Leaderboard: What must a classic WoW server have to make you play it?

Word yesterday that Blizzard has invited the “progressive vanilla” Nostalrius emulator team to Blizz HQ, presumably to discuss World of Warcraft and not the price of tea in China, has reinvigorated online discussions about what a hypothetical Blizzard-sanctioned vanilla WoW server might look like. In its “pristine servers” proposal — one dismissed by a large number of MOP’s readers earlier this week — Blizzard seemed to imply that its focus would be on purification, on eliminating outside influences on the game, like transfers and cash-shop shenanigans, rather than on on mechanics. But players argue that Blizz has missed the mark — that mechanics and systems and gameplay are what retro gamers are really after.

Of course, once you get down to discussing mechanics, you start to realize that people who want old-school servers often have very different ideas of what that means and what ought to be included or excluded. So for this weekend’s Leaderboard, I thought it would be fun to pick out some systems and sort out the meat of this argument. What exactly do we want the most out of a vanilla server? Let’s put it to a vote.

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