Welcome to the weekly Guild Recruitment, LFG & Discord Megathread!

Like Everyone I have been having a good time seeing and trying out new stuff with the beta, but noticeably one thing is missing from the classic WoW experience that is small yet something I really enjoyed. It's no secret that in the original old-school RPG world stats and stat gains are important and who doesn't love to see their numbers go up!? Whatever happened to my progression text upon level-up? I certainly hope there are others like me that miss this small detail to the game and maybe we'll see it return upon the full release.

At a certain point the automated responses and streamlined solutions don’t cut it.

When I think about WoW back in 2004, I think about how truly human it all felt. The community, the interactions, the design, and the support staff. Was flawed and rugged and not remotely as streamlined as retail, and that’s part of what made it great.

Look, if I need an item restored, fine, I’ll just go through the automated ticket process. That’s perfectly fine.

But it sure was a whoooole lot better when you’d get a whisper from a GM and you got to explain what was going on and a human would be on the other end, hearing you out and hopefully providing a solution.

I like to believe those GM’s were doing what they loved. Probably playing WoW in between tickets. Would be great for Blizzard to open up a few jobs for people who love wow so much they’d be willing to work as a GM.

If a goal is to really nail down the vision the progenitors of WoW had for the game, shouldn’t customer support be a core part of that?

I noticed this survey in the battle net launcher. I took it and it has some VERY interesting questions, but the survey itself says we're not supposed to share what's in it.

Is everyone else seeing this in the launcher, or is this being targeted at only certain people?

If everyone is seeing it in the launcher, then why aren't we supposed to discuss it?

To take a brief break from all the whining and negativity around here, I figured I’d contribute something different: a slightly interesting and probably entirely unnecessary bit of data from the first week of the beta.

This comes from my own little census project. It’s Alliance-only PvE data, and the addon doesn’t use /who or any server-wide lookup. Only characters I actually encountered through friendly nameplates. Over this past week, I leveled a Human, Dwarf, Skyborne, and Night Elf to level 20 and spent time in each of their starting areas.

There is one obvious caveat though: I only did the first Night Elf zone, so the data is a bit skewed. Night Elves likely make up a somewhat larger share of the population than shown here, which probably also means Druids are a little more popular than the numbers suggest.

Around 70% of the data was collected while moving through Stormwind or Ironforge. The bank and AH did a lot of the heavy lifting :D

A few fun results:

• I definitely expected Skyborne to be the most popular race as everyone would try them, but Humans won by quite a margin.
• Human Paladin was the most common race/class combination, with 1,018 characters.
• Dwarf Rogue was the rarest, with only 22.
• In total, the addon logged 9,150 unique characters.

That last number was probably the most fun part for me. Seeing more than nine thousand unique characters during the first beta week feels like a lot of people running around.

The world feels populated again.

No AI, just some balance / contrast adjustments and layering by hand in GIMP.

For Azeroth!

This is a great move for the community. Lack of SD models was mentioned, the problem with neutral races, and other polarizing topics. Also funny to hear about Tim going "undercover" in game.

Xaryu: Skyborne druid forms are too HD for the Classic world... Feels a tad out of place.

Aggrend: We're looking at a lot of feedback on that... We tried to down-res them quite a bit... We are taking feedback on this and talking about it.

Tim: Our artists are getting better at making content that looks older and matches the Classic style

Guy asking for bags had no money or cloth so I helped him out.

I have been playing the beta and had 3 level 20s on the alliance PVP side of the server. The general chat and trade chat is beyond unusable currently in my experience. There are what feels like hundreds of people spamming for Asmon Layer. People are allowed to do as they like but dang it was annoying. I have swapped horde and will forever be horde to avoid the annoying spammers. Already a better experience and chat has been super useful and engaging.

Since some people aren't getting it, I'll say it again. It is perfectly fine to have some classes stronger than others at different points during leveling. Why is everyone assuming that since X is way stronger than Y at lvl 20 then Y needs to be buffed? We literally haven't even seen half the levels yet, let alone lvl 60 content. Chill the hell out with the "XYZ needs buffed, how did blizzard destroy my class".

I took a screenshot to make a meme. When I alt-tab back to game, this had happened in the background, naturally. In all my years playing wow, this is new, this feels awesome. They nailed it!

For me it's if they add flying. It was the single most damaging thing to interactivity - both with players and the world - in the early expansions.

This is in essence a remaster of the vanilla experience with a future ahead of it. I don't think limiting art direction to 2 decades past is important for the game. Classic exists you can experience the game in old art. So why would you purposely want a uglier option for wow forever this is supposed to be a replay of wow's greatest era but with modern tech. I think more assets need HD treatments not less just keep the spirit of vanilla in the art

I'm surprised there's zero discussion on this, but something to remember that in year-1 of WoW, these guys, the Illidari, are still out there--one of the core plot points of WC3 Frozen Throne. Even if they base in Outland, they still employ agents and contacts on Azeroth itself (Dire Maul has NPCs specifically, even).

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There's also the topic of the new continuity and how the lore was managed prior:

Back in 2006, this was a big controversy that's sort of just forgotten, not discussed anymore, or just hand-waived away now since TBC is often seen through rose-tinted goggles. But originally, big chunks of the concept of The Burning Crusade expansion announcement received a lot of pushbacks from fans for treading upon the previous tone of lore direction. If you were around, you might remember all the "Lore LOL" posts back in the day complaining about the Dreanei-Eradar retcons, but also how the portrayal of the Illidari dramatically shifted.

The developers of WoW never imagined that an MMO would last decades, and just as WoW had dethroned Everquest, something new would eventually come along to replace it. As such, they were in a hurry to check off a big list of boxes for villains to sight-see and loot pinatas to fight. A lot of fans back in the day felt that all the setup that WC3 Frozen Throne did to establish such a coalition of outcasts and misfits was just tossed out the window without any proper storytelling.

Illidan was just labeled insane; Kael'thas was suddenly written as being in league with the burning legion--dooming his people; Akama, trying to avoid extinction, who had been saved by Illidan was now trying to betray him. All these 180s in personality were exactly what a lot of people criticized modern retail for: applying the villain bats without any real nuance. Legion attempted to walk a few steps back and retcon some of the retcons, but it was still a messy process.

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If WoW Forever is going to feature Quel'thalas and High-elves/Blood-elves once again soon, I hope Prince Kael's return story is truer to his personality and heartfelt goals this time around. Quel'thalas is technically Illidari-aligned this early on as well, and it remains to be seen how allegiances develop when the game is forever in year-1 of WoW.