What's Really Going on with Classic Era?

When a few thousand people are happily playing an MMORPG, but none of them post about their experiences online, how does anybody else even know about it? Aside from exploring Classic era by playing it myself and paying attention to in-game chat, I thought I'd also do some research online, and it's been quite interesting.

I mentioned previously that there've been a lot of public declarations floating around of how dead Classic era is, not just on the official forums but also from actual content creators, such as WillE putting out this video called "Classic Era Servers Are OFFICIALLY Dead" in May, which has nearly 300k views at the time of writing this.

However, while era players have mostly been quiet and kept to themselves, more recently there appears to have been some pushback against this "era is dead" narrative. Only a week ago, someone made a massive megapost on the WoW Classic subreddit that explains in detail how the era servers are structured, who the major guilds are and more. I thought it was funny that the most upvoted comment to that was someone asking what era servers actually are; they didn't even know!

I also found two small YouTubers who've been reporting on Classic era - they are also referenced in the reddit post, but I actually found them before seeing them mentioned there. First there is Morphious, who - by his own admission - initially did the same thing as many other YouTubers or streamers and logged into era for just a few minutes to have a look around and then declared it dead. However, when people told him that this wasn't true, he looked into it some more and quickly became part of his server's local community, leading to a follow-up video proudly declaring "Classic Era is Back" in the thumbnail, which is now the most viewed video on his channel. He also has a video answering some frequently asked questions about era.

The other YouTuber is DwarfLord, who most notably released a video only yesterday in which he interviews a bunch of people on his server about why they play Classic era, and also includes some little comedy skits.

There are multiple references to era having a "small town feel" to it, where people know each other and help each other out. Which sounds great and is one of the things I wanted out of Classic from the beginning. Of course for someone who's not comfortable on a server with fewer than 10k concurrent players, this is probably more or less equivalent to "being dead" anyway, but for those of us who're looking for more of a community feeling and are okay with not being able to anonymously queue up for a battleground or join a pug at all hours of the day, there's definitely something there.

Interestingly, a lot of people talking about their experiences on era also mention that it's been growing recently, which I can definitely see being a thing. I may be part of a minority, but surely I'm not the only one who'd rather go back to Classic than forward to Wrath of the Lich King, and whenever Season of Mastery ends, that might also provide a small influx of additional players. Which is kind of funny in that it's the opposite of WillE's video and his bold declaration about era servers being "officially" dead now.

Of course, one thing to keep in mind is that up until now, people have still been able to buy clones of Classic characters that previously moved on to BC, but in only a few days, that will come to an end and all dormant clones will be deleted. I went ahead and cloned a few more of my lower-level characters, just because Blizzard drastically lowered the price of the cloning service and I'd rather have those characters available if I become more invested in era than regret not unlocking them later on.

Once that's gone though, levelling a brand new character from scratch will be the only way to join the action in Classic era, and we'll see how that's going to affect the population. On the plus side though, deleting all those tens of thousands of dormant clones that have been taking up names will make it a lot easier for players to find names for new characters that aren't already taken.