Checking in on Hardcore

I hoped that merely writing about my current feelings about Classic would be enough to calm that particular itch until BlizzCon, but that hasn't been entirely the case. After mulling things over for a bit, I decided to log into my hardcore priest for a bit, whom I last played over two years ago.

The first thing to note is that I had already played her a bit more back then, by which I mean more than I actually wrote about at the time. I don't recall why I didn't post about it right away, but I did save a screenshot of me being in a group in Wailing Caverns to remind myself that I did in fact end up running it. I don't know why I stopped playing after that, considering that being unable to get a group for Wailing Caverns was the main reason I cited for losing interest at the time, but I guess it doesn't matter now.

What I did capture in the screenshots I saved was that I had a druid tank who wore the Arena Grand Master trinket - an item that requires you to get the treasure from the centre of the Gurubashi arena in Stranglethorn Vale twelve times. That's not something many characters will ever get, never mind a lowbie on a hardcore server - he'd clearly been twinked in some way. I think the dungeon run was pretty quick and smooth as a result - I certainly don't remember anything like the nerves I felt while trying to keep everyone alive in Ragefire Chasm.

But as I said, all that was two years ago already. What did I find upon logging in this time? A very empty Orgrimmar for one thing, which immediately made my heart sink. I did recall that Blizzard had launched a "fresh" hardcore server at some point (completely unnecessarily, in my opinion), and unsurprisingly, this has resulted in the two original servers becoming pretty depopulated. They are not dead by any means... but very quiet. Gone are the days of world buffs dropping on massive crowds in Orgrimmar every day.

While I do see other levellers around, the make-up of the population is... odd. When I did a /who for my level range, the vast majority of characters were hunters, and when I opened the LFG tool, again, I had to scroll past something like ten hunters before I even saw another class looking for a group. I get that they are probably a popular class for hardcore, but just how dominant they are on Nek'rosh now feels abnormal and weird, and doesn't give me much hope for being able to find dungeon groups.

Lonely at the zeppelin 

Checking on what I had in my quest log, I had some quests pointing me towards Stonetalon Mountains, which seemed like a fun and safe option to start on at level 22. And it was. I gained about two levels doing various green quests and never really found myself in any danger. The scariest thing I did was solo Besseleth, but even though I was out of mana at the end, the fight never really got too scary.

I also did a bit of work on my professions on the side, picking more flowers, making potions and pausing at various fishing pools. And I'm a bit embarrassed to admit... I may have been affected by primarily spending my time in retail for months now, but I kept thinking that it was all a bit slow and boring. By the third time I was running up and down the full length of Stonetalon on foot with no speed buffs I found myself wishing for a mount. It just felt lonely and I wasn't particularly excited by any of it.

Nonetheless, I pushed on for a little while, mixing it up a bit by also questing in the southern Barrens and Hillsbrad, but I just didn't feel any of the old magic. I guess I can say that I hit level 25, which officially makes this priest more long-lived than Lossy the mage was, having died at level 22, but I don't think I'll keep at it for now. I've had a taste of Classic and at least this particular experience wasn't actually the flavour I was looking for. We'll see what September brings.

Classic WoW & Me in 2024

It's once again time for my by now annual look back at my relationship with WoW (Classic, there will be a separate post about retail), through the lens of which characters I've made any progress with this year and how much.

The main thing that immediately became apparent when I started putting the numbers together for this is that I spent a lot less time in Classic in 2024 than I did in 2023. Based on my 2023 review, about 50% less in fact. That still left me with more than ten days /played, which is not nothing, but for comparison: in 2019, the year when Classic first came out, I spent more time than that on a single character over the course of only four months.

When I did play Classic, my focus this year has generally been on rolling up new characters for novelty, with the occasional check-in on old favourites for some routine gameplay or the odd adventure here or there.

Season of Discovery

I'm going to start with Season of Discovery, which got the largest chunk of my play time as far as I can tell, though the numbers might be a little skewed as I'm pretty sure I created most of these characters at the end of last year and they just hadn't reached a high enough level yet for me to want to include them in my end-of-year round-up. I then still played quite intensely for the first two months or so of 2024, before getting utterly disenchanted with the state of SoD and giving up on it. It wasn't until the other month that I felt inspired to dip back in, but it's actually been quite nice to get to the party late and not feel like I have to give a fig about whatever's going on at endgame.

Shintar - Wild Growth

• Level 37 Priest
• 2 days, 23 hours played (+1 day, 11 hours)
  
• 188 Alchemy (+48), 205 Herbalism (+55), 204 Cooking (+54), 201 First Aid (+72), 174 Fishing (+52)

Raiding in SoD phase one, even if only did BFD twice or something, turned out to be an unexpected boon as I reckon the gear my priest got from it might well last her until the level cap at this point. She's currently leading the charge of my alt brigade with the goal of seeing Demon Fall Canyon some time next year.

Shintroll - WG

• Level 35 Hunter
  
• 1 day, 21 hours played
• 154 Leatherworking, 225 Skinning, 205 Cooking, 115 First Aid, 153 Fishing 

My hunter is an interesting contrast to this because she hit level 25 only just before phase two came out and has been wearing mostly the same greens since then. Levels come fast with the XP boost, but gear not so much. It's starting to become somewhat noticeable at this point, but fortunately hunters are sufficiently OP that she's still managing to get by.

Shindig - WG

• Level 28 Mage
  
• 1 day played
• 98 Enchanting, 125 Tailoring, 103 Cooking, 75 First Aid, 75 Fishing

Mages have an interesting concept going on in SoD with all the books you can find and the scrolls you can decipher, but sadly most of them haven't seemed particularly useful to me so far. We'll see whether that changes at some point.

Shikana - WG

• Level 24 Shaman
  
• 18 hours played
  
• 129 Engineering, 111 Mining, 103 Cooking, 77 First Aid, 91 Fishing

I think I created this shaman with the goal of trying out shaman tanking, but with the changes to runes I'm now too worried about being considered "suboptimal" for group content without all my runes purchased from the vendor. This was very much driven home when I did a Ragefire Chasm on another character with a shaman healer who was only level 8 (TIL that you can enter RFC at level 8; I always thought the minimum was 10) and he basically did all his healing with spells from runes. Her gear is also starting to fall behind rapidly and I'm thinking I may have to take some time out just to hunt down both some gear and runes.

Shinlu - WG

• Level 21 Druid
  
• 1 day, 12 hours played
• 89 Herbalism, 90 Skinning, 71 Cooking, 52 First Aid, 34 Fishing

This druid hasn't had a chance to do much yet... I think I've only found something like four runes so far as well. Much work to do either way.

Tirr - Lava Lash 

• Level 32 Priest
• 1 day, 19 hours played
• 104 Enchanting, 140 Tailoring, 180 Cooking, 114 First Aid, 205 Fishing

This was the character I made on the RP server with the goal of "rerolling" there for phase two, just for the server to die the "free transfer death" shortly after. I was honestly surprised to see that it was still up when I logged back in last month. I did a bit of solo questing there, but a completely empty world doesn't hold that much appeal to me right now. That was a fun experiment last year, but for the time being I'm kinda over it. 

Hardcore

Shintar - Nek'Rosh

• Level 22 Priest
• 23 hours played
  
• 96 Alchemy, 140 Herbalism, 100 Cooking, 115 First Aid, 136 Fishing 

While hardcore isn't really my (primary) jam, I did decide to revisit it briefly in spring by creating a priest on Horde side this time around. That character is actually still alive, I just lost interest in the low 20s as I so often do because I felt I should run Wailing Caverns for the quests but also struggled to find a group until my interest just kind of fizzled out.

Classic era - Alliance

Tirr - Zandalar Tribe

• Level 20 Hunter
  
• 22 hours played
  
• 141 Herbalism, 101 Skinning, 136 Cooking, 115 First Aid, 140 Fishing 

The most invested I got into Classic era this year was probably when I checked out the "community fresh" project on Zandalar Tribe in summer. Even so, that still resulted in less than a day of play time from me, so that should give you an idea of how inactive I've been on era in general this year. Also, when I logged in to check this character's /played, there were only two other people online on the entire server. No need for "community fresh" when there are actual Blizzard-run fresh anniversary servers.

My existing Alliance characters saw a little bit of... not really play, but active time as I started making money over on Alliance side at one point. Earlier in the year, a guildie needed help transferring an expensive recipe from Alliance side to Horde via the neutral AH and I was happy to help him out. He reimbursed me of course, but the whole thing did make me realise how poor my Alliance characters were in comparison to my Hordies, so I decided to try and make some easy money by actually regularly using my cooldowns to refine Deeprock Salt and create Mooncloth. Nothing to write home about, but I'm just going to list the overall stats in bullet point form for my own future reference:

• Tirr - Nethergarde Keep: 36 days, 9 hours played (+3 hours)
  
• Sarelle - NK: 20 days, 14 hours played (+1 hour)
• Faly - NK: 8 days, 22 hours played (+1 hour), 292 Cooking, 225 Fishing
• Jehna - NK: 7 days, 16 hours played (+3 hours), 300 Tailoring (+5, from making Mooncloth), 252 Enchanting (+2), 281 Cooking, 122 Fishing
• Razorr - Pyrewood Village: 2 days, 8 hours played (+4 hours... I have no idea what I did in that time as she gained no levels or skill-ups - it's possible I just made a mistake in my calculations last time), 160 Mining, 235 Skinning, 162 Cooking, 196 First Aid, 65 Fishing
• Shintar - PV: 2 days played (+0), 125 Mining, 172 Engineering, 181 Cooking, 145 First Aid, 126 Fishing

Classic era - Horde

Shintau - PV

• Level 56 Shaman (+3)
• 8 days, 18 hours played (+19 hours)
  
• 268 (Tribal) Leatherworking (+3)

My only Horde character to achieve anything noteworthy this year was my shaman, who gained three levels. Still not 60 after more than five years though, hah! I just did a bit of questing and ran both Sunken Temple and Maraudon. The Mara run didn't give me much XP, but it allowed me to play with a friend from OG Classic that had finally decided to start playing on era and we had a good time.

The rest of my stable didn't do much either, so again I'll just list them in bullet point form for my own future reference:

• Shika - PV: 33 days, 16 hours played (+1 day, 5 hours) - I think I may have attended one or two raids at some point in the year, I got to be part of Bracken's Atiesh adventure, and I did spend some time farming ore on occasion. Mostly I just logged in to put stuff on the AH though.
  
• Shilu - PV: 16 days, 7 hours played (+3 hours) - I don't even remember what I did on this one
  
• Shinny - PV: 4 days, 14 hours played (+10 hours) - my mage appears to have lost two levels since I wrote down that she was level 44 last year, and she's only 42 now; as this isn't Everquest it seems safe to say that was just me getting it wrong. She maxed out her tailoring due to me deciding to regularly craft and sell Mooncloth on Horde side as well: 300 Tailoring (+12), 143 Enchanting, 272 Cooking, 263 First Aid (+7), 178 Fishing (+1)
  
• Fooba - Mirage Raceway: 1 day, 12 hours played (+1 hour), 133 Mining, 97 Blacksmithing (-27? clearly another mistake in my notes last year), 76 Cooking (+56), 110 First Aid (+17), 77 Fishing (+70)
  
• Gemba - MR: 1 day, 4 hours played (+0), 97 Herbalism, 150 Skinning, 2 Cooking, 113 First Aid, 80 Fishing 

Once again I'm ending the year with no real idea of what next year will bring for me in Classic. Season of Discovery has given me some goals for the time being but that mode has a very uncertain future. I might revisit Hardcore again at some point, but beyond that I have no real plans, so my play time may well continue to decline until/unless we end up getting some kind of Classic-related surprise reveal that appeals to me.

More Hardcore Horde Adventures

I've continued to level my hardcore troll priest in small bursts of activity, and she's now up to level 20.

I initially struggled with more interface problems, as I could tell that I still wasn't seeing all the death announcements, even after joining the server-wide HardcoreDeaths channel. Some googling revealed that there's an additional drop-down in the in-game settings nowadays where you need to select how many deaths you want to see, and it's set to show only those of guild members by default.

I was happy when I finally got that sorted out and could see everything, as the discourse from the peanut gallery about deaths is always interesting. There were some raised eyebrows about a wipe in Ragefire Chasm for example, and when a level 52 died to fall damage in Tirisfal Glades there were exclamations along the lines of: "Why not wait five seconds for the zeppelin to actually dock, man?!"

Aside from that, guild chat sadly remains a bit confusing because they expect you to install an addon called "Greenwall" to connect it with the guild chat of sister guilds, which I've refused to do so far because I don't like the thought of having an extra addon just for that. That said, it makes reading guild chat a very disjointed experience right now as it's very obvious that people are frequently responding to things that I'm not seeing. I might cave eventually.

I've been surprised by how regular world buffs are dropping on hardcore. I think I mentioned this before, but still... I know that people raid on hardcore, but I figured it was more of a fringe activity considering the risk vs. reward. The number of world buffs going out on the regular seems to defy that assumption though.

After accidentally picking up some buffs in Orgrimmar one night, I decided to venture forth into Skull Rock at level 12. I knew that was probably a risky move, but I was feeling brave and was hopeful that I wasn't going to be the only person there. Indeed, I ran into a male troll hunter as soon as I turned the first corner. At first we continued fighting separately, just leap-frogging each other with our mob pulls, but then I spotted the rare elite warlock around a corner and suggested we group up to kill him. We did and then continued killing more together - grouping up is such a force multiplier in era (particularly as a priest!), it never ceases to amaze me.

Just as we were about to go out, a mage entered the cave and asked to join. I invited him, but of course he was only just starting his quests. The hunter thanked everyone politely and took his leave, but I stuck with the mage to help him get his quest done too. Then a druid showed up as well! I enjoyed the grouping experience, but at that point I was getting a bit worried that I 'd gotten myself caught in an endless loop of helping out new joiners. As if he'd read my mind, the mage said that he'd stay with the druid to help them complete their quest, but that I was free to go. I thanked everyone and took my leave, happy that the most deadly place in Durotar had gone so well for me.

Up next, I started questing in the Barrens. One funny experience I had there was when I was killing centaurs around the Forgotten Pools and a death announcement popped up that "a Stonearm" had killed someone at my location. For all the hours I've spent in the Barrens over the years, I had never heard of "a Stonearm" before, and I was rather alarmed to hear that this unknown entity was apparently killing people in my vicinity. A quick Wowhead search revealed him to be a rare centaur, and about five minutes later he killed another player. I was looking over my shoulder with some serious paranoia now, wondering whether he was a patroller or something, but he was not. I eventually spotted him guarding a chest near some tents but decided not to engage after the earlier carnage. When I came past the tents again a few minutes later, someone else had successfully killed him though.

At level 15 I wanted to run Ragefire Chasm. My first attempt to find a group in the evening wasn't successful - I saw that another group was already looking for a tank, so I didn't fancy my chances and went off to do something else. This turned out to be a good decision though, because when I logged in the following Saturday morning, I didn't even have enough time to type "LFG RFC" into chat before someone had already whispered me to ask whether I wanted to go there.

It was a smooth enough run, but it also highlighted to me that healing in hardcore feels like a much bigger responsibility than usual. We had a level 18 shaman tank, which was fine enough, but there was also a level 15 warrior with a two-hander and a mage that liked to go up close to spam Arcane Explosion, and they both got aggro on more than one occasion, which resulted in sudden damage spikes on them, and that at a point when I didn't yet have Flash Heal or anything... I think I saw the mage chug a healing potion once and when the warrior got low, the other shaman in the group threw him a quick off-heal. Usually I'd be mildly offended by people "panicking" like that as soon as someone's health drops below 50%, but in hardcore I understand wanting to be safe rather than perma-dead.

We also made the most out of the experience (seeing how you can do each dungeon only once per day) and even went to kill the troggs in the little cul-de-sac to the left, something I hadn't done in donkey's years.

We'll see how things develop as I go up in levels. I do love how much everyone seems to appreciate being buffed with a priest's fortitude. I do it all the time on the road and people will often stop what they're doing just to whisper me thanks - I like knowing that those extra HP might really help someone out in the world. My next personal goal is probably going to be to get into a Wailing Caverns run, but there's no rush.

Hardcore after the Hype

I'm in a bit of a funny place with WoW at the moment - a lot of things are happening and many of them good (in my opinion) but I'm still somewhat undecided on what I want out of Classic in specific right now. On a whim, I decided to pay the hardcore servers a visit again. It's been about six months since the death of Lossy the mage, so I was ready to give it another go.

I'm also slowly coming around to some of the arguments that people used to make to me about why they love hardcore - that it's not so much about the permadeath and more about how it changes levelling. I used to say that nothing stops you from taking your time levelling in "normal" Classic either and that I have indeed generally played that way, but I can't deny that the older Classic gets, the more it feels like a certain min-max culture starts to permeate every aspect of it, which can make slower and more casual play styles feel unwelcome. Sure, there were people like that in 2019 as well, but at the time I still felt that I could get away from their influence myself, while it seems harder now somehow.

Anyway, both hardcore realms in Europe at least are low population nowadays. Since I played Alliance on Stitches last time, I decided to create a troll priest on Nek'rosh this time around. The low population meant that my census addon no longer struggled to complete scans, though the numbers are still somewhat larger than those of the era PvE cluster. It also feels busier than era because characters are more spread out across the levels. On era, about 40% of all characters are at max-level, with many of them presumably raid-loggers, while the nature of hardcore means that people are constantly forced to roll up and level new characters, and less than ten percent of all characters my addon registered were level 60.

The addition of self-found mode at the end of February doesn't seem to have made much of a splash, though I did see a fair few characters with the buff in the starting area. I was surprised to find out though that Blizzard cut out the "solo" part of the challenge, so these characters can still group up too. Either way, this is something I'm definitely not interested in, as trade is an important part of earning money for me and I bought a wand from the auction house as soon as I could afford it.

When Blizzard released that video about the top ten causes of death in hardcore, it was noteworthy to me that most of them happened in Alliance starter zones. Looking at things from the Horde side, it definitely stood out to me how much less dangerous questing in Durotar seemed to be, with no caves full of kobolds or lakes guarded by murlocs. There are basically only two really deadly places: Skull Rock (which I've avoided so far) and Fizzle Darkstorm's camp. I was lucky and ran into a druid when I approached the latter, because even though I knew it was dangerous, I was still taken aback by Fizzle's almost instant respawn and how easy it was to aggro more and more adds... needless to say, if we hadn't grouped up, the druid and I most likely would've both been toast, but as it was we were fine.

In general all my interactions with other players have felt very positive. Drive-by buffing is alive and well, and someone randomly traded me some low-level herbs after they saw me making potions in the alchemy shop. A level 42 randomly whispered me to ask if I was French - not sure what that was about.

When I got a polite and unobtrusive invite to what's supposedly the server's biggest levelling guild, I took it. I was kind of missing the death announcements to be honest (and I didn't want to install the addon for that). Weirdly though, I still didn't see any even after joining the guild, even as I could see others responding to death announcements seemingly happening somewhere. Eventually I figured out that Blizzard apparently moved all death announcements to its own dedicated global channel called HardcoreDeaths, and for some reason it's not turned on by default. It was good to see that random deaths were still a thing after I joined it, though with a lower (and presumably more experienced) population they were few and far between compared to the craziness of hardcore's launch.

I'm not sure where this is going to go, if anywhere. Maybe I'll just die again in a few levels (which seems like a likely scenario, to be honest), but for the time being it's a nice distraction.

I'm Not Sure How to Parse This BlizzCon

In my post looking ahead towards BlizzCon about a month ago, I stated that I expected it to have a pretty binary outcome: either Blizzard would surprise and delight with something unexpected, reinvigorating a jaded player base, or they'd deliver more of the same, causing WoW to continue to stagnate and decline.

So of course what we got was... weirdly in-between? There was definitely some business as usual in there, but also a couple of genuine surprises, so I'm not quite sure what to make of it. I shall go into more detail as to why.

Retail WoW: Worldsoul Saga

On the retail front, Blizzard surprised by announcing not one, but three new expansions that will be thematically tied together under the name "Worldsoul Saga". Coming up first we have "The War Within", which will have us going underground to deal with Azeroth's injuries from the giant sword (I think) while running into Earthen and Nerubians, followed by "Midnight", which looks like it will have a void theme and will supposedly have us returning to the Eastern Kingdoms to do stuff with elves. The trilogy will finish with "The Last Titan" which will see us returning to Northrend. It's unclear whether these will follow the existing two-year expansion cycle. Apparently Metzen did mention wanting to deliver them a bit faster, but Blizzard tried that several times in the past and always failed.

I applaud their long-term thinking for planning the next three expansions in advance, but to be honest I'm not sure it was a good idea to reveal all this to the public, as by doing so, they've basically spoiled their big BlizzCon reveals for the next several years. Plus what happens if parts of War Within turn out to be not so well received, e.g. because people don't like certain character or story developments? Harder to pivot when you've already publicly locked yourself in until the end of the decade.

Also, the overall theme of the trilogy seems to be to tie up a bunch of existing loose story threads - not gonna lie, leaning into the "What sword?" meme making fun of how everyone seems to have forgotten about the giant sword stuck in Silithus was well done here. However, that aside, I can't say that any of it has me particularly enthused. I'm not against wrapping up old story threads in principle, but a lot of it seems to reference events and themes from Legion or BfA that I didn't personally experience when they were current and that are hard to make sense of if you're coming to the content later.

For example there seems to be much excitement about the character of Xal'atath, who I know virtually nothing about. I think her spirit lived inside the artifact weapon for shadow priests during Legion or something? I also seem to remember finding her in a possessed knife on the shores of Stormsong Valley in a BfA side quest, but nothing really came of that... so basically I feel lost because I don't really know who she is or why I should care about anything she does. Never been a huge fan of dwarf, void and titan lore either, so the notion that this is gonna be WoW's focus until 2030 or so is a bit oof.

On the plus side... the cinematic was really nice. When it first played, I was actually a bit distracted and not listening, so I was unsure who the human was that Thrall was talking to. Then I rewatched it properly and was like "Whoa, that's Anduin?!". I saw people joking that this is what doing Maw dailies for several years does to a person and got a good chuckle out of that.

Also, in an interesting twist, the "systems" panel for War Within seemed to get the most enthusiastic cheers out of all the announcements as far as I could tell from home, as the devs reiterated that they want to keep improving the game in permanent ways with no more temporary additions that end up being abandoned a year later. This includes dragonriding becoming available for more mounts and being rebranded as "dynamic flying", an expansion of the new talent tree introduced in Dragonflight, a new type of solo to small group open world content called delves, and a whole bunch of new account-wide features such as shared reputations, shared transmog and a shared bank. This is all good stuff, but I'm not sure it'll be enough of a draw if the main theme of the expansion(s) doesn't really appeal to me.

In summary, I'll probably play this if the husband and friends want to, and I do think some of it definitely sounds interesting, but I'm not particularly enthused right now.

Classic WoW: Cataclysm and Season of Discovery

I expected the Classic news to be underwhelming and was mostly curious to watch the bizarre level of hype that the Classic WoW subreddit had worked itself up into, where some people seemed to think it was an absolute certainty that Blizzard was going to announce their personal pipe dream of Classic Plus despite of no evidence for this whatsoever. It was honestly approaching conspiracy theory levels of delusion.

That said, what we got was actually quite interesting. First off, Cataclysm Classic is indeed going to happen, with "some changes" but nothing too dramatic based on what I've heard so far. As expected, this was not received with too much enthusiasm by the crowd, and I felt a bit bad for the lady who had to present the panel on the subject as the crowd refused to laugh at any of her jokes until she was allowed to make a few comments about hardcore at the end. I guess at least there was no outright booing? There'll be people who'll play it no doubt, and the Hurricane cinematic was once again very well done. Does this guy just officially work for Blizzard now?

More interesting though was the reveal of the much-anticipated "Season of Mastery 2", which is not going to be a Season of Mastery. While the original SoM was basically a fresh Vanilla server with some raid-focused changes, they decided to go into a completely different direction with this new one, called Season of Discovery. This one will instead be focused on levelling, with the level cap initially locked at 25 and then gradually increasing over time, plus a bunch of new open world content to explore and "runes" to collect that will grant abilities from later expansions. There'll be low-level raids (apparently Blackfathom Deeps will be a level 25 raid for example) and no open PTR, to make sure everyone discovers the changes together on launch, with no possibility to prepare guides in advance.

I'm sure some of this is going to turn out to be broken as hell, but honestly, I think for a seasonal server that's probably fine, as no long-term harm will be done if things don't work out. In the short term, raiding BFD at level 25 with a shaman tanking and a mage healing honestly sounds like a chaotic bit of novelty fun. I might want to check this out - it already launches at the end of November too!

Finally there was a brief mention of them adding a self-found mode to hardcore, which will give people the option to have a "more hardcore hardcore" experience like with the original addon that prohibited grouping and the use of the auction house. No further details so far.

Conclusion (for now)

I'm slightly unsure how to feel about the path forward for retail and while Blizzard did deliver something surprising on that front, I'm somewhat sceptical about this particular surprise right now. Meanwhile Season of Discovery sounds surprisingly intriguing and like it could be up my alley in a way I didn't expect at all. I guess that's leaning closer to the success side of things for Blizzard than the "same old, same old" failure state I originally posited.

The Death of Lossy the Mage

I was going to sit on this post for a few more days but then I figured: It's Halloween, what better time to entertain people with a tale of death? Which is basically my way of saying that my hardcore character died. I'll tell you how it happened, because as I said previously, how people die in hardcore is easily the most interesting thing about it.

The main thing that came to mind after the death was that it's true that it gets you when you least expect it. Here I had been worried about Defias in Westfall and pugs in the Deadmines, but I certainly didn't expect to be killed by some random naga on Zoram Strand.

In hindsight, I probably shouldn't have played on a day when I was feeling a bit under the weather and quite fuzzy-brained (I spent most of the afternoon sleeping after shutting down WoW) - I'd like to think that I would have made fewer bad decisions if I'd been entirely with it, but it is what it is.

So what happened was that I decided to make my way to the Wetlands and from there to Kalimdor to unlock some flight paths. I reached Astranaar in Ashenvale without incident and decided to do a few easy quests while I was there. One of them was to collect twenty naga heads on Zoram Strand, which was easy enough as they were three to four levels below me.

When I got there I also "found" another quest I'd completely forgotten about, the one to retrieve an ancient statuette. I decided to pick it up since it was on the way. The follow-up asked me to get a key from a named non-elite naga, and I figured I might do that as well. So I went to the little island where she resided, where most of the mobs were yellow to me instead of green, but I still didn't think too much of it. I noticed that the named naga was patrolling with two guards attached to her, but I was confident that I could take them on with clever use of sheep and frost nova. You can probably guess where this is going.

I still don't think that this was a terrible thing to do in principle, but I should have taken more care. I sheeped the named naga and started nuking the melee guard, but there was also a caster that kept blasting me. When I tried to freeze the melee guy in place I also didn't immediately step far enough away and he still got several hits in. I noticed that I was taking a lot of damage and chugged a health potion, but I thought I still had it under control - this is where things really started to go wrong as I waited too long to start running.

I also hadn't considered that being on a small island meant that my only escape vector was by swimming, which made me very slow. When I eventually tried to make a run for it, using blink etc., I noticed that my health was still going down even with nothing hitting me, because the warrior-type had put a bleed on me. Can't even bandage like that! I thought I was almost sure to die but the bleed ended with me having 17 hitpoints left, which is when I took the below screenshot. I actually thought I'd made it for a moment as I thought I'd lost my pursuers, but then the melee guy caught up with me and one final swing finished me off.

In hindsight I can see on the pre-death screenshot that I still had a lot of mana left, so mana shield might have saved me if I'd thought to use it, but oh well, when you're running scared you don't always think of all your options. Plus I honestly thought that I'd shaken them off (it's a bit hard to see while swimming) or I might have tried to frost nova one more time.

Thus ends the story of Lossy the Mage, and probably also of me trying hardcore for now, as I have no particular urge to immediately start over. I was, after all, just checking the mode out for the novelty. We'll see what news BlizzCon brings on the weekend.

Top Ten Causes of Death in Hardcore

I quite liked it when Blizzard released statistics about deaths on hardcore shortly after launch, so two months later I was kind of wondering when/if they were going to post some sort of update... so I was most pleased when one appeared in my video recommendations yesterday:

It's less than five minutes long and well worth a watch, but to provide a written summary anyway:

At this point, nearly 3 million characters have died on the hardcore servers, and the top ten causes of death at the time of the video were as follows:

1. Falling
2. Kobold Miner
3. Voidwalker Minion
4. Defias Trapper
5. Wendigo
6. Defias Pillager
7. Other players
8. Drowning
9. Porcine Entourage
10. Kobold Tunneler 

The thing that immediately stands out is that seven of these are low-level mobs, while the other three causes of death are level-neutral and can theoretically affect a character at any level. So a lot of people died early on - which is unsurprising - though I think percentage-wise this will go down over time as fewer inexperienced people try out hardcore for a laugh.

The next thing you'll probably notice is that six of the seven mobs are from Alliance starting areas, and only one from Horde. Judging by the comments, people read this in a variety of ways, from "nobody plays Horde on hardcore" to "Alliance players are bad" to "Horde starting zones are just easier". My favourite take was that Hordies are too busy falling to their deaths in Undercity and Thunder Bluff to have time to engage with mobs. There's probably at least a grain of truth in all of these.

Still, I also find myself agreeing with the comments that state that it would be interesting to see more videos like this, but filtered by faction or level for example. Since they do provide the actual death count for each source in the video, we know that the top ten are "only" responsible for about 14% of all deaths, which leaves a lot of room for other ways to die.

To talk about the items on the list in specific, well... I'm still surprised by how high falling and drowning rank, despite of being level-agnostic. It's not that I don't "get" how you can die to these things and I've certainly had my fair share of deaths from these way back when I was noob (e.g. by accidentally walking off one of the bridges in Thunder Bluff), but once you get the general idea of which heights are dangerous and how quickly you run out of air underwater, it's not that hard to take a bit of care in my opinion. It's not like you'll ever find yourself at the edge of a cliff or underwater unexpectedly.

Most of the mobs are not a surprise, as many of them are located in caves and can gang up on you due to fast respawns. I guess it's a little surprising that murlocs aren't on there, and that Defias Trappers rank above Defias Pillagers. I guess the trappers can net you when you try to run away (which isn't even mentioned in the video, which is quite an oversight in my opinion)... plus pillagers and murlocs are well known for being deadly at this point, so maybe their numbers are somewhat suppressed by people actually taking greater care around them now than they did twenty years ago.

The one that surprised/impressed me the most is the Porcine Entourage, because there are only two of these out in the world and they are neutral, so dying to these is never a pure accident but always overconfidence. Though I do get that people may not realise that they come as a package deal with Princess or just how hard they hit.

Nothing's as interesting about hardcore as hearing about how people die.

Hardcore: I Like Caves

My ultra-casual approach to hardcore, as in, playing for an hour or two maybe once a week, has been pretty beneficial towards my mage's survival, as it means that I'm always rested and it's easy to stay ahead of the levelling curve, so the mobs I fight for various quests remain safely a level or two below me.

I did eventually get up and quest my way through most of Westfall, though I also did another brief stint in Loch Modan. One thing I realised during this (to my great amusement) is that I'm actually kind of starting to like caves, the very things hardcore experts always warn you away from as death traps.

I'm not denying that they're dangerous, but when you're in an extremely busy zone where it's hard to get tags on mobs and you need fifteen of a particular type, the local cave can end up being the only place offering some respite from the constant competition, even if it's dangerous. There's a certain risk vs. reward appeal to that.

I found it most noticeable when I entered the Silver Stream Mine in Loch Modan - I mean, I needed to be there for multiple quests, but even so there was a moment of hesitation when I tripped over about half a dozen player corpses right at the entrance. It was like a big warning sign that the kobolds in there were not messing around, and I noticed it for myself in my very first fight as well, as the fireballs from the caster types hit quite hard, even with Dampen Magic up and my character being two to three levels above them.

Nonetheless, even the entrance area to the cave was still annoyingly busy, so I decided to venture forth to the very back of the cave where seemingly nobody else dared to tread. Admittedly there was one scary moment when I found myself surrounded by respawns, but being a mage with sheep and first aid, I was able to make it through. (I'm starting to think that above anything else, hardcore is about being able to do basic maths on the fly to figure out at which point you're at risk of running out of health and need to take appropriate steps to counter that.) In turn I was rewarded with two ore spawns, two chest spawns, and a rare that dropped a nice green that I managed to sell on the auction house - I mean, that seemed pretty worthwhile! I had a similarly good time inside the Gold Coast Quarry in Westfall, a place that I'd usually rather avoid.

Another cave beckoning me to enter it were the Deadmines. I've noticed that people on hardcore tend to want to over-level their dungeons to some degree before going in (which makes sense), but I figured that my usual plan of going in at level 19 was probably still good enough. I sent most of my cash off to my bank alt and imagined my mage writing a letter to her to say that she was about to embark on an adventure that she might not return from... really puts running dungeons into a whole new light!

I have to admit that I was in fact a little worried about running a dungeon on hardcore. I'm the kind of person who's usually very chill when it comes to pugs and people making mistakes, but I couldn't help but wonder how it would make me feel to suffer perma-death due to someone else's mess-up. Fortunately that's a question I didn't need to answer this time around (yet). To be honest I can't remember the last time I wiped in the Deadmines anyway, and my group was never at risk this time either.

Actually getting a group was more difficult than I expected though. The server is still crazy busy (marked "full" on the server selection screen) and there are always new levellers, but a lot of people have also moved on to endgame. I don't see nearly as many death announcements as I used to, and the server-wide proclamations that yet another character has reached level 60 are coming in quite frequently at this point.

Also, another reason for me usually preferring medium to low population servers is that at high populations, Looking for Group chat is a sea of extremely fast scrolling text that's almost impossible to parse without an addon. I felt like I was going cross-eyed trying to keep an eye out for someone building a Deadmines group and eventually just decided to start my own when I saw a tank looking for a group. I thought that having a tank should make it a breeze to fill out the rest of the party, but it still took me about ten minutes to snatch up three dps from the fast-scrolling LFG chat (nobody ever responded to my own "LFM"), and for the healer I eventually just did a /who priest 20-23 and whispered one that was close-by in Elwynn Forest. I was surprised that they immediately accepted.

The run itself was super smooth and everyone was very friendly. For example two of the others were also miners, and we took turns on the tin nodes so that we could all get skill-ups. The tank was a level 23 paladin with engineering, and when I commented on his extremely professional pulling, he shyly responded that he'd watched a guide. Later he expressed concern whether he was pulling too slowly for us, but we all reassured him that he was doing great and that we would all rather be safe than sorry dead. We also all had a good laugh when we found a chest and not one but two people rolled a 1 on the roll-off. Basically, it was the perfect dungeon pug. I also hit level 20 during the run and completed all the Deadmines dungeon quests.

In other news, when I was back in town I spotted a guild name being advertised in chat that vaguely rang a bell. I looked at the name of the poster and it was "Eagle". I whispered him to ask whether he was the same Eagle that was a pretty infamous trade chat personality on Hydraxian Waterlords ca. 2020 and he confirmed that he was. Small world!

As for my mage, she's still in the same random guild and it's still active. Last time I said that its numbers appeared to have dwindled a lot, but since then I've seen what I assume to be the guild master go through several sprees of spam-inviting more people to get us back to the member cap as well as booting those who'd been inactive for over a week. To be honest I'm surprised that I've not fallen victim to one of these inactivity purges myself yet, considering that I log on pretty irregularly.

We'll see how things go from here. To be honest the first twenty levels or so are always the most fun on a new alt (on normal servers too) but as I have to roam further afield to get things done, my interest tends to dwindle. On the other hand, doing a few quests once or twice a week is a pretty low time investment as it is and not that hard to keep up with.

Some More Experiences with Hardcore

I didn't immediately forget about my mage on the Stitches server after launch day; I did in fact go back to play her some more and see what else was happening on the server, plus I figured I might as well play until I died, which was surely going to happen soon.

I picked up mining and herbalism in Stormwind to supplement my income, figuring I'd avoid any crafting profession since levelling that would've just felt like wasted effort once I died. I also vendored most of the herbs I picked - when I talk about using gathering skills to make money, I'm not talking about the auction house, since it was so utterly flooded that absolutely everything was going for coppers. If you actually do want to level a crafting profession though, it's probably not a bad time to do so. I've seen plenty of crafters advertising their wares for cheap at all times of day, and I myself used the services of a tailor to get some bags made and bought a cheap wand from an enchanter.

As far as my gathering was concerned, it was hard to tap ore nodes and pick flowers before anyone else did due to how busy it was. While visiting the Elwynn farms, I found myself wishing that I'd taken up skinning instead, as I watched a constant stream of skinnable, hyper-spawning boars fall to adventurers keen to feed Billy MacLure.

I also joined a guild, not out of any particular desire to be social, but simply because someone threw me a random invite and I was curious to see what life was like in a hardcore guild. The first message I saw was someone talking about farting into their hand, which honestly made me want to immediately leave again, but then there was so much text scrolling across the screen, I did want to at least see some more first. The guild message of the day declared that the guild was "international", which manifested itself in people speaking a variety of languages in guild chat that most members probably didn't understand.

Death announcements were scrolling by pretty frequently and elicited a chorus of Fs in chat pretty much without fail. The average level of people's demise seemed to be around 8, with frequent causes of death including kobolds, murlocs and wendigos. Aside from that there were constant "so-and-so has joined the guild" announcements as the guild master appeared to be spam-inviting absolutely everyone for reasons unknown.

One guy that stood out to me among all the crazy chatter was someone who claimed to be a Catholic priest and who, unlike most people, talked in full paragraphs that were only slightly preachy but sounded very sincere. I couldn't help but wonder whether he was for real or some sort of elaborate troll or chat bot. I never found out, because he died to a kobold at level five and I don't know what he did after that.

I quested my way through the entirety of Elwynn and was level eleven by the time I hit the border to Westfall. And honestly, despite the constant death announcements, it was less scary than I expected? I just made sure to always run away if I wasn't 100% sure of the outcome of a battle. The only thing I had that was somewhat close to a near-death experience was when I went into the Fargodeep Mine (yes, I've heard all about the dangers of caves but I wasn't not gonna hunt down Goldtooth) and found myself running very deep inside because there were people everywhere and no mobs - until I suddenly saw a kobold in front of me, turned around, saw a kobold behind me, and everywhere else I looked I was suddenly surrounded by kobolds with no other player in sight. I basically just started running and didn't stop until I was out of the mine and the four or five kobolds I had in tow had reset. Frost Armor probably saved my hide there by slowing them after their first hit and allowing me to get away. When I made my way back into the cave a second time, I advanced more carefully and managed to find and kill Goldtooth with no problems.

Oh, and while hunting gnolls, Hogger spawned right on top of me not once, but twice. He hits pretty hard for his level and took about a third of my health off in a single hit both times, but again being a mage was helpful with getting away.

All that said, I didn't really want to start questing in Westfall and deal with Defias at level eleven, so I returned to town and logged off in order to accumulate some restedness. When I logged back in a week later, the guild had shrunk from over 500 members to less than a hundred, with a lot of the still active ones now being in their thirties or forties. I guess on hardcore a guild can die in a more literal way.

I decided that I was going to get a couple of levels in Loch Modan. I know that troggs can be dangerous too, but I seemed to remember the ones in the open hills being a bit more predictable and less janky than the Defias in Westfall. And indeed, being rested, I gained two levels doing just three or four quests in the area to kill troggs and wildlife. There were quite a few bodies at the entrance to Stonesplinter Valley though, and I witnessed a death "live" for the first time, as a female human warrior or paladin (I didn't quite catch it) was fighting near me one moment, and then I looked over just in time to see her expire to a trogg. It felt oddly traumatising to know that character was truly gone now.

Back in town, I heard a strange sound that sounded like a crowd of people shouting and which I couldn't place, but I soon learned through a guildie that this announced a character on the server having hit level 60. 

Lossy the mage remains alive at the time of me writing this, once again chilling in Stormwind after having hit level 13. Apparently that already makes her better than average, as the official Warcraft Twitter has enjoyed sharing some statistics about official hardcore life (and death).

I like how in the heat map included in that first link, you can see the trail of death from people attempting the Wetlands run at low level... and to think Pallais thought people weren't gonna do that! A lot of the causes of death listed in the second post also align with my own experiences based on the death announcements I saw, though I'm surprised to see fall damage and PvP ranked that high. I can't even think of that many places in Vanilla where you can fall to your death unexpectedly, unless the Undercity elevator still does that thing it used to do...

Anyway, I guess I'll casually keep going for a little longer until I either die or get bored.

Official Hardcore Launch Night on Stitches - EU

So as I've said many times by now, I'm not really interested in playing hardcore personally, but I'm interested in the new hardcore servers as a concept and community event, because in an MMO where you're no longer getting new content, the ebb and flow of the community is what shapes the game's narrative.

With that in mind, I was looking forward to checking out the hardcore server launch last night. I thought that the go-live time was midnight in my time zone, but I was apparently off by an hour... which meant that I arrived to the party an hour late. This probably wasn't entirely a bad thing as it meant that I only faced a queue of six minutes when I tried to get into the Stitches server around midnight my time. Both it and Nek'rosh were showing as full.

On character creation, I found it a bit annoying that you have to agree to a pop-up that explains what hardcore is (and most importantly, that there are no appeals if you die) - or rather, that this pop-up appears before the server has confirmed that your chosen name is actually available. So I had to hit "agree" half a dozen times just to be presented with a "name not available" error each time. However, eventually I found something that was available and off I went.

I created a human mage and unsurprisingly, Northshire was absolutely packed. There were so many new characters spawning in at the same time that the name over my head disappeared in a giant purple blob. Even an hour in, the area was heaving, to the point that I found it impossible to kill anything. Someone commented in general chat that at least this way, they were in no danger of dying, though I found a human corpse in the hills anyway - pretty impressive to die in an area with nothing but neutral mobs.

I ran around for five minutes, having a look around and trying to tag a kobold or wolf here and there, but I simply stood no chance. In the precious seconds my mage needed to wind up a fireball, one or more melee characters would've already tagged anything I tried to attack.

I decided to log off and have a look at how things were going Horde side. I opted for the undead starting zone there, and made a warrior in order to have a better shot at tagging mobs. Things were still very busy there as well, though slightly less so I think, and being a melee character definitely helped a lot with getting the first hit in. Often "my" mob would be hit by someone else's spell a mere second after and I thought, "yep, been there, done that". I made it about halfway through the first quest before I started to question my life choices (why was I fighting people for mobs like this on a server I had no plans to stay on anyway) and decided to log off again.

 

For a change of pace I logged into my low-level hunter on Hydraxian Waterlords, the RP server that had previously been designated as the unofficial hardcore server. My census addon only saw a total of 30 characters online on Alliance side, though that's still more than there used to be before this whole hardcore thing took off. We'll see whether anyone decides to stay or whether the place will go back to being completely abandoned in short order, now that the hardcore players have an official home. As for me personally, I enjoyed the peace and actually did a quest on my character there before calling it a night.

The next morning I decided to have another look at the situation on Stitches. I got in without a queue and was pleasantly surprised that the human starter zone was actually playable. It was still very busy of course, but no longer in a "ten players for every mob spawn point" kind of way. When I got to the quests to kill the Defias in the vineyards, it definitely felt different knowing that an accidental overpull could kill my character for good. I thought it was very noticeable that everyone around me moved much more carefully and deliberately - none of the reckless "just barrelling through to get to my quest objective" that you sometimes see on regular servers.

General chat also continued to be relatively entertaining, with conversations such as how people thought that finding a certain colour of bag first was a sign of good or bad luck. One level one chimed in to say that their last character hadn't even made it to level ten before dying to murlocs. My own mage made it to Goldshire before I decided to log off again.

When I checked back once more later in the afternoon, there was a 40-minute queue. When I checked again in the evening, queue times had increased to two hours. Needless to say, my curiosity wasn't strong enough to warrant waiting in line for that long. We'll see what the new mode's staying power is like. On the unofficial servers people seemed to be happy to re-roll endlessly for months so I expect sustained interest here as well, but I'll be very surprised if we still have queues in a week or two.

Other people writing about the launch:

• The Last Chapter Gaming Blog
• The Ancient Gaming Noob

Hardcore Patchocalypse

It's a well-known truism that patch day in any MMO means chaos. New features are exciting of course, but something random is always bugged and becomes the worst problem ever for a few days, just to promptly be forgotten almost instantly the moment the issue is fixed.

Classic era should be devoid of such issues, seeing how it's a static game that doesn't receive content updates - however, as I mentioned previously, technical adjustments still need to happen sometimes and can introduce new bugs. Today's patch not only pushed the changes to the PvP ranking system live, it also laid the groundwork for tomorrow's launch of the official hardcore servers... and played havoc with era in general in the process.

Nothing was really completely broken, but there were a dozen different things going on that confused people, probably more than usual since everyone's used to things not changing on era. Chatting and grouping with people on the same cluster suddenly posed challenges, casters using wands would find their character starting to smack mobs with their useless melee weapon if the enemy got too close, and spell ranks had seemingly disappeared from the spell book (though they could be made to reappear via a Wrath-style tickbox). Talents were reset for no reason, and the talent window suddenly acquired a dungeon finder-style role icon. The general settings menu was updated to match that in Dragonflight, which looks bewilderingly different... though the thing that really bothers me personally is that the little check boxes are done in a different style than the Vanilla ones. Where's that striving for authenticity now...

Anyway, nothing's completely unplayable, and most problems seemed to be down to people's addons breaking, which is not unusual for major patches - but again, kind of unexpected for era players. Era also doesn't receive as much community support as other versions of the game, so some of those broken addons might stay outdated for a while. We shall soldier on.

As a somewhat tangential fun fact, the names of the hardcore servers going live tomorrow were revealed yesterday. There are going to be two per region, because apparently Blizzard hasn't learned anything from Wrath Classic's mono-faction servers, but oh well. Either way, what I really wanted to comment on were their names, which I thought were pretty brilliantly chosen to be honest: in North America, players will be playing on "Defias Pillager" and "Skull Rock", while Europeans will get to choose between "Nek'rosh" and "Stitches".

Defias Pillagers of course are notorious for being the most deadly low-level mob in Vanilla. Back in the day, the official Warcraft site had a "leaderboard" that showed how many people had died to different kinds of mobs, and the Defias Pillager, a low-level caster mob from Westfall that shoots disproportionally powerful fireballs for its level, was very high up on the list, right up there among raid bosses that were wiping raid groups forty people at a time. I expect the good old pillagers will claim the lives of many hardcore players as well, and that this will become the North-American Alliance server.

Skull Rock on the other hand is a cave in northern Durotar that is known to be a death trap for low-level Hordies, due to housing a mix of hard-hitting melee mobs and warlock-type enemies with pets, at a level when most classes don't really have the tools to deal with multi-mob pulls very well. I wrote about my own struggles with getting the Voidwalker quest for orc warlocks done in there in this post. I'm guessing many hardcore Hordies will meet their doom there as well, and that this server might end up being more favoured by the Horde.

Nek'rosh is an orc elite boss in the Wetlands and I guess has surprised many a unsuspecting Alliance player who found themselves sent on a mission to kill a level 32 elite when the previous quest in the chain had them kill regular orcs in the mid-twenties. But that's Vanilla for you! I'm not sure he'll get to kill that many people on hardcore since I don't think many who'll get that far will go into this chain unprepared, so I guess this name is a little less exciting than the others. I'd initially thought it was better than it was since I got my orc names mixed up and mistook him for one of the nasty named warlocks in Durotar.

Finally, Stitches is of course the high-level elite flesh golem that wanders the roads of Darkshire whenever someone completes the necromancer quest chain. While his body count probably isn't as high as that of other mobs, unexpectedly seeing this hideous giant lumber your way surely gave many an Alliance lowbie their first life-or-death scare after they innocently expected to be safe on the road. Another very worthy name for a server that's going to be all about dying at low levels.

We'll see what mayhem ensues tomorrow.

Era News: SoM Gone, PvP Changes, Hardcore Launch

Time for a short post to mention a few things happening in and around era that don't really affect me much personally, but that I'd still like to make note of here as they are milestones of a sort.

Season of Mastery Gone

The temporary Season of Mastery officially ended in February, but while the servers were locked at that point, they still showed up in game as accessible and people could go and grab their old characters to make use of the free transfer option to move them to the regular Classic era servers. Blizzard said that this option would be available "for at least three months" but then didn't specify any further.

Until last week that is, when they suddenly gave short notice that the realms were about to disappear for good in a few days. If you had characters on those servers and didn't bother to save them until now, they're gone for good now, sorry.

Based on my experience with the shutdown of the Classic era cloning service before Wrath of the Lich King, I anticipate a constant trickle of people posting on the forums and on Discords from now on to complain that Blizzard deleted their characters "without notice", or to assert that surely nothing was really deleted and Blizzard just needs to stop hiding their characters already.

PvP Changes Going Live on August 23

Back in June I mentioned that the Classic devs had decided to overhaul the PvP system on era. These changes were eventually explained on the forums in full and tested on the PTR. They ended up changing more than I expected, but all the feedback I've heard from PvPers in my circles has been positive even so.

In a nutshell, Blizzard is getting rid of both the competitive aspect of the old system as well as rank decay. The former means that your progress is no longer measured against other players, but gaining rank is simply a static honour grind with fixed values. This gets rid of a lot of nonsense that people were doing in order to game the old system. From what I've heard, the new fixed honour requirements for each rank are lower and easier to attain if you were previously on a busy PvP server, but if you were on a chill PvE server where there wasn't that much competition, you might have to work a bit harder to get to max rank than you did before. This is kind of along the lines of what I expected.

What took me completely by surprise was the removal of rank decay. There will still be weekly honour decay, but you won't be able to go down in rank anymore unless you get dishonourable kills. This means that going up in rank still requires consistent play for at least a couple of weeks, but you can basically "take a break" between working on ranks without decay pushing you back to the very bottom of the ladder. This obviously takes away a lot of the "no-lifeing" requirements of the old PvP system and makes it much more accessible to a wider audience. I just wonder whether that'll mean that we'll eventually find ourselves surrounded by Grand Marshals and High Warlords everywhere.

Oh yeah, and like it says in the headline, a few days ago Blizzard announced that this change is meant to go live on August 23.

Hardcore Realms Coming on August 24

That very same news post also contained the announcement that the official hardcore realms are meant to launch a day later, on August 24. Honestly, I'm kind of looking forward to this one now, even if I'm not planning to play hardcore myself, simply because I expect it to be a big community event involving lots of drama. That should be fun to watch.

Official Hardcore Rules

I always feel a bit conflicted talking about hardcore because I've previously established that it's not my cup of tea, and I feel that one shouldn't be too opinionated on forms of entertainment one has no personal stake in. On the other hand though, it is the biggest thing currently happening to WoW Classic era, so I'm curious to see how it will shake out.

Official hardcore logo

With that said, I thought it was worth mentioning that Blizzard announced the rule-set for official hardcore servers last week, and they opened up the hardcore test realm as well.

The unofficial hardcore addon has a lot of rules beyond permadeath, and there was much debate around how many of them should be incorporated into the official game mode. As it turns out, Blizzard did make a few more changes to this new realm type beyond making death permanent, but they kept it relatively light touch overall.

Above anything else, there seemed to be a focus on preventing griefing, something that was apparently a pretty popular activity on the unofficial hardcore servers, whether it involved high-level mobs getting kited into low-level zones and wiping out the lowbies, or various ways of tricking people into flagging themselves for PvP so that they could be killed. While I don't condone griefing, I've got to admit that some of these got quite creative. I remember seeing a video on reddit of a bunch of troll players that were pretending to be mobs in a cave in Dun Morogh... I didn't even realise what I was watching at first glance until I read the explanation underneath; that's how convincing their "roleplay" was.

Anyway, none of that will be possible on the official hardcore realm(s) as no quests will auto-flag you for PvP, and accidental attacking will also be impossible as you'll only be able to flag yourself by typing /pvp or attacking opposite faction NPCs. Mobs will also have tighter leashes to prevent people from kiting high-level enemies into low-level zones.

PvP in general won't really be a thing, with battlegrounds and battlemasters getting removed. If people want to take part in any kind of organised PvP, they can do so, but death will still be permanent and there'll be no honour to be earned. The only sort of semi-supported form of PvP will be the newly added option to duel to the death, with the winner earning a cosmetic buff called "string of ears" that shows how many people they've bested this way. I thought that was kind of a neat touch actually.

There'll be no restrictions on grouping or trading; level 60s just won't be able to group with lower-level players to prevent boosting, and while levelling, characters will also be prevented from doing more than one dungeon every 24 hours to keep people out in the open world. I get the idea behind that one but I wonder how it'll work out in terms of finding groups...

That abilities like a shaman's reincarnation or a warlock's soulstone will be disabled was to be expected, but I was kind of surprised to also see them officially disable the paladin's ability to bubble-hearth, considering that many max-level hardcore players apparently achieve a similar effect on all classes by using certain consumables, but okay.

Should your character die, you can still log in as a ghost to chat, and you won't have to delete the character - there'll be a free transfer to a non-hardcore realm available. That's another nice touch and I wonder how many people will choose to take that option. I assume that the Pyrewood cluster will be the target destination for these in Europe.

Either way, like I said before - while this isn't really my thing, I'm very curious to see how it will play out.

Official Hardcore Servers and a New Season Are Coming

Blizzard used to have a reputation for scheduling all their announcements in such a way as to take attention away from anything interesting their competitors might have been doing. I don't know if that was ever really true, but I couldn't help thinking of that this past weekend, and what a contrast it was to see them be foolish enough to make a major WoW Classic announcement at the end of an unofficial stream just as a large part of Europe was in the throes of Eurovision. I didn't even see people talk about it in my guild until the next day, and even then the tone was rather disinterested.

The big announcement was that they'll be releasing an official hardcore server this summer, and a new season of some kind is planned for later in the year, though they don't want us to expect it to be "Season of Mastery 2".

The hardcore announcement was no surprise considering that the addition of the hardcore flag was datamined a couple of months ago, and I guess it's nice to see Blizzard taking something that's popular with the community and running with it. I might check it out briefly once it launches just to see what the experience looks like in game - then again, maybe not, considering the starter zone hell that is Hydraxian Waterlords right now. If nothing else, it will be interesting to watch the drama as people argue about what exactly the rules on these official servers should be. Permadeath is a given, but the hardcore addon has so many extra rules that at least some people would like to see implemented and that Blizzard is never going to bother with, the arguments about the "right" way to play hardcore are already raging on reddit.

Either way I don't expect this new server to really affect my gameplay, as most people on the EU-PvE cluster just play the game normally and have no reason to leave. I guess it'll be interesting to see whether Hydraxian Waterlords will just be abandoned again instantly or whether some players will remain.

The new season on the other hand is more likely to affect my personal experience. I'm not really worried about everyone jumping ship for this new mode either - the Pyrewood cluster has grown so much in recent months that even if half the population left to play the new season instead, it would still be three times as large as it was when I started playing.

The only thing I find slightly concerning is that it might throttle the "organic newbie hose" for Classic era. Until the big population surge I hadn't really thought about it, but apparently Classic era is kind of hard to find even if you're looking for it, as the game defaults you to the "seasonal" tab on first login, and you have to notice that there are tabs to switch to other versions of the game at the bottom of the window. Right now people make their way to era anyway because while the SoM servers still appear, they are inactive and locked. However, once a new season starts I can imagine those new servers metaphorically sucking the air out of the room by hoovering up all the newcomers logging into Classic for the first time, simply because they are what the game presents to a new player by default. That would be a bit of a shame.

Still, era is about the long game and no matter how popular this new season ends up being, it too will end and ultimately people will have to come back to era yet again.

More on Era Server Populations

On the WoW Classic subreddit it's a bit of a meme that era players can't stop talking about how busy the era servers are and there's certainly some truth to that, but if you're someone who's been following the development of era for a while, it's just been utterly fascinating to see how much the star of this MMO with no active development continues to rise.

When I started playing on era last year, my Battle.net friends seemed to consider that a weird move at best, and nobody had any desire to join me. Yet in the past couple of weeks, two of my old guildies suddenly contacted me after rolling characters on the PvE cluster, and I briefly chatted with two others who'd created characters on Hydraxian Waterlords to try out hardcore mode. Suddenly, era is "in".

I mentioned in January that the EU PvP cluster as well as Hydraxian Waterlords - now unofficially designated "the hardcore server" - had both grown to medium population. In March, they ticked over to high, and just the other day their status changed to "full". I'm actually not sure what that means nowadays - Wowpedia states that "players cannot create a character on a full realm unless they already have characters on that realm", but I'm not sure whether that's true anymore, considering that there's also "locked" (which doesn't apply to any era realms at the moment, but has been used in Wrath). Either way, it's pretty clear that those servers are full to burst, and one has to wonder what that will mean for any potentially upcoming "overspill".

I logged into the hunter I made on Hydraxian when it first hit medium to see how the population growth had affected the experience of playing there, and it was a stark reminder that to me personally, "high" population is not actually appealing at all. Teldrassil was being scoured of mobs as they spawned, and I completed two quests by basically just running back and forth between a couple of spawn spots where mobs re-appeared mere seconds after having been killed. Trying to hand the quest in at the end was a chore as the quest NPC does a little bit of RP every time someone completes a quest with him, and there was a whole huddle of night elves around him just spam-clicking to get in there first. I logged out again shortly after that because the whole experience was just giving me hives.

On the other end of the spectrum, with the PvP cluster being classified as full, I suddenly found myself wondering about the other, abandoned PvP cluster on EU, centred on the Gehennas server. I don't usually play on PvP servers, but what does it matter when there's nobody around to fight you? So I made a human paladin there to have a look around - I was pleasantly surprised that the first three-letter name I entered was not even taken. I actually had a pretty good time questing in Elwynn all by myself - like Redbeard, I find the experience of replaying certain starting zones to be the virtual equivalent of "comfort food".

The census addon didn't see much activity there - never more than 20 people online at a time, which does not make the cluster appealing to a mainstream audience right now, but if Firemaw runs out of room, who knows what the future will bring? Hydraxian Waterlords was deader than this less than a year ago and look where it is now.

The PvE cluster (where I play) is also still classified as having low population, though we've been growing so much, I feel like we should be ticking over to medium any day now. I really want that to happen as well because I feel with how slowly we've been growing compared to PvP and hardcore, people are starting to not take us seriously as a "main" cluster anymore - which is a silly thing to worry about, I know, but being active on the era Discord as I am, it does bother me a little. More importantly though, officially being classified as medium would help to make it clearer to more casual players that we're one of the currently active realms. It may not be apparent on the server selection screen, but there's a big difference between a "low" realm with thousands of players and one with virtually none - even if the last few months have demonstrated that things can change surprisingly quickly on that front.