But that's not really what's happening here. I'm not generally a fan of dictating design by popular consensus, and I think that developers can get into a lot of trouble by trying to follow the whims of a Reddit thread rather than their own design sense. That's the lesson: listen to what fans want. But sometimes it's best to just listen to what the market was saying, and in this case, the market was saying that it wanted to go back to 2004. Most developers spent the better part of the last 15 years trying to knock barriers down and streamline a player's access to fun, and now they are for some reason demanding that things become difficult and unpleasant again. The love of classic servers was about rejecting the dungeon queue vision of an MMO, and it's easy to see why a large-scale modern developer would be perplexed by that. You do not need to trek through the plaguelands to reach the Scarlet Monastery: you could, but it wouldn't matter.
And yet it has a way of annihilating the world in which it exists: dungeons are no longer strongholds in particular places but just arenas in the ether. It's a defining feature of modern MMOs, making for a streamlined, seamless experience with no downtime. I think a lot about the dungeon queue, which lets you broadcast your willingness to fight some baddies in a small instance and then teleports you off to a randomly selected battle where you can hop right into your chosen role. It's both a love of a property that has now lasted longer than anyone imagined and a tickling desire to revisit old game systems, and it's that last bit that Brock rejected in that famous quote. World of Warcraft Classic is not just weaponized nostalgia, even if it definitely weaponized nostalgia. What caused the change in heart? Good sense and a desire to make money, mostly.
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