Classic Era Is Not Just Naxx

Most of the conversation about Classic era revolves around its population. How many people are playing on which servers? However, in the past couple of weeks I've encountered another... misconception about era that I've found interesting. The first time I really noticed it was in a troll comment in reply to a reddit thread about era. It was rightfully downvoted, but I still found it oddly intriguing. After first expressing annoyance with the era-focused thread, the commenter finished with a sarcastic: "Enjoy your never-ending runs of Naxx though!"

As it goes with these kinds of things, once you spot a certain trend for the first time, you suddenly notice it everywhere. First it came up in conversation with a friend, and then on the era Discord when a disgruntled player complained that everyone on era seemed to be all about min-maxing their Naxx speed runs. (When I asked him which server he was playing on, he said he hadn't made a character yet and didn't know where to go, so what he was even basing his complaints on, I have no idea.)

The common theme among all of these conversations is that people seem to think that Classic era is simply an exact continuation of the state of Classic as it was in May 2021 when the servers were split into era and Classic BC, with the majority of the player base being focused on Naxx. That is simply not the case.

That server split was effectively a social cataclysm for era. The world may have technically stayed the same, but all guilds disappeared, and 99% of the population effectively vanished in a form of rapture. You can't just go on as if nothing happened after that; doesn't matter if all the content is unlocked and your character is fully kitted out in T3.

I remember when I was chatting with the few who remained on Hydraxian Waterlords before the free transfers to Pyrewood Village were introduced, and hearing about how some had tried to continue their Naxx runs but had to give up eventually after barely being able to scrape twenty people together. In terms of social structures, everything was reset and couldn't just be rebuilt in a day.

From what I gather from comments by those who played era during that time, it was a slow process of scraping enough people together to even do ZG or MC again. Of course, nearly two years have passed since then, and yes, there are people who are running Naxx now, but they are by no means the majority of the player base.

New players are joining all the time, and old players stop playing (whether temporarily or permanently). Guilds that used to raid successfully fold and new ones arise as social groups that formed during levelling decide to try out raiding for the first time. People play the content at all levels, and I smile whenever I see someone post on the era Discord that their guild killed Hakkar or Nef for the first time. The content is static, and there's no "patch momentum" to carry a majority along at the same pace. Instead it's the fluidity of the small community that determines which content is run the most in any given month, depending on who shows up.

Don't get me wrong, if you want to step into Classic and play like it's 2020, speed-running all the raids with maxed out world buffs and most of the raid being warriors, you can probably find a guild that does that if you roll up on the right faction and server. However, you can just as easily find a guild that's focused on socialising, levelling, or maybe just starting out with raiding. You might have to shop around a bit, since not all servers are the same, but the important thing is that while there are obviously a lot of characters at level 60, there isn't a meta in terms of how to play, an "it's what everybody does". 

I think this is important to state for people who are worried about perhaps being late to the party, that it's all been done and that they won't have anyone to play with if they don't want to jump straight into Naxx. Era may not be everyone's cup of tea, but just like Vanilla WoW back in 2005 it accommodates people with lots of different interests.