Wanted: Retro Servers
Over the past few years, World of Warcraft has had two major expansions. Each raised the top limit on character level, added new areas to play in and new quests to do—targeted mainly at high level characters, since they were the ones who had already done most of the interesting stuff in the previous version of the game.
This raised a problem for a new player or a player with a new character. Before getting to the fun new stuff he had to spend a lot of time "leveling" his character to get him up to the necessary level. To solve that problem, the expansion modified the existing material, typically by making everything easier, reducing the cost in time and effort of getting a new character up to a reasonably high level.
The downside of that change was to lower the quality of the lower level material. Quests that used to provide an interesting and enjoyable challenge were now only a test of whether you had half an hour free to do them. Some players responded by persuading, or paying, higher level characters to walk their low level characters through the quest, cutting it from half an hour to fifteen minutes—and, incidentally, eliminating any point to doing the quest other than as a way of leveling the character.
Not everyone was happy with the changes; some players miss the challenges of the earlier versions. The obvious solution is for Blizzard to provide, in addition to its regular servers running the current version of the game, a few retro servers. A classic server would run the game as it existed prior to the first upgrade, a Burning Crusade server the game as it existed prior to the second upgrade. A player who wanted the fun of working through the early quests could create a character on one of the retro servers, a player who preferred the later could have a character there, and one who enjoyed both could have characters on both sorts of servers. A character from a retro server could, perhaps when he reached the maximum level, transfer to a less retro one. Transfers in the other direction would presumably not be permitted, since the new material and higher levels from the current version of the game would not fit well into the early versions.
Is anyone from Blizzard reading this post?