Pent up Classic Energy

I haven't written much about Classic in recent months, but I'm still thinking about it a lot. Especially in the shower for some reason.

You know how your brain will sometimes form somewhat random but extremely strong connections between things that aren't necessarily related? Like a certain smell instantly taking you back to a moment from your childhood, or a song always making you think of a specific person you once shared it with. I have something like that going on with WoW Classic, specifically the Barrens and Wailing Caverns, as memories of them come to mind every time I take a shower and wash my hair on a warm, sunny day.

I'm not sure why that is - I just know that when Classic launched back in 2019, I binged on it pretty hard for the first few weeks, which included thinking about it basically all the time, even when I wasn't playing - including in the shower I guess? Since I rolled several Horde characters back then, I also must have spent a fair amount of time in the Barrens, including running Wailing Caverns over and over, which logically would then have been something I was thinking about a lot. And I guess it must've still been warm and sunny in September 2019? Like I said, it's pretty random, and it does crack me up a little every time I shampoo my hair and suddenly remember that time I grouped with an undead priest outside Wailing Caverns.

Anyway, that was a bit of a tangent to start with, but I'm generally thinking about how I just kind of miss Classic right now. I find retail fun in its own way, but it simply doesn't scratch the same itch. At the same time, there's no Classic mode I really want to get into right now.

I did log into MoP Classic after the launch of patch 5.4 and checked out the Timeless Isle for a bit, but I was quickly reminded of just how many hours I spent grinding there in MoP Remix almost exactly two years ago now, and I just have zero appetite for doing all of that again, and more slowly at that.

Sometimes I cast my mind towards Season of Discovery and wonder whether I should go back and pursue some more of the goals I originally had for that mode before it potentially goes away... but the feeling just isn't there.

The anniversary servers seem weirdly alluring right now, mostly because I keep seeing people on my Battle.net friends list playing there, and I just miss that Burning Crusade feeling a bit. It's so weird now: I used to say that BC was my favourite expansion, then Classic came and ruined a lot of that for me because of how differently people were approaching it in the modern era, but with some distance I'm once again reminded that there were also vibes and content there that I still genuinely love.

I just don't want to get into the cesspit that are the anniversary servers, so I'm vainly holding out hope that maybe Blizzard will make Burning Crusade era servers this time around when Wrath of the Lich King comes around again. I was so disappointed when there was no interest in that back in 2022, but in fairness, at the time Classic era still looked pretty dead and I reckon there were probably people both in the community and at Blizzard who wondered whether having these era-locked servers at all had maybe been a mistake. But as mainline Classic progressed further into more expansions, the era servers truly came to life and have managed to maintain a healthy population ever since, even if it ebbs and flows a bit depending on what else is going on with other versions of Classic. Plus if it's true that Blizzard is planning to make a fresh set of servers go through the first three eras of the game every few years (as indicated by the leak), having both a BC and Wrath era server as final destinations for some of these characters would simply make sense to me. Or are you telling me that people would prefer to go through anniversary editions of Cata and MoP Classic?

Regardless, the demand for BC era might still not be quite there yet, and even worse, as WillE has suggested recently, it might actually be in Blizzard's best financial interests to not have them. Sure, they'll lose a few subs from people who don't want to progress into Wrath or whatever, but at the same time BC anniversary has apparently been extremely successful in terms of selling boosts, which can probably at least partially be blamed on the fact that there were several years when there was no way to play BC Classic officially and people had time to miss it.

So I know I'm probably going to be disappointed on that front, but I just can't help hoping. If BC era ever became a thing, I'd definitely roll up a character there to see whether I could find a BC-focused community with similar chill levels as the guys and gals on Classic era.

One way or another all the Classic news will be coming out at BlizzCon in a bit over a month, including the reveal of whatever Project Camelot turns out to be exactly - and whatever it is, I'll definitely want to check it out just to see what it's all about. So I'm kind of sitting here, thinking I might as well save that desire for Classic for the big reveals and new opportunities that will become available soon - but that doesn't mean that I don't still miss it in the meantime.

My Raiding History, Part 5: WoW Classic

When I updated something on my about page the other day, it occurred to me that the series about my raiding history that I have linked on there and which I wrote in 2020 is actually missing a fifth installment about what happened after that point. There's no time like the present, so let's get on it now!

Everything I said in part four about how I realised that I mainly raid for social reasons and how that's why I still I raid in SWTOR is still true, but something else happened in the meantime: WoW Classic.

I started playing Classic at its launch in 2019, but I once again had no interest in raiding there initially. I just rolled up some Horde characters on the EU's biggest PvE server with a couple of friends from back in the day, hoping to revel in a bit of nostalgia. Unfortunately said friends all dropped out pretty quickly, which left me feeling somewhat lonely on a server that at the same time felt unpleasantly crowded to me personally.

I ended up re-rolling a night elf hunter on an RP server, where I was happier - while I still played by myself, the medium population and general vibes felt noticeably nicer to me. However, my interest started to falter again when I approached max level for the second time and started to run out of things I wanted to do - until I ended up joining an explicitly casual pug for Zul'Gurub one weekend, a raid I knew very little about at the time. It went so well that I returned the next week when the opportunity arose and won lots of loot.

Soon afterwards, a random paladin ended up chatting me up in Ironforge (which I still think was because of that raid gear) and I found myself invited to a raiding guild, where I quickly became swept up in the manic scramble to get someone the Scarab Lord title. I had an insane amount of fun taking part in the server's gate opening event, and my new guild just generally made me feel extremely engaged with the game again. Soon I started to join their raids as a social member and even though I was extremely reluctant at first, they eventually convinced me to become a proper progression raider as well. (It seems a bit strange in hindsight, but they really wanted more hunters at the time for some reason.)

I learned that I really loved 40-man raids and was very motivated to contribute as much to the good vibes as possible, even if what was required of everyone was very little. I spent several months primarily raiding AQ40, yet it felt like barely any time had passed when Naxxramas was released. I also geared up my paladin alt to serve as back-up healer for some bosses there that were more healing-intensive than others. Overall, Naxxramas was more challenging than expected for a bunch of casuals like us, and we ultimately ended up killing Kel'Thuzad only once, in the week before the Burning Crusade pre-patch, though in a way that ended up being a nice capstone to the experience. (I just felt bad for the people who had been on the bench that night and never got to take part in a kill.)

I was very excited to continue into the Burning Crusade, since that had been the golden height of my original WoW raiding, but boy, did I end up being disappointed on that front. The downsizing from 40-man to 25-man had wreaked havoc on many guilds when it happened the first time, and BC Classic was no different. As the roster was trimmed down, many more casual and less optimised members were no longer welcome, and others just drifted away on their own. Everyone who remained suddenly seemed a lot more hardcore and less interested in just hanging out, which left me feeling very frustrated.

We did clear tier four pretty quickly, but I was just not happy raiding anymore and stepped down. I took a break for a couple of months, but then ended up returning during tier five, when a lot of the initial excitement had worn off and people seemed to have chilled out a little.

Unfortunately then Blizzard decided to inject some drama from their end instead by axing the RP server we were on, which resulted in a huge emotional rollercoaster for me. I eventually rejoined my guild on its new regular PvE server home, but a couple of months later, early into tier six, the guild suffered a sudden death anyway. I continued playing for a few months, but once I found out that everyone would be forced to transition into Wrath of the Lich King (which I really did not want to replay), I lost all interest in that version of Classic.

However, after a few months away I felt the itch again and decided to start exploring the vanilla Classic era servers instead, which were considered very dead at the time. (I had paid to clone my entire stable of characters during the BC transition.)

I quickly found myself invited into a guild on Horde side, and almost immediately hopped right back into 40-man raiding there, again as a hunter. I ended up raiding with them for a little over a year and it was a lovely time, though I made a point after the emotional intensity of my BC Classic adventures to not get quite as emotionally entangled. Progress was really hard and slow at times, largely due to a lack of numbers, and I never actually got to fully clear Naxx with them (though they did go on to do so without me later). I still check in on their Discord every so often and am happy to see that the guild is still going strong years later.

The main reason I stepped down from raiding on era was simply a lack of time. When I first started raiding in Classic, it was the height of the pandemic and my employer had everyone working from home full time, which meant that I had a lot of extra free time from not having to commute to London. Even so, I was still working, so I'm honestly not sure in hindsight how I mustered the energy to raid almost every single day of the week (as I was still playing SWTOR as well).

My job kept us working from home longer than most, but by late 2023 I did have to return to the office at least twice a week, and those days coincided with my Classic era raiding days, which was one of the main reasons I stepped down.

That said, I still miss it sometimes, because those chill 40-man raid vibes are just something else. I know why many people hate the format, and I certainly wouldn't want to be one of the poor officers who have to organise it all, but as a mere participant it's a unique experience that I've loved more than once now. A friend in retail keeps asking me whether I want to come along to some raids with the guild he's in there, but the mere question always makes me recoil a little because while I've come to enjoy many parts of modern WoW too, raiding is still not one of them and I don't think it has anything to offer me on that front. Those impeccable Classic vibes though... the memories still make me sigh wistfully and just re-reading some of the posts I linked about the subject here hit me right in the feels. I just don't think that I have enough time for it now. Maybe one day if circumstances change again.

New Changes and New People Coming to Classic Era

The Classic anniversary servers are getting ready to leave Vanilla behind and progress into the Burning Crusade, with Blizzard announcing on Tuesday that the expansion pre-patch will arrive in January. Those who don't want to progress into BC will be given the option to freely transfer to Classic era, which I think everyone kind of expected and which should give the era servers a nice population boost again.

Some were surprised that there's no option to clone your character this time, but I wasn't. I've long been under the impression that the cloning service saw very limited use back in 2021, but what it did do for sure was lead to no end of complaints. I think I also saw a dev comment at some point that it required a surprising amount of work or something? Either way, I'm not at all surprised that Blizzard didn't consider it worth the effort a second time around.

What did make my eyebrows shoot up was this tidbit hidden away in the patch notes for the Burning Crusade Classic PTR:  

When making your decision to transfer, please consider that the Group Finder tool and the Dual Spec feature will soon be added to Classic Era realms. This means that new and existing characters on Classic Era realms will have the option to learn Dual Spec. At the same time, the rulesets between Anniversary Hardcore and the original Hardcore realms will be aligned. This means that the original Hardcore realms will receive Dual Spec, Instant Mail, and the Dungeon Finder tool. [...]

We recognize that to some players, any change being brought to the Classic Era or original Hardcore environments arrives with hesitation. We acknowledge this, and we want you to know that we consider any change we make to these realms extremely carefully. In the case of the Group Finder tool, we consider it to be a true quality-of-life update, bringing players an additional and intuitive way to connect with each other.

A similar quality-of-life update is Edit Mode, allowing players to edit their user interfaces, which we are adding as a new change to BCC Anniversary Edition. Quality-of-life user interface options like Edit Mode could eventually make their way to Classic Era as well, and we look forward to the community’s thoughts on optional user interface quality-of-life additions such as this.

The choice to bring Dual Spec to Classic Era similarly received a tremendous amount of consideration and listening to the community’s thoughts on this feature. Since its introduction to Vanilla WoW in Season of Discovery, and again from the very start of Classic Anniversary, the introduction of Dual Spec to Vanilla WoW has been arguably the single most popular new feature and one of the most well-received in the Classic space. Players have praised that it simply makes the game more fun to play, and our hope is that Classic Era players will enjoy it just as much.

I immediately got flashbacks to when they dropped a bunch of random changes on era last year and there was a proper uproar from the community. I guess at least they are telling us in advance this time... though hiding it in the patch notes for another mode's PTR is not good form in my opinion. It's a good thing that the era community is so tight-knit that it's extremely good at spreading gossip - I had a ping about the news literally minutes after it was posted, thanks to Ronkuby from the Classic era Discord.

I don't think there's going to be a huge uproar this time though. Streamer Xaryu did a community poll last month about what kind of features people would like to see in a hypothetical Classic+, and while I wouldn't claim that any streamer's community is necessarily representative of the player population as a whole, it was still interesting to see that dual spec was one of the most popular features with a 94% approval rating. (I originally saw this in a handy graphic that I unfortunately can't find anymore, so I can only link to this AI-powered summary of his poll and stream that I found instead; I'm sorry.)

I'll say that I'm personally not a fan of this move - I rated dual spec as one of Wrath of the Lich King's best features back in 2010 so I do get the appeal, but I do also think it changes things in a way that I'd personally have preferred to keep out of era. It greatly increases the pressure on hybrids to be competent and geared for multiple roles, and people who prefer to just play one spec are increasingly seen as "lesser" than those who are more flexible, in a way that isn't as pronounced when changing specs takes a lot more effort and there's no real expectation that most people would want to do it.

But it is what it is, and I haven't been spending a lot of time on era for a while anyway. Same thing with the group finder tool - that's the one for manual listings that was also on SoD I presume, not the fully automated retail variant. It's handy for sure, but it does change things a little yet again in a way that at least as far as I'm aware, nobody on era was asking for. How many more tweaks can we make to this museum piece before it becomes something very different?

Looking Back at My Classic BC Experience

With Classic Wrath launching in two months, and Red writing about his conflicted feelings about it considering his experiences in Classic BC, I wanted to jot down a few final thoughts about my (less than a) year of Classic BC as well.

I've been going back and forth about how to approach this topic and structure this post, but in a nutshell I can say that Classic BC has been a big disappointment for me. Don't get me wrong, there were some good things about it, which I shall list first:

• The world and the content were pretty much as enjoyable as I remembered them to be. I loved farming in Nagrand, raiding in a plethora of colourful environments, and running dungeons over and over again because they were just plain fun. The class changes from Vanilla/Classic were also great and massively improved balance while still maintaining each class's unique flavour.
• There were times when I did feel some of the old love for and connection to friends and guildies, mostly when we were running heroics for the sheer fun of it and after the guild contracted a bit during tier five.

However... that's already where it ends. Meanwhile, the following issues marred the experience for me:

• The switch to the smaller raid sizes changed the general attitude in the guild I was in from one of inclusion (to make up the numbers) to one of exclusion and competitiveness (fighting for raid spots, constantly trying to out-do each other, expressing joy about getting rid of certain players).
• Increased access to powerful rewards for the solo player and small groups meant that people cared less about the guild as a whole and more about going through their personal checklists on their own time (which usually seemed to mean as fast as possible).
• While I could still appreciate the quality of the content, I did find it somewhat disillusioning and disappointing to see raids that I remembered as these epic battles in original BC be demoted to a level where they were considered a trivial farm.
• Players and Blizzard pushing for mega-servers for easier trade and random group-finding destroyed server communities and made it harder to exist in the open world (insane competition for spawns, people increasingly wanting to avoid the opposite faction, rarely seeing the same people around).

For all that, I don't think my opinion about original Burning Crusade being my favourite expansion has changed. It's just that what I remember so fondly about it still had a lot of "Vanilla influences" to it, with the old world not getting nerfed until quite late in the expansion and most players still approaching the content with curiosity and a sense of wonder.

Classic has definitely been ruined for me though, at least the "progressive" version of it (not counting era). I suppose it's still possible to enjoy it if you just stick to yourself and mostly stay away from endgame, or if you have a tight-knit group of friends that creates its own fun, but if you participate in the wider community there is definitely a trend towards rushing and solipsism that's hard to ignore. If you're someone who's planning to do group content in Classic Wrath, I can only wish you good luck.

My Experience on a US Server

I mentioned as a side note in a post from January that I had somehow managed to create a free trial account for the US servers by accident. Despite the fact that I never even logged into it, my Battle.net launcher annoyingly keeps defaulting to that account whenever I want to play retail, which is a bit of a nuisance.

The other day I had a bit of a discussion in Redbeard's comments about Chromie Time and how it works, and it made me want to test some things out for myself, specifically in regards to the new player experience. Of course, you can't very well simulate being a new player on an account that's been active for over a decade... which was when I suddenly remembered my empty US trial account. At last, a purpose for it!

I don't really have all the answers to my questions yet, so I won't  talk about Chromie Time or related matters in this post, but just the experience of rolling up new characters on a US retail server was interesting enough that I wanted to write about it.

I started by creating a night elf druid called Shintar on Ysera - I can't believe that nobody else tried to grab that name over there in over a decade, but it was certainly convenient for me! As expected, I didn't have a choice of starting zone but was put into Exile's Reach by default. Classes that have their own starting zones and start at a slightly higher level, such as death knight and demon hunter, were greyed out with a note that they required level ten to unlock.

When my druid loaded onto the Alliance ship where the Exile's Reach experience starts off, I was confused to find another druid standing there, already up to level six, and spamming a single spell over and over. I was initially a bit mystified as to what spell they were even casting... after all, there were no enemies there! Only after a few minutes did I realise that it was Moonfire and hitting the ship's target dummies... which are killable and award XP. The character was just tab-targeting and hitting Moonfire so fast and consistently that I can only guess that it must have been botted. People do the strangest things.

Anyway, aside from that, the whole thing wasn't very remarkable. As I said in my original post about Exile's Reach, it's a zone that's perfectly serviceable but extremely generic. The only thing that stood out to me was that as a druid, the brief class quest you get about halfway through the zone taught me travel form at level six... but I guess due to homogenisation no class is allowed to go faster than another at that level, so using it actually made me go no faster than night elf or cat form. I could see that being somewhat confusing to genuinely new players...

I also noticed that I was automatically put into a channel specific to new players where people called "guides" would answer questions. I vaguely recall hearing about that system before but I'd honestly forgotten it existed and still don't really know anything about it beyond what I saw. People mostly seemed to use the channel to ask (to me) uninteresting questions like "Which class should I play?" or "How do I link an item in chat?".

As soon as I hit level ten, I logged out and went back to the character creator. All classes were unlocked now, and I was able to choose any starting zone, so I rolled up a human paladin and started her off in Elwynn Forest for comparison purposes.

I'd forgotten what a weird number Cataclysm did on Elwynn, as it actually kept a lot of the vanilla quests more or less intact, but what changes Blizzard did make feel very jarring for old-timers, such as Princess being right next to the quest giver who wants her killed and Goldtooth chilling in a camp outside the Fargodeep Mine instead of inside of it. The changes to Northshire also feel pretty rubbish, what with the oh so threatening "invasion" by lots of neutral mobs. I did note though that Blizzard appeared to have removed the basic "use your abilities on the target dummy" quest I remember appearing after Cata - probably because truly new players for whom this sort of guidance would make some sense all get funnelled into Exile's Reach anyway.

Anyway, I ran about hunting kobolds, murlocs and what not, and it was very noticeable how much less streamlined and efficient this was than the Exile's Reach experience. It's kind of funny to me that I found myself in a world where the Cataclysm content is the one that feels outdated, considering I still always think of the Cataclysm revamp of the old world as the "new" content (compared to how things were in Vanilla).

However, what surprised me was how... comforting it all felt. Redbeard made a post yesterday about briefly logging into retail and going to Goldshire, where he was immediately put off by the crazy mounts. The timing on that was funny to me because my feeling about visiting Goldshire in retail was almost the opposite in this instance. Were there crazy mounts? Probably; I didn't really notice. What I did notice was that there were people out in the town square, chatting, showing off and goofing around, which felt heart-warmingly familiar. There was also a random corpse on the ground, something that represents "typical old-school Goldshire" to me like nothing else.

While I was out questing in Elwynn, local defense went off about the Horde attacking the inn and I had flashbacks to my very first night playing WoW back in 2006, where that exact same thing happened as well.

Another fun moment was when I tore through the murloc village north of the Eastvale Logging Camp - in terms of button presses, retail is of course much more engaging than Vanilla/Classic and characters get more powerful early on, so I was tearing through those murlocs like nobody's business, AoEing and healing myself, which is very unlike the old days... but at one point it did almost seem like I had bitten off more than I could chew, so I was very grateful when a hunter and mage decided to add some damage of their own and probably saved my butt.

I logged into my BC Classic server on EU for comparison and rode down to Goldshire there. All I saw was two levellers passing through, one of whom instantly logged out the moment he entered the inn. People in BC Classic don't "hang out" in Goldshire anymore in my experience. You log on to do the content you want to do and then you log off again. Anecdotal for sure, but food for thought nonetheless.

WoW Classic's Population Problems

I woke up to the shocking news this morning that come August, Blizzard is planning to shut down more than half of all BC Classic servers in the West. (There are currently 79, and the plan is to shut down 22 of the US ones and 21 in the EU.) My old home Hydraxian Waterlords is among those servers meant to be put out of their misery, after Blizzard already killed it off for all intents and purposes back in November by offering free transfers away from it.

Seeing Blizzard announce such a large number of actual server closures is quite shocking, as they've long had a reputation for never shutting down servers. Connect into clusters, sure, but outright shut down? Never!

Now, this was never entirely true... for example there were some EU servers many years ago that acted as unofficial Russian servers and were closed down when Blizzard decided to set up actual Russian servers, but by and large, Blizzard definitely made sure to avoid any bad press associated with that kind of thing. Players would point and laugh at other MMOs for closing and merging servers, but never WoW.

So, does this mean that Classic's dying? Not at all, but boy, does it have other problems.

I actually started writing this draft about server populations a couple of days ago, after Redbeard brought up the subject in a comment. You see, before Hydraxian Waterlords' sudden death I had been blissfully unaware of Classic having any population issues at all, but since then I've been looking around and the situation is actually pretty incredible, to the point that I'm continually surprised that there hasn't been more reporting on the subject.

Let me once again illustrate what I mean by using data from ironforge.pro. I've referred to this site before - it collects weekly data on how many characters are featured in raid combat logs or as having participated in arenas. As I've also said before, this obviously doesn't present a complete picture of a server's population, as there'll be many players who don't get captured by either of those measures, but it does give a pretty good indication of general trends. And they are crazy.

I'd like to illustrate this by comparing the historical data from the last week of OG Classic to data from last week, which was Burning Crusade Classic's 52nd week... so exactly a year later. I will be excluding arena data from this, as there's no comparable PvP data for OG Classic, so it seems more fair to only look at PvE (while keeping in mind that dedicated PvPers are also out there, somewhere).

First off, let's look at the overall numbers. The last week of OG Classic registered 207,365 active PvE endgame characters in the US and Europe. Last week in TBC Classic a stunning 275,243 characters were counted using the same metrics, which is nearly 33% more! I'm not sure we can interpret this growth in numbers as a growth in actual player population, considering that it's much easier in TBC to also do some raiding on alts, but we're definitely not dealing with a dying game.

Next, let's look at the overall faction balance. Blood elves have caused a pretty dramatic shift here - where Classic finished with the raiding population being 54.5% Alliance, it's now down to 47.8%, with the majority of players being Horde instead. Still, in the grand scheme of things that's not really a problem, and it's actually surprisingly close to even.

However, when we dig down to a server level, things don't look nearly as good. For the purposes of this post, I defined a "decent" faction balance as the larger faction making up less than 65% of the population. I know this is fairly generous, and I'm sure there are people who already consider that unpleasantly unbalanced, but I just had to pick a cut-off point for comparison purposes and that's what I went with.

The point is, even with that fairly generous interpretation of what makes for decent balance, less than half of all servers (38) qualified for it at the end of OG Classic, and now, a year later, that number is down to 13. If you actually enjoy encountering the enemy faction out in the world and standing a chance at a fair fight, your options have become increasingly limited.

The absolute extremes of imbalance show in the form of what can only be called "single-faction servers", where one faction has effectively died out to the point of the other making up 90% of the population or more. By the end of OG Classic there were already 11 servers that could be classified as such, but now we're up to 15.

However, all this wasn't the real shocker to me. Are you wondering why Blizzard is shutting down half of Classic BC's servers if there are actually more or at least a similar amount of characters being played each week? Because while by the end of OG Classic there were only four "dead" servers (defined by me as having less than one hundred PvE endgame characters logged), we are currently sitting on forty of these in Burning Crusade. Blizzard finally shutting these down is way overdue.

If the total population has grown or at least stayed roughly the same, and half the servers are empty, where did everybody go? The answer is that through a combination of free and paid character transfers, the Classic player base has increasingly congregated onto a bunch of mega servers. Before the launch of Burning Crusade, the largest server in the West was Gehennas (EU) with 6,706 endgame characters logged. A year later, the new "king" is Firemaw (EU) with no less than 29,163 known max-level PvE characters - nearly five times as many. Incidentally, Gehennas has also grown to a population of 18,560 - however, it has also gone from having good faction balance at the end of Classic to being 100% Horde now.

I can't even imagine what it must be like to play on one of those servers. Nethergarde Keep with its ~3k active endgame players is way down the list but still feels a bit too big to me even now. I miss the cosiness of Hydraxian Waterlords being less than half the size of that before it was killed off. However, apparently this is not what the majority of players want, and therefore it had to die.

And then it hit me: This is what has been wrong with Classic all along; I just never realised it. Even when #nochanges was the motto of the day and people like Asmongold were campaigning even for bugs to be reintroduced into the game, there were two areas were people were surprisingly quiet on matters of authenticity. One was the user interface, because the most outspoken campaigners were going to mod it all away anyway (when a client update suddenly introduced up/down arrows for gathering nodes on the mini map it took me ages to find even one person to mention that this was a Legion feature and not something that should be in Classic). And the other was server population.

I talked about this a bit during my private server days. During the heyday of Nostalrius, its fans were often going on about how amazing it was that the server could (supposedly) support 10k concurrent players. Meanwhile I was happily plodding away on the much smaller competitor Kronos and grateful for the peace and quiet.

When Classic became official and Blizzard sought input from its intended players, the Nostalrius narrative remained dominant. Never mind the fact that servers were limited to about 3k concurrent players back in the day, that was just a hardware limitation and there's no reason not to cram as many people as possible onto a single server nowadays! There are no downsides, honest!

I was never comfortable with this narrative, but during OG Classic, I was lucky without even realising it. I started on Pyrewood Village, which is now the biggest PvE server in Europe, and did bemoan even at the time that it was too busy for my liking, but I re-rolled on Hydraxian Waterlords after a few months and immediately loved that it was more quiet there. 

I remember commenter Kring complaining about Classic servers being too big in those early months, but thoughts like that quickly receded into the distance for me because I was now playing on a server that was actually fairly "vanilla-like" in its population: where known "server personalities" would shoot the shit in the LFG channel and you'd join a group for a dungeon you didn't need just because it was an odd hour and you felt like being kind to those strangers looking for just one more to be able to start their run already. People would complain about bots and boosters and GDKP runs ruining Classic on the subreddit and it all felt alien to me because none of those things were happening on my server. Because it was small.

It makes me wonder whether we aren't witnessing WoW being "ruined" all over again, just in a different way. WillE posted an excellent video on this only yesterday, but even he thinks that players congregating on mega servers "is the sensible thing to do" because apparently having the biggest possible player pool to choose from for your dungeon groups and having a full auction house are the only things that matter nowadays?

I feel that just like the automated LFD tool, this is one of those things that looks like it has no downsides when you look at it from a purely utilitarian point of view, but then you see some of the increasingly aberrant behaviours that arise in the environment you've created and go all surprised Pikachu.

The main difference when it comes to population issues is that they can't entirely be blamed on Blizzard. Players have campaigned for massive Classic servers from the beginning, and have paid good money for the privilege of jostling elbows with thousands of other players in Stormwind and Orgrimmar. I can't entirely blame Blizzard for letting those players do what they want, not to mention that the cost of all those server transfers must be raking in crazy amounts of money for them. However, I do have to say that I think it's part of an MMO developer's job to be able to say "no" sometimes and to recognise that there are things that are detrimental to a game's long-term health, even if there are people clamouring for them in the short term.

I wonder if mega servers will end up being one of those things for Classic or whether Blizzard will manage to come up with some sort of solution. Just like with automated group finding, I don't actually think that big servers must necessarily cause problems for an MMO, but they sure seem to be leading to some wacky behaviours in Classic right now and they are definitely not true to the original Vanilla or Burning Crusade experience.

What's the point of Classic now?

I'm still logging into Classic regularly, but it's mainly an exercise in going through the motions, such as to use my daily alchemy transmute. Even though the Sunwell patch dropped this week, I've had no desire to go to the Isle of Quel'Danas at this juncture.

I keep clinging to the notion that Blizzard could still change their minds about the continued existence of BC Classic servers, but having followed the relevant forum threads I'm not hopeful, and then I wonder why I even bother if all my characters are effectively going to be deleted in a few months.

I went back to some of my early posts about Classic and it struck me as almost tragic to see how much things have changed since then. My excitement for Classic was based on a simple premise: Blizzard letting us continue to play our favourite expansion forever. Sadly I couldn't find the link (if you know where to look, please share in the comments) but I distinctly remember an interview about Classic not long after its original announcement where someone from Blizzard (I think it was Ion but not 100% sure) said something along the lines of them realising that there was a huge passion for Classic and that they were going to honour that by recreating it and maintaining it effectively as a museum piece, even if only a small number of players were interested in playing it continuously.

Now, to be clear, I know they never claimed that they were going to do the same for later expansions, but I don't think I was unreasonable in taking it as a general expression of sentiment and to think that they were likely to approach classic versions of other expansions in a similar way. Their current attitude towards BC isn't just a slight deviation from what they said back then - going "well, we're not going to maintain it because we don't think enough people are willing to pay for it" is a complete 180 degree turn! They effectively built Burning Crusade Classic just to close it down again after less than two years.

And again, I'm not saying that progressing into Wrath of the Lich King is inherently wrong. I get that this is something that a lot of people want. It's just not what I wanted, and Blizzard certainly didn't make it clear that this was going to be forced on me when I opted to move my characters forward into Burning Crusade less than a year ago. For me, the promise of Classic was that it would allow us to go back and re-experience content and the world as it was, without having a deadline looming over our heads when it would all go away again. And no, of course a "stagnant" MMO like that wouldn't be as busy with people grinding frantically as a constantly evolving game, but that's kind of the point. Classic era is quiet, but it is being played by people who are enjoying themselves and re-running the old raids just for fun. All I wanted was the same opportunity for BC.

If Classic is just turning into a bunch of progression servers, that's - to me - worse than retail. One of the things that put me off back in Cataclysm was how blatant a treadmill the game had become and how fast it expected you to move, to the point that it would basically push you forward forcefully if it considered you too slow. New content was no longer an open invitation to do more, it became a mandate. The way the Classic team has been rushing to push out the last few Burning Crusade patches already replicates that feeling pretty perfectly.

Meanwhile, Shadowlands has had the slowest patch cadence ever, something that a lot of people have been complaining about, but which at the same time makes it extremely casual-friendly because you have loads of time to complete your goals. The irony of that is not lost on me.

Videos as Scrapbooking

In about one and a half months, it will have been exactly a decade since I was given my first piece of video editing software for my birthday. It wasn't a surprise gift, but one of those "a family member really wants to get me something for a special occasion so I'll have to think of something that vaguely interests me but that I've never really looked into getting myself" things.

A few days later, I uploaded my first public video to my YouTube channel: a three-minute clip compilation of me playing Huttball in SWTOR, set to a K-pop song. Honestly, that is pretty representative of the sort of random nature that my videos have retained since then. (I don't even particularly like K-pop, I'd just stumbled across that one song somewhere and it got stuck in my head. Using it in a video was a way of helping to excise the earworm.)

Throughout those ten years, I'm happy to say that while I've kept uploading semi-regularly (my channel contains over 300 public videos at this point, which averages out to two to three videos a month), I've never felt any real desire to become a professional YouTuber. I continue to be amazed by how many kids apparently find that job aspirational nowadays, considering that it's always looked pretty tedious and unrewarding to me.

The closest I've ever come to trying to make content for a wider audience was when I created a series of videos about levelling a character in SWTOR purely through pugging instances, which was fun for a while but also extremely time-consuming considering that the videos weren't even anything particularly fancy. Plus it made me realise that talking to an invisible assumed audience wasn't really a strength of mine. It did make me relate more to why so many YouTubers have a desire to monetise their work - considering how much time it takes to record and edit videos, it must be a hard hobby to maintain with any sort of frequency while also being bogged down by a day job.

That said, there's something very liberating about not having to worry about monetisation on YouTube. You'll often hear YouTubers complain about their battles with YouTube's copyright detection for example... but I am blissfully carefree in that regard. I use famous songs in my videos all the time and am perfectly fine with the original owner asserting their copyright and claiming the non-existent ad revenue. My videos have less than a hundred views on average anyway, and I always use an ad blocker while watching YouTube. I'm just happy to be able to legally share random vids that use someone else's music with my friends.

The main purpose of my videos over the years has quickly become memory preservation. When I got my first camera at the age of eleven, I used to take photos of everything and diligently sorted them into albums. With everything going digital and more of my life moving online, my focus moved more to taking and saving screenshots of my adventures in MMOs. Videos turned out to be a nice complement to that, in the sense that they are great for preserving memories of events where sound or context matter a lot, such as everyone whooping on voice chat after an exciting boss kill or people having a laugh about someone doing something particularly silly.

When I joined <Order of the Holy Fork> in Classic, it did not take long for me to upload my first video of my adventures with them - the adventure in question being a small raid storming Undercity to steal a quest item for our prospective Scarab Lord while someone played the soundtrack from Apocalypse Now over Discord. I was just laughing so hard throughout the whole thing, I had to preserve it... and I think I knew right then that this guild was a keeper. (It still makes me laugh on re-watching because of the sheer absurdity of it all.)

I soon found myself with plenty more material and ended up making more videos about my adventures with the guild - some random "outtakes" compilations featuring gems such as me accidentally getting a bunch of people killed the second time I went to pick up buffs from a Dire Maul Tribute run. I had fun making them and my guildies loved them too. In fact, I soon had more funny clips than I knew what to do with... I held a lot of them back with a thought to maybe using them in a more specific way later - e.g. I had quite a few recordings of people falling down into the eggs in Upper Blackrock Spire, and had this vision of one day perhaps making a video consisting of nothing but that.

But then... well, Classic Burning Crusade came and things weren't so great anymore. I initially found few opportunities to experience and capture the same kind of fun I used to have. I recall at least one guildie asking me when I was going to finally make a new video... but I just wasn't feeling it. At the same time, the old clips increasingly started to feel like an albatross around my neck - they were like a stack of old photos spread across a table in the corner of the kitchen, something that makes you feel like you should really tidy it away, but at the same time you kind of don't want to look at it.

Remembering the happy times just emphasised the contrast with how much things had changed, and reminded me of people that had left the guild or stopped playing and whom I missed. At the same time, I realised that the longer I waited to do anything with those video recordings, the less likely they were going to be relevant or interesting to those who still remained in the guild. It just added another aspect of sourness to the unhappy feelings I was already having about goings-on in the game.

But well... the guild is gone now. I wasn't playing in a way anymore that was going to add new material to the pile. In fact, I wasn't playing much at all, so I finally found the time and energy to go through with the clean-up throughout the past month. All the OG Classic clips went into a video that I ended up simply calling "Classic WoW Endgame Memories" - most of them are from our time in Naxx, but there were also some much older recordings in there, such as the aforementioned occasions of people falling down in UBRS. I just put all of it together into one video, sorted it a bit and threw it out there.

This weekend, I finally went through the much smaller number of Burning Crusade recordings I had of fun nights in dungeons, and compiled those into a single video as well - again, there was much in there that made me smile:

I think this one is going to be quite relatable to anyone who's done a lot of BC Classic dungeons...

Either way, getting this done has felt very good. Aside from the general good feeling you get from tidying up a bothersome mess, it also gave me a chance to relive many of the happy times I had with the guild and to preserve them in a format that I'm satisfied with. This has provided me with some closure and I feel ready to move on to whatever will come next.

No BC Classic Era Servers? Come on, Blizz.

Blizzard really has a way with their timing when it comes to delivering emotional gut punches to me in regards to Classic. When I worried about my RP server's continued viability back in November, they opened up free server transfers to dismantle it literally the next day. 

Two weeks ago I talked about how dejected I was feeling about my situation in BC Classic at the moment, but concluded that I also had some hope for maybe finding more of the sort of atmosphere I'd been looking for once most of the "current content crowd" had moved on to Classic Wrath and I could potentially hang out and be chill with more like-minded people on BC Classic era. This assumed that Blizzard was going to handle the transition from BC to WOTLK the same or at least in a very similar way to how they made the one from OG Classic to BC: by giving people a choice.

Of course, then I found out that this time around, Blizzard isn't planning to give people a choice, and that the plan is to simply forcefully progress everyone currently playing on BC servers to Wrath whether they want it or not. Here's the relevant quote from an IGN interview with lead developer Brian Birmingham and production director Patrick Dawson:

Another shift Classic players might want to take note of is how Blizzard is handling the transition from Burning Crusade to Lich King. When Burning Crusade was first announced, Blizzard allowed players to choose whether they wanted to stay in the original World of Warcraft Classic or move to Burning Crusade. While those who opted to stay in the original version can still remain there, this time there won't be an option to keep characters in The Burning Crusade expansion. Everyone who's already in Burning Crusade must move on to Wrath of the Lich King.

Fortunately, Dawson says that not many people currently in Burning Crusade want to stick around in that expansion anyway.

I just read that and was like: "What?!". Thanks for crushing my dreams yet again, Blizz. If my choices are going to be WOTLK Classic or bust, I'd rather stop playing Classic altogether, thanks.

This whole situation is just giving me flashbacks to my late Cata days when I was getting increasingly frustrated with Blizzard's constant pronouncements that nobody could possibly like the things I liked, so that it was only natural to nerf or remove them. I thought that they had turned a new leaf with Classic, acknowledging that hey, perhaps they'd used the argument that "nobody likes this anyway" to sand away features enjoyed by a relative minority of the player base one too many times over the years. And yet here we are once again, being told to run with the pack or GTFO.

I'm not giving up just yet because they've said that they are open to feedback in regards to all things Classic, and I'd invite you all to add your voice too if this as something you care about at all. Here's the thread on the US forums, here's the one on the EU forums, and here's a reddit thread on the subject. It's worth noting that this question might be relevant to you even if you personally want to move on to Wrath anyway, because Blizzard has already indicated that they are open to progressing to Cataclysm after Wrath, and would you want to be forcefully moved on then? Do think about the precedent that is being set with BC now.

I know that playing on BC era is something that is only going to be interesting to a minority, but we're not really asking for much here! They can merge servers down to one PvE and one PvP per region to simplify things and everything! However, entirely removing BC Classic once Wrath comes out just seems wrong to me, and goes entirely against the original mission statement of Classic being at least partially a preservation project. I'm not hopeful that the ones responsible at Blizzard will care enough at this point, but don't let it be said later that nobody spoke up about this.

Stick a Fork in It

My Classic guild <Order of the Holy Fork> is more or less dead at this point. It hasn't literally been disbanded, but the last 25-man raid was over a week ago and nobody has expressed a desire to have any more of them. Most raiders have either stepped away from the game entirely or moved on to greener pastures. The last raid that was officially ours was another half-pug to Black Temple, in which we weren't even able to get a single boss down for some reason - after five wipes on Naj'entus we gave up. It was the very definition of going out with a whimper. There've been a couple of guild Zul'Aman runs since then, which I've dutifully avoided after how my first visit to the place in Classic made me feel, but I don't really expect those to last either.

I have very mixed feelings about the whole thing. Part of me wanted to just move on and not spend any more time thinking about it at all. I reminded myself that it's just a game and that I've got plenty of other things going on, but my brain and heart insisted that they cared and couldn't just let go on command, so I guess writing this is one part of me processing the situation.

Above all, I am sad. My relationship with both the game and the guild has been somewhat fraught since the launch of Burning Crusade, but I still cared a lot, and just before everything started to crumble very suddenly, things had actually been going exceptionally well from my point of view. I know guilds don't last forever, but I have always been pretty invested in the ones I've been a part of, and watching things fall apart while feeling powerless to stop it is always heart-breaking. I find myself thinking back to the time I logged into my night elf priest back in the day and found that the leader of our fun little social guild had decided to disband it overnight in a sudden moment of rage about something or other and nobody even really knew what was going on.

As much as I hate to say anything bad about anyone here, I'm also feeling a little resentment in regards to how the officers handled the situation. I know it wasn't an easy situation to deal with, and I'm not saying I expected them to perform any miracles, but the complete and utter apathy on display towards the guild was frustrating to watch at times. I can't tell what was going on in the privacy of their heads, and maybe they were having passionate debates about the future of the guild in channels I couldn't see, but if that was the case, none of it leaked into the discourse visible to regular members.

If we asked about why events weren't being put up in time, we were told that people with ranks other than officers had the capability to do so if they wanted (OK? But as officers you're the ones in charge of organising the core raids, why would we spontaneously expect someone else to start doing it?), discussions about the future of the guild mostly consisted of the same small handful of regular members talking in circles without any officers weighing in, and when an officer finally did comment last week on the question of whether we should try to merge with another guild, his response was that it wasn't his place to make that decision. Like, what's the point of being an officer if you don't want to organise things and don't want to be responsible for anything? Isn't that kind of the point of taking on that role? I get that officers have their ups and downs with the game too, but when all of them slip into "eh, I don't really care anymore" mode simultaneously, it kind of leaves everyone else out to dry by default.

On the other hand, there is a small part of me that's actually somewhat relieved that it's all over now. Wanting to be a good guildie until the end, I signed for and attended every 25-man raid that I could make, and it was disappointing how often they had to be cancelled or ended up filled with lots of strangers just to make up the numbers, even if these strangers seemed nice enough. (And I will give credit to the officer who led those raids until the end.) That constant uncertainty and the way our performance actually became worse and worse week after week were not particularly fun things to be a part of.

Even on a larger scale though - when I quit WoW in favour of SWTOR back in 2012, I did mention in my post about it that it was tough to constantly be pulled in two different directions, and that's certainly something I've felt throughout my time in the Forks as well. Heck, it's why I didn't want to get involved with a guild in Classic in the first place! But then it just kind of happened and I really liked it, so I made it work and I don't regret putting the effort in... however, I won't deny that at times it was also a lot.

I like raiding, but that doesn't mean that I necessarily want to raid every single night of the week, but between raiding in Classic and running ops in SWTOR that was exactly what was happening sometimes. And even as I did that, I always felt a little bad and like I wasn't giving either guild enough of myself. With that in mind, a part of me is relieved that there's no longer an expectation for me to raid with the Forks, as it makes my weekly schedule less busy and leaves me with a bit more time for other things.

As you might be able to deduce from that last sentence, I'm not planning to find another guild to raid with. It's clearly been a priority for many guildies who left, but at this point I really have no interest in raiding in Classic just for the sake of raiding - I was only really doing it because of the Forks. Right at this moment I'm not even that interested in socialising at all to be honest. It's an urge that will come back to me I'm sure, but first I feel like I need some time to myself to get over this breakup so to speak, or whatever you want to call the slow dispersal of a guild.

The odds of me being interested in Wrath Classic don't look good now - I was considering giving it a try for the sake of the guild, but with that gone there's no real draw for me beyond perhaps a little bit of curiosity about how the launch will go. It will be interesting to see how the BC Classic era servers will pan out - I've actually found myself wanting to playing on Classic era sometimes, but the truth is that without the social ties, I struggle to think of things to do with my max-level characters there. BC would be a bit different in that regard as there are plenty of solo grinds left to do that I haven't tackled and that I could see myself investing some time in once the bulk of the server has moved on to WOTLK. Plus being away from the current content crowd where all the achievers are racing each other to who can be done with the game first might actually increase my chances of finding more like-minded people to hang out with. Time will tell.

Zul'Aman and the Pain of Nostalgia

I've said pretty much since the beginning of Classic that while nostalgia is a powerful draw, to truly be able to enjoy Classic, you need to be able to keep it at bay to some degree. If playing Classic starts to feel like you're trying to re-create the exact experience of being a young student with endless free time and (relatively) few worries in the world, things are likely to go down a dark path fairly quickly. The joy of Classic should lie in playing a game again that you've missed and that is still good fifteen years later, but while still being aware and leaving room for the reality that it couldn't ever feel exactly the same as it did fifteen years ago.

I think I mostly managed to do that throughout Classic's original run. The familiar environments stirred up memories for sure... but I tended to play different characters, and I actually participated in endgame in a way in which I never really did in vanilla, which very clearly made it a new and different experience.

I think part of my struggle with Classic BC has been that I did much more of BC's content in its original iteration, and that all of this happened during my most formative WoW years, meaning that I have a lot of powerful and positive memories associated with pretty much everything - more so than I did in old Azeroth, and no matter what I do in Classic BC, it has often felt like it pales in comparison to the original game if the experience isn't totally amazing.

With that in mind, I've been anticipating the opening of the Zul'Aman raid with very mixed feelings. I wrote a post on here two years ago in which I described the experience of raiding with my fixed Zul'Aman group back in Burning Cursade as "the height of my WoW raiding career". No matter how much I may have wanted to practice self-awareness to temper my expectations of the re-release, that kind of high was always going to be a very tough act to follow.

I don't have detailed records of my Zul'Aman runs back in the day, but I strongly remember the sense of camaraderie as we came together for every reset, goofing off in the entrance area until it was time to ring the gong to open the gates - which was the signal to put our serious hats on and be intensely focused for the next forty minutes or so.

We messed up the timed run many times, but we did get better over the course of weeks and months, and there was a strong sense of progression and of overcoming a challenge as a team. When we finally beat the timer for the first time, it was glorious and felt well earned.

The previous paragraph was originally supposed to start with "I have no records of my Zul'Aman runs back in the day", but I did actually find a text document on my hard drive in which I'd saved the write-up of our first successful bear run that I'd originally posted on our now defunct guild forums. Let me reproduce it here in full to give you a sense of the general vibes I associated with ZA:

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17/6 [2008] - Onslaught's first bear mount!

It started with one man having a simple idea. This Zul'Aman place is nice, Kanoth thought to himself, I think I'd like to go there every week, even if it's not part of the official raid schedule. Some of those timed chests contain amazing rewards! Always being a man of action, he soon started to assemble a group for this very purpose.

At first it was a bit of a struggle. Our gear wasn't quite up to the intended level, and it took some time to figure out the ideal strategy for each boss. Sometimes people stopped playing or just couldn't make the raid times anymore so the group makeup had to be changed. In the end this became the final "Team Bear Mount":

Arkiza - Noggenfogger addict and shooter of chain heal lasers
Drokhnar - suicidal killing machine and provider of windfury
Kanoth - cookie dispenser, crowd controller and frosty aoe master
Kordac - unsurpassed circle of healing spammer
Koreth - stabmaster supreme
Minox - whirlwinding bringer of death
Marasha - crazed warlock alt of Iarwain
Odious - amazing Tuesday tankadin
Shintar - neverending source of mana
Verment - strong bear and fierce cat in one

Two chests were a guaranteed reward for us in no time, soon three. Losing Kordac for several weeks as he moved house set us back a bit and made our runs considerably less spirited, but we persisted. As we got closer to the fourth chest the many ways in which you could just mess up the timer made us want to tear our hair out. Make sure you wear your tanking gear on the boss, Verm! Oh god, Marasha got too close to the hut! How did Odi just die there? What the hell is wrong with Shintar's computer, we're practically nine-manning this! [Note: I'd forgotten that this coincided with the time when I was struggling with an utterly crappy PC, lol.] ARGH.

However, in the end it was only a matter of time. Tonight we knew it would have to happen. People were excited before we had even started, and Minox got subjected to many vicious pokes by impatient people while trying to cook his dinner until he finally decided to leave it for later. We rang the gong and were off.

As usual Odi tanked a large part of the eagle gauntlet in one go and we just aoed it down. Akil'zon only had a chance to cast three storms before he bit the dust if I recall correctly. Barely a few minutes had passed by the time we engaged Nalorakk. He too went down fairly quickly and we rushed on to Jan'alai's gauntlet, the hardest bit of trash in the instance. However, people were really on their toes this time and all scouts were quickly intercepted and disposed of, without a single one getting a chance to call for help. On the dragonhawk boss himself there was a brief moment of panic when a hatcher didn't get killed in time and the whole right side of eggs got hatched before we were really ready for it, but fortunately we had just managed to kill off the left side before so Odi was free to pick them up. Flame debuffs were everywhere but nobody lost their cool and we were able to regain control while the healers did an amazing job keeping everyone up. As Jan'alai fell, Arkiza was so exhausted already that she stood on one of the remaining bombs and died right after the boss, becoming our first casualty. 😂

At this point we had almost twenty minutes left on the timer and Kanoth cautioned us to better move a little more slowly and carefully now rather than risk a wipe. The troll spirits smiled upon us as we sneakily wove our way through huts, past trees and across the lake without incidents, as all the patrols were conveniently in just the right place wherever we went, not even requiring us to wait for them to move. Our hearts pounded in our chests as the last of Halazzi's trash mobs died at our feet and we still had almost ten minutes left. After one last check that everyone was buffed and ready, Odi and Verment charged in... and only a few minutes later Halazzi was dead, with about five minutes left on the timer.

VICTORY!

We were all happy and laughing as we freed the last prisoner, a chatty little gnome that zoomed all over the room before finally revealing the fourth chest to us. And then it was ours, our very first Amani War Bear! 😀 Arkiza was the lucky winner of the first roll but I think we were all equally happy really.

Here's a shot of the happy team with Ark on her bear, unfortunately we suck at lining up properly. 😉 Also, here's a bigger one of just Ark and the bear in all its glory. Now to farm nine more bears for the rest of Team Bear Mount!

A video of the event made by Odi should also be forthcoming. [Note: I actually found that this video was still up on YouTube fourteen years later! You can tell it's authentic from the minimal editing and the stamp-sized resolution, which means that you can't even read people's names, but you can make me out as the shadowy blob mind-flaying Halazzi from the side.]

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I kind of dodged the matter of Zul'Aman opening in Classic for a few days since I wasn't playing much anyway, but then the Monday raid got cancelled once again and someone suggested going to Zul'Aman instead. "Screw it," I figured, "I didn't reserve this evening for a raid for nothing, so I might as well make this ZA run happen." (It fell on me to organise it since no actual officers or raid leaders were present. Yeah...)

After poking a lot of different people, I managed to assemble a group of ten, even if some of us were on alts. I had to play on my druid to fill one of the tanking spots myself, and the other tank was a warlock's paladin alt. People were asking whether we were going to try for a bear mount and I firmly told them no. Not only did we have a bunch of alts in the group, for many it was their first visit to ZA altogether! Obviously things weren't going to feel quite as challenging as they did back in the day, but the notion of people expecting to get a bear the very first time they set foot into the raid seemed ludicrous to me.

And in a way, my assessment wasn't wrong. The first boss, Akil'zon, took us three tries, meaning we already failed at the very first chest. I didn't feel too bad about this either, because as I said, my expectations were based on how hard I remembered this timed run being in the original Burning Crusade. The bear boss went down on the first try (even if my health bar yo-yoed to a scary degree), but then the dragonhawk took two tries, and the lynx no less than five. That last part threw me a little because I didn't remember that one being that much of an issue.

After four more wipes on Hex Lord (the penultimate boss), we had to call it because some people wanted to go to bed. And I'm not going to lie, at that point I did feel disappointed. I didn't expect us to get a bear, I didn't expect us to get any chests, and I did expect us to wipe repeatedly... but I'd hoped that we'd at least be able to complete the instance.

For that extra bit of salt in the wound, a friend joined us on voice chat just as we were finishing, to ask how we were doing, and when someone else told him that we'd only killed four bosses, his counter-question was: "Did you at least get a bear mount?" At least! Bears are now the bare minimum you should get out of this instance, pun intended!

The next day while I was doing business in Ironforge, as if to taunt me, a random parade of bears formed up between the bank and the auction house, as if to say: "Look how easy this is nowadays, we're only a week in and there's loads of these around already!"

It's not so much a matter of envy - I don't really crave a bear mount for myself in Classic - as being made to feel that the general vibe and the expectations around Zul'Aman are totally different now than they were fourteen years ago. The goal posts have moved from "here is a new raid and if you really work on it you can also earn a mount from it eventually" to "if you don't get the bear every single time from day one, you suck", and my memory - nay, my knowledge of how it used to be is so strong that the clash between then and now is painful.

Back then our gear was mediocre (if you look at the above group shot I used as my desktop background for a while, you can see a lot of tier four in there still, as well as gear from Zul'Aman itself, which we had farmed over time and which had actually been upgrades for us), everything wasn't as well documented, and the ZA timed run was a challenge on which we failed over and over again as a group until we got better, something that truly felt like an achievement.

In Classic, it feels like everyone's already running around in Black Temple gear, doing enough dps to steamroll everything with ease, and the ZA bear run is just treated as another item on the checklist of "objectives to complete in Classic BC" before moving on to Wrath. I hate it!

I can't really hold it against anyone who enjoys this type of play, but it's so fundamentally unlike what I've wanted out of my Classic experience that I honestly find the realisation kind of depressing. I wonder if people who spent months on the vanilla raids back in the day already felt something similar during OG Classic...

I also find myself missing our old server once again, because I have a hunch that this "issue" wouldn't have been quite as pronounced on Hydraxian Waterlords where we only had a small number of guilds doing hardcore progression. Over there, a bear mount would still have been a rare sight in week one, and we all would've gone, "Oh yeah, that guy's in Caelum, of course it's easy for them". Things feel very different when you're on a server where dozens of guilds have been farming Illidan for months.

The Socialiser's Lot

Playing WoW Classic and my ups and downs with it have made me do a lot of soul-searching about just what it is that motivates me to play MMOs. My previous results on the Bartle test have struck me as pretty on point in that regard: I'm mostly an explorer and socialiser, with a smattering of killer and very little achiever in me, which seems to make me very different from the majority of MMO players nowadays.

But what does that mean in practice, especially in a game like Classic? The explorer portion of my interests was pretty evident at launch, and I got a lot of joy out of rediscovering the old world, re-familiarising myself with old quests and all that jazz. My interest started to falter once I had revisited most of the major milestones and my socialiser heart was starting to feel lonely... but then I found a guild and that "saved" me, because just having a fun group of people to hang out with made everything interesting again.

The 40-man raids forced a lot of people into doing at least a bit of socialising I guess... and even if it wasn't their primary reason for playing, I suspect that most of those who chose to raid were at least okay with spending some time on it. I guess it's similar to how achievement systems don't do a lot to motivate me personally, but that doesn't mean that when I see an unexpected achievement pop up I won't sometimes go "oh, that's neat".

I was shocked then by how many of those social dynamics I saw getting lost in the transition to Classic Burning Crusade, because I honestly did not expect it. But smaller raid sizes meant cutting people out because efficiency won out over community, and instead of being grateful for every warm body that you could add to your roster to increase overall raid dps, people started to pick and choose based on performance.

The removal of the world buff meta also largely eliminated the whole "getting ready for the raid together" mini game. (Seriously, I know it had its downsides and people did a lot of complaining about it, but it was also such a team building exercise.) Increased "puggability" of raid content has meant less reliance on guilds, and resulted in achievers slowly switching towards playing with whoever could get them results the fastest vs. who they might otherwise have enjoyed hanging out with.

It was such a depressing wake-up call. Basically, as long as the game had made it beneficial for all types to be social, I had been under the illusion that everyone also enjoyed it equally. Little did I know that as soon as socialising became less mandatory, literally almost everyone seemed to be ready to ditch it in favour of achievement-hunting, whether that took the form of chasing the next level or the next piece of gear (what with there being no explicit achievement system in Classic - that didn't come in until Wrath).

To be clear here, I'm not trying to paint this as some sort of black and white, us vs. them scenario. We all have a myriad of different factors influencing our in-game motivations at any point in time. For example, if someone asks me to do a dungeon in WoW, here are some of the considerations that will help me determine whether I'll say yes or no:

• Social: Who's asking? Who else is coming? How much do I like them? Would my coming along really help these people out or am I easily replaceable?
  
• Curiosity: Have I been before? Has there been some sort of change that might make it interesting to revisit? Even if it's a place I know well, do I maybe get to bring a different class/play a different role than I usually do, to mix things up?
• Progression: Is there some sort of benefit for my character in this? Potential gear drops, XP, reputation?
• Gameplay: How fun is the moment-to-moment gameplay likely to be? E.g. I enjoy healing more than tanking, so being able to heal would tip the scales in favour of yes, while having to tank might push me more towards no. Also, how difficult is the content and how much time is it going to take? Do I have to take responsibility for forming the group or other "administrative" tasks?
  

If all or most of these questions have positive answers, I'll be there in a flash, while negative answers might make me hesitant. It's about the cumulative effect though, and no single point is going to turn the tide on its own. Nonetheless it's key to note that not all questions carry the same weight. I already tried to do some ranking here by putting the more important ones on top and the less important ones at the bottom. For me it's a no-brainer that the social part of the experience is one of the most important things, and that the other motivations would all need to be really strong to outweigh negative feelings in the social area.

What I found in Classic BC though was that many people's priorities were obviously very different, with "progression" often taking the number one spot and being the most important for them, and that has been both eye-opening and hurtful in some ways.

It has also meant that - somewhat paradoxically - my enjoyment "cycle" is kind of the opposite of that of many achiever types, who are happiest and most engaged when a new patch has just dropped and there are lots of new goals to chase. Meanwhile I just end up frustrated that my friends suddenly sideline me to grind dailies on three different alts or whatever. Conversely, when they get bored and run out of drops or reputations to pursue, I finally stand a chance to get at least some of them interested in simply doing things to hang out again, because the all-important progression part of the content has already been exhausted for them.

The one thing I'm still not sure about is why this has been such an issue for me in Classic but not for example in SWTOR. I think it helps that SWTOR as a whole doesn't actually cater as strongly to achievers: sure, there's new gear to grind sometimes, and there's an achievement system, but neither of those things are really designed to be the game's primary focus. There's no reason to do group content more than a couple of times if you don't actually enjoy it, so people don't sign up to raid with a guild if the company isn't a primary motivation for them, meaning that you're more likely to end up grouped with people who actually have similar interests.

Vanilla/OG Classic was the other way round in that it funnelled almost everyone into group content for gear, but that also worked in its own way to get people on the same page. In BC though, things have changed to the point that you'll still find many people doing group content primarily for the rewards, taking up valuable raid spots, while at the same time trying to escape the commitment of socialising - which I guess many solo achiever types would rate as an improvement, being able to get their BiS gear while having to rely on fewer other people. As someone for whom the social aspect is the focus at this point though, I've found it kind of hard at times, simultaneously having to compete for spots with people who don't actually want to be social, while also struggling to get the people I want to play with the most into groups with me.

All of this is only a small part of my current WoW malaise, but mulling these things over in my head has been a reminder of just how much WoW has cultivated a player base that is heavily achievement-driven. I can't remember whether I ever fit that mould in my early WoW days - I might have - but even so I have a strong feeling that the player base used to be more diverse in terms of motivations back then.

I was watching an old Extra Credits video about Bartle types and how to balance their populations before writing this, and I found it very striking that the way they describe an MMO with an overabundance of achievers, "players are playing simply to get further in the game, each in their own, small bubble", seems to describe my early BC Classic experience to a T (and is something I've seen in other MMOs as well). They also point out that socialisers need lots of other socialisers around to have fun, and yeah, I'm definitely feeling a strong impact from the seeming lack of like-minded people at the moment.

Fortnightly Classic Update

I haven't been playing Classic very much these last few weeks, partially because the new SWTOR expansion is still keeping me very engaged, partially because Classic has been a source of melancholy for me more than anything else.

About the most interesting thing I did was some questing on my little warrior alt - which is where I ran into what may well be Classic's last remaining mystery: how to get the assassins in Southshore to spawn in order to unlock the quest Assassin's Contract. It's a quest that I picked up on many previous characters more or less by accident, but curiously I never ran into the little event while in town with my warrior.

I started researching it and was surprised to find - as evidenced by the top comment on the Wowhead page linked above - that to this day, nobody really knows how to trigger it. There are all kinds of theories, from timers to it being set off by players starting or completing certain other quests, but at the same time every idea seems to have been disproven so far. I did my own bits of experimentation, going as far as to bring another character to Hillsbrad to do other quests in the zone while periodically relogging to my warrior in town to see whether anything was happening, but to no avail. So much for a "solved game"...

Aside from that little bit of fun though, I've been feeling a bit gloomy. My questing buddy let his sub lapse for no single reason that I'm aware of, and I've been feeling his absence all too keenly. We'd been working on levelling not one but two characters together, my shaman and my priest, and I keep staring at the character selection screen with thoughts along the lines of:

• I really love both of those classes, I want to continue levelling them so badly...
• But we worked so hard to be in sync in terms of levels, I don't want to play without him and mess that up.
• When is he going to be back though, if ever?
• When I think about it, levelling these characters without him would feel very empty, I don't think I'd want to do it anyway...
• I do have his contact details outside the game, I guess I could just ask when/if he's planning to come back? I guess I'm afraid that I might not like the answer though...

That's the downside of getting too attached to someone in a gaming context. It's great to have someone you like and whom you trust to always be there and to provide help and entertainment, but when that partnership comes to an end for whatever reason, it can be hard to go back to the solo lifestyle.

Not that there aren't still other guildies whom I like... one of them in particular keeps asking me to do dungeons with him and I always feel bad when I have to turn him down, because I do enjoy his company too (and I have run a few dungeons with him and others in the meantime). But it's just not the same.

The raiding situation has also continued to be very meh. At first we continued to cancel raids due to lack of attendance, until one such evening led to people having a bit of a chat on voice about the future of the guild. There was still a surprising amount of desire to turn things around somehow, which was nice to see. A lot of people (including me) spoke out in favour of opening up the core raids to community members, because even if that meant sacrificing some control over loot and things like that, it would surely be better than not getting to raid at all.

Then it took the officers a full week to set up these new events, and during that time another bunch of people posted goodbye messages about stepping down from raiding or the game altogether. This Saturday (a change of raid days that was welcome to me as Wednesdays were now out due to work) we were supposed to go to Black Temple, but almost half the group was pugs.

On the night, we struggled to find a third tank, and when we started to clear trash with just two tanks, we wiped three times on the same pull of naga just before the first boss. One of the pugs dropped group silently. It was looking pretty grim from my point of view.

However, somehow we pulled through. Leadership soldiered on undeterred, and eventually we filled the raid and succeeded at killing that trash pull. Nothing we encountered after that was quite as bad either, and we finished the night with four bosses killed, which didn't seem half bad for our very first foray into the instance.

Of course, before I'll even get a chance to go again, Blizzard will be releasing Zul'Aman next week... which to be fair, is a small catch-up raid and not a replacement for Mount Hyjal and Black Temple, but it still feels very soon for them to drop another patch, which in turn provides more evidence that they want to get everyone through the remaining Burning Crusade content quickly, potentially to be able to release Classic Wrath before the end of the year.