Battlefield: Barrens

Still feeling a bit sad about Turtle WoW's demise, I found myself logging into Mists of Pandaria Classic again when I was craving my Classic fix this weekend. It's on patch 5.3 right now, with 5.4 (Siege of Orgrimmar) meant to go live in a little over two weeks.

I figured it might be interesting to have another look around, as MoP's 5.3 patch was another one of those weird experiments Blizzard performed at the time, adding some content that only existed for that patch and was then immediately removed again. From everything I'd heard about it, it wasn't particularly exciting, but I still wanted to at least have a look since I had the opportunity.

In a nutshell, the short introductory quest leads Alliance players to Durotar, where they find out that Vol'jin's Darkspear are openly rebelling against Garrosh, and you concede that you have a shared interest in stopping him. You agree that you'll both hassle his Kor'kron in the Northern Barrens where they are trying to gather lumber, meat, oil and stone, to deprive them of said resources and help bolster the rebellion instead.

This is all meant to be part of the build-up to Siege of Orgrimmar and kind of reminded me of how in Wrath of the Lich King, there were these repeatable quests to gather lumber in Cystalsong while the Argent Tournament was under construction, which also went away once that was completed, only with Battlefield Barrens being much larger in scope. The overall design of it feels more like an extremely early predecessor to world quests and other dynamic open world activities that would get added many years later.

Basically you can always collect resources by just killing hostile orcs that are gathering them all around the Northern Barrens, but this is very slow and you're better off tackling one of the dynamic spawns that pop up on the map every so often, such as caravans that need escorting and named elites Kor'kron commanders that drop large numbers of resources. The intro quest only requires 15 of each type, but then you get a weekly that asks for ten times as much, which takes some time to accumulate.

I was pleased when I managed to join my first communal kill of a named elite and he dropped a pretty good chunk of resources at once. I followed the small crowd to kill another couple as they spawned, figuring that I'd actually be done quite quickly, similarly to how these things play out in retail, but then everyone just disappeared all of a sudden and I found myself alone at the next elite. I did try to take it on by myself and failed miserably, so I was forced to go back to smaller and slower gathering tasks. (I did keep an eye on the elite's icon on the map and it never went away for the rest of my time there, everyone had just gone.) I was honestly quite baffled by how abandoned the zone was aside from the brief burst of activity of four or five people killing a few of the elites together - I know the patch has been out for a little while but it's still the current content, with an expiration date no less, so I would have expected more activity there.

One bit that was funny to me was that when I completed the weekly I earned the title "Hordebreaker" - a title that I learned is somewhat rare because patch 5.3 was the only time you could earn it. It does feel more like something you should get out of PvP though rather than as a reward for a weekly collect quest.

I also decided to try and pick up Wrathion's legendary quest line again. After I finally hit revered with him from another two rounds of Shieldwall dailies, he tasked me with queueing for the two battlegrounds that were added in MoP (Silvershard Mines and Temple of Kotmogu) and queues were looong. Once I waited over an hour for a pop. In terms of gameplay, my team was completely stomped in Silvershard Mines while utterly dominating the enemy in Temple, which to be fair is my usual experience with these in retail as well.

The other quest he gave me was more of a problem though: you're supposed to kill a boss type orc called "Warlord Bloodhilt" at Domination Point, the Horde base in Krasarang Wilds. The quest does state that you'll need a group. Looking it up, it seems that he was a raid level boss originally, but had already been nerfed to be more of a small group fight or possibly even soloable with some skill. My first attempt was a miserable failure however as he ate my cat for breakfast and I had to acknowledge that I needed a proper tanking pet, so I went out to tame a turtle. I also realised that I'd never bothered to learn a single glyph, another thing I rectified.

Unfortunately, returning more prepared ultimately didn't help because Blizzard introduced a bug a few months ago that causes the Kor'kron flak cannons in the base to not just shoot at players on flying mounts, but also on people on the ground, and more importantly - they can shoot through walls and inside buildings. So I honestly never got very far, less because of the boss himself but more because of the flak cannons often randomly nuking me in two to three hits. Certain spots sometimes seemed to be safe from them, but it wasn't consistent so I never really managed to come up with a safe strategy.

At one point I briefly got my hopes up when a pandaren monk arrived who also wanted to kill the boss. We grouped up and after getting blown up by the cannons a few times he suggested we just kill them. We did so, but unfortunately they respawned too quickly and were soon nuking us through the walls again. Eventually my gear was broken and the monk got fed up and said he'd rather go fishing than deal with this fuckery any longer.

I'm at a bit of a loss about how to continue. I find it very hard to think of a way to progress the quest at this stage, as even a larger group would likely get nuked by the cannons, never mind me being able to assemble such a group. As mentioned, I know for a fact that this bug has been in the game for a few months already (as I was actively playing when the daily quests in that area went from chill to "WTF is going on with these cannons"), and bug fixes for MoP Classic have not been a priority for Blizzard. You'd think something that blocks the legendary chain like this might still matter, but most people who care are probably already past this stage, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ If you've got any hot tips for this one, please feel free to leave them in the comments.

Turtle WoW's Final Farewell

As of today, the Turtle WoW private server is no longer available. I was able to make it to the final shutdown event last night, and I'm glad I did because it certainly was a unique experience.

I originally logged in about an hour beforehand, because I wasn't 100% certain of the exact time and didn't want to accidentally miss it. There were already plenty of people in both Stormwind and Moonwhisper Coast (at the Farewell Faire) and GMs were walking among them openly while spawning in some strange NPCs, such as a giant white cat.

One thing I think I never mentioned before was that Turtle WoW also had an in-game radio station. The reason I didn't mention it was that I never used it. I basically tried to connect once but nothing was playing, so I figured it was only active on special occasions. Plus, to be honest I wasn't that keen on having some modern music blasted into my ears while playing WoW anyway - I prefer the in-game music for immersion.

Either way, that evening I clicked the button for the radio again as there was a DJ playing for the final shutdown, and it worked. From my understanding he was also hosting some community run event on the Ambershire server.

Still, as there was still over an hour to go and I didn't care to just hang out for that long, I took some screenshots and then went away again to do something else for a while, only logging back in about ten minutes before the real shutdown.

It was nice to see how many people had shown up for the final farewell. As mentioned previously, the population had dropped down to a couple hundred concurrent players after the shutdown announcement, but for the party we were back to several thousand online on Nordanaar alone, and I'm sure there were just as many if not more on Ambershire, plus I imagine even some on the smaller Tel'Abim PvP server.

Some were sitting quietly on the beach and staring out into the sea, others were dancing, others were bouncing around like rabbits on crack. Chat got so busy that I was no longer able to read anything because the text was scrolling past so quickly - it was like in one of those Twitch streams where you get nothing but a vague impression of sentiment as hundreds of people spam yells in ALL CAPS.

Along the beach a line of people riding their turtle mounts had formed, and after riding back and forth along the line a couple of times, I planted my own among them. The DJ put on Semisonic's Closing Time as the last song to play before the shutdown and I've got to admit I was definitely feeling some feelings, having that in my ear as I sat among the turtles with fireworks going off around us and chat spam flying everywhere.

And to think I had only come here after the lawsuit, knowing full well that it was all going to go away! I'd only wanted to have a brief, curious peek, but even though I wasn't looking to make friends, it was hard not to get engrossed and feel part of something bigger. I'd always scoffed at the idea of a "Classic Plus" but what I saw on Turtle WoW really did bring back that feeling of old school excitement for me, of not knowing where that boat was going to go, being giddy about making it to the next zone to see what was new, and of eagerly thinking about what I was going to do the next time I logged in even when I wasn't actually playing.

For my own reference, here's how much progress my little high elf made over these last few weeks (since I last wrote down her stats in my 2025 end-of-year post):

• Level 45 Hunter (+7)
• 5 days, 15 hours played (+1 day, 12 hours)
• 225 Jewelcrafting (+24), 250 Mining (+24), 261 Cooking (+36), 221 Fishing (+16), 270 First Aid (+58), 1 Survival (-97 since they reset it)

The DJ did his job well in terms of timing, so the song ended and then it was over as we were all disconnected.

I have my blog to record my personal adventures, but the Turtle WoW devs also put up a website for people to share their own most memorable moments on the servers, which can be found on theturtlegrove.com. I do think this server will stand up there with Nostalrius as one of the big WoW private servers that really made an impact. We'll see whether there'll be any traces of it in what Blizzard does next for Classic, though I'm not particularly hopeful, not because I don't think the devs are capable but because I simply don't think Blizzard is interested in catering to this particular niche.

One thing I haven't changed my mind about in regards to a potential Classic+ is that it will be impossible to make everyone happy, and that applied to Turtle WoW as well! It just happened to really hit the points that I personally love. While they also created new raids and did things for PvPers for example, you didn't hear nearly as many people talk about that because it simply wasn't as popular. If all you wanted to do was PvP, there were probably better places for you to do so. You just didn't hear that much negativity about Turtle WoW because if someone didn't like it there, they just moved on to somewhere else. It's not like with official WoW, where there's a whole economy around publicly ranting about how terrible everything is and people can make a living off that.

Turtle was focused on the world, the old Warcraft RTS lore, roleplayers, community and levelling above all else, and they did those things exceptionally well. I don't think anyone currently in power at Blizzard shares those interests in the same way, so I suspect it's unlikely that we'll see anything close to this level of investment in those areas again.

Not that nobody is going to try at all, of course. People have been joking that surely the server will spring up again somewhere else as soon as it's shut down. I'm not on the Turtle WoW Discord, but I've seen some comments about how people should keep an eye on it for some sort of special announcement about the future later down the line.

Meanwhile I've also been hearing talk about a server called "OctoWoW" run by different people, which is based on a leaked older version of Turtle and apparently they've been trying to get some of the newer content back onto it as well. I've not got any personal interest in that, but I'm sure some people will jump right onto it. Plus there are the usual rumours about a rogue dev running off with the code and wanting to spin up his own project.

For my part, I'll just have one more "post mortem" post about Turtle WoW so to speak, to talk about my experiences with the last custom zone I played through, which was their version of Gilneas. Then I'll close the book on the subject of private servers again for the time being. That said, I've certainly made a lot of memories on this one for the relatively short time I played there.

Why I've Become a Classic+ Believer

The first time the concept of something like Classic Plus came up on this blog was in early August 2019, when I was wondering about WoW Classic's future (at a time when it's actual launch was actually still a few weeks away). Wild that this was almost seven years ago! At the time, I (rightly) considered it unlikely that Blizzard would invest time and money into developing new content for the vanilla world when they had all these cheaper and easier options available to keep people engaged and get more money out of Classic.

Nonetheless, people kept talking about it, and it's remained a subject of conversation throughout the years at least in some circles, gaining more and more mainstream traction the further away progressive Classic moved from the expansions that people remembered the most fondly.

To be honest, I used to think that a lot of the Classic+ believers were hopelessly deluded (in my post about BlizzCon 2023 I expressed major bewilderment at how many people had been dead certain that Blizzard was going to announce Classic+ at that event, three years ago now), and I know a few of my fellow bloggers who still feel that way. I've got to admit though, I've kind of come around to the Classic+ fans' point of view.

I'm actually a little embarrassed to say that because of how... weird a lot of them have been over the years, but even a broken clock is right twice a day and I actually think their moment is about to come. I do think that Blizzard will announce a Classic+ of some sort at BlizzCon this year, in the sense of new Classic servers based on Vanilla but with some tweaks and an intent to provide continued development and new additions for that vanilla world.

What has changed?

As far back as before the release of Classic, Blizzard prided themselves in their game being the gold standard for MMOs and their developers always knowing best. That all came crumbling down with the huge success of Classic (I don't remember where I saw it, but I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that Blizzard was very surprised by just how popular Classic was when it came out) and the dark days of Shadowlands. Players made it very clear that they didn't like what the devs were doing with the modern game, and the devs actually took note and made changes: The way retail has transformed over the last few years has been huge. You might still not like it (after all, there's no way to make everyone happy), but they've made huge strides towards giving players more features that had been widely requested:

• Too much of a content draught between patches? Have a new one every eight weeks.
• People sick and tired of pathfinder achievements limiting access to flying? Just fly from the start of every new expansion now.
• Not enough content for people who prefer to play solo? Here are delves!
• People don't get to appreciate the beauty of the world enough because they are just sitting in town while queueing up for stuff? Have all kinds of world events that encourage you to traverse all the zones every week.
• After more than two decades without it, housing is a thing now! 

... to name just a few examples.

Likewise, they've been wanting to hear what players wanted out of Classic from the start. They sent out many surveys over the years to get a feel for how players wanted things to continue. People clowned on the announcement of Cata Classic, but Holly Longdale's speech at BlizzCon made it clear that there had been a demand for it - presumably from regular players who just wanted to keep playing characters they'd become attached to.

And I suspect that over time, the interest expressed in some form of Classic+ content in those surveys has grown. In July 2024, Blizzard in fact gave us a survey entirely devoted to the subject!

The major argument against Classic Plus ever happening (that I used to make as well in the past) is that it would require too much money and effort for not enough guaranteed pay-off, or in other words, that the corporate overlords wouldn't want Blizzard to put too much work into Classic because it doesn't bring in enough money compared to retail and its cash shop.

I just don't think that logic applies anymore. Wanting to keep things lean and focused on a quality product was the old Blizzard. I remember when in the run-up to Classic, they said in an interview that they didn't really want to go too crazy with it, because it would essentially be like running two MMOs at once and they kind of wanted to avoid that. Not only are they effectively running two different MMOs now, there are half a dozen different versions of Classic! Spreading themselves and the players too thin is clearly no longer a concern.

The way I see it, they want to grow their profits by growing their customer base, and they're trying to do that by providing people with more stuff. This is perfectly in line with corporate overlords generally wanting to see the line go up - according to Play Nice, Bobby Kotick was already pushing Blizzard to release more content faster decades ago; the then leadership team just couldn't or wouldn't do it. I would also argue that Classic having more limited microtransactions is even more of an incentive for Blizzard to instead aim for ways to get more subscriptions out of it, such as offering a whole buffet of different options for people to choose from.

And what else can they do at this point to achieve growth on the Classic side of the business? I hadn't even thought about that point when I started writing this post, but when I went back to that old entry about what will come after Classic, I realised that by now, Blizzard has already implemented three out of the four progression options I listed at the time: "Do nothing" is Classic era, "Fresh start servers" is Anniversary, and "Give more expansions the Classic treatment" is why MoP Classic exists. The only major thing they haven't done is go down the Classic Plus route.

As for the argument that developing a second MMO is a lot of work and that the Classic team is too small... eh! I'm not saying that it wouldn't be a considerable undertaking, but a lot of MMOs that aren't modern WoW are run by much smaller teams. Even with limited resources, the Classic dev team managed to add some genuinely new content to Season of Discovery, such as a bunch of new quests, two new dungeons and a new raid.

My experiences on Turtle WoW have also been hugely eye-opening in that regard. Again, not to downplay anyone's efforts, but a regular WoW expansion has so much completely new stuff in it, from new gameplay systems that need to be developed and coded to entirely original new zones that need to be designed and built, to dozens of new creatures with new animations... the Turtle guys had none of that. They built their new zones out of what looked to be 90% existing vanilla assets, filled them with quests and dungeons that simply mimicked what Blizzard had done before, and people loved that stuff. I bet Blizzard absolutely has the capacity to do something similar.

The one thing I feel the need to clarify is that when I say that I've become a Classic+ believer, I only mean to say that I believe it will happen. I still think it's unlikely that it will appeal to me personally in the long run. I mean, I'd love it if it was simply magical and wonderful and everything I ever dreamed of, but I just struggle to imagine a world in which that's the case. I believe that the Classic devs have their hearts in the right place, but after I saw in Season of Discovery how everything ultimately came down to just funnelling people into raiding once again, I struggle to not see any potential Classic+ going down the same road after a while, simply because the people who only care about raiding and parsing are so fucking loud. Even if Blizzard made a bunch of beautiful additions to the old world, the focus at Classic Plus launch would likely still just be on people racing to the level cap again and complaining about boredom two weeks later while demanding new raids. And because the squeaky wheel gets the grease, things then slowly deteriorate for everyone else. (It's ironic to me how retail is actually better at catering to casual and solo players at this point than Classic.)

All that said, I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't extremely curious about just what Blizzard is cooking up. MadSeasonShow released a video the other day in which he summarises all the various hints that have been dropped so far (if you can stand his endless griping about Blizzard nowadays). At the same time, rumours are flying around that a bunch of Classic streamers have been invited to Blizzard HQ under an NDA this week. I've actually felt pressure to get this post out while the subject still remains somewhat controversial and before anything gets leaked! Regardless, I think we'll get the big reveal in September at the latest.

Turtle WoW: Notes from a Dying Server

At the time of me writing this, Turtle WoW has less than a week left to live. I haven't dropped everything to binge Turtle above everything else, but I've been happy with the number of hours I've been able to get in. My high elf hunter is level 43 and I'm hoping to wrap up one last custom zone before the server goes down.

The moment I hit level 40 I bought my blue racial mount. Call me basic but I enjoy an elf on a unicorn.

After the initial wailing and gnashing of teeth that followed the shutdown announcement, the server has been getting a lot quieter. Nordanaar used to have thousands of concurrent players, but within days it was down to a few hundred whenever I checked, and has remained at that level pretty consistently since then. To be clear, I've played on servers that size before and it's actually a perfectly fine population level to have a good time with - it's just sad here in the context of how quickly and sharply activity dropped off. The same applies to the auction house, which still had 50k+ listings the day of the shutdown announcement, then half of that, then half of that, and with only a week to go we're down to about 5k active auctions.

The people who were already pretty invested in the server and its community have mostly tried to pack up and move somewhere else as a group from what I can tell. The guild message of the day has been "AQ40 8/9 - Great Job - C'thun kill Monday" for weeks. I wonder whether they ever did go back for C'thun, but I kind of doubt it. The one officer (?) who still checks in did a bunch of promotions the other day, which resulted in my level 43 becoming a "Core-Raider", which amused me. I'm guessing it was just a simple way to increase everyone's guild bank permissions for the final weeks or something.

I think most of the people who remain are in a similar situation to me and just want to see some more of the content/enjoy some more of the vibes before it all goes away. I'm grateful for those who still put things up for auction, not to get rich but to help out other adventurers who might still benefit from certain items on their journeys. I remember when I used to vendor all my iron ore because there was just too dang much of it circulating - over the last few days I went back to listing everything I mined and sold all of it for a decent profit, though I primarily hope that it's simply been useful to someone. I've also been on the other end of this as I had to buy some green trousers after accidentally vendoring my previous pair, purchased an enchanting material I needed for a quest, and a player-crafted item that was required to continue levelling my jewelcrafting.

In general, while my focus has been on doing some more exploring, I haven't been "min-maxing" the experience in that respect. I still pause to fish here and there and do some crafting. At one point I did the quests to unlock the last rank of cooking and first aid. For what purpose? Because it was fun.

Touring some of the old zones for the cooking quest was a reminder of just how much Turtle WoW modified in those as well. In the Hinterlands I found a narrow mountain path that led me all the way up to a troll village that was located on a sort of overhang from the Hinterlands into Arathi, which did make me a bit wistful about the many more things I now wasn't going to get a chance to see.

A few days ago, the Turtle WoW devs also launched the "Fantastical Farewell Faire", a little event to allow players to get together one more time for the server's shutdown. A faire barker in town will offer to teleport you to Moonwhisper Coast, another custom zone, this one located north-east of Winterspring. They put up some Darkmoon Faire style tents and activities there that allow you to earn a currency called "Turtle Coin", with which you can buy some random items like pets and mounts.

I'm sure many must wonder why people would bother with any of that at a point when the shutdown is so near, but I found it a nice gesture. There's also a vendor who sells all kinds of raid consumables for cheap, presumably to help those players who are trying to get a few more clears in and might find the auction house no longer a source of sufficient supply. Additionally, there are a couple of quests, including one to light the way for the "Great Turtle Spirit", which actually made me tear up a bit.

I'd kind of like to be there when the server shuts down for good, to take one last screenshot and see who else is there for one last hurrah, but I don't know if that will align with my work hours. We'll see.

The Grim Reaches: TWoW's Take on Twilight Highlands

While I was trying to get into a group for Stormwrought Castle, I quested my way through another one of Turtle WoW's custom zones: the Grim Reaches. Designed for levels 33-38 according to the Turtle WoW Wiki, the Grim Reaches are located east of the Wetlands and Loch Modan, around where the Twilight Highlands were added with the launch of Cataclysm.

The Grim Reaches are lacking said Twilight influence, but aside from that there are similarities between this zone and its retail counterpart, at least in the sense that it's a hilly green region inhabited by Wildhammer dwarves and Dragonmaw orcs. Visually I'd describe it as a desaturated version of Loch Modan, with similar grass and trees, just a lot less vibrant and kind of dull looking in terms of colour. I'm definitely noticing a theme in that regard, which makes me wonder if this artistic choice was simply motivated by a sense that higher level zones should look less appealing/idyllic or by a desire to strongly distinguish Turtle's world from the way Blizzard leaned heavily into more cartoony aesthetics as time went on.

Regardless, this was not one of my favourite custom zones. It wasn't bad, mind you, it just kind of... was, lacking the clear identity and strong vibes of the previous custom zones I'd played through. The quests from different dwarves asking me to slay orcs, troggs, raptors and murlocs all kind of blended together, with few NPCs actually being memorable to me, such as the crazy dwarf by the lake who asks you to kill crocs, and the family of blacksmiths down south.

What stood out to me by its absence was the subject of gryphons. How can a town of Wildhammer dwarves not have a single quest related to gryphons? I'm not saying they need to be flanderised to the point of caring about nothing else, but the complete omission of the subject struck me as odd. 

There were also at least three occasions where I was sent into a cave or fortress to kill stuff, encountered a named NPC at the end and thought to myself "I bet the next quest will send me back here to kill that guy" and it was true every time. That's not exactly a complaint, but more of an observation on how devoted to certain aspects of the vanilla formula the Turtle WoW devs are, even ones that have been widely criticised over the years.

At the very northern end of the zone I encountered a skull level elite hydra at the beach, which I thought might be a world boss, though on doing some more research on it, it turned out to be just a normal max-level elite with an unknown purpose.

In the interest of full disclosure, I feel I have to mention that I ultimately didn't "complete" this zone, since I left with two group quests still in my log that asked me to kill some more orcs, but for which I couldn't find a group and I expect no longer will at this point. There was also a prettty large area in the south filled with hostile dwarf ghosts whose purpose I couldn't make out, but maybe that area is part of the intended Horde experience - there was a Horde outpost in the zone that clearly had its own things going on.

One final thing I wanted to note about the Grim Reaches was that the flight pathing to it was weirdly horrible, which made me wonder whether this is something the Turtle devs had issues with. As you can see on the map above, the dwarven settlement of Dun Kintas is pretty much straight east of Loch Modan, with just mountains separating them, but for some reason, the gyphon taxi wouldn't go over them, but instead insisted on looping all the way up to and through the Wetlands just to then go back down from the north, which made the zone very tedious to travel to for how close it actually was to Ironforge.