ericcouch: WoW’s greatest strength is also its biggest onboarding problem: it became so culturally dominant that Blizzard forgot new players don’t inherit twenty years of context by osmosis. The world is incredible, but the game often acts like you already know why.

JYoutubeHandle999: Not even 2 weeks between videos?! I'm locked in.

Sixsten: The War Within’s giant marketing tagline was “Get BACK in the Fight”

Midnight was “Adventure is Calling You Home”

Both just wholeheartedly assume you USED to play World of Warcraft and it makes me want to punch walls

sbsftw4232: Can they not just put a "which wow is right for me" quiz in the launcher and make it a pop-up for new players?

bilateriannewt4222: Vanilla WoW is immersive. Immersion is by far the most important thing for MMORPG.

Atraira: > KOTOR box art instead of SWTOR

> SWTOR fans will remember this

lawfulwood: MYTHICAL REFRESH WITHIN TEN SECONDS

Azza_JR: Gbay making Bobby Kotick jokes? hes settled right into the community

s01itarygaming: Blizzard: "Some players might not know what a keyboard is"

Also Blizzard: "Oh, yeah, they'll totally know why it suddenly takes them 3 hits to kill something that used to take them 1 hit to kill, and how to fix that."

ericcouch: The saddest part is that the fix sounds small: sell new players on why WoW is worth playing, then guide them toward the version of the game that fits them. Blizzard has a once-in-a-generation fantasy world, but the front door currently looks like it was designed for people already inside.

Jedidiah_McCain: Well there goes my productivity.

SaltyBlakey: As a veteran let me tell you Blizzard do not expect really any new players to try classic. Retail the current version that receives new expansion like Midnight is what they think is for new players.

A big problem with Blizzard is that at some point they became terrified of all the things you have enjoyed about classic so far and took them out of retail. Some of it was cut and sold as "Quality of Life" improvements for veteran players while others changed to speed up the levelling process and help new players get to the endgame. But that just turned the entire game into a seasonal MMO and no longer a living world.

Its also pretty funny your now at the stage you see some of Blizzards big flaws with wow and you see the simple solutions. You will soon come to learn Blizzard can never just do the simple solution to fix things. They will do the Blizzard solution which usually doesn't actually fix the problem.

ericcouch: The point about the 24-hour day/night cycle is dead-on. Modern games often optimize the inconvenience out of everything, but sometimes the inconvenience is what makes a world feel real. Azeroth feels alive because it doesn’t always revolve around the player.

vanyadolly: I suspect the problem is Blizz has no idea what makes the game good, either. They were completely blindsided by classic, and I can't remember the last time I heard something positive about retail.

alan8087: If you want to understand why WoW got this way, you need to learn about how the company started, who started and built it and wow vanilla, the mindset and philosophy behind it all, how it changed over time, how it was bought by activision, how that impacted the company, who was driven out or left due to incompatible views with the direction the company was going, the different scandals that the company later faced, and ultimately, who is running it now, and how their goals and reason for doing so is so fundamentally antithetical to how this franchise was originally built and started that it's impossible to recapture that original magic.

rumplstiltztinkerstein: Kind of ironic that Blizzard is exactly the kind of people that talk a lot about UX user experience, but the experience of new users suck.

barretstone6923: Oh boy just got my coffee and clocked in at work, we're so back

1fox3: It's not too famous, they are just out of touch, understaffed and their effort are poor or missplaced

Anpeo: Gbay doing arena and BGs in his PvE gear is a vibe I'm here for

filipvadas7602: WoW quite literally became its own worst enemy. Blizzard wants ti have both the cake and eat it too, it wants an influx of new players, but forgets that said new players can't just magically absorb 20 years of lore in a few sittings, this creates a major disconnect that pleases noone.

ChrisElison: Part of what made WoW special for me is I had no idea what the game was about or what I had to do when I first started, I had to ask other people or my friend or find out for myself!

DutchMaster6: pvp gearing is something guildwars 2 did absolutely right. everyone in the pvp arena has equallized gear stats

RadPlad: When I was asked, “Why do you play WoW?” My first thought was because Chuck Norris approved it in his ad.

zachjackel: 26:55 Resetting the world is a huge error.

They have 20 years of content they're trying to throw away instead of trying to make it relevant.

They will simply never have the fame and glory of the first 10 years of WoW.

AntiZombieFortress: It's such a strange dichotomy.

Retail WoW's art style and aesthetic has changed over the years to diversify itself and attract a "wider audience" (often at the expense of the darker, more brutal warfare elements)

But then when it comes to marketting and story elements... they seem to forsake the new player that they tried to gain in the first part? For example: Today, new players meet legendary figures in their starting zones that used to take weeks of playing to achive an audience with. The new player can't determine why this story beat or character is even significant.

There's no nostalgia for new players in retail. What is the draw?

teamrip8872: I wanted to be a night elf mohawk. I was able to be a night elf MOHAWK! Thats my why.

Unchainedboar: as a 20 year player, Retail is soulless and has lost pretty much everything that made WoW magical, classic is definitely the best WoW experience

Jun 30 2026

Buy WOW Classic Gold (lvl60)