Which Classic?

I've got to say that I was not terribly excited by the announcement of World of Warcraft Classic Servers. I started playing in Vanilla (admittedly at the tail end) and I never really got the nostalgic hype for it. Actually, the odd thing is that it still informs my attitudes about certain classes - I still have at the back of my head the image of my Protection Paladin as something of an underdog, proving to others that Paladins can tank and don't just have to sit at the back and heal, even though Tankadins reached public credibility back in Burning Crusade, and have generally been closer to the top in the ever-shifting perceptions of tank viability even as three new tank classes have been added to the game.

My general sense is that the appeal of Classic servers is that we'll be able to experience the game as it was when the oldest players (and I guess I count among them, even though to me, coming in a year and a half after launch makes me feel like a newb compared with a lot of my guildies) first experienced it.

Unfortunately, I think that most of the change that people lament is on their side, not Blizzard's. Even if all is restored exactly as it was, it will no longer be new to you. If you've gotten used to min-maxing, checking Icy-Veins or Noxxic to perfect your spec, and expecting to get a full set of raiding gear and feel kind of disappointed if you don't have one, none of those attitudes are going to disappear just because you've stepped into a recreation of the time before you thought to do any of those things. You're never going to walk into the Barrens after getting your Troll, Orc, or Tauren to level 10 and be awed by how enormous the world just became, because you already knew it was that big, and you know what lies beyond its borders.

One of the most concrete aspects of that state of the game is that we'll have the pre-Cataclysm world. And while I stand by the revamp to questing as the most impressive thing they've done in a single expansion (such that I was never able to call Cataclysm an overall bad expansion, even if its high-level content was deeply flawed,) I, too, sometimes wish that I could revisit the dry canyons of Thousand Needles or a Plaguelands in which the Scourge is still at full strength.

In the desire to create a relatively dynamic game world - which is mostly a good thing - Blizzard has left us unable to see old things. For example, I suspect that Battle for Azeroth is going to reintroduce Hakkar the Soul Flayer as an important figure within the lore of the Trolls. But at this point, both of the major instances that involve Hakkar - the Sunken Temple (technically called the Temple of Atal'Hakkar) and Zul'Gurub have both gotten revamps. The former was shrunken down to a single floor, when it used to involve a basement and an upper floor that made the whole dungeon crawl a much longer experience. Zul'Gurub does retain Hakkar as a character, but not as an enemy. The infamous Corrupted Blood debuff from his fight, which scientists used to study the spread of disease, can no longer be attained (though of course it was also fixed during vanilla after people started spreading it outside of the instance.)

I'm sure there are many who honestly would rather level to 60 and run Molten Core and Blackwing Lair (and old Zul'Gurub) instead of continuing to move forward with modern WoW (or perhaps along with it,) but to me, the value of Classic servers is more to serve as a kind of museum piece for those things that have been lost in the game. We don't know exactly how the servers will work - whether they'll progress into the expansions after time or if they'll be stuck at some point in 2006 forever - but I think that for most people, this is going to be an interesting exercise in comparing memory and nostalgia with what Vanilla actually was.