Retail Players and their Obsession with Dictating the Classic Experience

As someone who lived through the entire “wall of no” era of wow forums… here’s my take.

The promise of classic’s potential always was that it could somehow influence and inspire future retail design. You can go back and read constant articles and posts from devs referencing this as the potential.

Somewhere along the way though retail became furious that 7 years after classic launch that Classic has stolen the internet zeitgeist of WoW’s image. All the internet news on wow since then has been mostly through the lense of what is happening in Classic.

Classic 2019 launch loot drama, Olympus and APES videos, hardcore tiny violin, hardcore only fangs with pirate software, etc.

There are countless wow classic videos that have topped millions of views and an entire cottage industry on new players experiencing vanilla for the first time recounting their journey 1-60, but retail videos just aren’t popular at all and struggle to break 100k views no matter the subject.

Only retail news I’ve heard of is a gm losing is job to simp for a girl by clearing her m+. In the last 7 years.

Retail has gone through 4 expansions and they’ve all been lukewarm tbh.

They feel entitled to whatever Classic has going on because it has somehow defaulted to the most mainstream view of their favorite game— but this version they can’t tolerate to play because it’s an actual mmorpg and not a seasonal action rpg like retail.