Classic Hardcore and the Unexpected Revival of Hydraxian Waterlords

WoW has a long history of community-created challenges. The earliest one I remember learning about was the Ironman levelling challenge: permadeath, no grouping allowed, no professions or consumable use, and no gear better than white quality. In Classic, a variant commonly referred to as "hardcore" seems to have gained traction instead (and I wonder whether the name ever causes confusion, considering that the term has commonly been used to refer to other play styles). It's a similar concept to Ironman but a little less restrictive - probably because the open world in Vanilla is dangerous enough without asking people to run around close to naked.

I'd heard mutterings about it for years... a former guildie of mine really got into it for example, but personally I didn't pay too much attention to it. Similar to the changes made in Season of Mastery, I can understand on an intellectual level how the hardcore rule set could be appealing to some, but it's very much not for me. I loathe deleting characters in any game, for any reason, and not being allowed to group with others sounds extremely depressing to a socialiser like me. But to each their own of course.

Long-time readers of the blog may also remember that I spent most of my time in Classic on Hydraxian Waterlords, the EU's only English-speaking RP-PvE server. I actually started out on the biggest PvE server, Pyrewood Village, but rolled a character on HW as a side project and soon came to prefer it there. I did love the Hydraxian community throughout all of Classic, until Blizzard decided to make everyone transfer off during BC Classic... though they then changed their minds about that in Wrath and enabled free transfers the other way round from what I heard. Let's not talk about that; it just makes me mad again.

The era version of Hydraxian Waterlords did not do well, as the RP tag meant that Blizzard's server connection policy meant that it was left out in the cold with no connections to any other realms. There were some attempts to re-grow a small community there in the early days, but ultimately these did not work out. By the time I sadly transferred off my last (Alliance) character, there were no auctions left on the AH and /who showed me to be literally the only person on the server.

Anyway, to get back to the hardcore challenge, even as someone who's not specifically been following it, it's been hard to ignore that it's been gaining more and more traction over the past few weeks, helped by multiple streamers promoting it. On the Classic era Discord, the subject was even given its own dedicated channel. In the introductory post in that channel, the servers named as dedicated to hardcore play by the community were the old RP servers: Hydraxian for EU and Bloodsail Buccaneers for US.

This was an intentional choice because they were dead. As someone in the hardcore channel put it (in their words, not mine): they're aware that their play style can be considered "abrasive" by other players due to the whole not wanting any interaction thing, and a larger population doesn't really help a person going hardcore anyway. At the time, they stated that their guild on Hydraxian was very small... maybe 5-10 people online at a time.

However, as I said, the whole concept has been increasing in popularity recently, and today someone pointed out that Hydraxian Waterlords had become the first single era server on EU to be marked as having a "medium" population instead of low. I was so baffled by this that I had to log in and see for myself. And indeed, even on a Monday at 2pm, the medium flag was right there. I created a new level one character and killed a few mobs while my census addon ran a check on the population - and it came back with more than 400 people being online on Alliance side alone, just at that particular moment, which is more than we see on era Pyrewood Horde side even on a good evening. The hardcore guild was no longer small - in fact, they had filled up at least three guilds worth of characters and had started on a fourth one.

While I'm happy to see Classic era get any kind of recognition, I've got to admit it feels super weird to see my former abandoned home get repurposed like that, and to see the hardcore challenge generate so much interest much faster than era on its own ever has. I also feel like the server name still means enough to me that I'll want to keep an eye on what happens there, even if I don't care to "go hardcore" myself.