Two Weeks of Classic Era

It's been about two weeks since I started playing on Classic era. My night elf rogue hit level twenty and managed to get into a group for Deadmines, but I didn't have a whole lot to say about that run. It was good fun but relatively uneventful. Since then I've allowed the character to rest up a bit in town while I focused on being active in my newfound Horde guild.

Playing on Horde side is very weird and in some ways quite unlike any MMO experience I've had before. I noted in my initial impressions of the population on Alliance side that it seemed uncomfortably low for my standards - and while we don't have reliable numbers, I reckon that the Horde population is maybe half as large as that of the Alliance, if even that (which is very much in line with the typical faction balance on PvE servers from what I've seen).

The auction house rarely has more than 100-200 auctions running and it's driving me batty, not because I have any ambition to be an auction house baron, but because I'm used to making a bit of money on the side by selling useful drops and trade goods. I'm already vendoring a lot of things that I'd usually try to sell to other players, but with some items it just feels wrong. I must have re-listed the same stack of mithril about ten times by now but I just can't get myself to vendor the stuff. Plus the auction house should have some mithril on it, just in case someone is searching for any! I'm not claiming to make a lot of sense on that front, but it's how I feel.

The emptiness of the open world is actually quite charming to be honest. It makes quests that send you out to deal with local threats feel more real somehow when you really are the only adventurer in town. And when you do run into someone else out in the open, you really notice that person, take note of their name and guild, and maybe emote at each other. Every encounter feels meaningful.

In the cities the emptiness is a bit harder to swallow to be honest. I had a bit of a crisis of faith when I did a /who Undercity one night and I was literally the only player there. Playing on era means needing to be able to feel comfortable with being alone sometimes. Orgrimmar at least gets a little bit busier around raid time, but then it's weird to notice that all the people in and around the bank are in my guild. There'll be the occasional unguilded character or member of Trinity, but other than that, it feels like the world basically exists for my guild. Did I mention yet that this is a very weird situation to be in in an MMO?

And yet, I've been playing in that environment, both solo on my hunter to work on some bits and bobs, and joining my new guildies for dungeons and raids to soak in some of the social atmosphere. In Thursday's raid I laughed out loud a couple of times, prompting the husband to ask what was going on, something that hadn't happened in regards to WoW Classic in a while. This is the sort of thing that made me fall in love with the Forks two years ago...

Still, I'm conflicted in some ways. I shouldn't be looking to replace the Forks, and nobody likes a person who constantly compares everyone to their ex. I worry that I might be making myself too comfortable too quickly. And do I really want to go through all that progression in Classic era all over again? I don't know.

I do know that I felt proud to finally be able to afford my tauren hunter's epic mount tonight, and to finish up her BWL attunement with the help of some guildies. That's another kind of interesting and bizarre thing: On the one hand the lack of an active pugging scene is obviously a massive inconvenience, but on the other hand it does put the onus more obviously on the guild to help people. I think of my many moans in early BC Classic about finding it hard to get guild runs together and how the response was always to "just pug it", because people didn't think that it should be their responsibility to make things happen for their guild mates.

In Classic era, that's not really an option, which is why I actually felt somewhat empowered to stand up and ask people to come run UBRS with me for my attunement despite of being very new, and after one of the raid tanks agreed to come along, the rest almost sorted itself, even as I felt hopelessly out of my depth keeping track of whose alt was doing what. (I'm still a big noob here!)

The lack of a functional economy also makes gold nearly worthless beyond taking care of certain vendor-sold conveniences such as mounts or chronoboons. My epic kodo did require some grinding (and I was pleased to find that I had a bunch of solo quests left to do in Silithus, probably because they hadn't been added yet when I originally switched to Alliance), but aside from that everyone just tries to take care of each other by providing help and material assistance when needed. I already mentioned that resistance potions were being handed out for free in AQ40, and when I asked whether the guild bank had any of the hunter books from AQ20 in stock, I found all three of them in my mailbox only a few hours later.

It's just such a chill and cosy community, but the whole environment is also kind of weird and different, and I don't know yet how that's going to turn out for me in the long run. At the moment I'm having a good time though.