WoW Factor: What the Season of Mastery says about WoW Classic
The fracturing has begun. That’s what sticks out to me when I look at WoW Classic’s Season of Mastery limited-time experiment.To get more news about
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Obviously, this is not entirely accurate. After all, the fracturing for the classic userbase already occurred when The Burning Crusade launched and people were given the option to migrate forward or stay frozen in amber; if anything, this addition of a new server ruleset seems like a compromise to minimize or at least address extant fractures that were already present. But it also means that classic has now launched full-on into the varied rulesets that ensure a more limited and liquid playerbase along the way.
I find myself with an odd assortment of thoughts on this particular state of affairs, the sort of thing that fits nicely into a column but not neatly into a single grand conclusion. It’s definitely not an experiment that I am personally interested in playing, but I think it’s worth investigating the sort of people who are being marketed to and what these changes mean for the longer-term future of the game and seasonal changes in general.
First and foremost, I want to highlight something that’s been quietly elided in discussions about this particular ruleset change: the feeling that this is the absolute final nail in the coffin for anyone who wanted something that has colloquially been floated as “Classic Plus” more or less since the Classic servers went online. What precisely is contained therein varies, but the short version is that it’s a form of vanilla World of Warcraft with more stuff added, either cut content, totally new content, or additions to abilities and underperforming specs.
Any chance of that happening always felt slim, but this is also exactly where it would start off if it was ever going to happen. It seems pretty clear just from this first round of seasonal content that the development priorities for classic content have been laid bare. Tweaking existing content and balance is fine, but adding something new is a big no-no. That means this season and future seasons will all be balanced much more around the fixed pool of content.
Is this surprising? Not really; I figured this was a given as soon as we found out that the first expansion was coming out in Classic form. But this is a nail in that particular coffin just the same.As it stands now, Season of Mastery is a pretty solid experimental run to start doing seasonal servers because it really doesn’t require tweaking a whole lot of dials in order to make it functional. Players are going to be more firmly funneled into raid content and more efficiently pushed that way, but that’s really always been how Classic was set up. The tweaks are far more focused on ensuring that the content in question is more punishing, but it’s the same content people were always expected to be playing.
Of course, you might wonder how much can actually be done to really push that challenge element. Looking at a lot of the early raid fights in question, I think there’s only so much Blizzard can do to really make the encounters more difficult, and a lot of it runs into the basic problem that without new mechanics, it’s able only to minimize the external buffs and support it might be bringing in. Players won’t have access to as much gear or world buffs, but you still have to deal with two major things that are just naturally going to be different.
