World of Warcraft Classic beta testers are reporting vanilla WoW features as bugs

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  Blizzard has released a few images of World of Warcraft Classic that cater to players’ nostalgia. Certainly, a select few dedicated vanilla WoW players will remember trying to take down Ragnaros. [credit:
  Blizzard
  ]

Nostalgic World of Warcraft (WoW) fans have been calling for game publisher Activision-Blizzard to release World of Warcraft Classic for years, and they’re finally getting their wish. World of Warcraft Classic is now in beta, but some players have been surprised by what they’ve found when playing it.

WoW Classic seeks to recreate the “vanilla WoW” experience—that is, WoW as it existed before a series of seven game-altering major expansion packs from 2007’s The Burning Crusade to 2018’s Battle for Azeroth. To achieve this, Blizzard has rebuilt the game based on archived data from back in 2005 and 2006 (patch 1.12 is the goalpost—the current game is on patch 8.1.5). The company has committed to meticulously presenting the experience exactly as it was back then—warts and all—with only a small number of unavoidable or critical changes.

The argument for this is simple: what makes classic WoW great to one player might be different from what makes it great for another. And who are Blizzard’s designers to say which old features were just good or bad design for each player? It’s an approach that shows Blizzard believes (at least to some degree) that WoW doesn’t just belong to its creators but to its fans. That struggle between authorial intent or game design orthodoxy and “the player is always right” is at the heart of many of gaming’s big contemporary controversies. But so far, Blizzard seems committed to its plan with regards to WoW Classic.