When "Classic" WoW Really Died 

Rediscover your love for fantasy by listening to Songs of Chaos: link.michaelrmiller.co.uk/MadSeason People point at Cataclysm as the expansion to separate "classic" from "current", but is it really true?

for me "classic" died when my friends got too sweaty and it was no longer about rolling alts and goofing around together

I’m 32 now (12 back then) and was introduced to WoW by my uncle at launch. It’s hard to adequately describe how deeply it captured my imagination. I remember him showing me and my brothers the cinematic at his apartment a couple of weeks before launch. We had never experienced anything like it. There’s just too much to tell, but what I can say is that we had many gaming sessions in the years that followed. Uncle would pick us up for the weekend and we’d load our (3) heavy CRT monitors into the back of his truck and set up a lan party in his office. Leveled and raided together, ate junk food, goofed off, stayed up until ~4am, woke up early and repeated through the weekend. Nothing I comment here could do it justice, but if you know you know. Pure magic.

id argue the spirit of vanilla is dead space and emptiness, the long walks in-between zones, the tasteful thickness of it. My god, it even has an elite mob.

Classic died somewhere mid OG wotlk, when gear score became a thing. That's when the min max peak efficiency culture really started spreading

Classic died for me the first time I had someone whisper me, “Link your logs”

Blizzard is really uncomfortable with people being any level below the level cap.

For me, it was actually TBC that did it. Most of Azeroth and 1-60 were immediately invalidated for a new tiny world. The sentiment became, "All I gotta do is rush to level 58 so I can get to the real game!" I can't blame them for introducing expansions like this at the time, but I think if we could go back it would be much better if the focus was on expanding what exists without paving over it.

I simply miss when games weren't overrun with people who treat them like it's life-or-death. Many, many people have forgotten the concept of simple, casual fun that games used to be.

My favorite WoW moment to this day was sitting in Ironforge with my real-life brothers, just typing to each other via our in-game characters well into the night. We were able to say things we couldn’t say in person. We were level 25 or so, and didn’t end up playing together for long after that. My sister and brother-in-law divorced shortly after and I lost my best in-game friend and best real-life friend. Just typing this makes me feel like I valued WoW as a vehicle to bond with my family above all else. It really was a social device disguised as a video game. I miss those days.

Thanks so much for spotlighting Songs of Chaos man! Very honoured you've been enjoying the listen 🎧 For everyone who gives my books a chance, thank you so much, I deeply appreciate it!

I remember the week that Dungeon Finder came out was the last week my guild did dungeon runs together, and my playstyle as a tank shifted from tanking for my guild to tanking for gold because I could just do it all day with 0 downtime.

Here's what the "spirit of WoW" was to me. I was 12 and I decided that weekend to just chill at home and play some WoW. I was lvl 43 and wanted to reach 44 that weekend so I could equip the Phantom Blade. I'd just acquired the recipe but I still had to craft the weapon. After checking my bank and inventory I put aside a bag for the materials, I remember that the most complicated step was getting a potion of invisibility which back then was particularly hard since Alchemist wasn't that popular in the opening months of Vanilla. I then contacted my guild, it was one of those hangout guilds where the leader and his wife were absolutely addicted to the game and had a fully leveled character while also having two mid level alts. Another player agreed to sell me a few mithril bars on the cheap and another had alchemy. I went on a wild goose chase looking for the materials he had asked for the potion, we couldn't link the recipe, or at least we didn't know how if we could so I had the materials linked and went off. I needed some other stuff for the sword. I eventually got everything to craft a Phantom Blade and even though it wasn't much for warrior, or at least that was the notion people had, I still used it a fair bit. I reached 44 while looking for the materials and questing that weekend. It was a small thing but it was super fun. I remember there being a couple of NE warriors that I'd meet from time to time, they were always around the same level as me and I'd catch them in dungeons or out questing. It was fun bumping into them, we'd chat. Ended up playing a few Stratholme runs with them. BC was a wild ride. I had just been sent to live with my grandmother. I couldn't play the pre patch or the release. I'd level up a shaman on another server, Argent Dawn, where my school best friend was playing, to level 45 or 50 prior to moving out. The new friends that I made in school had played WoW in a private server but wanted to play the real thing. I told them the server but they didn't want to play in a rppvp server so they made their characters in Darkmoon Faire which was brand new at the time. They'd reach level 70 at some point and I was hyped listening to their stories. Like how they 4 manned a heroic dungeon at 2 am, a warrior, a paladin healer and a warlock with some random dude they picked up. By the time I got to play I was a bit miserable. Ended up finding a raiding guild that had just started out, we managed to do half of Karazan on the first week, did everything up to lib on the second and by the third we had it down. I was a "really good dps". It took me forever to get the mindblade for ele shaman. I loved the guild, Absolution, but our leader, Nichiniyo or something along those lines, was an absolute ass, he was known for being a "sarcastic bastard", being older now I feel like he thought he was being cute with a reputation like that, fact was that a absolute godly prot warr had left the guild and another chad of a feral druid also said goodbye, both officers, which prompted him to make a "pact" with a "sister guild" we had never heard up to that point, went in for a trial run for TK. Talk of "crushing lootreaver". We got to the dude, got him to 4% and wiped on the second try. Third try we went for the stacking on the boss strat since a lot of people had died to the balls, we failed at not even 60%. Leader calls it. Starts messaging me asking me why I hadn't healed. "elemental shaman chief, not my job" "but your set has healing bonuses" "I'm a dps man I ranked 4th on recount" "had you healed we'd have downed him" I remember being really upset, my class leader was a tosser that left the guild to play with a friend and then came crawling back, I remember his name, Nadjin or something like that, he died so many times to the balls because he couldn't see them. I'd grinded potions and elixirs for that run, leveled first aid to help with personal healing, had contacted my group mates prior so we could talk positioning so they could get the benefits for the totems. My heart sank when I saw another ele shaman from the new guild with the set shoulders from reaver, they had gone in on thursday which was the day I couldn't play, I had so many dkp stored for a set item. I left shortly after and didn't pick up Wow again until close to LK dropping. LK started with me paying for a server transfer. My mates had a really decent raiding guild ready to take me in. I specced enhancement since they needed it and we went on to clear everything up to and including mimiron. The raiding experience had definitely been streamlined with heroics being a small step up in difficulty, rep being easyer to farm thanks to the tabards and there being only one raiding rep. There were a few "stories" from our leveling but nothing as wild as what they'd tell me from vanilla and BC. We didn't clear ulduar before toc sadly, I had a chat with the 10 man organizer and if I had participated in it earlier we'd have cleared it, I only participated once because they were short a member.

As a newer player, I only played dragonflight and remix, maybe 2 weeks, then decided to try classic wow, I been there the last few weeks and I can see why people still have such a love for it. I am having a great time there.

One cannot stress how important it is that the leveling take as long as possible. These games live and die by the grind, the slow, satisfying progression of starting really weak and over time growing more and more powerful, each step being satisfying because of the time and effort put into it. Once you finish the "grind", that's it, you've beat the game, time to quit. No amount of repeatable endgame content will keep you there for long. The old school MMORPGs, including vanilla, understood that.

I would also say Faction Transfers to me really killed Classic in general, We saw so many communities on Realms go from "somewhat balanced" to 1 sided as PvE players realized that PvP meant ganking and griefing, To me my years on pservers taught me that if you don't incentivize players to pick the "inferior" faction then you end up heavily lopsided, I also think the Mega sized realms were a mistake as again taking from pservers you realize very quickly that a population of 3-5k is actually quite healthy and ensures resources are obtainable for anyone that wishes to put the time in, Community truly to me died the second they opened those realm transfers, whats worse is they repeated it again with SoD, I think for me as I age I realize my money just better spent elsewhere as well, WoW has truly been a long journey but I think for many it's just over, but we sure as hell got some great memories out of it!

Classic died for me in WotLK in the Vault of Archavon. I'd done the whole wintergrasp battle, we won, but then I couldn't get invited to any raid for the Vault because I didn't have the achievement and that was that. This is when the gearscore stuff was cropping up too and it just killed the vibe for me and the game lost a lot of fun.

RIP classic died for 1000000000 time

One dude's video says the sparkle horse was the begining of the end. The fact that truely blew me away was the fact the horse, when it went on sale, made more money in a few hours, than the entire amount Starcraft 2 had generated up to that point. That was also when Bobby realized he could get a boat.

"classic" died in the later patches of WoTLK. the new "classic" died when TBC released

I argue that WoW went downhill immediately upon Blizzard adopting the expansion model. Increasing the level cap was a terrible move and made the world feel less alive while all of the high level players spent their time in Outland and Northrend. This was especially the case with Dalaran. There was almost no reason to ever go back to Org/SW. Anyway, as bad as that was, the items you get from top raids becoming useless upon the release of the next expansions isn't helping. Here we have the best weapons and armor from Naxx being traded in for greens or blues. Its ridiculous. If they do a Classic+, I'd like to see them add new weapons and armor, just with different uses. Maybe some weapons are needed, despite their lesser stats, because they give you a bonus against the bosses you're fighting or they give you extra movespeed so you can dodge aoe attacks(I'm making stuff up on the spot here, but you get my point). Instead of making armor and weapons better every time, give them alternative uses. This is how the game should move forward. Also I highly disagree with the point that the lore was better back in Wrath. The lore was butchered with TBC and only got worse from there. I might be biased, sense Warcraft 3 is my favorite game of all time, but the things they did to Illidan and Vashj and Kael'Thas were unforgivable. They made them villains only so that we could kill big named lore guys. Guess what, all of the raid bosses with the exception of some from Naxx, were made for WoW. And they did a great job with them. You had some crossover in Strath with Balnazaar, but for the most part, Rag and Nefarian and Onyxia, these are memorable and awesome raid bosses. They didn't exist in Warcraft 3. Making the Draenei sexy goat people was ill conceived and only done to keep the Alliance "pretty". Akama and The Broken ARE the Draenei, they never should have been sexy goats. And the entire premise of WotLK is downright retarded. And I mean that literally. It make zero sense whatsoever to have the entire world come at you, guns ablazing, have them kill every single on of your lieutenants, just to try to turn them into the greatest warriors. Give me a break. If they had any balls, WotLK would have seen the destruction of SW or Org or had Arthas take up residence in the plaguelands. I know I will anger some TBC and WotLK fans, but go and play Warcraft 3 and you'll understand. Thank you for coming to my WoW Ted-talk.

I love that none of us can get over vanilla wow

I really feel it was the community. Vanilla allowed you to get to know the people on your server, both Alliance and Horde. The realm forums were so great for talking smack about pvp, or just chatting with other folks on your server. Our guild was formed December 2004 and I'm still friends with many of the folks who played the game then, to this day. "Classic" brought some of that feeling back, for a couple of years at least. There is no replacing the original run through though. I can still remember the first time running into SW and IF, like it was today. It was overwhelming and amazing.

I wish the Dungeon finder had been limited to Server only. That way you could still make bonds with people.

For me it’s always about the journey, to often I find myself not reaching my destination. Meeting a NPC who asks “Can you help me?”. “Of course, that’s why I’m here”. Then I see something on the horizon that needs harvesting….or run into another NPC who asks “Can you help me?” “Of course I can!” I say…..🙃

I remember standing in line for hours outside of my local Best Buy for the midnight pre-sale of the WotLK CE. That, in of itself, was a fun experience, just chatting it up with other people about the game and their experiences, expectations... Although I thought the expansion itself was pretty great, I had already felt a shift in the community, the pressure to grind to level 80 as fast as possible so our guild could start doing the next set of end-game content, which only accelerated the feeling of being left behind if you took a more traditional approach to leveling. Although 40-man raids offered its own set of challenges between coordinating that many people for the mechanics of raids like BWL and later AQ and Naxx and simply dealing with the lag and screen-tearing slideshow with encounters like Thaddius and Heigan DDR but also missed it because the whole guild was there doing it. The comradery on Vent, the shared wipes and the communal elation on a hard-won boss clear and people finally getting their long coveted Epic/Legendary class items. Ultimately, Wrath is when I burnt out and soon after, bowed out of WoW. Stuff in life made it more difficult to get on at my old schedule. I never returned. I popped on once or twice just to see what's changed, got a couple free weeks and a free level boost when WoD came out but nothing really grabbed me. It felt, more than ever, like I slept through the apocalypse and woke up to a barren wasteland.

Great vid - One major change you forgot to mention, that was started with Wrath and tripled down on in Cata, was "mandatory" dailies. In WOTLK stuff like the Hodir and Argent Crusade reps, where if you wanted to raid - Not only did you need to attune/gear up/do the proper quest chains like in raids past, you also had to spend a certain amount of time every day doing dailies to earn rep to get "mandatory" enchants and other things that any serious raid team basically required you to have. Cataclysm made this even worse and was a major major turn off for me and one of the reasons I quit at that time. The 40 day Molten Front stuff was super un-fun for me.

As Totalbiscuit once sang; 'Hark the Wrathbabies do sing'

Three months after launch of classic I couldn’t get a single dual outside Orgrimmar and asking for directions always resulted in being told to download an addon.

I’ve been playing on a TBC private server where they don’t allow addons. The community is pretty small (400 people so far) but wow it makes you realize how much bloat there is with modern wow and the way Blizzard started to implement the addons people developed into their own UI. Having no addons and just the basic interface is pretty fun actually.

Don't forget that Wrath is when the Lore Characters became voiced, and the player became their goffers... in classic and TBC the player was the hero driving the action. in Wrath you're saved by Jaina, saved by Sylvanas, Thrall vs Varian, Varian vs Garrosh, Bolvar saves you, Tirion saves you... etc etc. The whole game shifted from player focus to lore/NPC focus and its obvious upon a second run through Wrath.

When i come to world design and questing, tbc was already there. Quests hubs and flying mount + blob-like island with 4-5 zones. Vanilla leveling is so great because questing make you run around everywhere, many quest have a narrative to link with other areas : Best exemple is elwynn forest westfall redridge darkshire. With donjon's quest usualy being milestone in the lore of the area. another thing i realy like about vanilla is character progressing through leveling. You realy feel each steps, you get new and important spell while leveling with sometime specific quest for it. Your 1st green items are very impactful, same with your first blue from donjon quest, then you get rings, later shoulder and eventualy helmet. Around level 50 you start getting trinket. The dev made sure you get new and impactful stuff all the time.

Classic ended with the ingame store.

For me it was phase 2 in classic when the game died for me. Earthfury was really well balanced faction wise which made wPvP a blast as you had relatively equal fights while out and about. Then in P2 blizzard got this great idea to open server transfers from max population servers to Earthfury which massively unbalanced our server. Now horde had a 66-75% server population and Alliance struggled from there on out. Earthfury Alliance side finally died early TBC when almost all the Alliance players transferred off because there were no new players to recruit or like me quit as I had enough of what Blizzard had done to our once amazing server.

I just randomly clicked on your channel just to see this dropped 51 seconds ago. What a coincidence

The spirit of vanilla is an environment that encourages socialization. The long walks, flight rides, the need to personally engage to form groups, get help from guildies, fill in the tedium of grinding. All of that created an environment where you leaned on the people around you to get entertainment.

Levelling was the only phase of the game I wanted to do. Of course, I was also a filthy casual.

What WOTLK changed for old players, cata made true for all players. Cata made it true for everyone that leveling was easy, end game was all that mattered, etc. Whereas in WOTLK new players still got to experience "classic" wow design philosophy. I started in WOTLK and I had the classic experience. I leveled through the old world, and it wasn't empty on my server. I joined a guild or two, we grouped up and did low level content. My friends and I hung around outside orgrimmar and just chatted for hours, no care in the world for how fast we would hit 80. All the wonder of exploration was still intact. It took me a year to hit 80, I was second of my friend group to do it. It was just not important to us to hit 80 fast, and there were plenty of people like us beyond our little group of 5. Our guild was filled with experienced and new players alike. All of what classic means, my friends and I got to experience. The magic wasn't gone for new players. Then when we hit 80 the game expanded, and it was a whole new world, but not one disconnected from the world we had just taken a year to get through. The things wrath changed really only affected people who had been playing since before wrath came out. You couldn't get heirlooms, for example, if you didn't have a level 80 character already. Cata made heirlooms available for gold, by contrast. Dungeon finder leveling spam was only a thing at the very end of wotlk, but it was there for everyone from the start in cata, which is technically not a change that cata made but it means the experience wasn't had by new players until then. So people who started as new players in the beginning of wotlk leveled like normal players but if you started in cata you likely spammed dungeons. Basically, wrath did show a change in philosophy but that change wasn't felt, in my opinion, unless you had been playing for years before. New players still got to experience the classic philosophy when leveling up and starting out. In cata, however, nobody got to experience classic philosophy. New players were just as inundated with the new philosophy as old players. I think that's why cata is seen as the line and not wrath.

I remember the first time I hit 60 in vanilla I didn’t jump into raiding, I was sad my journey was over. So I made another char and did the whole leveling process again. The fun of it was whatever happened along the way. It doesn’t need to be complicated.

died for me when i was 1 bar from 60 on my HC toon of 200hours. didn't know why I was playing, so I do drowned it in the stormwind canals to give it a poetic death. RIP Struggled, priest of azeroth

I think one of the reasons wotlk was so well recieved was because people experienced the joy of the quality of life changes for the first time, and the negative long term effects on socializing, etc. hadn't taken effect yet. They do something very similar with Diablo 4. When you're playing the campaign in Diablo 4, legendaries are very rare and the game is slow paced and nostalgic. Originally you couldn't even use a mount until you progressed quite far into the campaign. But then once you finish the campaign, you're bombarded with convenience and QoL such as faster leveling, tons of legendaries, etc. and you're hit by that initial exctacy. But as you keep playing, then leveling up and finding loot loses its charm when it's been made too easy. They're just crossing their fingers that they got you hooked on the dopamine treadmill. I think over-doing convenience/QoL gives a big spike in player-activity and is good for making money in the short run, but they're changing the retention-mechanism of the game from being driven by socializing and sense of accomplishment to fomo and addiction, which eventually hurts the company's reputation in the long run.

Even back in TBC you started seeing some changes that broke the original philosophy of vanilla. Daily quests that made you feel like missing out if you didn't log in, whilst in vanilla, you had repeatable quests that you could do on your own terms. Tier sets were bought from a vendor, rather than dropped, which made it more convenient yes, but it's not as exciting and memorable to have a token drop, as having a piece of gear drop. Even a group finder tool was introduced. Not a dungeon finder with teleport, but automatic group finder, which is enough to kill a part of the chat for sure. The concept of different difficulties was also introduced in dungeons, with the heroic mode. Flying mounts were introduced, which went against the spirit of vanilla, since when you were on a flying mount, you were out of harm's way, which made the world not feel as dangerous. Plus it shrank the world down. Also, still technically in TBC, the Recruit a Friend functionality was introduced on the 6th of August 2008, and Wrath was released on November 13th.

Mad I’m a big fan of your channel and a lot of your points. So I’m gonna say this as blunt as possible. You just keep saying the same thing over and over. The problem is that old mmo players are chasing a high. A high that being an adult now has taken away from you. You will never be as care free and clueless and you were then. And thats what we need to “get back” to the old school feelings. Our time wasn’t as “valuable”. Streamers hadn’t ruined all the mystery of every single game just for internet clout. It’s gone brother. Accept it and start drinking. It helps.

As mostly Wrath player, I agree with you. I started several months before the release of WotLK, Sunwell was already half-abandoned by that point in the open-world part. I enjoyed faster leveling in TBC, but I absolutely hated how different it was visually from the world I started to play in. TBC was never a great expansion for me. Wrath was better in some aspects, but what did I do in my spare time when I was not doing dailies or raiding? I revisited vanilla dungeons and raids with friends in very small groups for a semblance of challenge. I used to farm Onyxia solo and I explored every corner of BRD, coming back to it hundreds of times. While still leveling in TBC I already knew about Atiesh and I hoped that I would be able to grab it once I reach max level just for the collection. That never happened of course. As a never vanilla player, I always wanted to go back in time and experience those adventures for myself. Thanks to the private servers I was able to do it before Classic launched and it was even a greater experience than I could have imagined. Sure, when playing vanilla sometimes you miss some QoL features or are annoyed that some class doesn’t shine in certain spec like in Wrath, but the whole slow, sometimes even boring experience of going from one part of the world to another for some XP for a simple delivery quest leaves better impression than grabbing 20 quests without reading and mindlessly doing them while watching all seasons of South Park with the game being in the background. I was going for the Insane in the Membrane achievement by the end of Wrath and was probably 60 % done when I lost all interest in game. I was burned out. I owned Cataclysm and I played it once for a week or even less when a friend sent me the Scroll of Resurrection. Since then I played only vanilla and that never left me burned out even after many years.

Classic died for me when people started min/maxing.

TBC 2.3 patch should get some special mention, in this patch they made leveling faster, killed elite quests, standardised creatures levels, added a bunch of free blue gear to low level dungeons, reduced mounts levle to 30, removed a lot of classes restrictions and limitations, paladin became physical etc. It was basically the WOTLK pre pre patch

"Told you so, by the way!" is a line I expect to hear in every MadSS video and I love the fact that it never disappoints! ^^

what killed wow is that people never wanted classic wow to come back. they wanted 2004 to come back. they wanted 0 responsibilities in life, getting off the school bus and running inside to level in a game that you know 0 about a vast world with raids, bosses and loot and riding a mount no matter the speed. now the world sucks, we all have shit we have to do and know everything about the game. nostalgia blows

A familiar, open world that exudes the feeling of freedom. That is a home for many and never changes. The feeling of having the freedom to do what I want at any time. Nevertheless, everything I do has a value, a meaning and also leads to the goal. But how, with whom and for how long the whole thing happens is something I decide to a large extent, freely myself. It is the player's freedom that is conspicuously the focus of Vanilla.

as soon as flying came out, and ended world pvp, was the end of it for me. it then killed any social interaction that was still left.

The spirit if vanilla is forming a group in a city for a dubgeon on the opposite side of the world because you need to free space in your quest log but you forget where you picked up the dungeon quest and wont be able to find it again if you delete it from your log.

"Deja vu all over again" -Yogi Berra

Classic died for me, when I could no longer keep up with the story - when I felt I was being rushed to the next "chapter" (aka. Expansion) before I was done with the current one. I never completed the Vanilla endgame raids, because people had already moved on to TBC. By the time I got to TBC's endgame, people were already getting started on WotLK. Because of my more casual pacing, I was always left behind before I had any chance to experience any of the "good stuff" that people usually refer to when they talk about WoW. I was stuck always grinding to level for the endgame, but never experiencing the actual endgame for myself. It was so frustrating, by the time Cataclysm rolled around - and I'd once again missed out on the endgame, all the stuff about the Lich King, that I as a Warcraft 3 fan had been looking most forward to seeing, I just gave up. Not only did Cataclysms release mean I'd once again missed out on the story, it completely undermined the story up until that point by inserting the whole "world changing" event, so I couldn't even just keep playing the previous expansions on my own, without dialogue, quests, and the landscape itself having been changed to accommodate the new expansion. That's when I gave up.

People blamed cataclysm for being a really bad expansion. But total overhaul of the azeroth itself and keep the endgame going was a huge businness back then and even now it is. People sings praises about WotLK everywhere but I remember people were complaining about that expansion that time too. Modernizing an element or total game itself doesnt kill itself. What's killing WoW is today's society, our new social interaction behaviours and "being a total dickhead in internet looks cool " mentality. These things are not just kill WoW, they can kill any game that needs a good co-operation and interaction.

I played since launch and quit at the start of Wrath. I was guild-less all the way to level 50-ish. I was in a dungeon with four others in the same guild. I was a frost mage....at the end of the dungeon, I received an invite because of how well I was playing as a "pug." I stayed with that guild until I quit playing. My friend, who introduced me to WoW, said at the very start before I even logged in: "you don't find a guild; the guild finds you." RIP WoW.

Let's see if this one gets taken down within a minute of me starting it again this time

Going to Orgrimar or Ironforge into LFG chat was something special. You created bonds there. You gathered the group of adventurers and you'd know them by names. And throughout your leveling process you'd see those people again and again and have those friendships bloom. Later on when you finally get to 60 you know so many people, you go "way back" with them. You join a guild where those people are, you move around, you go hunt for blue armor sets and then for their upgrades before you even attempt MC or BRD. Great time

Dungeon Finder was never bad. Raid finder…yes. Dungeons are for leveling. Raids are end game and the point is to get to end game.

Gah I freakin hated heirlooms. I totally forgot they were introduced in Wrath.

Cross realm did in fact destroy the community .

Cataclysm is WotLK+, it just improved upon and polished everything from WotLK while also making leveling 1-60 good again(and fresh at the time). But I'd argue that Cataclysm was a love letter to Vanilla, TBC and Warcraft 2 fans, along with some WC3. Now yes, some of the game's design isn't like vanilla, but it's mostly end-game. Keep in mind only Cataclysm every properly addressed pre-expansion leveling. As in changing and adding new proper content in the form of the revamped kalimdor and eastern kingdom. Every other expansion just cut the XP required and focused on its own leveling in the new zones. The small problem is that in Cata leveling was a numerically easier, now that there was proper itemization while leveling, meaning that not just weapons and some OP piece here and there were good, all gear was good. Plus with the removal of spell ranks, now spells had lower base damage, but higher stat scaling. If anything they could have introduced a second difficulty to leveling(heroic if you will) for those who enjoy leveling or just straight up make it harder. To this day I play WoW without taking achievements into account. If I get an achievement cool, I don't know how that happened for the vast majority of them. XD If you ask me when classic died it's either with MoP, WotLK or with the release of BlackWing Lair. You decide.

You are forgetting something here: Wotlk was the last expansion that saw HUGE system changes. They added phasing (which ashes of ceation/star citizen devs claim is a new invention by them). It is basically something akin to what is now called cloud. They could have dropped all realm restrictions exactly at that point but chose not to, for some reason. They added the PvP Zone and VEHICLEs. Which was used a lot in wotlk and is still used for much varied content. They did a lot of other technical changes which I forgot. While you might call Blizz lazy with TBC they really upped their game with wotlk. Unfortunately, very late into the expansion, Activision/bobby forced them to streamline and add all "current thing" features like achievements.

Talk about kicking a dead horse..

I'm so glad you made this. Wotlk was the first time WoW growth flat-lined. Meaning it was the first time in wow history that the same amount of people were subscribing that were unsubscribing. It truly was the beginning of the end

Hey man I think you make good content but it feels like you've made this exact video like 7 times now, it feels very samey. I think I've heard you explain the differences/transitioning between classic and modern WoW over and over again

Thats cutscene where silvanus fights saurfang was actually the best moment of BFA tho...

Mad ngl you should put your money where your mouth is on all of this vanilla hype. Play era and bring attention too it, I think this would be good content and would bring good light to those playing era.

It died when guilds started to treat it like a mobile game. Log in, get buffs, log out, wait for raid, and then bitch about how the boss should have died 10 seconds faster...

I always said Wrath is what killed WoW. Burning Crusade was the best of WoW

Leveling is by far one of my favorite things about all old era MMOs. The "Grind" of getting the next level to unlock the next tier of gear or weapons. That was the incentive to just "Feel stronger" and feel like the time you put into the game mattered.

plenty of people back in wrath pointed out that group finder would fuck the game up

I agree... the dungeon finder had the effect on me that i skipped entire questing zones in wrath and later it did not make sense anymore to explore them. So i basically did just fly from one certain spot to the next wondering about the places and npcs. Dungeons are faster leveling and better loot, but a lot of repetition, more grinding and less role playing

This is something I've been saying since wrath, the game took a drastic change from TBC to wrath but their "Bring the player not the class" mentality ruined the game feel for me, so many things felt like more of the same and every time the lich king showed up he either did nothing, got his ass beat, or just walked away, he has been the bitch king since wrath first launched.

For me, the "spirit of Vanilla" was the lack of shortcuts. You wanted to achieve something, you had to put time and effort into it. Even going to other zones was like this - mounts were expensive and available later than they are nowadays, so you had to do a lot of walking (and fending off random mob attacks). I disagree about Vanilla being linear - it gave a lot more freedom because the quests were not curated and arranged in neat chains as they are nowadays. You actually had to explore and find quests in obscure places. Some quests required travel to other zones, even other continents. Many quest chains ended without giving you breadcrumbs to other chains, so you had to go back to exploring and looking for stuff to do... and this created a fairly good feel of non-linearity and sandbox-like freedom. I could go on, but you get the idea...

Wow the irony of Madseason calling out blizzard for their money grab and then a good quarter of his new video is a money grab advertisement. RIP Madseason videos being good. Everyone sells out at some point I guess.

It hurts so much, thinking about the friends I made back in BC, b/c that's all gone now. I put together a huge care package and mailed it to a recovered meth addict who used WoW as a stand-in that saved his life. I made way too accurate murlock impressions into my mic on Vent and set Rick's drunk ass off screaming to know who pulled, only to be reminded through fits of laughter that we were doing Hyjal 40. A PvP-obsessed nelf rogue treated me like a little sister- sent me a plushie IRL and protected me from Horde IG. A prot tank who was leveling way faster than me would drop what he was doing to help me catch up when he saw me log in- we yakked about cut content in ST for hours after the place was cleared and the others left. Those are just a few of so many who I made connections w/ and mailed things like Yule cards to IRL. Remembering all that compared to how isolating everything is today hurts a lot. Even IRL interactions are shallow these days b/c of the modern online disposability mindset bleeding over. Will, Rick, Cameron, Kolby- I miss gaming w/ all of you and so many others.

I HATE THE WOW COMMUNITY. i want ssf wow where i only deal with them in instances and loot is personal

You're exactly right about WotLK. I realized it during last year's classic release. I am now realizing it about Phase 3 and 4 of SoD. Nightmare Incursions destroyed the leveling experience. Rushing to max level denies us the community-building experience.

The community killed Classic WoW. From the get go in 2019, it was just min maxxing and tryhards. The closest I've gotten to a true Vanilla experience was WoW HC.

I never thought I would ever be able to quantify the value of that small talk of forming the group together via chat rather than an automated machine, but you did exactly that. I miss it too

All you streamers man. You have no idea where to look except for what gets views. CLASSIC WOW IS ALIVE AND WELL just leave those garbage cataclysm servers and come to classic era WHITEMANE or hardcore servers DEFIAS PILLAGERS. World buffs everyday, growing community, full classic experience. It’s alive and well.

I am one of those who played WoW in 2006. As often as I could. Made friends online and enjoyed it a lot. However, work and life pulled me away and I stopped playing in 2015. I returned during the pandemic, but the game had changed into something completely different and it just wasn’t the same anymore. None of my old friends where online and the feeling of adventure was gone. I logged out and haven’t gone back since. I have many fond memories of WoW though. 😊😊😊

How many times you gonna make this exact same video? I like your content a lot but I swear I’ve heard you tell this whole story in several other videos

The magic for me happened when my college classes went online and I decided to hop on classic at the end of p3. Brimming with a bunch of people who have never even played classic with maybe 1/5 people being veterans, and 2/5 coming from retail. But still so many noobs just like me. Going from not knowing dungeons, not knowing what your class’s best rotation and talents looked like, not knowing what zones to go to to level, not knowing about logs, and not even believing world buffs were that important. Being in of those few leveling guilds that managed to start raiding, and to be buddies with people who knew about you class and could talk about how to get better, and all the people you’d run dungeons and pvp with. We got to be clueless together, and learn things over a period of a year and change. We were allowed to be bad, and we didn’t know any better. Now everyone’s time is important again, and being bad is rude because you’ll waste that time. Now I can’t just play, I have to grind or quit. The number might be getting bigger, but the growth stopped.

is bro still doom posting about wow in 2024?

Classoc died in Wotlk, but it took hold in TBC. I say this because of "catch up" tokens or marks to get pre endgame gear. That was the start

it died when they made molten core 20 man only

What made classic WoW great was the lack of convenience that forced you to explore and mingle. I remember many times I missed the boat or the zeppelin and ended up talking to the player next to me or my guild. You actually need to travel to a dungeon instead of just teleport in. I remember many people could not even find the dungeon entrance because they never traveled there.

Blizzard should bring back TBC Classic.

It started in late TBC. The original arguments for the change in philosophy was the classic "only 1% saw Naxx" and "most people quit before level 10". They were well into development of TBC before these ideas started appearing, so the early part of TBC and the first set of post-launch raids were still fundamentally made with the same philosophy the base game had. But then we got the reduced xp requirements in patch 2.3 (Zul Aman) and when Sunwell came out we had the first occurence of catch-up gear. Both of these changes were direct responses to the issues of lack of early-game retention and late-game participation, and everything that came after was just trying harder and harder to deal with those exact same issues. Early-game retention and late-game participation defined WoWs development for a very long time, and if anything stood in the way of those two things it had to go.

These videos feel so bitter, it's just been the same negative videos about Classic. SoD devs aren't doing super well rn but at least they're trying...

For me WOTLK was my Vanilla because I didn't play the game before. I enjoyed exploring everything, doing and reading quests, talking in the in game chat because I was too shy to speak on teamspeak or mumble. And WOTLK was kinda difficult because I was not very good at the game. I only got better after doing many PVP training session with a friend that had all classes leveled UP. It was the feeling of exploring a new world that got me hooked. Later I would play Vanilla on private servers and level up a hunter. I didn't play for long (got to lvl 57) but I remember the people I met along the way even to this day! I also played a lot during Legion and tanked in a PVE guild doing progress, it was really fun and I loved it! But the game shifted from being a casual exploration game to a sweaty tryhard one. I stopped playing at the star of battle for azeroth when even the gameplay got bad (not only Activision).

Man this is getting tiring. How many times are you gonna milk this topic? Classic died because all of us grew up and learned the game. Classic was a base game, everything else is an expansion. No fucking shit you’re gonna have to start adding something to speed leveling when the cap is going up and the whole playerbase is already maxed so what are they gonna focus on? I used to like your videos man, you’ve really turned in to Asmongold 2.0.

I sometimes wonder where WoW would have been if they went the OSRS route and just added more stuff to it and didn't change older content. On the topic of last video with "Nostalgia is why people still play OSRS and WoW Classic", it's a statement that pisses me off because I am 28 now, I never played OSRS but knew of it when I was younger. I played WoW and therefore saw OSRS as obsolete so I never got into it. I recently started playing it (2023 somewhere) and it's absolutely wonderful. There's so much flavor in that game in every nook and cranny. The quests are fun and it doesn't take itself too seriously. I did all the non-membership quests and got gifted a membership by one of my friends. I played the game a long while and it was a ton of fun. Diving into the wiki looking at ways to make money. Making strength pots and going out there to do slayer missions. It has a great learning curve and I haven't even come CLOSE to "endgame". And that's where my story ties in to my original question. Where would WoW be if it was still SUCH an incredible grind all the way to "endgame". It would have so much to do, so much to collect. And all of it would still be very relevant. They would never have gotten rid of Legion artifacts because artifacts would have been designed in a way that would make them useful besides just a skin. It would make grinding that thing be worth doing for a new player. Same for other stuff in the game. It'd be more interesting if each expansion had a kind of "carnival game" to do. And everything done within that game would be relevant to other content in it. Would give you reasons to go and explore. It would have made all of those years of development poured into these expansions worth something other than being called "legacy content" or "content for easy mogs and mounts". Rant over. Thanks for making the videos MadSeason, you allow me to think about what parts of WoW are the good parts. I'll remember those for when I inevitably make my own co-op RPG far into the future. It's a dream project but I am currently just too inexperienced to get started on it. o7

Gotta drive engagement on this channel by saying the same thing for the 15th time.

Waltz for Zizi being in the opener really brought on the love for nostalgia we based so much of our love for the games on. Great choice!

when will he finally stop crying XD

If you think back, LFD was a godsend. I remember having me and two others so many times sitting around asking for half an hour for someone to join us for a dungeon but no dice. LFD allowed us to queue and get those extras when we needed it. The problem is the players now because people stopped using the tool that way and now we can play as a solo player willingly any time.

Tbh what killed was the start of BiS/min-max stuff. While it's great to have some knowledge of the quests, itens and stuff. When you play a leveling character, everything you do is new, the quests are well designed and linear, you feel your adventure growing and you becoming more respected through your quests, your expertise increasing as well, but when you have all the info of the dungeon/raid, what optimal route, itens to go for and stuff. It's less work, but you start going for goals more than adventuring through the world.

Vanilla wow (2005-2007) for me was a (community) and a feeling of (connection), i have never felt before or after. Blizzard designed that original game for teamwork. We didnt have LFG back then, so you stayed with the team you had and made the best of your situation. This game changed me as a person and made me better at communicating in (real life). We are social creatures by nature and this game will continue to exist i my heart as long as i am alive. I still have friends from this game, which i will be forever grateful. In vanilla wow, you would see people in every zone (24 hours) a day. It was crazy, but in a good way! Not very strange that this made a lasting impression on those of us that played in this period💚💚💚