Happy Birthday to Classic

Today WoW Classic turns one year old. It feels weird to think back to the mania of launch night - on the one hand it doesn't feel like that was that long ago, but on the other it feels like it happened in a completely different world. 

And how have these last twelve months played out for Classic? Personally I've stayed subscribed for the entire year, though my activity levels did drop quite significantly after the first three months or so. I did drop down from subbing for three months at a time to one month the other day, as I keep thinking about taking a break and I'd rather not be stuck with months of unused subscription time if that does end up happening, but we'll see how things go in the next couple of months. I still enjoy Classic for sure, but my self-imposed rule of keeping it casual means that it's always competing for the secondary spot in my MMO roster and there are only so many hours in the day to play games.

Anyway, how has Classic done on a wider level? The big launch rush came and went, and I did find it very noticeable that most friends and bloggers dropped the game after a couple of months, but thanks to layering that didn't immediately make the servers any less busy. My own prediction for Classic's trajectory of success was that after the initial launch spike and inevitable drop-off, it would stabilise and then maybe even slowly gain population again. This did actually end up happening, causing Blizzard to have to deal with population problems in April - though since this was largely caused by the Coronavirus and millions of people suddenly staying at home I'm not sure it counts towards proving my prediction right.

It's a bit hard to say what the population is like now. Anecdotally, even the "medium" server I play on seems very busy at all times, but as the saying goes, the plural of anecdotes is not data. Blizzard stopped releasing sub numbers years ago, and even if they still did we wouldn't know how many of those subs can be attributed to Classic vs. retail. I do consider it telling though that Classic was called out positively in three out of four of their last quarterly earnings calls. Q1 2020 was the only one where they didn't specifically mention Classic, though they still noted that the number of active WoW players altogether had continued to grow, and I find it hard to imagine that Classic was tanking while BfA was soaring during that time.

Equally telling perhaps is the number of active servers. Blizzard introduced a technology called "connected realms" to retail in 2013, which - as far as I can tell - is basically the same as merging servers, only that the names of all the "origin" servers are preserved, people can keep their character names, and Blizzard avoids the bad PR associated with merging servers due to low population. The process is also slightly obfuscated in game as you can't easily tell which servers are tied to which other servers. To see the true picture you have to go to the forums, where connected realms share a single bullet point in the realm forums list.

On EU, you can see that what were once 95 different English-speaking servers back in 2013 (or possibly more, as there are several "et al."s on the list, seemingly implying that a few more were swallowed up that weren't even worth mentioning) have been merged down to 46 connected realms, with more mergers apparently on the way as more servers have reached critically low populations. On US, 242 realms have been pared down to 117 so far.

That is still a huge number of servers and I'm not saying retail is dead or anything, but I find it interesting to compare it to the number of Classic servers, which is 39 for the US and 23 (English-speaking ones) for the EU, of which only five and three respectively are considered as having a low population. This would indicate that about a third of WoW's total population are Classic players at this point, even 12 months later.

From a community point of view, I have to say it's my impression that the game has followed a similar trajectory as most post-original-WoW MMOs, which is to say that everyone who doesn't either play it themselves or follows MMO news very closely has already forgotten that it still exists. If you type "is wow classic" into Google, one of the first suggestions will be "dead", like for pretty much every other game.

It has its bittervets who quit early on because Blizzard made waaay too many changes compared to Vanilla (launching with layering, WTF), and it has its bittervets that still play while complaining that it's all very boring and Blizzard should really just make some changes already to keep them entertained.

At max level it has a bizarre hardcore culture revolving around speed-running and timely accumulation of world buffs that some people would like you to think is ubiquitous, but based on my own experiences there are plenty of people who don't play that way. Maybe it varies a lot from server to server too. Likewise, some complain about low-level gameplay being dead as everyone just levels alts by boosting now, but again your mileage may vary.

Of course, a year isn't such a long time, especially when you consider that Classic has been burning through the content releases much faster than expected. I found this article from September last year where the author speculated that phase 3 would be released this summer - in reality we're already up to phase 5, with only Naxxramas left to go. Things will definitely change on the high end once Blizzard runs out of content to add to Classic and people can "only" look forward to the release of Classic Burning Crusade.

As long as it always remains a place to level yet another alt through the wondrous world of original Azeroth though, I for one will be happy.