> Vanilla WoW really did have a different design ethos than the later expansions did, and some people prefer that experience.

Right, and that's my point. When you take away the nostalgia for the content, you reveal what players are asking for, which is a reversion to what is effectively a previous game as modern WoW lost all of what made it a good game, to those players, in the first place.

So yeah, there was definitely a group of players that literally did want Classic WoW, original content and all, but I also feel like Blizzard would have saw success continuing that Classic formula with new content. Blizzard sucked the soul and charm out of WoW. For all intents and purposes, modern WoW is a completely different game.

Yes. I've watched some videos on wow by Kevin Jordan, who was on the original team. He said the original game was built on 3 pillars:

1. Advancement over time.

2. Player interaction. Hard content should be hard in order to push players into working together to overcome challenges.

3. The world is a character in the game. Even when you eventually got mounts later in the game, they made it so mobs can knock you off & daze you. The world is big and full of wonder. Especially at earlier levels, just getting from point A to point B can be a journey in itself. Wanna play with your friends who started in a different zone? Fine, but just getting there will be an epic journey.

They abandoned those principles later on. Eg, by adding "sidekick" characters you can summon when you're playing on you own, to overcome hard content. The point of that content was to push you into making friends with other players. Flying mounts made the world small and safe. Just point in the vague direction you wanna go and go AFK for a few minutes. They also added more and more teleports, so you don't have to schlep overland yourself. And the LFG system.

It was a really different game back then. I didn't get that much out of classic wow. But I'd enjoy playing a new MMO built around those same principles.

Just understand that you are one of the player groups that Blizzard targets and they found that a significant if not plurality of their player groups were solo players. This is why they've actively changed the product to try to keep that player base subbed between expansion. By their account it seems to work.

I do think Blizzard is big enough they can maintain multiple experiences. One thing that is challenging is a vocal group of players really feel like they need to do everything in the game. It's compulsory (some game design choice did also force that at times). This leads to them not enjoying the content not designed for them. Blizzard has a challenging line to solve.

Classic was the right move, I do agree with your idea of someone making a similar game with the original principles. It probably can't be Blizzard anymore, their have a 0-1M user problem. Anything they make has to cater to everyone or they get flak. So a smaller outfit needs to do it. Challenging in this funding environment.

> And the LFG system.

The LFG system basically killed most social interaction in WoW.

So if you played for that, you got excluded.

They also sort of killed build diversity, but there was no build diversity in classic either, at least if you wanted to raid.

The grinding... I don't miss it. That could have used toning down.

> The LFG system basically killed most social interaction in WoW.

I started playing Anniversary vanilla one year ago. I played through it all and now I'm playing Anniversary TBC. I visited many dungeons. There's no LFG system, yet I didn't find any social interactions in dungeons. I'm pretty sure the whole social interactions thing is overblown. 99% of dungeons is like leader silently invites you or you write "inv holy pala GS 1400" and he silently invites you. You silently run through dungeons, silently leave. That's about it. There are no interactions. Zero. Some people write "hi" and "ty", some don't bother.

Might also be a feature of cross realm play. Or whatever is cross server play these days, I haven't touched WoW in a long time.

If you know you're not likely to ever meet those people again, you don't bother.

That's exactly what's happening on Anniversary servers. They crammed like 20 servers into one megaserver, so there are like 100 000 players on the same server and you're very unlikely to meet the same person twice.

>The LFG system basically killed most social interaction in WoW.

as someone who has played since 2004 with only a handful of month-long breaks, this is simply not true.

I played until (and including) WoTLK. The conversations outside my guild simply ... stopped.