WoW Classic BlizzCon Ponderings

The other day Google sent me an email to let me know that my most popular post recently has been the one about whether Warlords of Draenor Classic will be happening or not. Most people may not be that keen on the idea of playing WoD Classic, but a lot of them are at least curious to find out whether it's happening or not. 

I've also been thinking about this again recently, and as I've said previously, I expect to get some pretty big Classic news at BlizzCon in September. However, until then I think it's fun to speculate a bit about what else will happen. You see, at this point I'm actually not even that curious about the details of the next big Classic thing. It'll be whatever it'll be.

What I'm personally more interested in is Blizzard's general direction with Classic, by which I mean more or less the rest of it. If they do indeed release a "Classic Plus", will they want to funnel everyone into it? I'm sure there are plenty of players who would approve of this approach, especially as the modern mega server model has fostered a community that is very anxious to be where everyone else is, which is naturally easiest if people simply have nowhere else to go (if they want to play some flavour of WoW Classic on official servers).

If Blizzard were to go for this sort of focused or consolidation approach, I could see them shutting down basically every other version of Classic that isn't the new hotness or Classic era. Characters from MoP Classic and Season of Discovery would be transferred to Classic era or retail. Anniversary... actually, I can't see them shutting down the anniversary servers without at least letting people have another run at Wrath of the Lich King first, so I guess that would also be allowed to stick around (for a while at least).

The other option though would be to go in completely the opposite direction. More versions of Classic, more!

In this scenario, a Classic+ would be purely additive, with all previous versions of Classic also hanging around. MoP Classic would continue into WoD and then Legion. (I don't know why it took me so long to realise that an easy way to make a WoD Classic announcement more palatable would be to announce WoD and the fact that Legion will come afterwards at the same time, even if the latter is still some time away.) Anniversary Classic would still continue into Wrath of the Lich King, but maybe they'd also split off a Burning Crusade era this time for good measure.

I watched an interview with Ghostcrawler the other week, and when he gets asked about WoW Classic (handily that section is available as its own, shorter clip) he said that the big obstacle to overcome at its inception was the fact that WoW simply didn't have a versioning/branching system and that this had to be built from the ground up.

I'm not an engineer, but I reckon that now that Bizzard have the ability to run different versions of WoW (and Classic even) and are already quite happily doing so, it's probably considerably less effort to add one more variant to the pile. It's still extra work and presumably there's some sort of minimum level of player engagement that's required to make each version viable, but they might very well consider it a way of expanding their base.

From a player perspective, the main downside here is that it looks very confusing from the outside and new players often don't know where to start. But I guess any time they spend trying to figure out which mode they like is still subscription time paid.

I suspect the reality is likely to be somewhere between the two extremes I outlined. Burning Crusade Classic era is probably nothing more than a pipe dream, and I can see them shutting down the SoD servers eventually, but every version that retains a good population will likely be kept rolling until it doesn't anymore. We just don't know for sure! And that suspense of whether one's preferred mode has a future or not is definitely a bit of a weight on people's minds right now I suspect.

The WoD Classic Question

"Will we get Warlords of Draenor Classic?" is not a question I thought I would ever be asking myself ten years ago. Hell, I didn't think we'd ever be asking it five years ago. WoW Classic transitioning into Burning Crusade Classic seemed natural. Following that up with Wrath Classic was a no-brainer. Cataclysm Classic already raised some eyebrows, because can you really call any expansion that takes place after the destruction of the old world "classic"? Anyone having any interest in MoP Classic seemed even more unlikely considering the weak reception MoP had during its first run, not to mention that retail had just had the Mists of Pandaria Remix event. And yet here we are, wondering whether Warlords of Draenor Classic will be next.

I've tried to compile a list of factual pros and cons for why things could go either way:

Yes, we will get WoD Classic:

• It's a relatively low effort option. Not no effort, as it's still work to reinstate the way WoD worked in the modern Classic client, but at least Blizzard wouldn't need to expend any creative energy on coming up with anything new.
• There are still hundreds of thousands of players playing on the progressive Classic realms, numbers that many smaller MMOs would be envious of. You don't hear about them much, but we can see from activity data that they exist and are playing, which they presumably wouldn't do if they weren't enjoying themselves. MoP Classic as a whole seems to be a prime example of a quiet majority that just gets on with things and that you never hear about because they are simply content. That should be enough incentive for Blizzard to keep the good times (and people's subscriptions) rolling.
• We know that Blizzard is at least considering WoD Classic, because as part of a survey sent out around the middle of last year, they asked players where they'd want go play after MoP Classic ends. WoD Classic was one of the options, with some of the possible alternatives being a merge into retail, a MoP era realm or a transition back into a previous expansion (no idea how that would even work).

No, we won't get WoD Classic:

• From the outside, it would be a bad look. WoD is still considered one of WoW's worst expansions. (No longer the worst thanks to Shadowlands, but definitely in the bottom three.) While there is an audience that would like to revisit it for sure, the more outspoken parts of the WoW community all look down on the progressive Classic servers at this point. Most of the Classic community no longer considers them "classic enough", while they are obviously still more than a decade removed from retail as well. Cataclysm Classic already got a pretty lukewarm reception at BlizzCon 2023; I can't imagine anyone cheering for a WoD Classic if it was to be announced at BlizzCon this year. The devs must know that it would be terrible PR to potentially announce a Classic expansion and get booed, so with that in mind, they shouldn't do it. (If they go ahead with it, the announcement better be low-key and they damn well need to make sure that there'll be some other major Classic news to overshadow it.)
• While the old world has already been replaced with the Cataclysm revamp in Cata Classic, at least MoP Classic still has the old character models, right? WoD Classic would take another step closer towards retail by introducing the new character models (if we want to stay in sync with how things went during the original run). The closer the two versions get in terms of features, the less it feels like there's a point to still having this separate progression branch.
• Even if there's still a significant number of people playing MoP Classic, it's undeniably a branch of Classic that's in decline. New or returning players interested in Classic are far more likely to want to check out the anniversary servers rather than grind through 85 levels of an already disjointed levelling experience to start adventuring in Pandaland, and this is only going to get worse if more levels get added. On the dev side, Blizzard also seems to have cut back on the amount of attention they've given progressive Classic, and after the impeccably built original Classic launched in 2019, each subsequent expansion has been buggier and buggier. There was a post on the WoW subreddit three days ago about how Throne of Thunder in MoP Classic has been out for three months and still almost every single boss in there is bugged in some way.
• I know I cited last year's survey in the "yes" column already, but to be honest, you could also interpret it as a sign pointing towards no, considering that the relevant poll question had seven different options, only one of which was WoD Classic, and even that one said "if it becomes available" - Blizzard did not want to lock themselves into going down that route!

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I think there are compelling arguments for either course of action at this point, and I suspect that what will tip the scales for Blizzard will depend a lot on their internal metrics for MoP Classic, including the results of that survey.

Personally, I would actually check out WoD Classic on my hunter if it does come out, simply because WoD is one of those expansions I didn't play back in the day and going back to do some of the content in retail just hasn't been the same. It's definitely more insightful and authentic to do either a Classic or a Remix run. I don't think I'd play it for long, but I'd at least take a look.

On the other hand, I can't say that I'd be sad if they decided to call it quits on the progression servers at this point either, and I would also be fine with my hunter being merged into my retail character stable (or even going back in time to a previous version of Classic I guess, if that somehow becomes a thing).

Level 90 in MoP Classic: What Is This Place?

The other night I felt like playing a little bit of Lemix before bedtime but for some reason all the retail servers were down. I heard mutterings about a DDoS attack? Either way, to get my fix of the particular flavour of WoW grinding that I craved at the time, I instead fired up MoP Classic for the first time in a few months.

The devs went pretty wild with server merges since I last played. Fortunately Mirage Raceway is still the same as it was, so I didn't have to move my characters yet again. I do appreciate that they finally put an end to the farce that were all those single-faction PvP realms and converted them all to PvE. Now there are no more PvP servers in the EU version of MoP Classic at all, while the US only got to keep its lone holdout Grobbolus, the RP-PvP server where people actually cared about community and things other than griefing and therefore managed to maintain a somewhat balanced population. Can we finally stop pretending that the masses crave world PvP now?

I've said it before, but logging into MoP Classic feels weird every time. When I've just been playing Vanilla, it feels strange and too modern. What are all these buttons? Where is my ammo? But when I've been playing retail recently it's the opposite and actually feels quite nostalgic with its enforced ground travel while levelling and a hunter skill rotation that doesn't feel like total crap. 

When I last abandoned my hunter in Pandaria, I was mired in how tedious it felt to level to 90 (even if I wrongly noted it down as levelling from 84 to 85 in this post). I guess that just underlines how meaningless that stretch of levelling felt, just an endless bar going nowhere and taking forever to fill up. Since then, I think the XP required has been nerfed, or maybe the XP rewarded from kills and quests has been boosted - maybe even both. Either way it didn't feel too bad to work my way through that final level via a mix of questing in Kun-Lai Summit and doing chores for the Klaxxi.

 

Fun fact: While doing this, I also installed MoP Classic on my laptop, and even though Classic has been in the Mists era for more than five months now, the shortcut it created on my desktop was still called "Cataclysm Classic". Small indie gaming company and all that. 

I should be able to conclude my Project Vale soon, and we'll see what else I'll feel up to now that max level has unlocked a few more options in terms of content.

MoP Classic is quite an enigma to me in some respects. Both Redbeard and Wilhelm were grousing recently that Blizzard seemed to show little consideration for the anniversary servers transitioning into Burning Crusade, considering how closely in time the devs scheduled the TBC pre-patch to Midnight's in retail. And I don't think that perception is wrong, but I think people also have a skewed idea of where the core of the Classic population sits. Wherever I see people talking about Classic in general, it's usually about the Vanilla anniversary servers, but based on ironforge.pro at least, that's not where most of the people are! For all the talk about how few people wanted it, the numbers show MoP Classic still sporting the biggest population of them all (over 100k weekly raiders), bigger than anniversary (~60k weekly raiders), the remains of SoD and Classic era put together.

I know raiding stats aren't everything and it sure seems weird considering that MoP Classic has no buzz around it whatsoever, but it's not unheard of for lots of people to play in quiet contentment without making headlines. It really does make me wonder about that Warlords of Draenor Classic though. I keep thinking that surely that's got to be where the Classic progression train stops, but if the majority of Classic players are happy to just quietly chug along through all the old expansions that Blizzard will give them, even the ones that weren't that beloved back in the day, maybe it's still a worthwhile thing for them to do? I guess we'll find out one way or another next year.