My Take Away from Warcraft Classic

Full Disclosure: I have not played Warcraft Classic, but I have been listening attentively to those playing it, trying to understand why they like about it.  It sound like there are two things about it that really get people excited, community, and difficulty.

Difficulty:  Leveling in Warcraft Classic requires you to be more alert, and talent points make levels feel more impactful.  The raids are much easier, because 15 years of honing players against ever increasing bosses has led to a situation where a group of not even level 60 characters in green armor can clear Molten Core in less than a week.

Everyone knows that leveling in World of Warcraft has gotten onerous and wonky. I’m excited to see how the Devs take the information gained from Classic and use it in the impending level squish.

A while ago, I posted this about incorporating the Ironman Challenge as a feature that would be selected at character creation, or built into a special class, but now having a custom challenge server seems like the obvious solution.  “Extremophile” servers where things like, permanent death, disabled quests, NPC damage and health are increased, could be done.  It would have the advantage of putting everyone together in the same boat.  Right now if you are running the Ironman Challenge, most likely no one around you is, but if it’s a dedicated server, literally every other character would be playing by the same rules.

Warmode was a great addition to Normal Servers, but it seems to have taken something away from PvP servers.  I think removing the PvP flag from those servers was a step in the wrong direction.  Even if nothing mechanically was changed at this point, those servers have a strong cultural difference from normal servers that should be acknowledged.

Community: “With the LFG and LFR tools removed, people have to talk to each other.” is what I keep hearing about what makes the Classic community better, but what seems to really excite people are drive by buffs.  Getting Powerword: Fortitude, and Mark of The Wild cast on you as someone runs by is genuinely a great feel I remember back from Vanilla WoW.  I would not be surprised if weak “handshake” buffs were added for each class in the next expansion, so that walking past another PC means getting a little buff to say “Hi”.

Like the difficulty issues, these community issues could be addressed with specialty servers.  Removing the servers from CRZ and the disabling the LFG/LFR would be easy.  What else could be done to promote community at the server level?  What if “Lone Wolf” servers were created, a server where the character max is 1.  If you can only have one character on the server, and the barbershop is disabled, everyone will quickly become recognizable.  This would mean that you only have 2 professions on that server, so no making an alt for each profession and mailing yourself materials.  No bank alts would mean that the cities would not be full of low level characters standing around ignoring everyone.

What would all this lead to?  I don’t think I’m too far outside the realm of possibility when I suggest Private Servers.  Not the illicit pirate servers that people create, but a monthly fee to Blizzard for a server that people can join by invite only.  This is how Minecraft has operated for years.  When you’re paying for the server, you could set any number of options, disable features, set character limits, permanent death, or whatever settings are deemed acceptable by Blizzard.  If Private Servers happened, I imagine they would mostly be used by streamers to create servers for just their fans, and very VERY large guilds. These servers would probably not contribute to account wide collections either.

What do you think?  What kinds of challenges would you like to see added to retail?  Would you be turned off if Private Servers became an option?  What are the best parts of classic that could be brought to retail?

Should the Ironman Challenge Become an Option in WoW?

Iron Man Challenged is so popular, I hope Blizzard adds it as an official option when rolling a character one day.  It seems like it would be an easy thing to add, just tick a box and you can’t equip uncommon armor, enter instances or BG or learn professions…  Oh and when you die your character is dead forever.  Official integration would lead to a few ‘convenience’ features, like an official leader-board, and the ability to mail all your gold from your dead character to one of your living toons.  Heck, it could be as simple as having the title “Iron <name>” on all new toons that is then lost the first time you die or equip an uncommon/rare/epic item.

The best time to have added a leveling challenge would have been right after Cataclysm.  New leveling content and an incentive to run it in a new way.  Perhaps if they rework the level content again (unlikely) they will add it.  I think they are close to making boosting level at the beginning of an expansion so cheap and easy as to make leveling in the old world irrelevant.

I was checking out the leader boards they have at wowchallenges.com. Their other challenges are really interesting too.  Along with variable levels of the Ironman (such as Tinman) They have a Pacifist and Blood Thirsty challenges.

Pacifist has gotten a lot of attention from Polygon’s series “World of Peacecraft” staring the gnome rogue Raandyy, and before that the extreme efforts of the pandaren shaman Doubleagent.  In the past, I’ve said that Pacifist should be a separate ‘class’.  I say that because I think it’s the easiest way to make a character that does not have the ability to attack.  As a class they could get a low level sprint and some kind of aggro reducing ability.  Lorewise they could be cast as Merchants, leading to them being unfriendly/neutral with the opposing faction.

Blood Thirsty is challenging (all grinding mobs, no quests), but it feels like it’s missing something.  If Blizzard added something akin to Blood Thirsty, I think they would have to amp it up. They could make it starkly the opposite of pacifist and put you are at war with BOTH Alliance and Horde.  Those characters would need to have their own starting zone.  Story wise, they could lump all those characters together, like remnants of the Twilight’s Hammer, or make them unique per race, like Leper Gnomes and Grimtotem Tauren.  Something that puts them on the outside of society story wise.  There are certain places that tweaks would need to be made so that these characters could get around the world, like up to Northrend.

The biggest challenge I see with making these philosophically, is that they can not join groups or guilds.  Not being able to party up puts some of these characters at odds with the social nature of the MMO.  That being said, I don’t think anyone would play a challenge mode as their main.  I would love to see some new ways to play baked in as an official option.

WoW Challenges can be found on their website at wowchallenges.com and on Twitter: @WoWChallenges

Hero Classes Could Go Further to Break the Mold

The Current Hero classes, Death Knight and Demon Hunter are REALLY cool.  I like how Death Knight tried to add a really unique resource system, and Demon Hunter tries to do things that no other class can.  But in the long run, they are built and balanced like any of the other core classes.

I would really like to see some “Hero” Classes that shake things up as far as play style.  There are few ‘challenge mode’ things that people already do in wow that could lend themselves to this.

For example, some people play a Pacifist. They don’t do quests or kill mobs, the level up through professions and other none-aggressive means. That would be a real game changing class.  At level ten you could pick between an Artisan, or a Diplomat for your specialization.  Artisan could increase your efficiency with your professions, possibly opening up extra slots.  and Diplomat could give you bonuses to reputations, let you learn other languages, and possibly make you neutral to the opposing faction.  ((this class would not be able to swap specs after they had been chosen))

Something similar could be done for the Ironman challenge, but that might work more as a template of restrictions for the current classes, rather than a whole new class.

LUNK!