A Year of Playing on Classic Era

Exactly a year ago today, I made my first post on here about quitting Burning Crusade Classic in favour of going back to the Vanilla Classic servers. And wow, it's sure been a year!

I remember the loneliness of those first few weeks, when I would sometimes be the only person in any given zone, nobody talked in LFG chat, and the auction house was almost empty. Yet even then, I managed to find a guild (or rather, the guild found me!), I joined them for raids, and quickly became part of a community. It was largely what I'd hoped for: a chill, safe haven for people who just wanted to hang out and not always chase the latest patch.

I remember a funny conversation where one of the officers told a newcomer that things were slower on era, and he said something like that playing here was more like riding a sail boat than a high-speed train, and I chimed in to say that era wasn't even a boat; it was like sitting in a deck chair - just people relaxing and not going anywhere.

I figured that's just how things were going to continue to be - little did I know that a bunch of YouTubers would make Classic era go viral a few months later. Even with most of the focus being on the PvP cluster, my PvE home got a nice boost from the publicity as well and for two consecutive months we saw exponential growth, with the numbers recorded by my census addon doubling each month. It was pretty nuts to see all these new guilds pop up out of nowhere.

After that I stopped running scans as regularly, but my impression has been that activity more or less plateaued after we hit medium population, as the hype kind of died down. Still, things have remained stable, so I'm hopeful that we'll continue to see a more "normal" influx of players as the months go by. Classic era is still a niche game mode, but now at least one that people in the wider niche (WoW players, MMO enthusiasts) are somewhat aware of.

Ironically, for as delighted as I've been to see this development, I myself have actually been spending less time on Classic era in recent months. Part of that has been due to wanting to prioritise the seasonal content in SWTOR, but another is just that it feels kind of... okay to not be online as much. While the guild was struggling to fill raids, it felt important to me to join in whenever I could, even if I was late to arrive, because getting one step closer to having a full 40 people increased the raid's chances of success. When every raid gets 50+ sign-ups on the other hand, it's just not the same. I'm happy that the guild's seeing success, but I'm also happy to let others have my raid spot if they're keen, because I'm here for the long haul and not in any kind of rush. Or maybe I'm just a horrible hipster and era has become less interesting to me as it's become more popular; who knows.

Anyway, point is, I still log in almost every day, even if it's just to check my mail and auctions, and I usually attend one or two raids a week, so it's not as if I'm not around at all. It's just more of a background routine now, which I think is totally fine. Not feeling any kind of pressure to keep up is part of the appeal of era after all. I'm curious to see how things will develop over the next few months with the addition of the official hardcore server(s) and regular Classic potentially continuing into Cataclysm.