How Bad Design Made Vanilla World of Warcraft a Classic

Vanilla World of Warcraft is an odd beast.

On the one hand, it clearly has an appeal that has been remarkably stable with time. It was in WoW’s early days that it underwent its meteoric rise to become the undisputed king of all MMORPGs, peaking at a population comparable to the Los Angeles metro area or the entire country of Belgium. After WoW moved on from its early awkwardness to embrace more modern design principles, fan-run private servers arose just to keep vanilla versions alive. Back in 2016, Blizzard issued a cease-and-desist to one such fan server, nicknamed Nostalrius, which had an estimated 150,000 active players. The backlash was so extreme that Blizzard is now in the process of (re-)developing their own World of Warcraft: Classic, which launches next year.

On the other hand, it’s kind of remarkable that it rose to such popularity in the first place. In retrospect, especially with the benefit of modern eyes, vanilla WoW is a mess. Why did we had to trek on foot for half an hour to even start a dungeon? Why were critical quests hidden away in obscure corners that were difficult to find without outside guides? Why were whole specializations of numerous classes completely useless in competitive play? Why were whole endgame zones almost completely empty? We might not have questioned these things at the time, but we…