To echo what I said before, Velious released on Agnarr yesterday. One of the guilds grinded to get enough people flagged for Sleeper's Tomb then rushed in and woke the Sleeper, which not only fucked every other guild but theirs as well since. For those that don't know, once the Sleeper is awoken a bunch of targets in the zone vanish along with their loot tables, many of them are unique (like the gnome illusion mask) while others are highly valued, like the tradeable Sceptre of Destruction.
A bunch of their guildies have jumped ship too outright quitting while DBG has dismissed it as "All part of the Classic experience".
Keep in mind many servers back in the classic era held off waking the Sleeper to allow lesser guilds a chance at them including many of the PvP servers where you'd expect griefing to happen. On Rallos where I played it was an agreement by several guilds to wake it together to attempt a kill, which became the first legit Sleeper kill in the game.
Beware of this infecting any Classic WoW server.
Funnily enough many of the core gameplay mechanics in EQ began that way. Originally Feign Death pulling of mobs was looked on as an exploit and discouraged, until the community convinced SoE that the game was near impossible without it.
Much the same happened with the Cleric spell Complete Heal and raiders adapting the spell to do healing chains of it to keep the Main Tank up when it was meant to be used to heal the tank up after a fight ended.
I played on Project 1999, and the "community" had changed from 2001 when I had played EQ. It only took one wipe, and all the players would leave a group. They would make excuses, leaving one after the other. After a while I had been trained that I should feel awkward and distrustful in a small group. A big group was what they wanted, and powerleveling, and they said "I got an invitation to another group. Bye!" They were shameless, and common courtesy was extinct. Groups were disbanded with dead members, and corpses unretrieved. By level 20 I was playing with guilded players (Project 1999 had mega leveling guilds, unlike EQ as I remember it) who refused to split coins, and played dumb after they were asked to. I contacted an officer in the guild (who was a level 60 bard, and who had been pulling trains to "help" lowbies, boring them to tears with unsolicited powerleveling)and he said more or less that "nobody cares". This was the same EQ in which I, in 2001, in Velketer's Lab, after an aggressive player angered me, and I trained or kill-stole a few spiders from him, had to resign from my guild, and became a pariah on the server. Everyone was twinked, and soloed brazenly in the most overcrowded dungeons. I got the nastiest message from a monk who said that he had claimed by himself the fireplace camp in Unrest (the only zone at that level in which we could group): "FP is camped. Get out kid." after my cleric, who was solo and untwinked, pulled one mummy. Many players spoke in strange foreign English in lowercase letters like cave-dwellers, uttering only two or three abbreviated words at a time, and seemed willfully malicious and bitter, refusing to obey the group leader and several times I saw them attempt mutiny along the lines of (and this was their style of writing): "had enough boyz... pm me for new group". It was a base free-for-all. And equally bad was when I a few times saw players who made an attempt to role-play, which was very common in EQ, which did not initially have a role-playing server, and so had it spread across all the servers, and it was still done openly in 2001, and the response could not have been more sinister. Someone was role-playing being drunken from Elven wine in /shout, and he got the response "... what?". And another person was offering to hand out drinks in a group or dungeon, and the silence afterwards was overwhelming.
As classic WoW will not be a private server like Project 1999 it will surely be worse. I predict the worst doom for this game. It has only been announced, and I have already read things such as "dungeon finder","class balance","what the players want", "mount prices","battlegrounds","running to bg portals". One trouble with "classic WoW" is that they did not know what they wanted it to be then. First they wanted it to have PvP, and then they made guards overbearing, and towns could no longer be raided. And then they added battlegrounds, which went against the previous world PvP, and then they made guards "dishonorable kills". First they wanted the good items to be obtainable only in raids, but then they changed the 5 man dungeons to have special quests for good loot, and they changed the loot that already was there, to make it "better" (simplification of itemization was an ongoing trend) "Classic" was not a cohesive or unified period, and the expansion was a complete reversal. From what happened in TBC it seemed clear that they did not like the original World of Warcraft, not the 40 man raids, not even the honor system that they had added half-way through, as if they could not make up their minds what they liked. For the sake of their ever-changing vision, they tore down all the 40 man guilds, completely invalidated all the equipment that players had gotten in raids and especially that that the high warlords and grand marshalls had gotten, and that had been a tremendous feat that nobody can ever understand who was not one himself (I was a high warlord). TBC left me with a title and nothing else. Naxxramas was already offering competitive weapons to mine as a drop from trash. The only thing that was ever constant in WoW, whether classic or the expansions, was change. Now I ask how can a company, whose greatest fear seemed to be that players could ever have a "complete character" who could be retired, come back in a few months and not be a hopeless gimp, truly offer a classic experience, which is by definition within fixed parameters and unchanging?
Classic World of Warcraft (i.e. free-for-all in Light's Hope kind of classic) is a noble goal, but better MMORPGs of this kind could be made into classic servers, such as Lineage 2. They have one, but it is not in America sadly. And that raises the point that an American company, especially Blizzard, seems the least likely to handle well a classic server, whereas many Korean MMORPGs remained classic in America for several years. The quests are vain. Real solo players would prefer an MMORPG like Ragnarok Online or Lineage 2. Is it possible that Blizzard or many of its customers can understand or appreciate anything that is not like games today? I doubt it. The talking heads are where they are, because they like to talk. But when a game is played the talking stops. I am doubtful that a classic WoW can happen.
For all that the idea of a classic "solo MMORPG" is a rich one, but with the Internet being the virtual Baghdad or London that it today is, I think the strange amalgam of cultures and divers players will in the end unseat the game among general distrust, selfishness, alienation, and a feeling that something is wrong. And that wrongness will be blamed on the "old game", rather than Blizzard, who, many years ago, sold the game far downmarket. People who liked the original WoW will not be playing it now. I quit with each expansion that they announced, so poor were their decisions. The daily quests, resilience, arenas, badges, and Monty Hall "epics" stand as the worst decisions that I have seen in an MMORPG, and they only happened in the first expansion. I could tell the crowd had changed in TBC when I was able to join a "pick up raid". And then they began to say "looking for three more CC", and in WotLK "gear score must be...". But by then it did not bother me, because I had already lost my items twice, and shrugged at the 20th "Of the Cold Wastes" that flew by me on a dragon 10 times his size. In the original game you could tell who was there to chat, because of their items. And when Warsong Gulch came up then the men were separated from the boys. That was all lost in TBC, the good times in Azshara and Light's Hope, the community, knowing and seeing people on your realm, the conflict, treasure chests, exploration, rankings, guilds, respect for other players, true power, and meaningful PvP. Could that all be resurrected? Yes but will the company who eagerly destroyed it be able to do so? It is my guess that they did not like it then. Why in the world would they like it now, 14 years later?
