The Hurt Locker of MMOs

Let's wade into a minefield, shall we?

Okay, I didn't, but @shieldsftw from YouTube sure did with this video he released a couple of days ago:

At first I was going to pass this video by because I figured it was going to get pretty inflammatory really quick,

From Tenor.com and the movie Anchorman.

but it actually didn't turn out half bad.

I do applaud Shields for the intestinal fortitude to go asking questions of people on Reddit and the WoW Forums, and as someone who plays both Classic and Retail he kept an open mind about the Classic players' opinions on the matter.

Go watch it yourself if you want, because I'm going to briefly comment on the video.

I could get behind most of the reasons why people prefer Classic --I've mentioned quite a few of them myself over the years-- but I do wonder whether the "Warcraft Feel" complaint comes more from PvPers and Horde players than PvE and Alliance players. Most of the complaints I've seen about Retail from that angle come about when I'm in a Battleground, so I suspect that there's an inherent bias in that direction. Still, I can point to plenty of times in "Classic WoW" (such as TBC and Wrath) where NPCs are all about their feelings and/or coming together for the good of all, so the complaint about a "Disney-ification" of Retail kind of falls on deaf ears for me.

However, in the ending, where Shields simply says "there's no way for Retail to change to bring back Classic players" I do agree with. Retail has changed too much for someone who prefers an open world that isn't driven by an overarching storyline and a (relatively) low complexity for gameplay and design to find a place to fit in. There's all this game world that Blizzard is sitting on in Retail, yet everybody is funneled into the same few zones in the current expansion, and there's no encouragement to go out and explore unless you're out transmog or achievement hunting. You can't simply drop into a zone (such as, say, Ashenvale) and just do a couple of quests here and there because everything from post-Cataclysm onward* is designed with a purpose in mind. Blizzard has a story they want to tell, and that may not be the story you want, but good luck trying to avoid it.

Okay, this is an option, but trying to tell a
reader to "not read the quest text" is like trying to tell
the sun not to rise in the morning. From Reddit.

Since you can't turn back time and tell Blizz that maybe it's a better idea to not go all in on making sure there's a story everywhere, especially once an expansion is no longer current and the content becomes very dated, Retail is what it is. 

Just watch out for those landmines. 

*I'd argue from Wrath Classic onward, but the reworking of the Old World by Cataclysm largely wiped out the old unfocused open world that existed in Vanilla. If you want non-directed zones, you have to go to TBC's version of Outland, and that's about it.