I feel like I should write a post with my final thoughts on this topic, I was the guy that started the original thread that inspired this change I guess.
It 100% boils down to what the players want, most likely the best thing for Chero and his team to do is to release 1.12 tuned MC/BWL, because it appears it is what the majority would like. This is where things get interesting and I will try my best to convince you why this won't bring back the vanilla you knew or heard about from other players.
I want to point out that pre-activision this was not the way blizzard did things, doing what the majority want. They made the choice to balance end-game raiding for the top 5% of raiders and if you want to argue against this point then I will just bring up the point of how few guilds even killed C'thun, even long after naxx was released (your opinion may differ depending on what server you were on).
I will warn you that when you listen to the lowest common denominator, you WILL get a game that looks how retail does now (difficulty-wise). That's not to say there isn't very challenging content in retail with the end mythic bosses, but 95% of the game all the way up to that point is a complete facebook tuned game (leveling mobs, dungeons, "heroic mode"). So you have 95% of the game tuned for the "casual"/normal players, and 5% tuned for the core raiders which is the best way to do it business-wise, because the percentage of difficult content matches the same percentage as those players. However this massively sucks because for core raiders, you basically have a tiny amount of content aimed at you, it's difficult to justify spending a monthly fee when you are not the target audience of 95% of the content in the game. But that does not matter to blizzard, because if 5% of players quit the game over this then they still have the 95% to profit from.
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What I will say is I am slightly disappointed to see how few core raiders seem to turn up to these servers, when most of you want a 1.12 server and not a progressive server. Most of us have moved on it seems, but some of us cannot find a true replacement for old wow, because it does not exist anymore in the mmorpg genre.
And no, releasing all the bosses post-nerf 1.12 is not a progressive server. If you do that and gradually release the raids, then it is a limited content server, where your core raiders don't have anything to do but anticipate AQ40, which is the first raid that poses any challenge & fun in 1.12. You can all spout the buzzword "Blizzlike" a thousand times over, but the fact that AQ and Naxx does not exist in your 1.12 server is not blizzlike. It is time to accept the fact that if you want the real deal, then you're going to have to adjust some things in the year 2015, 10 years after the games initial release. People have changed if you have not already noticed.
If people want Feenix vanilla 1.12.1 private server wow v2.0 with actual working scripts and non-corrupt staff then as it stands you've found it, but that is not progressive vanilla, it is not "1.0" (figuratively speaking).
I'm sorry guys, but if your vanilla raiding experience goes as far as what you've seen on private servers so far then I have some bad news for you. Maybe its nostalgia taking its toll where you only remember the good parts of vanilla and none of the bad. The endless forum QQ that all the classes are unbalanced or have useless specs. The 100s of unfair wipes because the boss decided to crit/crush your tank twice in a row or taunt was resisted, good game try again. You've spent an hour on the boss wiping and all of the trash respawned, too bad clear it again. You've been wiping on Ragnaros for 2 hours? Aaaand he's gone. These are things that are designed to slow down progression and stop players from beating the content too quickly, or they risk having no content progression to do for months until the next update.
Newsflash: It is ok for frustrating/unfair/imbalanced aspects of the game like these to exist, because it is what makes the game so satisfying when you are finally victorious.
Without the endless wiping and therefore mandatory long consumables list, excessive farming is not a requirement. Old popular gold farming spots like Tyr's Hand are all but abandoned on private servers, because you do not need to farm a couple hundred gold a week on maintenance. There is less competition for herb spawns and world pvp suffers as a consequence in almost all high level zones bar blackrock mountain. It appears that the majority do not want the hardcore vanilla from 2005, they want the version that was designed to allow players to catch up on as much content as possible, as they are going to miss it otherwise due to the Burning Crusade expansion looming. Why do we need to rush through all the early content? The server will remain 1.12 forever, we have all the time in the world to wipe for weeks and farm a few thousand gold to beat the current content. Even if you do not have as much free time as you did as a kid, you too will eventually beat all the content if you play here for long enough, it is inevitable in a time-locked mmorpg.
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Why do below average guilds feel that it is their right to beat all of the content before the next raid is released? There are catch-up mechanisms in place which will be released in a future updates (D2, ZG, AQ20) that are designed to allow you to beat what you could not before. This is the mentality of the WoW players of today, and it is why multiple difficulty settings exist on retail, because you people want to beat all of the content when everyone else does and not feel left behind other guilds. This is what I like to call the opposite of a special snowflake or in a more degrading term, communism. That concept was not included in the design philosophy of vanilla, and it was better that way in my opinion.
Please do not bring up the point that fire resistance gear or Aqual Quintessence is going to slow any guild down much. Some of us have been in the private server scene for over 5 years now and have seen exactly how progression pans out after enough players in a single guild have reached level 60. I don't care how perfect you think the scripting is, because at the end of the day the problem is not a coding flaw, it is a problem in the patch that your server is running on.
Also tuning the raid after release is a very bad idea, it breaks the satisfaction of progression when you have already beaten the boss, and I am certain that I am not alone when I say that I would be happy to test and help fine tune your raids before the server is launched to get the difficulty curve right.
Vanilla was not a golden egg, it was a golden egg surrounded by a river of lava, a pit of spikes and guarded by hungry T-rex's. These are the things that made vanilla great, the sheer difficulty, time consuming and unfairness of the entire game. Challenge brings people closer together, wiping is a big part of the experience even if it seems frustrating at the time, this I wish more people understood. You will never get your taste of true vanilla without these elements, its a perfect pie with only half of the ingredients.
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Those of us old hardcore raiders who are scattered, wandering looking for a home who still believe that pre-activision wow was the best mmorpg to exist are out of luck when it comes to vanilla, because a server has never existed for us, peroid. I find this ironic because raiding was originally designed to appeal to exactly these kinds of players (the original everquest crowd), yet the developers of most private servers either fail to realize or on purpose balance the game to be even easier than retail, appealing to only the absolute lowest end of the spectrum or pvpers that don't give a shit about pve and just want their gear asap.
The first server to exist that these kind of players can call home will be Corecraft, which is the first true 2.0 progressive TBC server. But deep down I and many others who prefer vanilla over TBC long for the day that a true "1.0" progressive vanilla server exists that we can come home to.
I guess you can call this my final attempt at convincing those of you who have forgotten, or were not there to experience what it was all about, where vanilla wow got its reputation from. Most will probably disagree here and that is fine, everyone is entitled to their own opinions. You will all have fun here regardless and this will probably be an awesome server for you guys, because you are the target audience.