a raid, likely similar to Uldaman. There's a giant door to it in southern Tanaris.
Super minor class changes, likely not heavily impacting things on the high end, bleeding edge, but giving more options for casual and semi-casual players, like for elemental shaman, just a talent that helps with mana management and add Nature damage to Curse of Elements (which is dumb that it's not the case already considering the name). Part of the motivation for this is that Blizzard was sitting on many changes they wanted to make for the classes but held off so more stuff would ship with BC and the BC patch. Kevin Jordan said that if there was more time/patches in vanilla, most really PvE non-viable specs would have seen some kind of small buffs, and fury warrior dps would have been nerfed a bit. They were not intended to be higher dps than rogues.
And guild banks. Really (and this is where my personal philosophizing comes in) vanilla was originally a living, breathing game that had changes along the way. Classic, as we're getting it, is a game frozen in time at patch 1.12. Like the mosquito in amber in Jurassic Park. And I think it is reasonable to stay that way until we have access to all the original content. But I think it's also reasonable, after it's been long enough, to let the game start to be alive again and change a tiny bit, while very, very astutely maintaining the spirit and essence of vanilla.
That's it.
TL;DR - more PvE content, after Naxx and more 20 man content and there's lots of stuff in the old vanilla world that you can use, and minor class changes to make a lot of the unviable specs better for casual-oriented guilds. The king classes/specs would still likely reign among the top raiding guilds. More life breathed into the old world and more variety in the class composition of your typical raid. But nothing rocking the boat. + guild banks.
classic + means different things to different people
some want horizontal progression past naxx.
some want vertical.
some no balance changes, some want minor, some want heavy.
some want LFD, transmog, and others added. some do not.