I don't think that I would normally be compelled to subscribe to World of Warcraft, having gotten enough of my fill in the past, but WoW Classic was a huge draw. After Pie and I had started playing WoW at the end of Wrath and got really engrossed into it, we would often wonder what we missed out on had we played when the original game launched. The question took root in our minds so much that we sought to play on a private server which, incidentally, ended up making us sad that we missed out on the original experience. We rather enjoyed all the older systems that they had and could see some of the brilliance of the original design that had since been eroded as "quality of life features". It felt like, in catering to players laziness and/or making optimizations, they ended up eroding parts of what made the game special, and we would reflect on that a lot after playing on a private server for about a couple months.

A friend of ours ended up paying our way for a month in WoW classic to play with him and it was nice to check out just how alive the game was. Zones were bustling with people...random buffs from players were huge boons, scrimping to save the scant amount of copper you had to buy a bigger bag or one day save for a mount was satisfying in its own right.

It really made us happy that Blizzard re-thought their take on the merit of WoW classic, and it seems like they have learned from the experience and are hopefully carrying some of those lessons forward to the retail version of the game. Retail WoW would still be enticing to us for the zones alone; just being able to enjoy the scenery and the way the zones are crafted is something we both really enjoy, but the base game play was just too easy. With so many overworld enemies being so squishy, the encounters just became annoyances rather than engaging; the battles don't need to be long, but the threat of death should always be present; it keeps players on their toes and encourages cooperation when infiltrating camps of enemies~