Is Anyone Else as Excited as Me for WoW Classic?

* In case anyone was wondering, it sounds like WoW Classic will be based off of the 1.12 patch of the game.

It was around late 2007 when I finally got to play World of Warcraft for the first time. At that point, the game was on its Burning Crusade expansion and, while probably changed quite a bit from its original incarnation, was still much different than the WoW of today, or anytime post-Cataclysm for sure.

Those early years were some of my favorites playing WoW. I still enjoyed the game plenty when Cataclysm came out, and at the time it was interesting and jarring to see just how much the dragon's rampage had changed the starting areas of the world. But there was no denying that the game had tossed to the side much of its challenge and team-building focus in exchange for a game that was much more accessible and made soloing the game a lot easier.

Over the years I've continued to jump back into WoW sometime after each new expansion. I almost always restarted my character, or changed realms. While I still love the game quite a bit, I have always longed to experience the simpler, more challenging days of Vanilla WoW, or at least something a lot closer to the game as I first experienced it back in 2007.

As much as I like how useful newer features like the dungeon finder have made WoW, I find the idea of meeting a group of like-minded players, and then traversing across the land to challenge a dungeon together really fun. I like the idea of clicking each time to make my character attack, rather than sitting back and letting the game play for me automatically. I relish in the thought of returning to talent trainers to learn new skills and upgrade existing ones. And I am excited by the ambiguous directionless hints of quest descriptions urging me towards the next step rather than relying on arrows and circles on my mini-map explaining everything I need to do to me.

I didn't get to try the demo, but I wonder what others are thinking of it who have gotten to try it. We have more than half a year anyway until Classic is released to the public anyway, right?

I'm curious what everyone is thinking of rolling as and doing whenever they play WoW Classic. What side are you on, what race will you be, which class will you select, what talent tree will you focus on, and which professions are you taking up?

I almost always play Alliance, and I will likely make a Night Elf Druid and/or a Gnome Mage whenever classic starts. My NE Druid will probably have Herbalism/Alchemy, and my Gnome Mage will probably have Enchantment/Tailoring.

Are you excited for WoW Classic?

I quit WoW about two years ago after steadily playing it slightly after launch. They split the community too much when they merged realms and it felt like I was playing with a ton of strangers. The gameplay was still fun, but they changed too much of the game and it didn’t feel anything like what I fell in love with.

I’m debating on returning for Vanilla, but I played the hell out of that game. The discovery is absent and I already know all the raids and dungeons. Plus the grind will be hell. Leveling took forever, magic resistance was a chore to farm/craft, and my god - the faction reps will be a nightmare.

I know you’re looking for a yes or no, but I can’t honestly answer that. I would say I’m excited though. WoW took a big chunck out of my life and I don’t know if I can return. Plus most of my in game friends have moved on so it’ll never be the same.

@Sevenizz: I guess for me, I never really had that "definitive" WoW Vanilla experience, so I don't have as many fond memories of the classic wow as you do. That said, isn't it still great that now it is something you will be able to go back to if you want?

I have a buddy who I used to play the game with sometimes, and I'm thinking of seeing if he might want to team up for classic. Maybe I can even convince some other people to play.

I am.

I've played WoW since it's release (man, over a decade at this point), but more sporadic and "off and on" in recent years as my interest in it has waned. I still think of it as a good game that I do get some fun out of, it's just I've sort of seen it all and only get back to it with the expansions.

WoW Classic intrigues me because I never got to the level cap before Burning Crusade (first expansion) came out, so I never got to enjoy a lot of the end-game content, which from what I hear was quite fun. It will also be fun to go back to a pre-Cataclysm world and explore all that stuff.

I'm still not clear on the details--are they going to "roll back" the game mechanics as well? Is the level cap going to be 60? Will it be a different realm or even a different program entirely from standard WoW?--but it sounds fun. Any time an MMO offers incentive to start a level 1 character, I get excited because it's really fun to level with people; when the game is already established and has been out for a while, you often find yourself leveling alone.

Yes, this will be a complete return to the original game mechanics of World of Warcraft. So the classic talent trees, weapon mastery, magic resistance, and every other aspect of the game will be exactly as it was during the Vanilla game. I can't recall off the top of my head, but I remember reading that the game will have content from some patches as well, though I don't know where the cutoff is. It might bring things up to the patch just before where BC content was introduced, or else slightly after the game was released. If I were to guess I'd say everything will be there that was around pre-BC, but don't quote me on that.

It's unclear at this time whether the "new" character models will be available to use, though maybe. I saw where you will be able to use the old-school low-res graphics, or else improved higher definition ones, but the verdict was still out on enabling the new character models.

It will be an all-new program, separate from "main" WoW. You will be able to access it from a different program than WoW, and it's accessible with a subscription to main WoW. The level cap is indeed 60, and from my understanding it will have a few servers dedicated just to this version of WoW.

I do think one of the (several) big draws of WoW Classic is being able to see Azeroth before all hell broke loose. Before Outland, before the Lich King, and before Dreathwing came along and messed up all of the beautiful starting areas. The more I think about it, this MMO is one that started off relatively peacefully, but has grown and changed a lot in the nearly 15 years since its inception. A lot of story characters are dead now, and the world isn't as chill as it once was.

At the same time, the game actually required some brainpower to play back then. You couldn't rush into a group of monsters and survive, you couldn't solo everything, and you didn't have your hand held at all times to guide you through everything. It was more challenging, more personal, and gave players more of an opportunity to work together to take on dungeons and quests.

You know, it's true that the community won't be the same one it was in 2004. And I think that's okay. So what not all of the same people will be there that were before? The fact of the matter is, there has been a high demand for a WoW of old times for many years, even as long ago as the WotLK years. Lots of people want this, and lots of players new and old will play it. If you are concerned about finding a group, maybe we could form one here, or maybe you could convince some gamer friends to queue for it next year. I can't tell you how many people are going to play, but I can tell you you will likely find me playing when WoW Classic releases - and likely a lot of other fans of the game. I wouldn't be surprised if its release actually takes away from WoW itself for a while!

I played WoW for about 3-4 months and stopped right around the release of Cataclysm. I loved the Warcraft games so I thought WoW would be awesome!

Eh. It was alright. I had a dwarf ranger and a pet spider. I got him just up to the level were you get to wear chain mail armor. I had also, for no real reason, mined the crap out of anything that I found: copper, tin, silver, gold, mithril. I had stacks and stacks of it. They weren't big selling items at the time, sure people purchased them at the auction house, but you didn't rake in the gold doing so.

Then Cataclysm came out about 3-4 weeks before I stopped playing. Prices on metals went through the roof due to jewel crafting being introduced. I sold off almost all my stacks of mined metals and had thousands in gold.....though I never had anything to buy with it and I got bored of the game and stopped playing. 4 or 5 years later I got an email from Blizzard saying my password on my account was changed, so I figure someone hacked my account, never cared enough to look into it.

With this news of them re-releasing the "vanilla" version of WoW - it sounds like they're just trying to find a way to keep milking money from people for the WoW franchise.

I kind of get the impression that you didn't give the game enough of a chance. I get that WoW has a lot going on in it and it can be daunting to play alone. I also wonder if maybe you didn't pursue the right professions for the particular character you played. Don't get me wrong, pursuing gathering professions for profit can be smart, but as a hunter I'm sure you could have benefit personally from some other profession combo. If you went Engineering for your secondary profession, you could have made scopes and such for guns, which would've come in handy. Otherwise you might have had more luck going Skinning/Leatherworking for your armors.

I think around level 40 or so you kind of gain access to a lot of stuff and are really coming in to your own as a player. How far do you think you made it into the game?

A large part of the fun of WoW is working together with other players. You can't do everything with one character, so teaming up with someone that can do enchantments, for example, can grant you improved equipment that lets you dodge more or react more quickly. If you meet a Blacksmith, maybe they can make you some better guns or armor, depending on your level. And if you join a guild, usually there are tons of players on at any given time to supply you with things that are useful to whatever class you are playing.

Played a few years of Vanilla, was in the top PVP guild on our server and at some point we started doing the end raids. We were deep into AQ40 and Naxx when the first expansion came out and I stopped playing...still have my original screenshots folder! Spending waaaaaaaaaaaaay too much time in WoW while I had more important things to do, ie school.

I'm curious to try it again for the nostalgia factor, get my human priest back but I know it won't happen exactly as almost 15 years later, I don't have the same time to waste on a video game.

I think that is one of the big things, too. People who played WoW years ago were mostly teenagers or young adults with free time. Now a lot of those people have more responsibilities and less free time to dedicate to WoW.

From what I've read and heard over the years, raids and things like that got pretty difficult to put groups together for, and you might spend some time to fight through a dungeon and not wind up with any decent loot to show for it. It could take a lot of free time to set up a group for an instance, get to the instance and actually run the instance. So I get it, things could take much more focus than you're able to give.

...On the other hand, you know there's a level cap of 60. You know there will be no additional content added to the base game. And for me I think that takes some of the edge off. At a certain point you can complete everything this game has to offer, and yes that will still take a lot of time and work to do, but eventually you'll have every quest under your belt and will just be playing for the fun of it. Finding that slightly-better piece of equipment to max yourself out. Getting as many buffs as you can. Claiming every title you can attain. Doing some endgame PVP and running instances for fun and so other people can complete the game, too.

Dungeons and things like that, I wouldn't worry about right off the bat anyway. I'd say, just enjoy the game as it used to be. Quest and clear areas in your free time, and form parties with other nearby players and reminisce about your memories of this game from over the years. And seriously, while the game was more challenging and more frustrating, I think Azeroth was a lot more peaceful and chill to spend time in back then.

I tried hard to play with others when it came to the capture the flag PvP, most people couldn't play worth a shit and didn't work together. Even tried to join up in a clan and try it out, but still ran into a lot of the same stuff - everyone out to do whatever they want for themselves, letting the rest of the team get picked off because the other team worked together.

The game wasn't fun playing with others when they only wanted to play for themselves.

I had a good clan I played with in Aion when that released - worked together, advanced together. It was fun for 3-4 months, but most of them left the game and I stuck around for a while, but it wasn't the same.

I even had a good clan I was with in SWTOR - worked together, had fun for a good 6+ months.

I didn't pick the wrong class. I enjoy pet classes. In Aion I played a Spiritmaster and for the first 8 months or so the Spiritmaster class was a cluster, one of the most under powered classes, so most people didn't play them. I was in a small population of players that actually took time to play them. I enjoyed playing the ranger/pet class in WoW - I just didn't enjoy the other people that played the game.

Nothing special, there're plenty of Retro WoW private servers with plenty of people.

Will LFG be removed in favor of the tried and true pugging for instances?

Yes. It will be just like it was before the group finder was added to the game.

We'll probably need to use in-game chat and join guilds to find other people to play the game with.

I think it's great that Activision Blizzard is giving us official Vanilla WoW servers. It'll cost your monthly sub to play, but it'll be legal and run on dedicated servers, and you can be assured that the game will run as it once did.

A big part of it is that it is WoW bringing back WoW, so it's an official thing, and people are more likely to want to return and join that than some fan-run server. And it's going to be fresh, new servers, ripe for trying to make your mark on.

I know the one fan server that was closed down had a lot of players, and maybe part of that is because it was free to play on an illegal server, but I think it at least shows there's still a lot of people who are still interested in Vanilla WoW anyway.

PvP was always pretty difficult in WoW. I remember running Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin in BC and WotLK, and it was always pretty difficult. My team did win a few, but more often than not we lost. The Horde dominated battlegrounds on my server back then, I think there was a much larger concentration of Horde players and that had something to do with it.

I'd definitely give battlegrounds more of my attention with Classic, but it is and always was kind of tough. It also changes a lot based on your class and spec. Most important part is to keep your team from splitting up too much, but it was always hard to get the right mix of people to fight on two or three fronts and follow a strategy.

I met a variety of people in WoW. One of my better memories was when I rolled a gnome warrior, and met a dwarf hunter questing in Dun Morogh. We just happened to be in the same area and got to chatting. (People would type and chat more back then.) And we formed a group and conquered some quests together that day. A few days later I had him on my friend list and we did some more questing wherever I was at that point. We would kinda talk about our interests a bit, but for the most part we were all about the game and kept things focused on that.

On the same hand, I remember how cruel some of the other players were in instances. They would blame me for things not going well much of the time. Sometimes it was my fault, but other times it was other people being impatient or dropping out. I remember people telling me if I was a gnome I should be anything but a warrior, but that is what I wanted to be then. I remember running a dungeon as a protection warrior and everyone chose to make a non-protection paladin the tank since he could heal - it went well, but it was irritating for me because I was actually a tank lol. Even once I got good at managing aggro and not pulling too many enemies or focusing on dealing damage rather than absorbing it, the longtime players would get irritated that I didn't know my way through dungeons by muscle memory.

We'll likely still see some older players be picky about things, but at the end of the day you gotta have fun with the game, too. I think people who play WoW Classic today will be a lot more mature than the people who played back then.

@Ovirew: Some MMOs aren't illegal to create your own private server, I think WoW is one of them.

On legal private servers people shutting them down because the maintenance costs monthly while if you don't make any money out of it it's worthless to keep it going on.

So, are private servers illegal? Well, there’s no easy answer.

• If the server is profiting, it is certainly illegal.
• If the server is running stolen or leaked software, it is certainly illegal.
• If the server is distributing client files, it is certainly illegal.

Some mod on WoW servers said it's illegal, but then again private servers are gray area for lawsuit.

I don't think making WoW vanilla is something you need to pay for, if they screwed the game lore or gameplay with their expansions they should fix it rather then offering you to play without them.

I'll say that legality of things like private servers is not something I am extremely knowledgeable about. I do know that I played on private servers for at least two different MMOs years ago, and both of them were ordered to be shut down. They were private servers for Ragnarok Online and Phantasy Star Online. I don't want to get too much deeper into this subject anyway, it's kind of besides the point.

I also don't think Acti-Blizz owes us anything. I don't necessarily agree that they screwed the game up, they just evolved it to better suit the mainstream player base. A lot of stuff has happened in the WoW story since Vanilla, and a lot of things were added to the game that were pretty cool as well. Dungeon Finder is there for a reason, it was highly inconvenient to find groups before and get to dungeons. That said, I definitely understand the appeal of WoW Classic and I would prefer something more geared towards the original style of play. But there are pros and cons.

So I read an article from Eurogamer that clarifies some things about WoW Classic.

Apparently some content will roll out after the initial release, and won't be there right from the beginning. Wowpedia helps to explain the timing of patches and events in the game over the years.

This means the game will launch technically at patch 1.3.0, where the game would have been in March 2005. Many things will not be available for a few months, including Battlegrounds. Patch updates will be rolled out in four waves after launch.

Also, a few things in the game will change. The user interface will be updated to a more modern one. And the loot-trading system added in WotLK will be kept.

The vast majority of the game will be as it was originally though. This includes a cap of 8-16 debuffs on enemies, a 1-hour wait for mail arrival, and no cross-realm grouping.

I also figured I'd show this video IGN put together, which I watched before I even started this thread. Both people have fairly valid points, but I tended to agree with the guy on the left. I think there is definitely a demographic for WoW Classic, and I think some of us just prefer something closer to the original experience of WoW than the game in its current form.

Very excited its my most anticipated game sick of the private servers want the real deal

@ProtossRushX: Yeah, you know back when I started playing the game for the first time a buddy of mine was playing on a private server, and I convinced him to subscribe. This was like the end of 2007, or early 2008, as I mentioned. He started playing on the actual game servers and was hooked. Apparently it was much better than the private server he was on back then. I can't really comment on it myself since I never played WoW on private servers, but I guess the people running it changed a lot of stuff, and it made the game less fun. I think they were able to make characters level really fast, and increased drop-rates, things like that. But I'd have to ask him sometime and see if he remembers for sure what the differences were.

I'm glad other people are looking forward to WoW Classic as much as me. You know, I think even though the game was more involved then than it is now, playing WoW Classic will probably be a really chill experience. Login with your buddies, make some new friends along the way, and go questing together through Azeroth. Yeah there's gonna be a lot of competitive play, especially once battlegrounds drops, but I think the playerbase now isn't going to be so controlling about what everyone decides to play as. Won't be a ton of people like, "You're Horde, why didn't you play as Orc or Undead? They have the best racial abilities!" I honestly think a lot of people are just going to be thrilled to have the game back to pretty much its original form.

Meh doubt it will be a success for long to be honest, all the people who played it back then must be adults now and who the hell has time for a mmorpg as they used to be back then?? All new comers will play it for a while and then run screaming when there is no dungeon finder and the game actually forces them to work together to complete goals!

I never played much WOW myself, but played a lot of EQ2 back when that released, while I did love it I think it’s naive to think that magic will ever come back, time and gamer habits have changed and doubt you will ever get people to socialize as they used to do back in the days.

@djoffer: I'm not so sure. I'll agree that a lot of people who used to play the game now have too many responsibilities and won't play, mainly people with children or time-consuming jobs.

Nothing says to me that there isn't a base of players who want a classic version of WoW, since people have been calling for one for years. I don't think anything suggests all newer players would dislike it, either.

I enjoyed WoW best those first couple of years I played, in late BC and Wrath. I missed out on vanilla, but liked how the game played back then better than it does now. Since I have no kids, my job is really the main thing that determines how much time I have to give to this. But then I'm not some hardcore PVP and raid player, I get into the game but I'm a little more casual than most.

To me it's like... yeah they'll roll out some patch updates, but you know pretty much that there is an endpoint where you will have accomplished everything in the game if you keep playing. I don't think it's unrealistic for people who don't have every waking hour to dedicate to the game to still play at a slower pace and enjoy WoW Classic.

I used to love World of Warcraft, well, back when I first started playing it, but ultimately I don't think I ever want to try to repeat the experience. So much of it was about how new it felt to me, and how beautiful I I found the graphics. I loved it as the first game where undead was a playable race that you could choose upon starting it. My favorite part of the game was when you first started it up and looked at that portal and that cool music started playing. I found that track so uplifting, but I never found any of the other music in the game anywhere near that awesome.

Ultimately I quit WOW after a year or so, never to return, not on unofficial private servers or otherwise either. It basically comes down to gaming preferences. I like games where I can mostly solo, and maybe do some grouping for certain things now and again, I don't really like to run around with a group 24/7, I guess that's more just my introverted nature. Also I prefer a game to be more sandbox like and less linear, I just like exploring and not necessarily lining up to do stuff. I'm also not really a big fan of traditional level up and raid types of games. I just prefer the more casual nature of games such as Ultima Online, Runescape or Wograld. I played Ultima Online for over 7 years, and Runescape for 7 years also. Now, I'm moving on to a new game, in development, very sandbox like as that is still in Alpha called Wograld.

Oh yeah its a game you loved that you couldn't go back to because it was changed to something else. I miss World of Warcraft looking forward to it.