Turtle WoW's Final Farewell

As of today, the Turtle WoW private server is no longer available. I was able to make it to the final shutdown event last night, and I'm glad I did because it certainly was a unique experience.

I originally logged in about an hour beforehand, because I wasn't 100% certain of the exact time and didn't want to accidentally miss it. There were already plenty of people in both Stormwind and Moonwhisper Coast (at the Farewell Faire) and GMs were walking among them openly while spawning in some strange NPCs, such as a giant white cat.

One thing I think I never mentioned before was that Turtle WoW also had an in-game radio station. The reason I didn't mention it was that I never used it. I basically tried to connect once but nothing was playing, so I figured it was only active on special occasions. Plus, to be honest I wasn't that keen on having some modern music blasted into my ears while playing WoW anyway - I prefer the in-game music for immersion.

Either way, that evening I clicked the button for the radio again as there was a DJ playing for the final shutdown, and it worked. From my understanding he was also hosting some community run event on the Ambershire server.

Still, as there was still over an hour to go and I didn't care to just hang out for that long, I took some screenshots and then went away again to do something else for a while, only logging back in about ten minutes before the real shutdown.

It was nice to see how many people had shown up for the final farewell. As mentioned previously, the population had dropped down to a couple hundred concurrent players after the shutdown announcement, but for the party we were back to several thousand online on Nordanaar alone, and I'm sure there were just as many if not more on Ambershire, plus I imagine even some on the smaller Tel'Abim PvP server.

Some were sitting quietly on the beach and staring out into the sea, others were dancing, others were bouncing around like rabbits on crack. Chat got so busy that I was no longer able to read anything because the text was scrolling past so quickly - it was like in one of those Twitch streams where you get nothing but a vague impression of sentiment as hundreds of people spam yells in ALL CAPS.

Along the beach a line of people riding their turtle mounts had formed, and after riding back and forth along the line a couple of times, I planted my own among them. The DJ put on Semisonic's Closing Time as the last song to play before the shutdown and I've got to admit I was definitely feeling some feelings, having that in my ear as I sat among the turtles with fireworks going off around us and chat spam flying everywhere.

And to think I had only come here after the lawsuit, knowing full well that it was all going to go away! I'd only wanted to have a brief, curious peek, but even though I wasn't looking to make friends, it was hard not to get engrossed and feel part of something bigger. I'd always scoffed at the idea of a "Classic Plus" but what I saw on Turtle WoW really did bring back that feeling of old school excitement for me, of not knowing where that boat was going to go, being giddy about making it to the next zone to see what was new, and of eagerly thinking about what I was going to do the next time I logged in even when I wasn't actually playing.

For my own reference, here's how much progress my little high elf made over these last few weeks (since I last wrote down her stats in my 2025 end-of-year post):

• Level 45 Hunter (+7)
• 5 days, 15 hours played (+1 day, 12 hours)
• 225 Jewelcrafting (+24), 250 Mining (+24), 261 Cooking (+36), 221 Fishing (+16), 270 First Aid (+58), 1 Survival (-97 since they reset it)

The DJ did his job well in terms of timing, so the song ended and then it was over as we were all disconnected.

I have my blog to record my personal adventures, but the Turtle WoW devs also put up a website for people to share their own most memorable moments on the servers, which can be found on theturtlegrove.com. I do think this server will stand up there with Nostalrius as one of the big WoW private servers that really made an impact. We'll see whether there'll be any traces of it in what Blizzard does next for Classic, though I'm not particularly hopeful, not because I don't think the devs are capable but because I simply don't think Blizzard is interested in catering to this particular niche.

One thing I haven't changed my mind about in regards to a potential Classic+ is that it will be impossible to make everyone happy, and that applied to Turtle WoW as well! It just happened to really hit the points that I personally love. While they also created new raids and did things for PvPers for example, you didn't hear nearly as many people talk about that because it simply wasn't as popular. If all you wanted to do was PvP, there were probably better places for you to do so. You just didn't hear that much negativity about Turtle WoW because if someone didn't like it there, they just moved on to somewhere else. It's not like with official WoW, where there's a whole economy around publicly ranting about how terrible everything is and people can make a living off that.

Turtle was focused on the world, the old Warcraft RTS lore, roleplayers, community and levelling above all else, and they did those things exceptionally well. I don't think anyone at Blizzard shares those interests in the same way, so I suspect it's unlikely that we'll see anything close to this level of investment in those areas again.

Not that nobody is going to try at all, of course. People have been joking that surely the server will spring up again somewhere else as soon as it's shut down. I'm not on the Turtle WoW Discord, but I've seen some comments about how people should keep an eye on it for some sort of special announcement about the future later down the line.

Meanwhile I've also been hearing talk about a server called "OctoWoW" run by different people, which is based on a leaked older version of Turtle and apparently they've been trying to get some of the newer content back onto it as well. I've not got any personal interest in that, but I'm sure some people will jump right onto it. Plus there are the usual rumours about a rogue dev running off with the code and wanting to spin up his own project.

For my part, I'll just have one more "post mortem" post about Turtle WoW so to speak, to talk about my experiences with the last custom zone I played through, which was their version of Gilneas. Then I'll close the book on the subject of private servers again for the time being. That said, I've certainly made a lot of memories on this one for the relatively short time I played there.

Why I've Become a Classic+ Believer

The first time the concept of something like Classic Plus came up on this blog was in early August 2019, when I was wondering about WoW Classic's future (at a time when it's actual launch was actually still a few weeks away). Wild that this was almost seven years ago! At the time, I (rightly) considered it unlikely that Blizzard would invest time and money into developing new content for the vanilla world when they had all these cheaper and easier options available to keep people engaged and get more money out of Classic.

Nonetheless, people kept talking about it, and it's remained a subject of conversation throughout the years at least in some circles, gaining more and more mainstream traction the further away progressive Classic moved from the expansions that people remembered the most fondly.

To be honest, I used to think that a lot of the Classic+ believers were hopelessly deluded (in my post about BlizzCon 2023 I expressed major bewilderment at how many people had been dead certain that Blizzard was going to announce Classic+ at that event, three years ago now), and I know a few of my fellow bloggers who still feel that way. I've got to admit though, I've kind of come around to the Classic+ fans' point of view.

I'm actually a little embarrassed to say that because of how... weird a lot of them have been over the years, but even a broken clock is right twice a day and I actually think their moment is about to come. I do think that Blizzard will announce a Classic+ of some sort at BlizzCon this year, in the sense of new Classic servers based on Vanilla but with some tweaks and an intent to provide continued development and new additions for that vanilla world.

What has changed?

As far back as before the release of Classic, Blizzard prided themselves in their game being the gold standard for MMOs and their developers always knowing best. That all came crumbling down with the huge success of Classic (I don't remember where I saw it, but I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that Blizzard was very surprised by just how popular Classic was when it came out) and the dark days of Shadowlands. Players made it very clear that they didn't like what the devs were doing with the modern game, and the devs actually took note and made changes: The way retail has transformed over the last few years has been huge. You might still not like it (after all, there's no way to make everyone happy), but they've made huge strides towards giving players more features that had been widely requested:

• Too much of a content draught between patches? Have a new one every eight weeks.
• People sick and tired of pathfinder achievements limiting access to flying? Just fly from the start of every new expansion now.
• Not enough content for people who prefer to play solo? Here are delves!
• People don't get to appreciate the beauty of the world enough because they are just sitting in town while queueing up for stuff? Have all kinds of world events that encourage you to traverse all the zones every week.
• After more than two decades without it, housing is a thing now! 

... to name just a few examples.

Likewise, they've been wanting to hear what players wanted out of Classic from the start. They sent out many surveys over the years to get a feel for how players wanted things to continue. People clowned on the announcement of Cata Classic, but Holly Longdale's speech at BlizzCon made it clear that there had been a demand for it - presumably from regular players who just wanted to keep playing characters they'd become attached to.

And I suspect that over time, the interest expressed in some form of Classic+ content in those surveys has grown. In July 2024, Blizzard in fact gave us a survey entirely devoted to the subject!

The major argument against Classic Plus ever happening (that I used to make as well in the past) is that it would require too much money and effort for not enough guaranteed pay-off, or in other words, that the corporate overlords wouldn't want Blizzard to put too much work into Classic because it doesn't bring in enough money compared to retail and its cash shop.

I just don't think that logic applies anymore. Wanting to keep things lean and focused on a quality product was the old Blizzard. I remember when in the run-up to Classic, they said in an interview that they didn't really want to go too crazy with it, because it would essentially be like running two MMOs at once and they kind of wanted to avoid that. Not only are they effectively running two different MMOs now, there are half a dozen different versions of Classic! Spreading themselves and the players too thin is clearly no longer a concern.

The way I see it, they want to grow their profits by growing their customer base, and they're trying to do that by providing people with more stuff. This is perfectly in line with corporate overlords generally wanting to see the line go up - according to Play Nice, Bobby Kotick was already pushing Blizzard to release more content faster decades ago; the then leadership team just couldn't or wouldn't do it. I would also argue that Classic having more limited microtransactions is even more of an incentive for Blizzard to instead aim for ways to get more subscriptions out of it, such as offering a whole buffet of different options for people to choose from.

And what else can they do at this point to achieve growth on the Classic side of the business? I hadn't even thought about that point when I started writing this post, but when I went back to that old entry about what will come after Classic, I realised that by now, Blizzard has already implemented three out of the four progression options I listed at the time: "Do nothing" is Classic era, "Fresh start servers" is Anniversary, and "Give more expansions the Classic treatment" is why MoP Classic exists. The only major thing they haven't done is go down the Classic Plus route.

As for the argument that developing a second MMO is a lot of work and that the Classic team is too small... eh! I'm not saying that it wouldn't be a considerable undertaking, but a lot of MMOs that aren't modern WoW are run by much smaller teams. Even with limited resources, the Classic dev team managed to add some genuinely new content to Season of Discovery, such as a bunch of new quests, two new dungeons and a new raid.

My experiences on Turtle WoW have also been hugely eye-opening in that regard. Again, not to downplay anyone's efforts, but a regular WoW expansion has so much completely new stuff in it, from new gameplay systems that need to be developed and coded to entirely original new zones that need to be designed and built, to dozens of new creatures with new animations... the Turtle guys had none of that. They built their new zones out of what looked to be 90% existing vanilla assets, filled them with quests and dungeons that simply mimicked what Blizzard had done before, and people loved that stuff. I bet Blizzard absolutely has the capacity to do something similar.

The one thing I feel the need to clarify is that when I say that I've become a Classic+ believer, I only mean to say that I believe it will happen. I still think it's unlikely that it will appeal to me personally in the long run. I mean, I'd love it if it was simply magical and wonderful and everything I ever dreamed of, but I just struggle to imagine a world in which that's the case. I believe that the Classic devs have their hearts in the right place, but after I saw in Season of Discovery how everything ultimately came down to just funnelling people into raiding once again, I struggle to not see any potential Classic+ going down the same road after a while, simply because the people who only care about raiding and parsing are so fucking loud. Even if Blizzard made a bunch of beautiful additions to the old world, the focus at Classic Plus launch would likely still just be on people racing to the level cap again and complaining about boredom two weeks later while demanding new raids. And because the squeaky wheel gets the grease, things then slowly deteriorate for everyone else. (It's ironic to me how retail is actually better at catering to casual and solo players at this point than Classic.)

All that said, I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't extremely curious about just what Blizzard is cooking up. MadSeasonShow released a video the other day in which he summarises all the various hints that have been dropped so far (if you can stand his endless griping about Blizzard nowadays). At the same time, rumours are flying around that a bunch of Classic streamers have been invited to Blizzard HQ under an NDA this week. I've actually felt pressure to get this post out while the subject still remains somewhat controversial and before anything gets leaked! Regardless, I think we'll get the big reveal in September at the latest.

Turtle WoW: Notes from a Dying Server

At the time of me writing this, Turtle WoW has less than a week left to live. I haven't dropped everything to binge Turtle above everything else, but I've been happy with the number of hours I've been able to get in. My high elf hunter is level 43 and I'm hoping to wrap up one last custom zone before the server goes down.

The moment I hit level 40 I bought my blue racial mount. Call me basic but I enjoy an elf on a unicorn.

After the initial wailing and gnashing of teeth that followed the shutdown announcement, the server has been getting a lot quieter. Nordanaar used to have thousands of concurrent players, but within days it was down to a few hundred whenever I checked, and has remained at that level pretty consistently since then. To be clear, I've played on servers that size before and it's actually a perfectly fine population level to have a good time with - it's just sad here in the context of how quickly and sharply activity dropped off. The same applies to the auction house, which still had 50k+ listings the day of the shutdown announcement, then half of that, then half of that, and with only a week to go we're down to about 5k active auctions.

The people who were already pretty invested in the server and its community have mostly tried to pack up and move somewhere else as a group from what I can tell. The guild message of the day has been "AQ40 8/9 - Great Job - C'thun kill Monday" for weeks. I wonder whether they ever did go back for C'thun, but I kind of doubt it. The one officer (?) who still checks in did a bunch of promotions the other day, which resulted in my level 43 becoming a "Core-Raider", which amused me. I'm guessing it was just a simple way to increase everyone's guild bank permissions for the final weeks or something.

I think most of the people who remain are in a similar situation to me and just want to see some more of the content/enjoy some more of the vibes before it all goes away. I'm grateful for those who still put things up for auction, not to get rich but to help out other adventurers who might still benefit from certain items on their journeys. I remember when I used to vendor all my iron ore because there was just too dang much of it circulating - over the last few days I went back to listing everything I mined and sold all of it for a decent profit, though I primarily hope that it's simply been useful to someone. I've also been on the other end of this as I had to buy some green trousers after accidentally vendoring my previous pair, purchased an enchanting material I needed for a quest, and a player-crafted item that was required to continue levelling my jewelcrafting.

In general, while my focus has been on doing some more exploring, I haven't been "min-maxing" the experience in that respect. I still pause to fish here and there and do some crafting. At one point I did the quests to unlock the last rank of cooking and first aid. For what purpose? Because it was fun.

Touring some of the old zones for the cooking quest was a reminder of just how much Turtle WoW modified in those as well. In the Hinterlands I found a narrow mountain path that led me all the way up to a troll village that was located on a sort of overhang from the Hinterlands into Arathi, which did make me a bit wistful about the many more things I now wasn't going to get a chance to see.

A few days ago, the Turtle WoW devs also launched the "Fantastical Farewell Faire", a little event to allow players to get together one more time for the server's shutdown. A faire barker in town will offer to teleport you to Moonwhisper Coast, another custom zone, this one located north-east of Winterspring. They put up some Darkmoon Faire style tents and activities there that allow you to earn a currency called "Turtle Coin", with which you can buy some random items like pets and mounts.

I'm sure many must wonder why people would bother with any of that at a point when the shutdown is so near, but I found it a nice gesture. There's also a vendor who sells all kinds of raid consumables for cheap, presumably to help those players who are trying to get a few more clears in and might find the auction house no longer a source of sufficient supply. Additionally, there are a couple of quests, including one to light the way for the "Great Turtle Spirit", which actually made me tear up a bit.

I'd kind of like to be there when the server shuts down for good, to take one last screenshot and see who else is there for one last hurrah, but I don't know if that will align with my work hours. We'll see.

The Grim Reaches: TWoW's Take on Twilight Highlands

While I was trying to get into a group for Stormwrought Castle, I quested my way through another one of Turtle WoW's custom zones: the Grim Reaches. Designed for levels 33-38 according to the Turtle WoW Wiki, the Grim Reaches are located east of the Wetlands and Loch Modan, around where the Twilight Highlands were added with the launch of Cataclysm.

The Grim Reaches are lacking said Twilight influence, but aside from that there are similarities between this zone and its retail counterpart, at least in the sense that it's a hilly green region inhabited by Wildhammer dwarves and Dragonmaw orcs. Visually I'd describe it as a desaturated version of Loch Modan, with similar grass and trees, just a lot less vibrant and kind of dull looking in terms of colour. I'm definitely noticing a theme in that regard, which makes me wonder if this artistic choice was simply motivated by a sense that higher level zones should look less appealing/idyllic or by a desire to strongly distinguish Turtle's world from the way Blizzard leaned heavily into more cartoony aesthetics as time went on.

Regardless, this was not one of my favourite custom zones. It wasn't bad, mind you, it just kind of... was, lacking the clear identity and strong vibes of the previous custom zones I'd played through. The quests from different dwarves asking me to slay orcs, troggs, raptors and murlocs all kind of blended together, with few NPCs actually being memorable to me, such as the crazy dwarf by the lake who asks you to kill crocs, and the family of blacksmiths down south.

What stood out to me by its absence was the subject of gryphons. How can a town of Wildhammer dwarves not have a single quest related to gryphons? I'm not saying they need to be flanderised to the point of caring about nothing else, but the complete omission of the subject struck me as odd. 

There were also at least three occasions where I was sent into a cave or fortress to kill stuff, encountered a named NPC at the end and thought to myself "I bet the next quest will send me back here to kill that guy" and it was true every time. That's not exactly a complaint, but more of an observation on how devoted to certain aspects of the vanilla formula the Turtle WoW devs are, even ones that have been widely criticised over the years.

At the very northern end of the zone I encountered a skull level elite hydra at the beach, which I thought might be a world boss, though on doing some more research on it, it turned out to be just a normal max-level elite with an unknown purpose.

In the interest of full disclosure, I feel I have to mention that I ultimately didn't "complete" this zone, since I left with two group quests still in my log that asked me to kill some more orcs, but for which I couldn't find a group and I expect no longer will at this point. There was also a prettty large area in the south filled with hostile dwarf ghosts whose purpose I couldn't make out, but maybe that area is part of the intended Horde experience - there was a Horde outpost in the zone that clearly had its own things going on.

One final thing I wanted to note about the Grim Reaches was that the flight pathing to it was weirdly horrible, which made me wonder whether this is something the Turtle devs had issues with. As you can see on the map above, the dwarven settlement of Dun Kintas is pretty much straight east of Loch Modan, with just mountains separating them, but for some reason, the gyphon taxi wouldn't go over them, but instead insisted on looping all the way up to and through the Wetlands just to then go back down from the north, which made the zone very tedious to travel to for how close it actually was to Ironforge.

Drinking from the (Buggy) Content Hose

WoW Midnight got its first content patch last week. Despite only being a "minor" patch, 12.0.5 introduced no fewer than four new casual activities (among other things): Abyss Angling, Decor Duels, Void Assaults and Ritual Sites.

My first impression of all of them is that they are... fine. I've had fun trying them all out, and I'll probably do at least some of them a few more times, especially the Ritual Sites. However, I also would have been perfectly fine without them. Midnight has been out for less than two months and I'm far from being done and bored with the launch content. I didn't need even more stuff on my plate. It all feels like a bit much to be honest, even if I'm not necessarily a completionist who needs to do all the things. I didn't think it was possible for an MMO to overwhelm people with constant additions of new stuff, but at least to me, WoW feels like it's coming close right now.

This relentless onslaught of more content also comes at a price. This patch was apparently so buggy at launch that Blizzard actually felt the need to officially apologise for it. I wasn't affected too badly myself, but I'm not surprised it happened as this is something that has been building up for a while. It's kind of wild how we went from "Blizzard polish" and "we'll release it when it's ready" to the complete opposite, with new releases being pushed out the door on a strict schedule seemingly no matter what state they are in.

Not sure if this counts as a bug or is just down to my old rig, but the most noticeable new nuisance since the patch for me has been that the water graphics in the new zones go bananas sometimes. 

I remember when I started playing WoW back in 2006, bugs in the game were basically not a thing. I'm not saying there literally wasn't a single one, but they just weren't something I ever encountered. (Now, server stability was a huge issue at the time, but that's a different kettle of fish.) And Blizzard maintained that reputation for polish for a pretty long time, even as they piled on expansions.

Over time, some bugs did start to appear here and there, but it still wasn't too bad. The first time I used the "bugs" tag on this blog was in 2015, and even that was in relation to a private server. I didn't have cause to use it while talking about official WoW until 2021, in this post about a Shadowlands patch. 

And then with Dragonflight, the flood gates opened. I generally loved Dragonflight, and while I did notice that the increased content cadence seemed to come with a trade-off in the form of a lack of polish, at the time it didn't seem too bad yet. In War Within things escalated, and while I really enjoyed the Nightfall event for example, it was an utterly buggy mess at its launch.

With Midnight, things have ramped up yet again, and I've gotten used to encountering bugs everywhere. They're usually not game-breaking show stoppers, but noticeable nonetheless, from activity trackers not working and settings that won't stay saved to just randomly buggy quests. There's a world quest in Silvermoon where Magister Rommath asks you to spy on the newcomers to the city, which had been so hastily copy and pasted from a previous expansion that the written instructions still said to "take pictures of the wildlife" for weeks, which I thought was pretty hilarious in context.

I've been wondering whether and when we'd reach a tipping point, and I wonder if this is it or if we're still not there yet.

The thing is, I have sympathy for the Blizzard devs here. By nature, I'm a perfectionist when it comes to my own work - I'm human and make mistakes, sure, but I'll always strive towards 100%. However, in over a decade of working at the same large company, I had to learn to let a lot of things go or else go insane. I've been lectured about the 80:20 rule and how some things are just not worth doing from a business point of view. Some bugs you just write a ticket for, knowing full well that they are never going to get fixed because you just can't demonstrate the business value of fixing a typo and some wonky looking formatting, and I'm guessing that the WoW devs face some of the same pressures. It's probably better for the financials to work on the next content patch to improve retention than to fix some bug that most people will never encounter, never mind unsubscribe over. The impact this has on brand perception is not a metric that is easy to measure and demonstrate the value of.

I'm also not really upset because I've got to confess that my own tolerance for that kind of thing in MMOs has actually increased over time, even if admitting that marks me as not the most discerning of customers. I play SWTOR as my main MMO and that game has been buggy as heck ever since its launch. To this day, you've got to expect every major patch to have at least a couple of very noticeable and annoying bugs, and I know people who intentionally hold off on playing any new content for at least a few days to wait for some live bug testing first and then go in once the worst of it is fixed. If WoW is going down the same path, I'm not someone who'll easily be put off by that, but at the same time it's still a shame, because I honestly don't need quite such an aggressive patch cadence to stay interested anyway.

Turtle WoW Dungeons: Crescent Grove vs. Stormwrought Ruins

Let's talk more Turtle WoW while it's still around, shall we? Next on my list to explore and write about were the two custom dungeons Crescent Grove and Stormwrought Ruins.

Crescent Grove is a level 32-38 dungeon located in southern Ashenvale. I actually played through this one last year already, and did originally mean to write a post about it at the time - but then it turned out to be kind of boring, and I was like "wow, this is not enough material for a post, I'll have to bundle it up with whatever the next dungeon on the list is and write about them together". And then I lost interest, naturally.

To be clear, Crescent Grove is not a bad dungeon. I had a perfectly fun time running it with a friendly pug. It just seemed pretty uninspired, especially after my previous experience in Dragonmaw Retreat. I couldn't help but think that it must've been one of the first dungeons the Turtle WoW devs built by themselves, as it actually didn't feel very dungeon-like and nothing about it felt in any way original. To me it kind of felt like someone was just familiarising themselves with the devs tools and played around with Ashenvale assets, adding a little vale to the map where they tried out all the different environmental textures available in the zone and populated it with matching mobs, such as furbolgs, satyrs and demons.

I checked the Turtle WoW Wiki and according to that, Crescent Grove was added at the end of 2021 - compare that to Dragonmaw Retreat coming out in 2025. It makes sense that they would've learned some things about how to do more interesting things with the tools available to them over the course of four years.

Stormwrought Ruins on the other hand, a level 35-41 dungeon, came out in the same patch as Dragonmaw Retreat, and boy, does it show. The first time I zoned in and opened the map, I was stunned by how massive it was. It's not quite as sprawling as BRD, but in terms of number of bosses it certainly comes close.

I'd been aware from the group finder that it had two Stormwrought instances listed, Castle and Descent, but I hadn't realised that it was effectively one giant dungeon that they'd just split into parts for the sake of the queue. I was quickly introduced to how that worked as the first group I got into only wanted to do the higher-level half and headed straight for the back door, even though I'd specifically queued for the first half. I didn't feel like I was in a position to complain and was just happy to take in whatever sights they were willing to show me.

Like Dragonmaw Retreat, Stormwrought Ruins goes extremely hard on the ambience. The custom music featured what sounded like church bells, choirs and... synthesisers? I don't know, music is not my area of expertise. But it was very loud and basically screaming "epic and scary stuff is happening here" (you can listen to some of it on this playlist).

Like everything else on Turtle WoW, all the environments and bosses were strongly reminiscent of existing dungeons, but unlike in the Crescent Grove example above, existing assets were put together in a way that still felt refreshing and new, even if it was clearly a derivative creation. The first half set in the castle reminded me of Shadowfang Keep and Scarlet Monastery in places, which makes sense when you think about it. That didn't change that the Duke's throne room looked pretty cool and impressive.

Also, the mobs were mostly (Stormreaver) orcs, which did make for an interesting combo with the human architecture. One of the bosses was Oronok Torn-Heart, and I've got to admit that with this one, I definitely felt a bit bad about killing him, recalling his canonical retirement in Outland as a peaceful boar farmer.

The mid section of the dungeon, where the two halves meet, is dominated by wetness and fungal decay, reminiscent of Maraudon or the Naxx plague wing. There's a room with a death knight boss that was pretty intimidating.

You encounter members of the Shadow Council as trash mobs throughout, but the final section of the instance is dedicated to them in specific being, well, horrible, conducting human sacrifices and shit. The penultimate boss was a giant red blob called "Remains of the Innocent" and there's a quest that has you confirm that this used to be the missing son of a grieving mother in Northwind. It strongly reminded me of Scholomance, but even that has less of a downer ending, because at least you give the ghosts some peace at the end.

The second group I ran with did the full dungeon from start to finish and it took us something like two and a half hours. At the end, people wanted to pose for a screenshot together, which I thought was cute. A true adventure! In both runs, the more experienced players had been more than happy to explain to us newbies how everything worked as well, which was very much appreciated.

The Twilight of the Turtle

When I decided to get back into Turtle WoW for one last hurrah before the project gets shut down (for real this time), I still remembered exactly where I'd left things off last time and what I wanted to pick up again. However, I was surprised to find that my hunter's talent points had been reset, a couple of my abilities had gone missing, and my tent-making profession had been reset to one. I guess that's one of the risks of playing a variant of Classic WoW that's not static but receives (or used to receive, anyway) continuous development. Things can change. Though resetting a profession that I'd invested time and money into levelling still sucked in my opinion.

Anyway, last time I played I'd just started on the custom zone Grim Reaches, and was trying to get into a run for the custom dungeon Stormwrought Castle. So... I went right back to that! I'd had good luck with the game's automated dungeon finder in the past, so I put myself in the queue for Stormwrought and started questing. I figured that there'd still be plenty of people around, wanting to make the most of Turtle WoW's remaining uptime to see more of the content unique to the project.

After about one and a half hours of questing with no signs of life from the queue, I decided to try my luck in the LFG channel. Silence. Maybe it was /world where the action was? I couldn't quite remember as I tend to leave or hide public channels where people talk too much nonsense. It turned out that the world channel was indeed the place, though not in the way I'd expected. 

I'd seen people in guild chat talk sadly about the server's shutdown, while also discussing what other private servers everyone was planning to move on to next. (I learned the names of a lot of new ones I'd never heard about before in the process.) However, I was not ready for the level of dooming in /world. It was all the emotions I'd seen in guild chat, but amped up to eleven. Some people were saying rather uncough things about Blizzard that I'd rather not repeat, and from what I can gather, were even encouraging others to harass Blizzard employees with email spam, which was just not cool.

In more amusing developments, there was talk of a "flesh road" between Goldshire and Stormwind, which is to say that people were paving the path with the dead bodies of characters they were no longer going to play. As you do. I hearthed back to Stormwind to check this out and they were not kidding.

I don't recall whether I mentioned previously that Turtle WoW allowed hardcore characters to mingle with regular ones, and that if a hardcore character above a certain level died, they left a little gravestone behind, whose size and ornateness depended on what level the character died at. People had made use of this feature to go out with a bang (as I'd noted the night before) by building a mini Stonehenge inside the bank, and a tower at the gates that others could use like a sort of jumping puzzle.

It was certainly... something. Someone compared the situation to one of those disaster movies where the world is ending and while some people go crazy, others just continue to go about their day as normal, and that certainly seemed apt. I got kind of fed up with all the complaining and the more toxic comments though, so I soon logged off again to take a break.

When I returned later to resume my questing and try queueing for Stormwrought Castle again, I wasn't too hopeful - were there even any others like me left who still wanted to do some of the content unique to Turtle WoW while they had the chance, or was everyone just dropping the server like a hot potato? I'm all too familiar with how quickly a community can abandon a server en masse. However, I did end up getting into a dungeon run fairly quickly that time, so the server isn't entirely dead just yet and I should be able to at least get a couple more posts out of it.