the elitism and 20 year background check just to get into a raid is what made me quit.

from season of discovery to Season of Recovery

World of Warcraft 2004-2006 was bottled lightning. It wasn't datamined before release. There was still secrets and a mysterious world to explore and adventure. We can never get it back.

Instead of classic plus we got retail minus.

Spoiler: *No.* P1 was nuts, P2 was meh, P3 was bad and P4 just took far too long to come out.

The novelty was good, but they never recovered from mistakes and exploits, and the faster pace of the gear treadmill was crushing.

Trivializing leveling is the biggest mistake they will ever make. Majority of players just want a fun chill leveling experience, where progression feels meaningful and noticeable. SoD is just an accelerated track to retail, it's classic but feels like retail and it is awful. We wanted a Classic+ or at the least a classic what if, this is just retail.

Season of discovering the Devs don't play the game.

Giga W take in saying turning wow into an Esport is killing it. Wow should not be an Esport. Let it be braindead, easy and fun

seasons dont fit into mmos if you ask me, makes it automaticly boring after a couple of weeks each release cuz your gear gets useless so fast.

Killing GDKPs isn’t the reason SoD has floundered. Turtle WoW doesn’t have GDKP either and has grown. Even classic era servers have seen resurgence by organizing a “community fresh” run on a couple servers. The real reason SoD has suffered has a whole lot more to do with missing the spirit of classic

No it can’t because blizzard had a chance to do classic plus and all they did was recreate Wrath play style, they didn’t take any gambles.

SoD was awesome until they introduced incursions. That feature pretty much broke SoD and was directly responsible for me quitting.

“Mages don’t heal” says the guy who used to suggest a mage that could heal by rewinding time. 💁🏼‍♂️

They need a race that can summon a roller coaster as an attack that would be great

I think the reason we have "seasons" is that Blizz doesn't wanna bring out a fresh vanilla classic+ persistent version while Classic [insert exp] is still going. When Cata dies down and IF there is no MoP, I think we will see a restart essentially of Classic within a year. And, also GDKP simply had to go. In an ideal world it's fine, but in reality it was enabling botters and gold sellers to ruin the entire game. The gold is out there and it was creating an unbearable economy which has recovered a lot now.

I still remember when DKP was tracked by one poor bastard in the guild who entered it onto a page on the guild's website 😜

Im shocked that streamer that is given thousands of gold per day thinks gdkp is a good idea. Totally shocked

Nightmare incursions were the beginning of the end. Mop remix was a confirmation of how bad the modern devs are at making "modern" content.

Incursions ruined SoD and this is without question. GDKPs were banned and SoD was still incredibly popular and thriving, it wasn't until the addition of incursions that people started leaving in droves. How blizzard thought incursions was ever a good idea just shows how distant from the classic playerbase they truly are.

I feel that Blizzard needs to either make WoW 2, or totally revamp the game. Both Classic and Retail feel like they are throwing bandages on a cadaver while asking for more money for said corpse-bandages

Season 3 killed the game

These points are exactly why INITIALLY people said "no changes". Because people didnt trust Nu-Blizz to have any idea what made WOW good. SOD is proof that we were right to an extent. Of course there were things that needed improvement (like world buffs causing raid logging), and yes people really wanted classic+, but SOD is showing exactly why people initially said NO CHANGES. Because nu-blizz has no idea what makes a good game.

Thousands of different stories about how people got to level 60 in classic. But in SoD it is the same one for almost everyone, spamming Incursions

Looks like Classic, plays like retail, feels like retail, full of retail design mentality, and it's seasonal.

People underestimate how much p2 killed the game. Everyone sat in SM, started to hate the leveling grind, then joined gnomer pugs that couldn't kill anything. The bad will, combined with p3 incursion meta was the kill shot.

They took it way too far. I know everyone had their ideas on what Classic + should be. I can't speak for everyone, but all I wanted was just minor adjustments to make more/all specs viable and MAYBE a new raid/dungeon or two. A lot of specs in classic coulda been made viable by increasing the debuff limit further or removing it all together, and fixing mana issues for specs like Ele sham and boomkin. We didn't need to bring in all these extra new abilities. Maybe one or two here and there where it makes sense. Besides that all I wanted were very small QOL changes such as dual spec.

SoD has been a speedrun of the retailification of the original WoW except since it's happening a million times faster and with fewer resources, it's just scuffed. I look at SoD and I can't find what's supposed to appeal to me with it because it's lost most of what's appealing about classic while also not being as polished as retail, it's just this abortion in-between.

They wasted all the momentum with the incursions. Leveling is easy, yet they added boring repetative grind for exp and gold instead of making more interesting runes and a new dungeon or raid. Also with how easy gold and leveling is this doesnt feel like classic, it feels like retail with classic dungeons and lichking/cata classes

Nope, it's all incursions fault it was a silent killer

Its underrestimated how much it matters that classes play/feel different from each other. Classic was best at it. Classes could not do anything and so there was synergy between them

Gotta be honest. Without Incursions and the removal of GDKPs I am 100% sure it would be alive and kicking now. Incursions did so much damage to the game it's insane. Classic doesn't need new ways to level up...

It can work. Just have people vote on updates like with OSRS.

In chess, pressure is what is holding the game together. Removing pressure often leads to the whole board falling, and either one player is now dominating or both players are going to draw. Removing pressure is seen as either a pro move, or a total noob trap. Making leveling easier was a noob trap.

"its not the customers job to know what they want" - Steve Jobs

I really like the mage healers and rogue tanks tbh. Those interesting combos have me more intrigued than thinking they are stupid - it's part of what has kept me interested in SoD.

They broke it with emerald dream season. they should have known better.

We wanted Classic + and got Retail -

Tbh GDKP was not the same it used to be back in the day. The constant gdkp spam was very very annoying and was just a ton of foreigners who didn’t speak English running them so they could take a big percent and sell the gold after for real money.

I wish they would do another classic release like they did. I want to get back into it and do Vanilla -TBC - WotLK again. Hopefully I don’t need to wait long.

There are 0 SoD W's for PvP. Every decision made with SoD made pvp a little worse until I inevitably just quit. Got to just before P3 when the P3 leaks let me know it wouldn't be worth playing.

GDKP is emergent gameplay ? More like IRL gameplay

Mage healers make perfect sense actually. They don't really heal, they rewind time back to when your hp was higher. It's magic, mages use magic.

How is swiping your cc for gold and buying gear more fair?

It was a huge mistake to try and create new specs instead of fixing existing specs, and then they clearly ran out of ideas after phase 1, gave up on new specs and just went the lazy route of adding in random retail abilities to classic

Simply put, they made too many mistakes and lacked effort. The team size for recycled content having to pushback deadlines so long for such small changes is offputting.

Asmon talking about gdkp... Viewer: "put me into a discord call, you will lose this argument" GL bro 😂

the biggest mistake was players thinking this shallow gimmick would lead to bigger things and calling it "Classic+".

WoW is designed to be played in a guild with a static group of people but at the same time caters to people that dont/wont do that. (loot distribution is the idea here. "bad players can get gear" so run with your guild so you dont have those people or eventually you get your stuff)

I was done after Phase 1. Too much hassle with not enough rewarding gameplay.

blizzard will save SoD the day asmon gets to play ffxiv again

Mage healer and tank rogue is what made SOD cool. I liked all these new specs and cool spells and abilities.

Yesterday I was lvling a druid in turtle and the moment I completed the bear quest I felt so powerful and rewarded for my effort of doing the quest chain, that is the beauty of vanilla, you are progressing since level 1, you are progressing when you take a new flight path, when you level 10 points in the primary profession, when you get a new talent point, thats why sod is failing, it only cares about raiding, it forgot and neglected the leveling journey.

OSRS handles the seasonal content issue via offering pretty sick cosmetics in the main game the better you do in their temporary gamemodes. It ties progression back to the main game without it feeling required to play.

My guild 100% died to 20 man raids. Other things contributed to speed it along, but pugging 8 braindead people for ST, banging our heads against a wall, and having someone leave after a wipe led to zero sense of progression and community

Crazy how all the problems Asmon has with WoW aren't issues with osrs

I think we need to stop saying "classic is easy, classic is hard" because it's just not true either way. It's easier in some places, like the ceiling of raids, and it's harder in others ways, like levelling takes a long time and pulling too many mobs can kill you more than in retail. Even then, even with the low ceiling of raids, because of stairs-like way raids are made and that you need people in AQ gear to do naxx, you need people in BWL gear to do AQ, only a very small minority of people stay through the weeks, lockdown after lockdown, to finally reach Naxx. Those people are dedicated, and I think the most dedication it takes to get there is simply having the patience to wait every single week for fucking raid lockdowns to reset. The real change that would make classic great, is removing raid lockdowns. All changes made by modern Blizzard to classic have lessened the experience, but this change would improve it. It would make degens run molten core every single day until their ready for AQ and then do AQ every single day and boom a LOT more people would be able to reach Naxx. And when I say a lot, I mean like maybe 10% instead of the current 2%. Really the most gatekeeping feature of WoW is by far the weekly raid lockdown. That's the single reason why you have to "schedule" raids to accomodate normies who "have jobs" or "have families". Who the fuck wants to play a MMO to be able to raid once every week, having to be on time on a specific day just because people in your guild have lives like WTF is this BULLSHIT? Just let people farm the fucking raids over and over again like dungeons.

I just wish that instead of adding experience boost modifiers and leveling path modifiers such as incursions… They instead added easy rune/spell book catch up for all non current content runes.

I think focusing on endgame and not leveling is the single biggest reason SOD isn't more popular. Leveling in classic was such an awesome journey.

Streamer that gets hard free carried for millions of gold GDKP's and handed BiS items supports GDKP's. BIG SURPRISE.

When entering a raid, it should scan your gearscore, if you have a high gear score it should give you an option to accept a quest and gives like 3k gold but opt you out of loot from that raid. When you kill the final boss just hand in the quest

I love that Mages can heal. When I play my mage in Cataclysm, I miss having healing and resurrection skills

SoD was announced: "Oh, so it's an added spell/talent system you explore to find on top of classic? Sounds fun." SoD was released: "Well, this is pretty cool." SoD updated piece by piece: "I'll take a break, this is getting too messy and strangely grindy." SoD current state: "Nah, looking at it feels like looking at retail - I don't get it. I'll wait for SoD 2 or something."

I wish they had implemented loot lock per boss instead of raid lockouts. It sucked spending a few hours trying to get a raid going and then bouncing before the first boss if things looked sketchy because of the lockout

yo asmon , i just started playing wow on classic cat , do you have any good tips or tricks i might be able to use to improve and try to fit in with the flock of experienced players ? currently i have a tank / healer / dps , so i can go ether way

For P1 and P2 I played on Penance (one of the smallest servers) and what killed the game was basing the first two phases around 10 mans then switching to 20 mans. It meant that most guilds built a 10 man raid team and didn't expand past that for the first two phases. It basically meant that guilds had to merge in P3 to survive. The actual game was great, it just wasn't accessible to a large part of the community on Penance.

Even after the nerfs people are still whining about how long and difficult ST is, most normal non-speed running guilds are clearing it in in well under an hour, 30-40 minutes in a lot of cases. It is an incredibly easy raid to clear, it isn't even TBC difficulty. Speed running guilds are clearing in 15-20 minutes. AQ was significantly harder than anything in SOD.

Blizz giving up on the bot fight is what made me 100% quit. In phase 1 when I couldnt even get a tag due to all the hunter bots. Said nope not for me anymore.

15:00 it’s true, the pot is good enough alone and the more your desired items drop, they get bought leaving you to get it at a steal later.

Slow progression made it feel like an epic quest to Mordor. I loved that it took months 1-60.

Phase 1 of SoD is the closest feeling I've got to playing WoW back in 2005. Classic was great but I already knew everything about it.

Could hear asmon speak about wow for hours, and I dont even play anymore You can feel his passion for the game

gdkp is so immersive. i love when the warrior goes into his wallet and pulls out his visa card of azeroth so he can buy gold and buy items not even on their bis list. I just get lost in the immersion.

im a new player to WoW and started in SoD and i can say that with the level cpa and contents being locked behind phases it allowed me to learn classic at my own pace instead of being overloaded with so much at once so imo its a good place for beginner wow players just to learn the game if anything.

As long as people are playing and paying for a subscription, Blizzard has no incentive to create anything new. the business model of just recycling old content with very little creative effort is a goldmine. and blizzard will milk it to the very last drop.

If they delete my SoD character I will never return to WoW again.

I don't think Asmon is really tuned in to why people enjoyed SoD or why they left. I'll tell you. Most people don't want to raid. They especially don't want the best gear gated behind it. The most fun I had in SOD was going around trying to gear up for raiding S1 while PVPing, or leveling alts. It was never raiding. I'm going to repeat it: for 99% of people raiding isn't fun. You know what people did way back in 2004-5? They leveled characters. Only a small percent of players ever set foot in a raid. Yet for some reason, Blizz has been catering all end game content to raiders for so long, they don't know how to do anything else. The other reason is exploits. Every new level block came with a new exploit, and you felt left in the dust if you weren't doing it. Season 2, you had people hitting level cap in like 3x the speed of the fastest previous times - cleaving through dungeons etc, then proceeding to exploit STV. So by the time someone playing even at a higher than normal pace and leveling regularly leveled up, they were already greeted by decked out level 40s. S1 was almost screwed by this too with Hunters having insanely overtuned abilities. So yeah, focus on raiding, exploits killed SoD.

I really enjoyed phases 1 and 2, but 3 felt like it had so many missteps and systems too much against the grain of Classic, and the phase 4 announced additions don't give me much confidence in them moving away from that direction Edit: sucks cause this is the only place I can Warlock Tank.

the GDKP take is probably one of your worse takes asmon xD

Recover from what? People not playing a seasonal game mode 24/7 during down time? Do people always regress into mouth breathing apes every time a game is waiting for new content? Holy

Discovery failed? Who saw this coming? That's CRAZY.

This is why private servers will defeat this pile of garbage everytime

Every class is overpowered vs. the leveling experience. Regular mobs weren't updated with new abilities as players did. The journey feels cheap, like Retail.

"This tank, is an ex-parrot"

Nightmare incursions and Sunken Temple just not being fun overall killed it for me. Also didnt help the best warrior spec before i quit was playing with hamstring for rage dump/windfury procs and no bloodthirst which felt horrible as a warrior main.

31:20 "The WoW devs view the points of friction as something to be improved upon, but I think the points of friction in vanilla WoW give it the texture that makes it a timeless game". Truest true brother. Skyrocketing people to the endgame is the very antithesis of what made vanilla special and good. The reward of a long journey.

World of Warcraft has always been a seasonal game though. They just didn't call it seasonal. Classic was seasonal because not all of the raids were out at release. Each raid release was basically a season...

Its called Season of Discovery. Its not called Season of the same old boring shit that has been out for 20 years. It shouldnt take more than 1 or 2 wipes per boss the first time to learn the mechanics. They are still super easy. With DBM it might as well be a quick time event. Also SoD is nothing like retail. People who say this have never played retail a day in their lives. SoD keeps the spirit of classic gameplay and community building with some added spells. Its an experiment with new class choices that are for fun. If you dont like it just dont play it. Also bring back gdkp. Its way more fun and provides way more pugability. GDKP also provides everyone with extra gold for doing something they were gonna do anyways. It beats farming by a landslide.

People shat on Asmon for thinking removing GDKP was a bad idea because it was a stupid take. Just because you believe you're right doesn't mean you are. Removing GDKP didn't destroy the game either.

All I ever wanted was Classic WoW but with 9 playable classes instead of only 4-5

no

anyone else doesnt find this type of humor/way of talking amusing? not funny even in its short form sarcastic way it was intended in, especially not in this where it actually conveys a longer, detailed and deeper message....very annoying actually

Even now, getting a weapon upgrade on classic means a lot more to me then getting a weapon upgrade on retail. Getting Corpsemaker axe was a huuuuuge deal for my warrior. Or Meteor Shard on my Rogue.

I think that dungeon and raid finder also destroy some of the experience ,when you need to gather group together from all the world and go together on the entrance, the game is not about fast-forward, it's more about adventures, feeling the places, gather memory's.. enjoying

Couldn't agree more on Mage Healers/Rogue Tanks/Warlock Tanks being stupid. "Ever wondered what it would be like to be a Mage Healer?" No.

We need gdkp back, sod is so boring if your character is full geared and you have nothing to do. I also agree with mage healer rogue tank etc complete useless.

though there are many problems, I am especially sad that the runes are not as creative as I'd hoped them to be

Anyone notice the Baldurs Gete 3 music in the background? Editor added that im assuming

SoD was a good try but they turned the dial way too far from the classes and the raids

We gotta stop letting people pretend like GDKP was a massively popular thing back in the day. It wasn't. Nobody did that shit in classic. I dont know a single person that actually did a GDKP run before ICC. After you geared, you did pvp, helped friends gear, and ROLLED ALTS. That's where people continued playing. It wasn't because of GDKP. It's such a lie pretending like most people just did GDKP in vanilla. Problem with GDKP is and always will be gold buying/botting. And even if blizzard bans for it, it doesnt fix the frustration. If someone buys gold illegally or profession bots for a ton of gold and they win an item over me and then get banned 3 days later for their infraction, I dont give a fuck because I still don't get the item. It doesn't retroactively go to me. It's just gone forever. And the next time it drops, another gold buyer or botter takes it and the frustration cycle repeats. Personally I don't care if GDKP is allowed or not allowed. But I do hate this narrative that it's what made people play the game back in the day. That's just a straight up lie.