The Short Version
Seven things a veteran MMO critic says retail World of Warcraft got wrong, and the fact that Riot has committed to none of them.
What happens to a world after the patch that replaces it?
That question sits underneath most of a 26:45 video Preach Gaming published on September 8, two days before he flew out to BlizzCon. On paper it is a prediction video about Classic Plus. In practice he keeps stopping to name the thing that made a Classic Plus necessary in the first place, and by the end there are seven separate failures on the table. None of them is a bug. They are all decisions somebody made, and kept making, patch after patch.
Riot has made none of them yet. That is why this one is worth a RuneGrove reader's time rather than a Warcraft reader's. Riot Discovery Studio is early enough that all seven are still open tickets, and two of the people who will help answer them came out of Blizzard: WoW's PvP lead of eleven years and an engineer who shipped WoW Classic.
They are all decisions somebody made, and kept making, patch after patch.
Who Is Talking
A former hardcore raid leader who Blizzard flies in when it wants to know what is broken.
Mike Lester has been making World of Warcraft videos as Preach Gaming since the raiding scene still had something to prove. He led hardcore raid teams. He interviews developers on camera. His usual mode is not hype, it is taking a system apart until the design intent falls out of it, and that is the mode this video is in.
Mike 'Preach' Lester
Preach Gaming
He is not guessing from outside the building. He is guessing from just inside the door.
The access is the reason his read on BlizzCon is worth anything. He describes being pulled off the floor during the Undermine race to world first, mid race, in Germany with the Echo team, for a 45 minute private Blizzard call that turned out to be the BlizzCon announcement. He describes the Boston housing think tank, where a room of creators got told what was coming and then got to play it. He notes explicitly that this video carries no NDA, which is why he could make it at all.
The pattern he spotted afterwards is the whole setup. Blizzard invited an unusual number of WoW creators to this BlizzCon, held a separate meeting with people big in the Classic community, and shipped a schedule with more "What's Next" panels than normal. His conclusion is that Classic Plus is coming and that it is going to be much larger than a nostalgia re-release. The video took 303,041 views inside two days, which is the other reason to read the complaints in it seriously: they are the complaints a lot of people apparently recognized.
Problem One: The Gap
Retail's distance between a new player and a good one, in his words, has become a vanishing point.
The first complaint is arithmetic. Retail's ceiling kept climbing and its floor did not, so the distance between somebody who installed the game last week and somebody who raids seriously has become, in his phrase, a vanishing point. Some players do cross it. Most look at it and stop.
He grounds it in the tier he is playing right now. Heroic Venomous Abyss, run with a community raid full of ex hardcore players, is harder than he expected. He breaks down Coiled Altar on heroic as precise damage pushes, forced DPS stops, debuff timers to track, strict movement, orbs that need rotating and a ghost per person to manage, all inside one fight.
The delta, the difference between the very good and the very new, is so enormous that it's practically just a vanishing point.
Preach Gaming, 8:29
His measuring stick is what heroic used to be. The last heroic boss of a tier sat roughly where an early mythic boss sat, and a pug could get there. He says that is no longer true, and that the specific skills the fight demands are not skills anybody picks up in LFR or on normal difficulty. The game teaches you nothing and then tests you on it.
What Riot still gets to decide. Difficulty tiers are not the only tool. SWTOR now ships a per-player difficulty dial for its open world, so your friend can fight the same monster on easy while standing next to you. Riot has said nothing about how its MMO scales encounters, which means the "teach nothing, test everything" gap Preach describes is a shape it can still design around rather than inherit.
Problem Two: The Pressure
Timers, meters and gear inspections turned a video game into a performance review.
The second problem is not difficulty, it is surveillance. Mythic Plus has a timer, and his point is that the complaint was never that the timer is hard to beat. The complaint is that a timer exists. Stack a damage meter that now ships inside the game on top of it, then other players inspecting your talents, your enchants and your gems before they will take you, and a lot of people are being appraised while trying to relax.
The anxiety that World of Warcraft causes in so many players is monstrous.
— Preach Gaming, 11:43, watch
He has been making this argument for years, and it is the one that best explains the example he keeps returning to. His brother was in the beta before he was and has played the whole way through. What his brother does now is play Classic, all the time, because a mage there can press Frostbolt and get most of what the class is capable of without add-on tech, cooldown managers or a public score attached.
What Riot still gets to decide. Riot has already run a version of this experiment in a smaller room. When League Classic launched, Riot killed the API for it and asked the stat sites to stand down, which removed the inspection layer before it could form. Whether the MMO ships with an in-client damage meter, or with the data pipes that let a third party build one, is a decision nobody outside Riot Discovery has heard yet.
Problem Three: The Front Door
His eleven year old quit the tutorial because the game asked him to summon a mount he did not have.
The third problem has a face on it. He watched his eleven year old play the current World of Warcraft starter experience. The kid finished the starter island, got moved to Dragonflight, and picked up a quest telling him to choose one of his mounts.
He did not have a mount. Nobody had given him one. He sat there for twenty minutes looking for a way forward, then quit. Preach checked the quest afterwards and confirmed it: there was no mount to choose. Other quests were available, but by then it did not matter, because the game had already told an eleven year old that he was the problem.
The specific broken quest is not the point. The point is that the game assumes a base knowledge the player has no way to acquire and no reason to suspect they are missing. His kids play Rocket League and Rainbow Six instead, because those open with one verb, let you be bad at it, and save the depth for after you care.
What Riot still gets to decide. Riot's whole business is that on-ramp, and the RuneGrove readership has already fought about how far it should go: the group finder argument split the MMO community down the middle, with Riot's own League Classic launch the only evidence anyone has about which way the studio leans. A first hour that strands a player is a much cheaper failure to avoid than a raid tier that does.
Problem Four: Dead Ground
Every new season makes the previous world worthless, and the map is mostly previous world.
This is the one he says he first raised about ten years ago. World of Warcraft is a gear game, so the moment a season ships with new gear, everything that dropped the old gear stops mattering. Not gradually, and not after a few weeks. The day the season lands.
Every time they release a new piece of content, they frankly cannibalize everything they've done before.
— Preach Gaming, 15:32, watch
What that costs is the map. Azeroth and every island bolted onto it is enormous, and almost all of it is inert unless you are chasing transmog or you happened to pick that zone as a leveling route. He includes the current expansion in the accounting: once Midnight's new season arrived, Midnight's older content was dead too. The game keeps building land it then makes worthless.
What Riot still gets to decide. Other studios are now spending real seasons trying to undo this. Sea of Thieves switched off fast travel for an entire season with no headline feature at all, purely to find out whether its world comes back to life when players have to cross it. Riot has revealed nothing about whether its MMO's older zones stay load-bearing, which is exactly the kind of thing that is cheap to decide now and impossible to retrofit later.
Being set in Runeterra is the single confirmed fact about this game. Everything about scope is still unrevealed: which regions ship, how much of the map is in at launch, what era it opens in, none of that has been said, and the map above illustrates the fiction rather than a starting zone. What is on it, though, is the shape of Preach's problem in reverse. Ionia, Noxus and Shurima arrive with centuries of written history and live conflicts already attached. Blizzard keeps building land and then switching it off. Riot is inheriting land that a decade of League and Arcane already made people care about, and every acre of it starts out with a reason to stay lit.
Problem Five: One Currency
He asks why an MMO in 2026 still has exactly one thing worth chasing.
Halfway through he asks it plainly: why are we still a gear game? The alternative he points at is Guild Wars 2, where the level stops and the world keeps widening. Expansions arrive carrying masteries rather than levels, and a mastery changes what your character can do with the world instead of how large its numbers are. A new mount system shows up, then the masteries that let you cling to a wall with it. You do not need them. They are just good to have.
He also points backwards, at vanilla's own answer to the same problem. The tier 0.5 dungeon sets looked useless to him as a raider, and then it turned out an enormous share of the player base had never set foot in a raid at all. Those sets gave that group a target, materials to collect and a reason to run dungeons. He calls it a huge win, and draws the line straight to Delves in retail: solo, collectable, no stress attached.
What Riot still gets to decide. ArenaNet is building the next version of that philosophy right now, and Guild Wars 3 forces the question Riot's MMO cannot dodge either: who are you in a world already full of heroes, and what are you actually accumulating? Riot has not said what its MMO's reward currency is. Gear is the default answer only because it is the default answer.
Problem Six: The Number on the Box
A cap that climbs every expansion eventually reads as a wall to everyone who is not already inside.
Problem six is a marketing wound Blizzard keeps reopening. Every expansion adds five or ten levels. Do that enough times and the cap becomes a large number. Somebody already inside the game knows the cap takes two days, that there is a speedrun for it, and that you can buy a boost for an alt. Somebody outside the game, whose last frame of reference was an RPG where a single level took hours, reads a three digit number and does not start.
Keeping things at level 60 stops the inflation that actually turns players away from your game.
Preach Gaming, 21:15
His fix is to freeze it. Hold Classic Plus at level 60 permanently and let the world get wider rather than taller. New raids sit beside the old ones instead of on top: extend vanilla's Molten Core to Blackwing Lair to Ahn'Qiraj to Naxxramas ladder sideways with more twenty player and ten player options, different stats, different procs, maybe even elemental resistances again. He knows how that sounds to a modern audience. He also says it made complete sense the whole time he was playing Classic.
What Riot still gets to decide. This is not theoretical any more. Black Desert set a hard ceiling at 75 after twelve years of infinite levels and rebuilt its endgame around seven gods instead. Riot has never named a level cap for its MMO, or said whether it has levels in the shape anyone expects. That silence is an option nobody has spent yet.
Problem Seven: Rules That Move
Season of Discovery changed its raid sizes mid-season, and his guild never came back.
The last problem is stability, and it is the most specific complaint in the video. He played a great deal of Season of Discovery. What killed it for him was the raid size changing partway through. His team was assembled for one number, then the number was different, so everybody had to restructure a roster they had already spent months building. Interest evaporated on the spot.
The thing that killed that for me was when they changed the raid sizes.
Preach Gaming, 24:34
What he wants from Classic Plus is the opposite promise. Pick the raid size, then hold it, so a guild can look four or five years down the road and know the shape of the thing it is recruiting for. The size he wants is 10, and he thinks Classic is the only place it can still work.
His reasoning is that retail cannot run 10 player raids any more. Too many class variations, and too much power concentrated in single players, so a 10 man group collapses into class stacking. He points at Cataclysm, where 10 man guilds went dramatically over the top for exactly that reason, and notes that a game starting from Classic has not created that problem yet.
What Riot still gets to decide. Small raids are having a moment for the same reason: the EverQuest relaunch capped its raids at eight people and dropped the death penalty on the way. Riot has not announced a group size for anything. The lesson from Preach's Season of Discovery is not really about the number, though. It is that changing a load-bearing number after guilds have organized around it costs more than picking the wrong one in the first place.
Side by Side
What retail chose, in his account, against what Riot has actually said about its own MMO.
| The decision | Retail WoW, per Preach | Riot's MMO |
|---|---|---|
| Level cap | Climbs five or ten every expansion until the number itself deters new players | Not revealed |
| Last season's content | Dead on arrival day, outside transmog and collecting | Not revealed |
| Raid size | Ten is off the table; individual power turns it into class stacking | Not revealed |
| Difficulty floor | Heroic now asks for precise damage windows, debuff timers and orb rotations | Not revealed |
| Reward currency | Gear, and effectively only gear | Not revealed |
| Public performance data | In-client damage meter, timers, gear and talent inspection | Riot pulled the API for League Classic and asked the stat sites to stand down |
| Business model | His one red line: a cash-in on mounts and transmogs | Nothing on the record. Riot's catalog is free to play monetized through cosmetics, which is a track record, not a promise |
| Who is building it | Blizzard | Riot Discovery Studio, running on Unreal Engine, with ex-Blizzard PvP and Classic staff |
Five of those eight cells on the right say the same thing, and that is the honest state of it. Riot has put almost nothing about this game on the record. The value of Preach's list is that it names, precisely, which silences are the expensive ones.
His One Condition
One thing would make him walk, and it is not difficulty.
For all of that, he ends the video excited, which he says has not happened for a WoW announcement in a long time. A new expansion arrives with new raids, new dungeons and a new landmass, and he says he mostly shrugs at that now. This one has him giddy.
There is one thing that would flip it. His condition is monetization: he is fully in as long as Classic Plus does not turn out to be, in his words, micro transaction slop built to sell mounts and transmogs. That is the same fault line the MMO audience keeps testing Riot on, and it is worth being precise about where Riot actually stands. Riot has never put a business model on the record for its MMO. What exists is a catalog that is entirely free to play and monetized through cosmetics, which is a track record rather than a commitment. We went deep on the difference between those two things.
Should Riot's MMO lock its level cap and never raise it, the way Preach wants Classic Plus locked at 60?
What to Watch
Three games that already picked an answer to one of his seven.
