Westfall Stewing

From a purely "and what did we achieve today, hmm?" standpoint, the answer is "not bloody much", which is the entire point of Classic. I tromped around Westfall killing some wildlife, bemoaning that maybe one out of four goretusks had livers and stumbled across a beach covered in crabs. These are my beloved loot crabs from days long past. They provide a couple of types of meat, which is useful for people leveling cooking and the occasional pearl, which I think is used in making rings? At any rate, they are safe and easy kills and although their meat doesn't fetch much now (because the demand isn't there yet and supply is high), I made a footnote to come back in a few weeks to clean up.

Between collecting assorted boar parts, shooting dozens of crabs for fun, and completing the westfall stew quest, I was able to reach level 12 and thus gained the ability to heal ScratchFever. He himself has made it to level 11 and level 4 loyalty so his appetite, while still unreasonable, is at least manageable. After collecting nearly half a gold, I blew all but a few silver on training and an underpriced 8-slot bag. I have everything trained except a melee movement debuff, but it was either that or a bag and honestly, I value inventory space so much more.

I also created an alt because YES, I AM THAT TYPE OF PERSON. Thus a new human priest was born. I played through the Northshire Abbey and had an insane amount of fun randomly buffing and healing people as we collectively murdered a billion kobolds and wolves. Upon reaching level 5, I made it down to Goldshire and called it a night. This will be a fun character to piddle around with and the knowledge that at some point people will laughingly tell their friends that they teamed up with "Somerando" to heal their Deadmines run gives me such a wicked grin.

Really enjoying Classic. There's no push for dailies/weeklies, no general sense of "OMG! I'm falling behind!" or FOMO, particularly if you mostly solo. It's a leisurely stroll that costs $15 a month.

From a business model standpoint, it's interesting to see two sides of the same coin from the same product over its lifespan, particularly running side-by-side.

Classic is your "gym membership". If you can get lots of people paying to play, but kind of half-assing it, you're winning! The social and exploration aspects are what keep people engaged moreso than a higher ilevel.

Retail is the casino-- you want to keep people present and pulling the slot machine levers for the dopamine fix. Everything must get done and it must get done quickly!
It relies heavily on "sunken cost fallacy" to keep people engaged.

Here I -almost- started writing a treatise on the contributing factors over the years that led to this shift in perspective, (phasing, cross-server grouping, warforging/titanforging, homogenization of loot, simplification of statistics, etc.) but it's enough for me to recognise it's a different draw and that draw is far beyond mere nostalgia.