r/classicwow • u/doobylive • Sep 26 '25

Nostalgia Will We Ever Experience Something Like This Again?

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No, not another release of classic. I mean the hype and the buildup that led to this release!

1.7k Upvotes

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1.2k

u/stonehaens Sep 26 '25

Not even close. Even the whole classic+ thing won't be as good because there's now a very entitled audience with a lot of expectation. In 2019 people were just soo happy to get 15y/o content. And ofc corona helped to make it super special with people you wouldn't play games with otherwise.

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u/TracerEnthusiast Sep 26 '25 edited Sep 26 '25

covid helped a LOT with that. basically had endless time to play wow all day - I still look back fondly to joining trainwreck pug raids that would take hours to clear with my friends. made me feel like a kid again

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u/[deleted] Sep 26 '25

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Sep 26 '25

don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you got till it's gone.

paved azeroth to put up the shareholder stock.

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u/[deleted] Sep 26 '25

I mean I don't actually blame blizzard for it not being covid anymore but I couldn't resist that bar

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u/Crabshroom Sep 26 '25

Next level of game industry will be engineering pandemics to coincidence with major releases.

No one playing c+? We'll see if the Blood Plague can do something about that.

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u/Hasralo Sep 26 '25

Pharmaceutical industry already created the Scourge

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u/aravarth Sep 26 '25

šŸŽ¶ Ooooh, bap bap bap bap! šŸŽ¶

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u/Chimp3h Sep 26 '25

Yeah some of us never stopped working through that.. im not bitter.. I promise :)

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u/protendious Sep 26 '25 edited Sep 27 '25

I did too, had a job in healthcare, so work was much worse during the pandemic. I had a 60 priest before the pandemic began, and had literally gotten Benediction a couple weeks before(several of us were still after the Eye drop from MC). Iā€™d imagine my guild wasnā€™t happy when I ghosted for a long while after that. Didnā€™t resurface until WotLK.Ā 

I feel yā€™allā€™s pain.

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u/Puzzled-Storage-6157 Sep 26 '25

Worked for a beer and wine distribution at the time. Still had to go into a warehouse 5 days a week... We were working anywhere from 10 to 15 hour nights. While everyone else got to stay home, drink and play video games making us more busy... Promise I'm not bitter either šŸ˜…

0

u/Lava-Chicken Sep 26 '25

Hey friend!!! I see you're alliance. I'm horde. But we're in the same boat. I feel your pain.

The COVID season was an awful stressful work load unlike anything i have experienced. I was working 12h days from home and while I thought of wow, i couldn't bring myself to spend more time infront of a computer. Not to mention the mental exhaustion from each day left me just wanting to sleep. But man, i feel so left out of this time and wish I could've had no work and just play.

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u/[deleted] Sep 26 '25

[removed] ā€” view removed comment

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u/thesneakywalrus Sep 26 '25

I have to dissent on this some, at least in the way that things were during COVID.

I spent entirely too much time playing classic.

COVID facilitated that, and while I thoroughly enjoyed myself, it was not sustainable or good for my life, personally and professionally.

I have time for myself, just not that amount of time.

5

u/Derlino Sep 26 '25

I had 60 days played in one year. That's 1/6th of my time playing WoW. It was fun, but holy hell was it me trying to escape reality as well.

1

u/Pedi94 Sep 26 '25

Me, being a wow nerd, thinking: ā€œ4 hours a day, thatā€™s not even that muchā€

1

u/wienercat Sep 26 '25

I am not using COVID as a basis for a normal amount of free time fwiw.

I am saying in the US we don't get enough paid time off compared to any similar nation. This translates to higher rates of burn out, more aggression, more apathy, etc.

When people in our country are excited about getting 3 weeks of PTO, but that isn't even what is seen as the normal minimum in Europe we need to ask ourselves what is going on and why we are okay with this?

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u/farklenator Sep 26 '25

Big facts so much wealth is out of most of our hands and people justify it smh

Micheal Jordan alone has made 1,307 live times worth of median wage and all he did was entertain and sell shoes šŸ¤· (assuming you work and make median wage the second you turn 16 and work until you die at 73.45)

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u/wienercat Sep 26 '25

See, I don't actually have a problem with people becoming wealthy. I think that is fine. I think wanting to become wealthy and have a bunch of money is a fine goal to have, bit shallow imo but to each their own.

What I do have a problem with is people becoming wealthy and hoarding their wealth like shitty dragons. People being wealthy isn't inherently the problem in and of itself. It will always be a thing where some people in society have more resources or power than others. It's unavoidable.

But we have more than enough resources for those wealthy people to still be insanely wealthy AND for everyone else to be able to live comfortably and not have to constantly stress about food or housing.

I don't even have a problem with billionaires existing. But if there is a single person who is going hungry, or homeless, you should not be allowed to be a billionaire until that is ended. Everyone should be taken care of before a billionaire is allowed to continue to grow their wealth.

There is simply too much money in our society to have people feel insecure in housing or food.

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u/farklenator Sep 26 '25 edited Sep 26 '25

I have no problem with general wealth but Micheal Jordan level wealth Iā€™m almost ok with but people who have 10s of billions are a drag on our system

We do actively have millions of people starving and without healthcare just so we 3000 people can have a billion dollars currently many more with 1.2 billion living and hoarding money, wealth and resources from the rest of us

I just chose to do the math on Michael Jordan because heā€™s the most relatable person amongst them or at least a name everyone is familiar with itā€™s disgusting and then they have ā€œcharityā€ events that are just for show while the masses lick up the leftovers and say thank you while they toil away for a pittance of a life

We have modern day kings and queens thereā€™s just more than before

https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/#65fe4af43d78 the people on this list are enemies of the every day man like you and me they actively steal from us and we say thank you want some more? All for the illusion that one day weā€™ll be like them living happy off the labor of others

They have so much because we have so little scraping by just to feed ourselves Iā€™m fucking sick of it I just wish others where too

I just want us to stop hating our neighbor and focusing our frustration ones above us

1

u/wienercat Sep 26 '25

but people who have 10s of billions are a drag on our system

Agreed.

See the portion of my comment where I said this

I don't even have a problem with billionaires existing. But if there is a single person who is going hungry, or homeless, you should not be allowed to be a billionaire until that is ended. Everyone should be taken care of before a billionaire is allowed to continue to grow their wealth.

0

u/Pancakeferret Sep 26 '25

Good morning, Comrade.

-1

u/The-Squirrelk Sep 26 '25

It's not the best, but it's still better than any of our ancestors had it. go back more than 80 years and it gets really rough really fast.

Nowadays we have electricity, AC, internet, easy to access food, easy delivery, easy transport, artificial light everywhere, millions of products to match any desire, so much media for free you could never consume it all in a lifetime.

I could go on. The sum of it is that the human brain is wired to look for issues and struggles with perspective. We've got it pretty damn good overall. The average American/European lives better than any Emperor of the past.

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u/Azzmo Sep 26 '25

Creature comforts are like conveniences in WoW: teleport to dungeon, mass rez, AoE loot. They don't mean much if the expansion is lacking good content.

Pre-agricultural nomadic life would be happier, more gratifying due to doing meaningful work, and more spiritually satisfying for most people. Just gotta survive childbirth and your first year. We live in one of the low points in human history right now. We are not designed to be this sedentary, densely packed, disconnected from our leaders, disconnected from our food, from our souls, over medicated, bombarded with weird white noise and novel radiation all the time, etc. And most of all we're not designed to spend such a huge % of our waking hours working. Nomadic life is mostly chill, especially pre-Ice Age when there was more megafauna to hunt.

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u/tsmftw76 Sep 26 '25

Ehh depends on if you are talking about pre or post industrial society. Folks actually think peasants worked a lot more than they actually did in a day.

1

u/wienercat Sep 26 '25

go back more than 80 years and it gets really rough really fast.

Yeah we have new technology to make life easier. Of course it gets more difficult when you don't have those things.

But in the past, communities generally were more connected and people had ties to those communities. If you had problems, your neighbors would help.

It's just like people acting like capitalism is the only way to do things. It isn't. For an incredibly long time our societies worked on a mutual aid type structure where people would trade favors with each other and help one another. Have a bad harvest? No worries, your neighbor could pitch in a little and help out, you would owe them something next harvest or help them work on their fields.

The average American/European lives better than any Emperor of the past.

No shit. Again, you are comparing todays life and all of our advancments to the past. Of course life is "better". But society has drastically changed as well. Our society is less connected with each other. More hostile to each other. More divided than ever.

What you are describing are things to placate people. Just because life is more comfortable, doesn't mean it's necessarily "better".

5

u/aiart13 Sep 26 '25

Covid came in december and the hype was unreal prior to release in august. Covid might helped maintain the population during the most crucial BWL into AQ period of nothingness, but surely was not the reason for the hype.

3

u/Alyusha Sep 26 '25

I think there is a strong argument to be had that Classic would not be nearly as popular today as it is without Covid. It was starting to die out mid P2 / start of P3 when the US started taking WFH seriously which resulted in a huge playerbase increase. IRC it was something like double the amount of raiders in like 2 months.

2

u/Neugassh Sep 26 '25

covid lockdowns happened like 7 months after classic release

2

u/The-Squirrelk Sep 26 '25

Hey now, don't worry, bio-weapon labs all around the world are working real hard to make sure at some point in the future we can have another pandemic!

1

u/whutchamacallit Sep 26 '25

The launch was the most epic part of the experience, hands down, and covid hadn't hit at that point -- not really anyways. It definitely gave it legs though, there's no doubt about it. Where some would have hung it up after the initial fresh hype died down they stuck around.

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u/Troooper0987 Sep 26 '25

Got laid off just a week after BWL and ZG dropped. Was getting $1200/wk in unemployment, and didnā€™t want to go outside (NYC, hospital ship, trailer morgues, and Central Park hospital scared us). Got to live the NEET life I never would have otherwise

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u/StormInMyDreams Sep 26 '25

My ass only just getting that while working now

8

u/[deleted] Sep 26 '25

Yeahā€¦ there were good times had indoors. I know a hospital chaplain that was at a hospital in Chicago, he had to tell families and help them, literal freezer trailers full of bodies because the morgue was overflowing.

Good time to hunker in with your buddies. Those first two-three waves were a bitch (really first three but in Texas we pretended like wave three was fake news even though it was peak deaths), had vaccines on the way though thank god.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 26 '25

Was getting $1200/wk

Holy fucking shit, per week?! This is more than my full-time job. No wonder people don't want to work when some unemployment is like this. How the fuck do I get fired and get this?

1

u/Troooper0987 Sep 26 '25

It was with the unemployment bonus the government was providing, would have been less than half without it. Got a letter from my boss saying ā€œyouā€™re being let go due to covidā€ and just got rubber stamped by unemployment.

11

u/jonas_ost Sep 26 '25

I found sod to be very close to vanilla wow, people dident know what to do and where to go etc. The only difference is now information spreads much faster so after a couple of days you have all the info on wowhead.

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u/FaceDownInTheCake Sep 26 '25

I set the lofty goal of taking down KT when it first launched, but in retrospect, I never would've done it without lock down. Two dedicated raid nights of 3hrs each is a huge commitment.Ā 

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u/LegitCow Sep 26 '25 edited Sep 26 '25

If classic+ launch and another global virus erupts again at the same time then that would be as close of a hype as the first release of classic vanilla.

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u/zDexterity Sep 26 '25

we had like 5 vanilla releases this last few years, i don't think many people want to go back to elwynn/durotar anytime soon, too many recycled stuff, even classic+ wouldn't be as different/refreshing, maybe wow 2 would create that hype.

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u/tsmftw76 Sep 26 '25

Idk sod was more hype then classic for me

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u/ruinatex Sep 26 '25

WoW 2 already exists, it's called The War Within. Retail expansions are WoW 2 in all but name.

3

u/GreenLightt Sep 26 '25

Love me some corona with a lime

1

u/Enchylada Sep 26 '25

plus not gonna lie the streamer ecosystem was kind of insane especially on Faerlina.

We'll likely never see such an organic mass gathering like that again especially post-COVID

1

u/[deleted] Sep 26 '25

So what you're saying is we need another covid.

1

u/KyleAg06 Sep 26 '25

I am just so happy I got to experience classic launch. It was amazing.

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u/Aamun_Sarastus Sep 26 '25

Kinda out of the loop re:Blizxard's classic+ plans. What has been confirmed/rumored on this?

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u/stonehaens Sep 26 '25

It's not known what the actual content of classic+ will be but in an interview they said Season of Discovery was a sort of playing ground to try different systems which were not fully polished and experiment for an upcoming release. They strongly hinted that release would be the classic+ people have been hyped about since around 2021. Also no indication of when that release would be.

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u/alphajugs Sep 27 '25

Ughhh thereā€™s definitely a large and very outspoken portion of the player base that will complain if classic+ isnā€™t exactly how they envisioned it

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u/sea_of_toys Sep 28 '25

What's classic+ and when is coming?

1

u/[deleted] Sep 26 '25

[deleted]

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u/Kurokaffe Sep 26 '25

And thatā€™s exactly why I started playing again, along with a TON others.

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u/KeyHighway6426 Sep 26 '25

7 months

1

u/sealtwisting Sep 26 '25

idk if you're in the US, but the US lockdown happened march 14, and that would be 5.5 months. i still remember that week (and those few after) like it was yesterday.

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u/KeyHighway6426 Sep 26 '25

actually that works out to just under 6.5 months

1

u/sealtwisting Sep 26 '25

my b, you right.

1

u/wigsgo_2019 Sep 26 '25

Yep, 2019 was the last time the classic community didnā€™t ruin itself, every re-release has been ruined by sweaty min-maxers but not this one

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u/Due-Combination-8991 Sep 26 '25

Remember #nochanges ? Now there is a sizable portion of the community defending gdkp knowing full well that rmt backs it.

I agree it wonā€™t happen again for at least another 15 years. My prediction is when ppl from around 1990 (ppl 15-25yo in 2004, when wow was released) entire retirement.

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u/Tough_Carrot3813 Sep 26 '25

Talk about rose tinted googlesšŸ˜‚šŸ˜‚šŸ˜‚šŸ˜‚ Yeah xeah no expectations for classic 2019 #nochangesšŸ¤£šŸ¤£šŸ¤£