I was shocked how much time I've poured into the game with Classic (and I wasn't even looking forward to it, I've never touched a Vanilla server and didn't have much interest). I always assumed that wow was like a virus, super virulent when you first get it but that that intense focus would never return because I've had that flu before. (I don't want to talk about my time /played the first 8 months but it was... more than 4 hours a day sustained over months).

I think for me it is working for the talent point (which feels like a meaningful choice in the moment as you level, even if blizzard wants to argue that "everyone ends up with the same spec anyway) and spell upgrades. I'm also really entertained by being poor, I started the game with 5g in BC and peaked at about 3.3 million back when that was an impressive number. I never had to choose between a flight and buying a useless spell and everything feels so meaningful. The nature of the questing is also part of it. I have been uncomfortable with what I describe as a "theme park roller coaster" feeling for several expansions, like you climb into the cart and theno do all the quests in an exact order and you are just showing up and following the next arrow (is doing the zones in any order you like really meaningful?). I also like that areas start hard, but become easy. I think that nerfing questing to make it so that you don't outlevel zones was a terrible mistake of saminess.

I'm an impatient player in retail, bitching about having to be a "cockroach" when my flying gets taken away, but somehow I'm still playing a game where it routinely takes me several minutes to run back where I was going. on my slow little feet!

Qualities I am loving (in order of importance)
  • Talent points
  • Questing in a free world not a theme park
  • Buying spells as an event/reward as you level
  • Danger/challenge (I die so much) - choices I make on talents etc affect this! it matters!
  • Nostalgia for original characters



On the other hand, people at blizzard HQ must be hating their lives. All it took to get back real passion and what has to be hundreds of thousands of subs was to undo more than a decade of their work?