Good shit. Sooner than I expected. Not sure if I'll dive into it on release due to my time constraints, but it is nice to see something that was a good part of my high school years come alive again.
Are there any confirmed changes in comparison to old school WoW?
Well theyre using "layers" for the launch, so that a realm will have 3 layers with something like 3k people in each, that merges together after a month or so to make realms not die when the tourists leave, kind new i suppose but its nothing thats permanent.
Loot trading may be added, im not sure its confirmed yet. Making you able to trade raid loot after you recieve it for a certain amount of time to other raid members, just to clear up the issue of giving items to the wrong player, so its just to make it easier on the GM's.
Other than that not really, the schedule for patch releases is new i guess, for a month or so we wont have a pvp rank system or any battlegrounds so theres no incentive to pvp outside of just world pvp fuckery, which can be enjoyable on its own.
The entire classic WoW thing just seems doomed from the start, even if it's good. Splitting up the playerbase and devs, and if they don't update at all there are going to be tons of annoyances and staleness, and if they do then it's not going to be classic WoW soon. Or are people just hoping to get a month or two of nostalgia out of it?
Laughs in OSRS. That one literally surpassed the new Runescape in playerbase. Split perhaps, but there are tons of people coming back for vanilla specifically. It takes about a month or so to get level 60 on a normal pace if im not mistaken, a bit more probably since the in game /played time is usually 11 days for 60. Progressing raid content takes a couple of months per, and it wont all be released at launch.
OSRS still adds content too, and people like it. Classic devs have not mentioned adding anything, but it wouldnt count it out depending on community input.