I must be the only person on the Internet who doesn't get the popularity of Honest Trailers. Not a single one of those has ever made me even smile, not to mention laugh. They may be even less funny than SNL, and I'm not sure if that's even possible.

Anyway, I liked the Warcraft movie. It's a fun sword & sorcery adventure film, no more, no less. I sincerely regrett it didn't do well enough to get sequels. I for one certainly could have done with two less Hobbit films and two more Warcrafts.

For vets it's so you get to end game content faster, as you already went through it. A new player would pick this option to do dungeons and raids and stuff with the rest of his or her guild. WoW is a social game, and the focus is on current content. Back in BC I joined a guild and felt left out because I was still a lowbie. I didn't have the time grind to end game content. Modern WoW is way less grindy.

Unrelated to my previous post:

WoW before transmog: https://imgur.com/a/gw9BHpx

Thank you. Now that you mentioned it, I recall a friend playing as a hunter with a pet a few years ago, but at the time did not know what any of that meant really for gameplay.

I've never played WoW, but how is it possible to mess this up? Isn't everything needed to bring the worlds back up, like right there?

Btw i know nothing about servers and whatnot.

Yes, well what they did is put the old content in the new engine. The new engine of course was tweaked and developed strongly over the years so... it was a bit of a puzzle to get it working like it was classic. :-P

So, for you people who know WoW, maybe even an online game like WoW might have been affected over the years by thrends that happen in single player PC games? Like: making it easier, over the top augmentations/gear that essentially mean pay-to-win; simplifying the gameplay; herding the player along with achievements/daily or weekly quests, etc.

Less freedom for people who prefer to be told what they ought to pursue? And everything made easier and faster.

Oh I see, so it's not like you're right back at day 1 WoW

I was just discussing about it a few days ago.

The level skipping thing is aimed entirely at the pro or semi‑pro players.

It's those players who are either professional (literally, i.e. they are paid somehow), or they'd like to be.

In a professional or semi‑professional guild, if they suddenly need you to change class for whatever reason, you kind of need to do it. Or they'll swap you with someone else.

And if you need to do it, you don't have time to level up your character from scratch, so you pay. You will still have to grind all of the equipment etc., but at least you skip most of the leveling.

It's kind of not a great thing? Yes, it's not.
The way WoW is structured, it's kind of necessary? Also yes.
Could you redesign the whole game so that this feature would not be necessary or meaningful in the first place? Well, I hope yes, but it would be a massively difficult task – if it weren't, someone would already have done it.

When put like that I sort of get it... I mean, it's a bit like having to make a new character in a tabletop RPG after you died, right? You'll make one of an appropriate level for where the campaign is at the moment, you won't start over from level 1 when everyone else is at level 12.

I don't know, I guess I shouldn't be criticising a game I have not played in twelve years, and even then I didn't really get it.

Not really now. You can read more about it on https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/21881587/dev-watercooler-world-of-warcraft-classic. They did rip all extra features out like achievements and pet/mount storage etc. Those will be taking bag space again.

Yea, essentially they used the modern WoW client and server infrastructure (which have obviously evolved tremendously over the years). This meant all the old data was incompatible so they had to essentially fix all their data AND strip out features that are present in today's client but not during the original game. In the end what we got is something as close as we're going to get (outside of using outdated PC's with massive security issues). Some of the benefits are significantly less lag, during these tests there would be hundreds of people in a single area and the game would still run fine. You still get the old graphics but some modern effects are available for use (better light, denser grass .. that sort of thing). I think eventually they will either bring out TBC (cheapest/lowest effort) or release new content in the same design style as vanilla. We'll just have to wait and see what happens as they don't appear to have any plans just yet and keeping whatever they are up to close to their chest.

Except we've had WoW emulators for long enough which crapped on Blizzards claims.

They're also using the 1.12 version of Alterac Valley instead of the 1.8.

There's a number of reasons.

It's a multiplayer so the biggest group of similar players was at the endgame for the majority of the time.

A lot of it was filler to grab players with a timesink and get them addicted. This is why Blizzard payed off the legal system to get levelling bots banned.

Players can still go back and play the parts they missed. The transmogrifying feature helped because you could go back
and search for items to wear.

They definetely had to put a ton of work into it, those private servers have been worked on for years. On top of that, if they'd use the real 1.12 client all exploits that have been fixed over the years would have to be re-fixed. Regardless, what we're getting is the best they can do as even Blizzard has lost original data for pre-1.12.

I made a character on Elysium, played it to level 60. I will try out WoW Classic on an official server, but I am not sure it will be true Vanilla WoW. Compared to current WoW, Classic is a completely different game, much slower, much more downtime, unforgiving(depends a bit on the class you choose), a lot more freedom how you play it and you set your goals yourself.

The movie is decent when you are familiar with the WoW universe. I guess it will be a bit confusing for someone who is new to the world of WoW.

This guy sums up perfectly why vanilla was so much more satisfying and MMO-like than what we have now. tl;dw: the constraints and challenge of the game made other players much more relevant and made you more invested in the world. Hell you spent so much more time in the world rather than instances that you faceroll with randoms you'll never meet again.