World of Warcraft Classic goes live worldwide August 27

I think Mojang has done the best job at this with Minecraft. They actually lost some of their old versions and had to source them from the community. Now you can use the official launcher to select any version of the game - including every minor bugfix and pre-release verision.

Using specific older versions of Minecraft has always been a popular way to play the game. Some people are still playing on v 1.7.3 beta. Hell, that specific version even still has actively developed mods. Some created years after the version was released.

I personally don't agree with this even though you are entitled to your own opinion. I think this is the video game equivalent of rebooting a movie franchise. Maybe I'm pessimistic, but I see it as an easier cash grab than going forward and improving.
Blizzard failed to make their game better past the first few expansions. The majority of players are really disappointed with WoW. At this point, when a game company is clearly bad, players should be moving on to something else, creating new opportunities for other developers. I know that players won't be satisfied with anything else at the moment, I just hate that Blizzard gets rewarded for recycling their content.
It's sad that we have to roll back to more than 10 years ago to have fun again.

Furthermore, it's definitely not something I would encourage other companies to do. The beautiful thing about creation is that it brings new things. When you buy a remake, you're basically telling investors "it's ok to not take risks, we will buy the same game multiple times, you don't have to be innovative". I know that's an exaggeration but it's just to make my point clearer.

Yeah but it's still not free/open source. You're still installing proprietary bits on your machine and paying a subscription fee to a service that could one day die. This is a mere imitation of preservation and archival.

That's Burning Crusade for me. Probably more just to do with a guild I was in and the community at the time. So many good BC memories

I'm not usually one to appeal to my own authority, but: I'm a mod at r/wow and I've been involved in the WoW community for a number of years. I'm not an expert, but I think I have a good feel for the community; at least of the 1million or so people who make up r/wow, and the surrounding related subreddits.

I would guess that this will be fairly successful. There are a lot of people who fondly recall Classic WoW, and also a large number of people who played on Nostalrius (a huge Classic Private Server). Generally, most players / community members are moderately excited about Classic.

I think that there is a significant number of people who started playing at or around the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. Those people are probably not going to enjoy Classic WoW. The game at that point was really about grinding through things, and there have been a plethora of conveniences added to the game; if you've only experienced the game with those added conveniences, I think it would be difficult to not have them. They've also experienced a game that at the top end had much more depth than classic, where raids mostly amounted to the cat-herding-esque task of getting 40 people to show up at the same time and head in approximately the same direction, while doing one or two simple mechanics. Raids have evolved to be much more mechanically complex, and WoW has really turned into a game in support of the raids that they create. Classic was certainly more world-oriented, and also quite PvP oriented.

It'll be interesting to see how the two co-exist. I'm going to be playing (I think my guild is going to form a vanilla guild of all rogues, with maybe a couple of healers) and I'm looking forward to it, but I'm also cognizant of the fact that I'm not going to be raiding, grinding pvp titles, or really doing much if its going to take a hundred hours to get anywhere... but the joy of WoW (classic or otherwise) is that you don't have to go anywhere or have plans. You can just play in a pretty big, open world.

OSRS thrived because the game got new and exclusive content. There are plenty of quests, zones and items that are exclusive to that version of the game.

Almost every new update had been put to player referendum, where the players get a huge say on if an update makes it into the game and in what way the update is implemented. The only times they didn't do this were updates designed to uphold the integrity of the game (e.g. Duel Arena tax) and the controversial 2017 Pride event.

WoW's classic community by comparison is full of purists who vehemently hate any change, which is a stark contrast to the OSRS community that has accepted change as long as it doesn't result in a shittier game experience. A lot of them have been up in arms over things like how spell queuing will work, the graphics options available to players, the game's loot system and the question of whether to shard crowded low level zones to reduce lag.

Class balance is also a major concern in Classic WoW that the vanilla purists would flip their shit over if Blizzard dared to patch the game. For instance:

• Rogues were overpowered in 1v1 PvP fights to the point where they could indefinitely stunlock and whittle any opponent down to zero health. This was the reason why Preparation was nerfed in the TBC prepatch to no longer reset Blind's cooldown.
• There were plenty of dumb talents that existed in the game, such as Redoubt, Reckoning and Blood Craze which procced on taking a critical strike. Two of these are Protection Paladin talents which were both worthless because the entire point of tank itemisation was to stack enough Defense to become uncrittable.
• Vanilla WoW gear itemisation was terrible. Tier sets were only tailored for one particular spec while Hunters scaled from a clusterfuck of different talents like Spell Penetration, Arcane Damage, Agility, Spell Crit, Critical Strike and Attack Power.
• Many specs were not viable in raids. Druids, Priests and Paladins were only viable as healers. Warriors were the only class that could tank. Others were typecasted into just being one spec ponies.