When I decided to get back into Turtle WoW for one last hurrah before the project gets shut down (for real this time), I still remembered exactly where I'd left things off last time and what I wanted to pick up again. However, I was surprised to find that my hunter's talent points had been reset, a couple of my abilities had gone missing, and my tent-making profession had been reset to one. I guess that's one of the risks of playing a variant of Classic WoW that's not static but receives (or used to receive, anyway) continuous development. Things can change. Though resetting a profession that I'd invested time and money into levelling still sucked in my opinion.
Anyway, last time I played I'd just started on the custom zone Grim Reaches, and was trying to get into a run for the custom dungeon Stormwrought Castle. So... I went right back to that! I'd had good luck with the game's automated dungeon finder in the past, so I put myself in the queue for Stormwrought and started questing. I figured that there'd still be plenty of people around, wanting to make the most of Turtle WoW's remaining uptime to see more of the content unique to the project.
After about one and a half hours of questing with no signs of life from the queue, I decided to try my luck in the LFG channel. Silence. Maybe it was /world where the action was? I couldn't quite remember as I tend to leave or hide public channels where people talk too much nonsense. It turned out that the world channel was indeed the place, though not in the way I'd expected.
I'd seen people in guild chat talk sadly about the server's shutdown, while also discussing what other private servers everyone was planning to move on to next. (I learned the names of a lot of new ones I'd never heard about before in the process.) However, I was not ready for the level of dooming in /world. It was all the emotions I'd seen in guild chat, but amped up to eleven. Some people were saying rather uncough things about Blizzard that I'd rather not repeat, and from what I can gather, were even encouraging others to harass Blizzard employees with email spam, which was just not cool.
In more amusing developments, there was talk of a "flesh road" between Goldshire and Stormwind, which is to say that people were paving the path with the dead bodies of characters they were no longer going to play. As you do. I hearthed back to Stormwind to check this out and they were not kidding.
I don't recall whether I mentioned previously that Turtle WoW allowed hardcore characters to mingle with regular ones, and that if a hardcore character above a certain level died, they left a little gravestone behind, whose size and ornateness depended on what level the character died at. People had made use of this feature to go out with a bang (as I'd noted the night before) by building a mini Stonehenge inside the bank, and a tower at the gates that others could use like a sort of jumping puzzle.
It was certainly... something. Someone compared the situation to one of those disaster movies where the world is ending and while some people go crazy, others just continue to go about their day as normal, and that certainly seemed apt. I got kind of fed up with all the complaining and the more toxic comments though, so I soon logged off again to take a break.
When I returned later to resume my questing and try queueing for Stormwrought Castle again, I wasn't too hopeful - were there even any others like me left who still wanted to do some of the content unique to Turtle WoW while they had the chance, or was everyone just dropping the server like a hot potato? I'm all too familiar with how quickly a community can abandon a server en masse. However, I did end up getting into a dungeon run fairly quickly that time, so the server isn't entirely dead just yet and I should be able to at least get a couple more posts out of it.
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