Exploring Era?

My holiday in June finally broke me out of the habit of at least occasionally logging into BC Classic to fish and use crafting cooldowns. It's been almost a month since I last logged into any of my characters there, and I'm not sure I will log into them again. Whenever the forced transition to Wrath happens, I'm planning to just uninstall that version of the game.

I'm still holding off on finalising things in case there's a sudden turnaround on the subject of BC era servers, but the chances of that happening appear to be vanishingly small at this point. You could argue that I should just move on and forget about it, but I was so in love with Classic when it launched; I just don't want to let go as long as at least a chance remains for me to engage with it in an enjoyable way.

And since I don't want to play Wrath Classic, I've turned my eyes towards the only alternative that remains if BC era doesn't become a thing: Classic era servers. I've previously written about a few adventures I had on there, which were overshadowed by the fact that Classic era Hydraxian Waterlords had virtually no population. This was due to Blizzard deciding to keep it cordoned off from the regular PvE realms, which were all connected once era became a thing. They did offer free transfers off to Pyrewood Village though, which is part of that bigger server cluster.

At some point I decided to take this transfer on my two cloned characters, though I was quickly put off by how badly I had to mangle their names on the new realm. Still, every now and then I would log in, run around Stormwind a bit, check the auction house, and then log off again because I didn't know what to do. Last week I actually managed to muster the energy to run my night elf hunter from Stormwind to Darnassus, but then just ended up logging off there instead. She's already cleared Naxx and effectively "beat the game", what is left for her to do? It's not that I wouldn't repeat content for the sake of being social, but without my guild or any real connections at all, I was just lost.

I had a bit of a think about it and decided that if I wanted to properly get to know the way Classic era works and familiarise myself with its community, the best way to do this would be to start a character from scratch. You can still only have ten characters per server in era, but since the PvE cluster effectively merges several servers into one, I have near endless space to add to my roster on any of the other servers that are part of this same group. So I went ahead and created a night elf rogue on Mirage Raceway.

I'm not entirely sure why I went with rogue; it's not a class I've ever liked and I hope I'm not subconsciously sabotaging my own project here, but I didn't want to create another character of a class I already had, so there weren't a lot of options there. I also figured that rogues are pretty independent with their stealth and all, which should serve me well if I find myself soloing a lot.

I was definitely interested in interacting with other players if possible though, so I joined the LookingForGroup channel at level one, just to get the lay of the land so to speak - and promptly found myself double-checking after a few minutes that I'd typed it correctly because there was no conversation going on at all. At all. Throughout my first evening of questing, I would eventually see three grouping requests pop up: First someone was looking for one or two more for Deadmines (not sure if they found what they were looking for), then someone expressed interest in a group for Uldaman (pretty sure that didn't end up going anywhere), and finally a level 60 tank piped up to say that he fancied a dungeon, which eventually resulted in a group going off to do Undead Strat.

I'm not gonna lie: It was a bit discouraging. People will tell you pretty much anywhere that Classic era is dead, but after all that's happened in the past year, that was actually encouraging to me, not a deterrent. After all, I learned that my preference for smaller servers is the complete opposite of that of many Classic players, and that what looks "dead" to a megaserver player might in fact be just perfect for me. However, three LFG requests over the course of several hours was a bit quiet even by my standards.

I'm not about to give up that quickly, however. I have seen other players around, many of them guilded, which makes me think that the smaller population might have led to people clustering in guilds more strongly than I'm used to, with less pugging going on. And I found it very noticeable that every time I ran past someone, if they were capable of buffing me, they did so. I'd almost forgotten about the value of these drive-by buffs, considering that their importance gradually diminished with the changes to levelling content in BC.

So I'm planning to continue levelling slowly at the original Vanilla pace and see what I learn. Worst case I get to enjoy another tour of the old world by myself, which is what a lot of my early Classic experience was like anyway.