Quote Originally Posted by Apatheist View Post
Why? Recent experience on private servers seems more trustworthy than 15 year old memories to me. Pretty much all of the people I know that play on private servers also played retail vanilla.

Judging by what we've seen so far on beta private servers actually seem harder than classic. Players that have come from private servers are the ones complaining that everything is too easy and Blizzard have been trying to convince them the beta values are correct. If anything, the evidence so far suggests private servers are overtuned.
There have been several people, like Esfand, StaySafe, and TipsOut (whether you like any of them or not), who've been playing on private servers religiously, for years, only to repeatedly admit, on stream, that Classic is not the same as any private server they've played on, and the knowledge they've gained from private servers is not exactly carrying over to Classic.

So, with all of the missing information that private servers don't have and are forced to make guesses at (Nano from Nostalrius has admitted this multiple times in several interviews), I wouldn't fully trust whatever anyone has "learned" from them.