Return to Ragefire Chasm

I did two full runs of Ragefire Chasm this weekend. The first one was a boost, as a nice guildie offered to quickly run a bunch of new players and alts through the instance. As I've explained in the past, I tend to feel ambivalent about boosts, but in this case it was too good an opportunity to pass up, as my warlock was almost over-levelled for the dungeon anyway, and I was glad to just get the quests out of her log.

The next day however, I was fishing in the Barrens when I spotted some actual chatter in LookingForGroup about people wanting to do RFC on characters at the right level. Both a healer and a dps were involved in the conversation, so my thoughts immediately went to my little warrior, who was a few levels below the warlock - I could get out her sword and board and be the tank to complete the trinity! So I relogged, and not much later we were off.

The run itself was nice but unremarkable. We kept a good pace, nobody died and everyone was friendly. However, what made it stand out for me was that this was in fact my very first proper pug dungeon on Horde since since I started playing Classic era. I'd done a few on Alliance side before, but on Horde side with its much lower population, my dungeon runs had all been initiated and mostly comprised of fellow guildies, simply because the LFG channel was dead.

So this has been another lovely milestone for me, because while I obviously enjoy playing with my guildies, I don't want the world to feel like it just exists for my guild; I want to be part of something bigger, and encountering other players "out in the wild" is an important part of that.

Despite the recent virality of Classic era, population growth in our little neck of the woods has been slow, probably because playing Horde on a PvE server seems to be the least popular "combo" to pick for whatever reason (it's the same on the US servers). However, this past week it's really been picking up and giving me a lot of hope.

I saw it today while raiding Molten Core too. In the past, it hasn't been unusual for a lone leveller to pipe up with a dungeon request during a raid and get no response at all, until eventually a raider would reply that sorry, most of us were busy in a raid. But today I saw grouping requests get answered by other levellers even during the raid, and it just warmed my heart. It also makes me want to play my own alts some more to get in on some of that levelling and dungeoneering action. I'm always worried about jinxing things by being too optimistic, but it certainly looks like there are good times ahead right now.

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.

Character Transfers & Season of Mastery

In Classic era news, there are now free character transfers available for a number of realms in both the US and EU regions, including away from Hydraxian Waterlords and to Pyrewood Village. A keen member of one of the Discord servers I'm on noticed the option before it had even been officially announced.

My impression is that quite a few of the old max-level players on era are taking the option to transfer, and the guy who invited me to Azuregos a couple of times has been talking to me like he assumes that I'll come along as well, but I'm still not sure about it. If I was serious about continuing to play on era it would definitely be the sensible option, but I'm not sure that I am, so why bother?

If the destination server was empty for me, I could still do it easily just because, but even though the PvE server cluster consists of several realms, for some reason the transfers are only available to Pyrewood Village - which is the server on which I originally started playing Classic as Horde, meaning that half my character slots are already taken and I'd have to make choices about who to move and who to leave behind or whether to delete any characters. That just feels like too much decision-making energy for something I'm not too sure about, but I guess we'll see. Just putting my thoughts about this into writing kind of makes me want to do it more to be honest.

In other era news, Blizzard provided more details about the fresh servers they hinted at a bit over a month ago. The whole project will be called "Season of Mastery" and will include #slightlymorechanges as they put it, including a condensed 12-month release schedule, more health for raid bosses, no world buffs inside raids, and the addition of selected quality-of-life improvements from Burning Crusade, such as no debuff limit, faster levelling and meeting stones becoming summoning stones.

That sure does sound somewhat intriguing, but I was already dubious beforehand how relevant this was going to be to me personally, and hearing that they'll be trying to cram all of Classic's content into a single year only confirmed to me that this one's going to be a hard pass for me. I suppose it might be interesting to watch from the sidelines though. If nothing else this initiative's popularity will show how representative the people always clamouring for fresh servers really are of the wider player base.

AQ Gate Opening Event on Pyrewood Village - EU

I noted in my last post about the war effort that Pyrewood Village was close to being done, and sure thing, the next time I checked, the coffers were full and the NPCs were just counting down the days to the actual opening event. Consulting the server Discord allowed me to narrow it down further: apparently the gong was going to be rung at 20:35 server time on Sunday. Not a bad time to join in for a fun world event!

I made sure to take my tauren hunter down to Silithus in advance to beat the inevitable crowds. This seemed to have paid off when I logged in with about half an hour to go and watched a pile of horribly lagging wind riders pile up on the wind rider master, seemingly unable to land.

As I hadn't been removed from my old guild's Discord and I could see that lots of them were online and in voice chat, I hopped on to listen to what they were talking about. Apparently the raid leader had his own sceptre ready to bang the gong and there was much excitement, though they were also talking about people forcibly getting teleported out of Silithus due to overpopulation. As it turned out my own hubris about having been clever enough to log out in Cenarion Hold before was also about to be punished with an appropriate fall, as I suddenly found myself among a pile of other people teleported to the graveyard in Thousand Needles.

We rode to the nearest flightmaster in a giant train and flew back. The wind rider pile in Silithus was still laggy but it did land people eventually. Acutely aware that I was likely to get teleported out again (apparently only sceptre bearers were immune - or something like that) I mounted up and ran south to have a look at the gate itself. The crowds were real. The game clearly couldn't cope and would basically show me a blank landscape in any direction unless I stared at it intently for a few seconds, which would then result in more and more people loading in as time went on.

The next time the dreaded loading screen appeared, I found myself with a pile of similarly afflicted people in Ratchet for a change. Again we were off to the flight master and flew right back. Again I rode south to mingle with the crowds, hoping that maybe I'd be able to hang in there until the big event, but I got ported out for a third time at half past, once again to Thousand Needles. Others on Discord reported landing in Un'goro Crater and Tanaris.

I flew back a third time and my wind rider was just approaching Cenarion Hold again when the broadcast text went out that the first person to ring the gong had been an Alliance warrior called Moatty. Once again I rode back down south, hoping to see some of the Qiraj invaders, and I did! There were a whole bunch of giant Anubisaths about, but everything was so laggy that they didn't even seem to move. I did see people fight them, but again as far as my game was concerned, players were mostly running on the spot. I observed this for a while, until I once again got teleported out to Thousand Needles.

People on my old guild's Discord were now talking about trying to find some invaders in other zones. The crystals apparently spawn in zones all over southern Kalimdor, so there were people hunting elite silithid even in the Barrens (though the mobs were levelled down appropriately for each zone and also dropped lower level loot accordingly). Listening to my guildies on voice and reading chat channels however, things weren't quite so simple in other zones either. I made my way over to Feralas and asked if there were any groups hunting Anubisaths, just to be told flatly that they had all been wiped out within seconds.

I rode back into Thousand Needles, remembering that I had seen an Anubisath from the back of my wind rider earlier, and found a seemingly untouched crystal with lots of mobs around it - I soloed them down for the heck of it. Then I rode on and found some more crystals - it was only at this point that I realised that the mobs did respawn, just on a timer. One crystal I encountered looked abandoned and then all its silithid spawns repopped at once just as I was about to ride past. I killed a few more there but quickly got bored. Health potions and greens may be useful drops, but not so much when scaled down to the thirties (plus my bags on that character were already full too), and I didn't really care that much about getting Brood of Nozdormu reputation in increments of five.

On my way down to Gadgetzan I saw huge groups of players camp more crystals in the Shimmering Flats, I'm guessing because the mobs spawned there were at least in the fourties and therefore dropped slightly better loot.

And thus, the gates on Pyrewood Village are open. I still plan to see the event on Hydraxian Waterlords as well if I get the chance - at least now I'll have a bit of an idea of what to expect. Blizzard seems to have found a workaround to prevent the servers from crashing I guess, but I can't say that getting teleported out of the zone every fifteen minutes because it's considered too busy makes for the most fun experience as a player either. I'll concede though that I don't really know what else they could have done if the servers just can't take that many people in the same spot, even in 2020.

AQ and Paladin Update

It's been about ten days since the war effort started and as I predicted, the rate of progression slowed down a lot after the first day on both of the servers that I play on. If it had stayed the same, Pyrewood Village would have been done after four days and Hydraxian Waterlords after seven. Needless to say, neither server is actually there yet.

We get all these headlines about how some streamer/super hardcore server got everything done within hours but I'd be highly dubious of any claims that this is the sort of pace at which the average player experiences the game. Things may go faster than they did back in the day, but I suspect that most people who choose to play Classic still play at a much more casual/old-school pace than those reports would have you believe.

Anyway, I plugged the numbers into my percentage calculation spreadsheet, and as it stands Pyrewood Village is three quarters of the way towards being done, while Hydraxian Waterlords is almost halfway there. I like that the two servers' progression rates are so different, as it means that I'll have not one but two chances at potentially seeing the gate opening event!

One thing that was interesting to note was that despite the faction imbalance on both servers, the war effort progression percentages are now almost identical for both factions. Since both servers are PvE, I wouldn't be surprised if some Alliance raiders had made an effort to even things out a bit - it's not like it's difficult to roll up a Horde alt and farm some wool cloth in the Barrens (or transfer things via the neutral auction house if you want to be more organised I guess).

In terms of material progress, the low-level hand-ins continue to be the bottlenecks, with linen and wool bandages sitting at 18 and 31% completion respectively on Hydraxian Waterlords. On Pyrewood Village it seems like someone made a concerted effort to get bandages up - while they still have a long way to go, they are not the least provided items anymore. That honour now goes to light leather on Alliance side and Peacebloom on Horde. Alliance is actually 100% finished with herbs, well done!

All the extra demand for low-level materials actually makes this a really good time to play lowbie alts, because you'll get a lot more bang for your buck than usual when putting stacks of linen and the like up on the auction house. This inspired me to spend some more time playing on my human pally, but for some reason it's just not clicking this time and I don't know why. Everything just feels so slow and I keep dying! 

Which is all the more ridiculous considering that when I levelled my pally on Kronos (which was supposedly much higher tuned than Classic), she didn't even die once until a Defias Pillager got her in a cave in Westfall. Though now that I just went back and looked at that post in its entirety again, I did mention dying a lot around that level range too. Anyway, in one play session about a month ago I died so many times to fireballing dragon whelps in Redridge that I eventually just logged off and didn't log that character again in weeks. This time around things have felt a bit better, but casters are still a major pain and I just feel weak. I fear that levelling two easymode hunters in a row may have spoiled me a bit for difficulty.

The Time Has Come (for the AQ War Effort)

For someone who's "into" MMORPGs to the degree that I am, I'm surprisingly rubbish at keeping up with what's happening in Classic in terms of tweaks and patches. I guess that makes for a more authentic experience, considering that I had no clue what was happening to the game as a whole back in Vanilla either. Back then, every change came as a surprise to me.

Fortunately for me Wilhelm pointed out in a post that the AQ war effort started yesterday - I would have been disappointed if I had missed that. I wrote about my memories tied to the opening of the gates when the event first started on private server Kronos.

After reading that some guilds are apparently super prepared and have stocked up on enough materials to basically complete the collection pretty much instantly, I was curious to see how the two servers on which I have characters would fare in comparison. As a reminder, I play Horde on Pyrewood Village (PvE), and Alliance on Hydraxian Waterlords (RP-PvE).

 I could hear the sound of lots of people making bandages when I arrived.

I checked progress on both this afternoon, at which point it must have been about 24 hours since the hand-ins started, and while they were nowhere near done they were well underway. Pyrewood Village was about a third of the way there, while Hydraxian Waterlords had only handed in about 15% of the required materials - but then it has a notably smaller population.

One thing that was interesting to me was that even though both servers have an Alliance-Horde ratio of about 2:1, Horde on Hydraxian Waterlords isn't far behind the Alliance in terms of progress, while on Pyrewood Village, the Alliance has already done almost twice as many hand-ins.

On both servers there was a similar pattern of the high-level materials being provided much more quickly than the low-level ones - on both servers the Alliance was already full up on Thorium bars for example, while the bottlenecks on both appear to be linen bandages for Alliance and wool bandages for Horde. Those materials may well be easy to come by, but which raider wants to spend their time farming linen for hours?

My initial reaction was a brief surge of delight when I visited the Ironforge military ward on my night elf hunter and realised that one of the hand-ins was Spotted Yellowtails - I had just been fishing the day before to feed my pet and had several stacks of them, but was happy to donate them to the war effort instead. Of course, then I realised that all I'd get in return for my hand-ins was a piddly bit of rep, which I don't really care about, so...

I might just see if I can make a bit of money off people keen to do more hand-ins by farming materials. I had already been wondering why prices for Runecloth and wolf meat were suddenly noticeably higher than they'd been previously (before I had realised that the war effort had started).

And of course it would be cool if I could be there for the actual opening of the gates. On Kronos it was a bust for me due to the open world PvP, but fortunately I'm on two PvE servers this time around. Of course, the question remains of how soon we'll get there. The initial progress seems to indicate that the gates should open quite quickly, but then Kronos was full on Thorium bars on day one too and then ended up taking more than five months. While I don't think that things will be this slow on either of my servers in Classic, I do expect progress to slow down as people get rid of their stockpiles and find themselves having to do actual farming of otherwise fairly useless materials to advance the cause.

Level 40 the 2nd

Lest you think that I've been spending all my time playing Alliance, another milestone I've reached recently has been my druid hitting level 40, being only my second character to do so. And she got her first mount too!

What was interesting about that was that unlike on my hunter, I didn't feel nearly as much pressure to earn mount money, not least because I now have a level 60 main that could potentially chip in and help out where needed.

As it happened though, the druid ended up earning the 90 gold all by herself anyway. Once again I noticed that she was tantalisingly close already as she approached 40, so I held off on training some of my spell upgrades and gathered up some fish and herbs to sell on the auction house, which was enough to get her over the line.

I guess alchemy being less of a money drain while levelling than pretty much any other crafting profession probably helped, but it also feels easier to me to make a bit of extra money while levelling now that the economy has matured a little. With more and more characters accumulating at the level cap, there are fewer players harvesting low- to mid-level resources, plus those higher level characters have more gold at their disposal to just buy things off the auction house.

Mind you, Pyrewood Village is still insanely busy and sometimes those max-level characters will still go out to farm their own stuff: While questing in the Badlands for example I was quite taken aback by the sheer amount of high-level Alliance characters that were constantly swooping in to pick flowers right in front of my nose or kill certain mobs that I needed for my quests. Then again, that's something I should really be used to at this point, but it certainly adds to the appeal of the (relative) quiet on Hydraxian Waterlords.

Phase 2 & Level 50

WoW Classic's phase two launched this week, including the consolidation of everyone onto a single layer on all servers, the introduction of the honour system, world bosses, and the addition of the key ring - oh wait, they delayed that last one. Typical that this happens to the one feature that I was actually looking forward to. At least I "only" have the keys to SM and Gnomer taking up bag space so far; I feel bad for the max-levels who also have to hold on to their keys to Scholo, Strat, Dire Maul and so on and so forth.

The honour system was a big deal for many, considering how many Classic players seem to be obsessed with PvP, though I'm sure that now that ganking also gives actual rewards many people who rolled on PvP servers for the supposed fun of open world PvP will be starting to regret it. Especially since world PvP can also be had on PvE servers, without all the hassle of being dragged into it unvoluntarily. Some of my guildies apparently jumped into some Tarren Mill vs. Southshore action right away and one of them posted a screenshot showing a gain of nearly 1.5k honour points from his first night alone.

For me, the main concern was the layer consolidation, since Pyrewood Village still struck me as crazy busy when the date for the phase two launch was announced at BlizzCon. About a week or so later though, I found myself questing in the Hinterlands and started to doubt myself... it wasn't unpleasantly empty, but reasonably quiet, which made me think that maybe that final merge wasn't unfeasible after all.

When I came online on Tuesday evening I was surprised by the lack of a queue, though making my way through the Hinterlands once again I got flashbacks to Kolkar Village, with the whole area now stripped clean of mobs as if a locust swarm had descended upon it, and people running to and fro all over trying to pick off respawns as soon as they appeared. In summary: I guess it's not quite as bad as I had feared, but the world is still back to feeling a bit too full right now. We'll see how long it lasts.

Incidentally, my hunter has hit level 50. I unexpectedly got the entirety of Maraudon done at level 47 after joining a tankless group for orange and/or purple side that I saw advertising right outside the instance, and our four dps setup worked so well that we actually ended up proceeding all the way to the Princess despite of me being a bit low level for that part of the dungeon (fortunately everyone else was higher than me).

After that I pretty much flew through the next couple of levels, mopping up a number of green and yellow quests in Feralas, Tanaris and the Hinterlands that I really didn't want to miss out on, and I still have more left to do in all three zones. I also put my very first dungeon group together on my hunter after seeing both a tank and a dps with the mallet looking for a group for Zul'Farrak. This seemed too fortuitous an opportunity to pass up, so I invited them both, threw out a LFM request for the last two spots and five minutes later we were off.

I'm actually feeling reasonably optimistic about those last ten levels. As I observed back on Kronos, they are slow and I'm not very fond of many of the endgame zones, but there is a variety of goals to pursue at that point that aren't necessarily all about levelling, and you end up gaining a lot of XP almost as an afterthought.

Making Money

I alluded to it in previous posts, but the money for your first mount at level 40 can be hard to come by. I've been feeling the strain for a while now, and my hunter dropping down to as little as two gold with only three levels to go was a definitive wake-up call.

I suppose to some extent it's my own fault. For example I don't follow the oft-repeated advice to not train all your new spells. I mean, who knows when Eagle Eye could suddenly come in handy? I want to be prepared for anything.

Also, while I don't tend to buy things from the auction house, I don't tend to make much money off it either. It doesn't help that all four of my currently actively played alts are crafters, so from cloth to leather to ore, there's always someone who can use whatever I'm picking up, so that many things that would presumably be a source of income for others just quietly disappear into my personal crafting machine.

It doesn't help that the server economy still feels weird too. I've never been part of a fresh start server like this (as opposed to a brand new game launch where nobody knows how to play the market) so I don't know if this is simply typical for this sort of situation, but there are way more people trying to make money from selling goods than players interested in buying them.

For the first week or so this made sense, as nobody really had anything to spend, but by now most characters should have at least a few silver to spare every now and then, yet there is still seemingly no demand for most trade goods, with many of the lower level ones lingering at buyouts of mere coppers per piece still.

The one upside to this from my point of view is that if you run into a slightly awkward crafting recipe while levelling that requires what you'd expect to be somewhat unusual materials, you can just go to the auction house, buy said "rare" materials for a silver and craft the thing anyway. I still haven't quite managed to wrap my mind around that, fretting whenever I see an engineering schematic requiring gems for example, but then I check the AH and everything I need is usually available for little more than vendor price.

Wrathofkublakhan has been talking about making money with fishing, which sounded great to me since I greatly enjoy fishing on all of my characters. However, I haven't had much luck with that either. The lower level, supposedly valuable fish like Oily Blackmouth and Firefin Snapper, are still going for mere coppers on my server, and for anything even slightly higher level the competition is insane and it's often a challenge to find any pools at all. In addition, supposedly convenient fishing spots like the coast of Dustwallow Marsh or Feralas are a lot less so when you're Horde and your nearest town is a considerable trip away instead of directly on the coast.

I've actually had a bit more luck mining for iron on my hunter, despite of this being something that should be seemingly obvious and highly contested. There are two caves in Thousand Needles that are close to Freewind Post and contain two to three ore spawns each, usually iron, sometimes silver, gold or mithril (but never anything worse) and that few people ever seem to visit. I've taken to going there daily in the mornings, and while it's not the most profitable thing ever due to the aforementioned low demand for trade goods, iron is enough of a pain to find that it's got me at least back up to over thirty gold so far.

I haven't entirely given up on fish either and have mostly been hunting for Greater Sagefish on the coast of Lordamere Lake, but with mixed success. Fishing just isn't the insider's niche it used to be I guess, at least not on Pyrewood Village.

I'm undecided whether I should push onwards in terms of levelling at all while I still can't afford my mount or whether I should just keep grinding money. I suppose it doesn't technically matter, especially on a hunter who can travel at quite a steady clip with Aspect of the Cheetah anyway, but the thought of travelling everywhere on foot throughout the fourties because I can't afford anything else just feels kind of... shameful.

Population Problems and Layering

I've posited previously that the thirties are possibly the most awkward level range in Vanilla/Classic WoW. The game expects you to roam further and further afield but you don't have a mount yet (in fact you're probably fretting about how in the world you're going to afford yours in a few levels) and there's a bit of a dearth of good dungeons.

This time around though, it hasn't felt too bad so far! I think it helps that both my hunter and my shaman do have speed boosts in the form of Aspect of the Cheetah and Ghost Wolf, which makes all the running around a bit more palatable.

What has been surprisingly bad though are the crowds. I thought I'd seen the worst of that during launch week in the Barrens, with all four Horde races crammed into the same zone, but I forgot that both factions would come together in the neutral higher level zones, and early census data taken by addons indicated that Pyrewood Village has about twice as many Alliance players as Horde. (The EU chart on Wowhead had us as the ninth realm from the bottom in terms of Horde percentage of the population.)

I can definitely believe that after trying to quest in Stranglethorn Vale during prime time. After spending way too long competing with half a dozen Alliance characters for what felt like about ten basilisks, I vowed to myself to never come back there during the evening unless I was looking for a group for an elite quest or something. (I ended up killing Sin'Dall early in the morning, though even then I ran into at least another Horde player.)

I relocated to Desolace for the most part, which does somewhat live up to its name still. I even had Ranazjar Isle all to myself at one point! Though there was also another time when I tried to hunt for centaur ears in Kolkar Village and the entire place was nothing but a wasteland, with groups of Alliance roaming everywhere, trying to kill every centaur almost as soon as it spawned. I wouldn't have bothered to stay had I not been on my hunter - she at least had the advantage of being able to track humanoids, so that she could see every newly respawned centaur as a bright red dot on the mini map before your average human pally or mage, which allowed her to snipe just enough kills for the whole exercise to not feel completely pointless.

I did find myself wondering how it was possible that the mid-levels were still sooo busy when I hadn't seen a queue in weeks and a lot of people have surely stopped playing already. Of course that's when Blizzard proudly announced in both the US and the EU that they've had great success with merging down layers already. Some realms are even down to a single layer already, but the most that any realm has left are three. I guess that would explain how even with an overall (probably) declining population, the server's been feeling busier than ever.

This leaves one in the awkward situation of wanting the game to continue to be popular and successful... but at the same time wishing that more of the people on my server would quit already. I couldn't quite relate to when Kring commented that the servers were way too full and it was a horrible experience, but now I guess I can see what he means.

I suppose we can only hope that more people stop playing Classic...? Blizzard seems to be confident that they will, as Ion Hazzikostas told PC Gamer in an interview a few days ago that they expect to have all realms down to a single layer before the end of the year. Yay, I guess...?

Classic Launch Night on Pyrewood Village - EU

As mentioned previously, in Europe the Classic launch was scheduled for the not particularly convenient time of midnight / 11pm (the latter if you were in the UK like I am). As it was a holiday here, I had the day off anyway and found it increasingly hard to focus the closer the launch came.

Half an hour before the whole thing was supposed to go live, the first reports of queues started to come in: Apparently people were already clogging up the pipes on some servers just to get to the character selection/creation screen.

Wanting to avoid getting caught up in something like this on our own server, my friends Nemi, Ollie and I decided to already log in as well (there was no queue on Pyrewood Village yet) and passed the time by creating additional level one characters to make sure we wouldn't get kicked for inactivity.

Then the final seconds ticked down, the "Enter World" button lit up... and everything froze. "This is where we crash the server," I commented on Discord, but actually the servers did hold up alright to begin with. There was a noticeable pause of about half a minute on the initial loading screen, as the system clearly laboured under the pressure of thousands of people wanting to log in at the exact same second, but eventually the intro cinematic started.

And I had to laugh, seeing the huge, teeming mass of tauren. My husband came over to look at what was causing such hilarity. That said, the crowds dispersed relatively quickly, and to me at least it felt nothing like my main point of comparison, the re-launch of the Nostalrius PvE server (which is a good thing by the way).

"Woot" seemed on point.

Sure, it was busy and not exactly easy to find mobs, but I guess it helps that the tauren starter area is so large and open - as long as you always kept ambling across the next hill, you'd find a mob to tag sooner or later.

Relatively speaking, I'm also pretty sure that it was actually the quietest of starting zones, as tauren are the least popular Horde race from what I remember. (Or was it trolls? But they share a starter zone with the orcs in any case.) Nonetheless, it wasn't a good night to be a plainstrider or mountain lion.

While there was a little bit of lag initially, this went away remarkably quickly, and after that everything seemed to go quite smoothly - until I was suddenly kicked back to the character selection screen with this message:

I got back in almost instantly and then proceeded to play just fine for a while, but my friend Nemi, who had also rolled a tauren but immediately hit the road to Durotar in order to maximise her reputation gain with the orcs, got kicked out even sooner and was unable to log back in for hours. At a later point I was eventually kicked out long-term as well.

Checking sources like Twitch and the forums, this seemed to be a problem uniquely affecting the EU servers - on US everyone was just complaining about queues, and while we had some of that as well, it was weird to have the game completely breaking down on one side of the pond but not the other. It certainly didn't help the ancient prejudice of EU players being considered less important than US ones.

Even though it was going on silly o'clock, we persisted with our attempts to log in again and eventually Blizzard must have fixed whatever was going wrong. The "world server down" message seemed a bit misleading as the problem never actually seemed to affect the entire "world" of the server. Best I could tell, based on the fact that both of my DCs happened when I was crossing from one sub-zone into another, there seems to be some sort of instancing going on in the background that went haywire.

I think in total the problem persisted intermittently for about three hours, during which everyone affected was super grumpy and complaining bitterly... just to instantly forget about it all again the moment they were finally able to log back in.

I stayed up until gone 4am (yes, I admit it - I binged, especially as I had taken the next day off work specifically for this purpose) and managed to reach level ten on my tauren shaman in that time.

Population control seemed to be working fine, at least in Mulgore on my server. As I said: it felt busy, but not too busy. As soon as people got off Red Cloud Mesa they spread so far and wide that no quests were really problematic anymore.

The only quest that felt like a bottleneck early on was the one to kill quillboars in Brambleblade Ravine. The narrow, tight corridors forced everyone there into way too small a space, and where I previously mostly remembered that area as being quite deadly to new players, my experience this time around was that the quillboar didn't stand a chance against the onslaught of tauren forces.

Particularly interesting was the quest to kill the named chieftain, who was spawn-camped to hell and back. Unlike what I've heard from other servers, many of the early Pyrewood players weren't inclined to form an orderly line or even to group up, the latter of which I found very odd.

While standing in the crowd I asked about grouping up in /say but received no response. Eventually I just started manually targeting every single character around me and attempting to invite them. Some were already in groups but a surprising number were not, which meant that I quickly assembled a full five-man, which managed to nab a kill soon enough.

That still left the problem of the generic quillboar killing quest though. Two people left as soon as the chief died and a third quickly walked away even though he didn't leave the party, but me and the one remaining other guy seemed to share a quiet sense of frustration as we ran in circles over and over again, failing to tag anything.

Eventually we found a slightly out of the way precipice, which I think people were avoiding intentionally as it had three or four mobs on a fast respawn right next to each other, but with the two of us together we were able to take them on and killed them as many times as needed to get our quest done.

At one point my questing buddy also suddenly opened a trade and simply handed me a white shield that was better than the one I was using at the time. Feeling like I should reciprocate, I found a pair of grey boots in my bag that was slightly better than his and traded him those in turn. Simple gestures.

As I already mentioned, once people dispersed across the plains, things got a lot better, though I was also reminded of how incredibly annoying those early Mulgore quests are in terms of bag space. Not only do you get half a dozen quests to collect different animal parts, sometimes they are different parts of the same animal, so of course you feel that you should have them all in your log at the same time to benefit from synergies, but the end result is simply that you have no bag space for anything not quest-related and I ended up jogging in and out of Bloodhoof Village to vendor things every handful of mob kills for a while.

When a small green pouch dropped from a Flatland Prowler later in the evening, I actually gasped out loud and took a screenshot. This immediately made so much of a difference that I decided I needed to fill all my bag slots nau.

Fortunately this was handily facilitated by a friendly tauren tailor that had been advertising in general chat that they were happy to craft linen bags for the small fee of one silver as long as the customer also provided their own linen. So I sought them out and filled out my remaining bag slots, while also supporting local business. It immediately felt sooo much better.

Oh, and speaking of chat, as someone who usually turns off or ignores general chat in most MMOs, I was pleasantly surprised by how civil it was all night. There was some banter ("Is this Barrens chat?" "No, it's just a tribute") but everyone remained relaxed and in a good mood.

And that was my launch day/night experience - I've since had a whole day of even more play behind me, but that will have to be a story for another day.