Cata Classic: Halfway There

Progress on my little Cataclysm Classic project has been swift. I played a fair bit over the past week and already hit level 80. I'm still dithering in Northrend as I'm writing this because I felt like I was actually progressing a bit too fast and I don't want to move on to Cata just yet. It's one of those flaws with the way WoW does expansion content, that because of how much of it is concentrated at the level cap, when the level cap moves up, it requires a lot of effort to actually still take any of that content in because you'll just be sailing past it way too quickly.

The gameplay has been surprisingly enjoyable. For as much as Cata removed a lot of what made everything that came before feel "classic", there are still bits of flavour left in there that are now missing in retail, such as my hunter wielding both a melee and a ranged weapon. I always thought that was incredibly cool, even if I didn't use the melee weapon much - but shooting things with a bow from point blank range like you have to do in retail just feels dumb. My pet's AI also feels much better for some reason, with my pet actually reappearing reliably when I dismount (in retail I feel like I have to manually re-summon it every five minutes) and defensive stance working much more smoothly than the annoying split between assist and defensive that they introduced later and which makes your pet unresponsive at the most annoying times.

In general it's noticeable how damage rotations are still in a kind of sweet spot where they are more involved than Vanilla (requiring you to use, say, five different damage abilities instead of just one) but don't have all the annoying upkeep of buffs or temporary cooldowns that you're supposed to cycle through constantly in retail.

Not everything is great of course. After the War Within just made massive improvements to the way the game handles transmog collection, it's almost physically painful to be back to a system where collecting any appearances and even merely keeping track of what you've already got is strictly tied to your class and armour type.

Last week was also Darkmoon Faire week, so I hopped onto Darkmoon Island to do the rounds there like I do in retail. Since the Island was introduced in Cata, I didn't expect to notice many differences, but I was quite surprised. For example I had forgotten that there was originally no return portal, and the targeting circle for the "Target: Turtle" game was huge and incredibly inaccurate for some reason, making it feel much more difficult than in retail.

All that said, most of my levelling was spent in Northrend, flying around exploring the landscape, working on my professions and engaging with a quest hub here or there as the mood struck me. (As a hunter I just had to do the Nesingwary quests in Sholazar for example.) In-between I queued for dungeons - I have my gripes with Wrath, but the dungeons were pretty cool and I literally ran them hundreds of times back in the day. I initially expected that I'd have to look for groups manually, since I still remembered all the hubbub around WotLK Classic launching without a dungeon finder, but clearly they did decide to add it eventually.

I decided that I wanted to queue for all dungeons in order and even though that limited my selection and I was dps, my pops were always pretty quick. As if I needed confirmation that I wasn't the only one levelling a character now specifically for Mists of Pandaria Classic, I once ended up in a run with characters from two different guilds whose names implied that they were MoP levelling guilds, with the existence of a third guild implied.

At first I still tried to say hi and bye, but people rarely responded so I quickly gave up on that. in Dark'tharon Keep I got kicked at the end of the dungeon for declining to immediately re-queue as I was trying to hand in the quest at the end of the dungeon and it has some RP that requires you to wait for a bit. At least this didn't come as a complete surprise to me at this point, so I wasn't exactly shocked and dismayed, just slightly exasperated. I manually flew to the dungeon to see if I could re-enter and hand in my quest that way, but all the mobs were back and I couldn't get to the end. I didn't feel like re-queuing for the same dungeon and risking people do the exact same to me again, so I just abandoned the (completed) quest.

I did note that the unfriendly group that had booted me consisted entirely of people from Firemaw, which was at least on brand. With how few actually active Cata servers there are, server identity is clearly still a thing, and it figures that the PvP mega server still has the most jerks on it. People from the other PvE servers seemed at least marginally friendlier. In Halls of Stone a group from Lakeshire (a German PvE realm) even managed to convince the tank to do the two optional bosses.

Looking around on my own server (Mirage Raceway), it was interesting to see that even though it was largely alien to me (I'd just taken the free transfers at the start of Cata and had never really played on it) there were remnants of things I recognised, such as certain guilds or characters I remembered back from Nethergarde Keep or even way back from Hydraxian Waterlords. It did bring me a little bit of joy to see that some people have weathered the repeated server consolidations and expansion changes against the odds.

Anyway, I continued my levelling journey and got into Halls of Stone at 77 or 78. The queue for this took longer than for any previous dungeon I'd done, and I figured that the rush-rush people were probably intentionally avoiding the fifteen minutes of Brann RP. However, after opening my dungeon finder window again at level 79, I was surprised to find that Halls of Stone was just... missing from the list. I figure that's probably an even bigger reason for why the queue for it took so long.

At 80, things got even worse as most of the level 80 dungeons I still hadn't done also disappeared from the list. I found a forum thread about this problem going back to 2023, and it appears that this issue still hasn't been fixed two years later. I guess that tells us all about how much love Cataclysm Classic has been getting from the development side. So that's how my Wrath dungeoneering came to an end.

As I said, I'm still puttering around a bit as I haven't even explored Storm Peaks and Icecrown, and I want to get my leatherworking and first aid caught up. XP gains are already greatly reduced, but I expect to hit level 81 quite easily, by which point I'll probably feel the pressure to move on as XP payouts will likely go from reduced to near non-existent. I won't get away with getting as much levelling done in dungeons in Cata, as it says I'm currently ineligible to queue for any of them. I'm guessing they faithfully reproduced the mechanic where you had to find the dungeon entrance in the world before you could use the tool? I guess I'll just quest instead.

Pandamonium and Wondering about the Future of Classic

Not content to baffle the WoW player base with the release of Plunderstorm, Blizzard surprised with another announcement of a new game mode three days ago: WoW Remix: Mists of Pandaria, coming with patch 10.2.7 later in the spring. This seems to match what was previously called "Timerunning: Pandamonium" on the 2024 roadmap for WoW. That name was already a pretty big hint towards what it was going to be: something similar to Timewalking and something to do with pandas (even if the complete alien-ness of Plunderstorm combined with some additional datamining also led some people to speculate that it could be something else entirely).

The release of the previously linked article confirmed that it is indeed something similar to Timewalking and something to do with pandas, namely "a time-limited event which allows players to re-experience the entirety of the Mists of Pandaria expansion at an accelerated rate from level 10 through 70". There is still a lot we don't know and quite a few details left to be clarified, but we do know that it will require you to create a new character and that there will be a lot of special loot exclusive to this mode/phase.

Most of the reactions I've seen to this have been positive, and I've got to admit I'm kind of excited myself. Blizzard's still doing its usual thing of trying to bank on FOMO, talking about how fast levelling will be and spending a lot of time promoting rewards that I don't really care about, but I'm still looking forward to this event for a number of reasons:

• I always say that retail WoW has this huge world and wealth of old content that is severely underused, so them actually making an event focused on re-using an older expansion will always be a good thing in my book.
• I only played for a few months in late Mists of Pandaria, when quite a few bits of content had already come and gone, making the post-launch questing experience a bit disjointed. I have some tentative hopes that this event will give me a chance to get a more cohesive picture of the expansion (though some early clarifications are already tempering my enthusiasm in that area - e.g. we still won't get to see the Vale of Eternal Blossoms how it was before it as destroyed, and the legendary cloak quest line - which, from my understanding, was Wrathion's in-game debut for non-rogue players - will not be reinstated).
• It's an event focused on levelling and doing content of all kinds, which sounds like a great opportunity for my husband and me to roll up another levelling duo and have some quality play time together.

While it's officially an experimental, limited-time event, it's also not hard to see how the reception of this "Remix" could have a big impact on the game going forward. Some ideas that I've seen thrown around are:

• Maybe there'll always be an event revisiting an older expansion during the content gap before a new expansion in the future.
• Maybe this will be a template for how to improve Chromie Time.
• Maybe the option to replay an old expansion like this will simply become a permanent feature if enough people like it.

I would happily take any of these to be honest, and based on the positive reception I've seen so far, I think this event will absolutely be a success. For as much as certain parts of the player base and dev team have pushed for retail to focus on endgame at all times, there are still a lot of players who enjoy levelling in some form or another and/or who have nostalgia for older content that isn't currently being catered to in Classic.

Speaking of Classic though, I find it very curious that Blizzard would choose to have a nostalgia-filled event focused on the Mists of Pandaria expansion at a point in time when Classic Mists of Pandaria is presumably less than a year away. Yes, you read that correctly. We didn't just get a launch date for Classic Cataclysm the other day, but also a timeline that sees the expansion already hitting its last patch in January 2025. And here I thought they were going fast by making us go through each Classic expansion in less than two years, never mind less than a single year!

Most people seem to have read that as "haha, they just want to get to Classic MoP quickly", but I'm honestly not so sure anymore. I know that the Classic and retail player bases are not the same, but based on my own anecdotal experience at least, they're also not as totally separate as social media would sometimes have us believe, with many players happy to dip into both every now and then, even if there is one version they prefer. With that in mind, having a retail event that focuses on levelling through Mists of Pandaria, just to follow it up with the launch of Classic Mists of Pandaria six months later seems positively insane. No, it wouldn't be exactly the same, but way too similar to not feel repetitive to anyone who took part in the former.

This morning I was also hit by just how much the Classic player base has shrunk again throughout Wrath of the Lich King Classic, as a guildie pointed me towards forum threads about upcoming realm consolidations for both Europe and the US. I was struck by the fact that Nethergarde Keep, the server to which I was "forced" to migrate during Classic Burning Crusade and which at the time had about three times the population of Hydraxian Waterlords, is now also on the chopping block for being too small.

It looks like "regular" Classic will be down to about a dozen servers worldwide come Cataclysm, and almost all of them single-faction. I was shocked to see that even the PvE servers are not immune to this madness, as even the Wrath version of good old Pyrewood Village is 97% Alliance now. I thought things were already bad two years ago, but they are so much worse now. "Progressive" Classic is a mess with a declining player base, going into a controversial expansion that is unlikely to reverse that trend.

Before the official announcement of Cata Classic, many of us were wondering how far the Classic train could realistically go, as Wrath of the Lich King seemed like a natural end point. Once the continuation into Cata was confirmed, I saw a lot of comments along the lines of "well, then Classic MoP is a given" or that they could definitely keep going until Legion at least. However, after seeing those Wrath Classic population numbers and the timing of this "WoW Remix", I'm not so sure anymore. There is nostalgia for the (comparatively) more recent expansions, yes, but maybe Blizzard have decided to try and cater to that in retail instead of investing more money into rebuilding old expansions exactly as they were for a continually shrinking player base.

To be clear, I'm not implying that Classic as a whole is failing. While it was ultimately a disappointment to me personally, Season of Discovery still seems to be doing well. The "problem" is that it actually seems to be doing better than "regular" Classic by quite a margin, so I wouldn't be surprised if Blizzard decided to stop adding more old expansions to the Classic train and pivoted towards more seasonal servers or maybe even re-starting the Classic cycle from Vanilla again, while trying to pull players with nostalgia for the later expansions into retail instead, with dedicated time slots where those expansions are highlighted for replay.

The State of Classic Era at the End of 2023

As I've mentioned previously, with Classic era being a "static" MMO, the passage of time is mostly defined by the ebb and flow of the player base, plus the arrival of the occasional client update that breaks things. We just had another one of those actually, in preparation for the launch of Season of Discovery at the end of the month. For era this has once again meant a bunch of new bugs and minor changes, such as the in-game map suddenly being much smaller (not sure if that one's intentional or not actually), and enemy cast-bars now being visible in the default UI (with a toggle) so you no longer need an add-on just for those.

Mostly I wanted to talk about how the community is doing, though. I mentioned back in July that the "hype" around Classic era seemed to have died down but that the population seemed stable. I believe that the last reliable 30-day census I conducted with the census addon showed the Pyrewood cluster having an active population of 7-8k characters. I think that must have been around May or so? As I started to spend somewhat less time in game, my scans became less frequent and less reliable, so I didn't think too much of my scan numbers going down again at the same time.

The other day someone pointed out to me though that our cluster's official population had dropped from medium back down to low, which made me a bit sad. Mind you, it doesn't feel significantly diminished in game. There are still more people signing up for raids than there is room for, and Org and LFG chat seem reasonably lively at all times. It's just... a little less I guess.

My initial guess was that hardcore had taken a chunk out of the regular PvE population, seeing how it's a PvE-only mode (I myself gave it a go too, after all), and maybe that was true in the beginning, but we do seem to have entered a slight slump in population for all modes at this point, at least from what I can see on the European servers. Even the ever-popular PvP cluster has been downgraded from "full" to "high" again. The two hardcore servers have also mellowed out since launch. Initially they were both marked as "full", but now Stitches is down to "high" and Nek'rosh even to "medium".

The reason I'm writing all this down is not to discourage anyone from playing or to give off any "OMG, the game is dying" vibes, but because I'm curious to see how things will develop in the coming weeks. I think that Season of Discovery will be massive, but it will likely cannibalise both era and hardcore at least initially. Again, I'm fully planning to at least check it out, and a few people from my guild are planning to do the same.

At the same time, I don't expect it to be as much of a rival to the regular servers as Season of Mastery was. After all, that was shortly after mainline Classic had progressed into Burning Crusade, and the number of people who wanted to go backward instead of forward was very small. Also, SoM's sales pitch was something along the lines of "fresh Vanilla servers with some improvements", which I think put it into more direct competition with the "old" era servers. Season of Discovery on the other hand is openly promising a very different experience, which I'm sure will be interesting, but I don't think it'll scratch that Vanilla itch the same way the era or even the hardcore servers do.

Also, I suspect that we'll see another influx of fresh blood to the Vanilla Classic servers of all persuasions once Cata Classic launches early next year, as some of those for whom that is "a step too far" will want to return to their old, familiar haunts in the old world, just like I did myself when BC Classic's end was in sight.

There are currently no plans for Wrath era servers - much to the disappointment of some. I completely understand how they feel, and there was a period where I wondered whether WotLK's popularity might generate enough of a push for the creation of Wrath era servers despite Blizzard's disinterest in doing the same for BC, but looking at it right now, it seems increasingly unlikely to me. While there are definitely more people posting in favour of era servers than there were for BC, the subject is still flying pretty under the radar compared to other concerns, and it doesn't look like the campaign will reach the kind of critical mass needed to get Blizzard to reconsider.

Musings on Classic Cataclysm

I just wanted to write down a few more thoughts on Classic Cataclysm. While I'm not planning to play it, I guess now is the time to have opinions on it. I was particularly inspired by Wilhelm's recent post on the subject, in which he explains how he kind of came around to looking forward to Classic Cata, and how he feels he probably didn't give the expansion an entirely fair shake back in the day due to being off to a bad start for a number of reasons.

As for me, I'm kind of surprised how charitable I feel towards Cata (and therefore also its Classic version) in hindsight, especially compared to Wrath of the Lich King. At first glance, this simply doesn't make sense, because as far as I can tell from my old blog posts on here, I actually got more enjoyment out of Wrath than out of Cata, not to mention that Cata was when I originally gave up on WoW.

I think the difference is that while Cata had plenty of disappointments in store for me, Wrath - while more fun in some places - actively annoyed me in others, and there's a big difference in sentiment between "well, they tried but it was kind of disappointing" and "are they actively trying to piss me off or what". It struck me at one point that many of the things that felt bad about Cata were not really the fault of any of Cata's new features, but simply the result of changes originally made in Wrath of the Lich King (such as the addition of the dungeon finder or the push towards only caring about the latest raid tier).

I guess this explains why I had rather strong feelings about not wanting to play Wrath Classic when it came out, while Cata evokes more of a "probably not, but maybe?" I do remember quite liking some things about Cata back in the day.

Then again, looking back at that list also makes it kind of clear that there isn't really any reason for me to go back for those features. Rated battlegrounds and endgame as it was at Cata's release were kind of heavily dependent on being in a guild, something I no longer have in progressive Classic, plus they were also the kind of things that while I enjoyed them at the time, I'm not sure I'd want to go back and do them all over again. The rated battlegrounds in particular ultimately ended like all my organised PvP ventures, with me stepping down since my lack of skill was just holding the rest of the team back. As for the dungeons and raids... they were pretty fun at launch from what I remember, but I'm not sure they were fun enough for me to want to pick things up again and level a character through Northrend and the 80-85 Cata zones (which I remember being very tedious to repeat).

As for the other three items on the list (transmog, the revamped levelling zones and archaeology), those are all things that I can do just as well if not better in retail. Archaeology in specific is vastly improved in retail compared to how it was at Cataclysm launch. I remember when every dig site only contained a few digs before it was exhausted, each dig only gave a tiny number of fragments, and you only got skill-ups from surveying up to skill level 75 or so (out of... 515 I think?), at which point your only way of making any further progress was through combines. That whole process is so much more well-balanced and fun in retail now, so why would I want to play an all-around worse version of it?

I guess the main draw of Cata Classic is going to be for people who've been having a good time in Wrath with guildies and friends, because Cata will bring more things to do in a similar vein and there's no reason not to continue. In that scenario there's really no reason to hate on Cata just for the sake of it. However, it is yet another step further away from original Classic, so I also can't blame anyone for deciding that this is the point to jump off the train.

Wrath Classic Adds WoW Token, Community Goes Ballistic

I thought that my next post on here was going to be about some interesting changes that are coming to Classic era, but then I found out this morning that Classic Wrath is basically on fire, and that seemed like it might be worth talking about as a priority.

It started innocently enough for me, when I noticed a tweet from loyal commenter Pallais on my timeline, which contained a link to this Wowhead article and the comment: "I have to say I'm enjoying the popcorn-worthy drama some Wrath Classic players are experiencing because of this. ^_^" Funnily enough, I didn't even have any reaction to the WoW Token announcement itself, I just thought "well, that's not very kind towards people who might not like that" and scrolled past.

But then I got curious and checked the WoW Classic subreddit, just to find that it was basically one giant dumpster fire. I can't claim to be enjoying the show, but like a train wreck it's just hard to look away from (and I get what Pallais meant now). The mods have officially dropped the rule that previously forbade talking about private servers, and of course said private servers have happily taken up the opportunity to advertise. In general, people are mad at Blizzard and shouting a lot. And it's weird to me because while I think you can have plenty of reasons to dislike Blizzard or WoW, this seems like such a random hill to die on.

I searched my blog archives to remind myself of what sentiments I expressed about the WoW Token in the past, but I couldn't actually find a single mention of it. It came out during WoD when I wasn't playing, and I clearly didn't have sufficiently strong feelings about its introduction to comment on it in any way.

I can't say that I've taken any real notice of it since picking up retail again either. Obviously there's been a crazy amount of inflation during the years I was away, but I feel that I'm earning more than enough to cover everything I need. In the services channel in town, I often see people advertise carries through heroic raid clears for a mount or achievement, and I'm always surprised that these are actually cheap enough that I'd technically be able to afford one even with my super casual level of play. (Though I would be completely broke afterwards, not gonna lie!) Either way, my point is that it doesn't feel like buying gold confers a significant advantage to anyone; presumably it's something for the impatient or people who want to collect expensive cosmetics without putting too much effort in.

It's funny because on some level I feel like I should dislike the WoW Token more, simply because it's another micotransaction and in an ideal world I'd prefer a return to a pure subscription model. Considering it's very hard to find an MMO without a cash shop nowadays though, I've become pretty desensitised to it, and the simple truth is that not everything you can buy in a cash shop has the same impact on the game. Something like the WoW Token feels like it should be a big deal, but the more I thought about it, the more it hit me that basically, buying gold (whether from a cash shop or a gold seller) only causes problems if that gold in turn buys you things that we feel perhaps shouldn't be for sale (with either currency) but should have to be earned through gameplay.

To bring up an example that I mentioned before, someone who joined the Forks in Burning Crusade as a brand new player and bought gold to be able to power-level leatherworking and enchanting to max within days of creating his character. He was then super generous by always handing out free goodies to other guildies. When I found out about what happened, it ticked me off because I'd been trying hard to work on my professions to help the guild, and here this guy basically bought himself not just a pay-to-win shortcut on the profession front, but it also bought him clout with the guild, which just felt unfair.

In Classic, on servers where GDKP runs rampant, it essentially makes the game pay-to-win in terms of gearing, as the person with the biggest pile of money gets the best gear. As far as I can tell this is particularly prevalent in Wrath, which I guess does make the WoW Token a problem for players in that situation, especially if they bought gold from gold sellers before in order to gain an advantage. With everybody being able to buy gold legitimately, it will likely drive prices in these kinds of runs through the roof.

It doesn't really matter in retail because there are no GDKPs and loot just generally works differently. It wouldn't even matter that much on my server in Classic era either - when the news broke, someone in my guild Discord asked whether we were worried about the Token being added to era as well, and another guildie asked in return what you would even buy with it, which I thought was an excellent point. A new player might purchase a shortcut to their epic mount, or someone might use it to finance repeated respecs, and obviously that wouldn't be ideal... but it also wouldn't be a huge deal.

So I'm not worried. Again, that doesn't mean I think the WoW Token is a good thing, but I'm not going to pretend to feel sorry for people who opt to play in an environment where you can buy your way to victory, being upset that they'll now have to spend even more to keep up. If you think playing WoW should be all about how much money you have, I can't exactly blame Blizzard for agreeing.

What's Next for WoW Classic?

It seems to me that WoW players always concern themselves with future content more than the average MMO player. I suspect this is partially due to Blizzard's long but regular expansion cycles, partially due to the datamining and reporting industry that has grown around WoW and which relies on always being able to generate interest with something shiny and new. I'm certainly not immune to this myself - back in 2019, Classic was still weeks away from release when I wrote a post called "What Will Come After Classic?" for example.

For the past two to three years or so however, things have been pretty quiet on the Classic front. As soon as it became clear that Blizzard was developing Classic Burning Crusade, it was a no-brainer that Wrath would come after - there wasn't really any mystery about that. And the Season of Mastery servers were always meant to be a limited-time project with a defined end.

Now that this end is rapidly approaching though (at this point the SoM servers are due to shut down in less than two weeks), a lot of people are wondering: what's next? Many SoM players have found their way towards era, and while I've loved to see it grow, I think it's pretty clear that at least a sub-section of them is only seeing era as a way to pass the time until the next "fresh" server comes along. But when and what will it be?

Meanwhile in Classic Wrath of the Lich King, people are getting antsy about whether they'll have to deal with Cataclysm 2.0 soon. Blizzard sent out a survey back in September to gauge people's interest in a Classic Cata, which means they are definitely thinking about it, but at the same time that's all the survey questions really told us. This wasn't like the BC survey where it was obvious that they were already working on it and the question was just how exactly the transition was going to go down.

In some ways it seems like a no-brainer. People clearly dig this whole "reliving old expansions" thing, and Cataclysm is simply next in line. Presumably Blizzard has worked out a system by now that makes it relatively easy to revive yet another old expansion. Cataclysm maintains a bad rap, but people forget that for all that, Cata held on to more subscribers at its worst than Mists of Pandaria had at its peak, and many people look back at that expansion fondly by now, so there's likely to be a good chunk of players that would be happy to replay Cataclysm as well. Not to mention that even if you're personally not that excited about Cata, if you've made friends in Classic and they are okay with continuing into Cata, you may very well find yourself being pulled along by sheer momentum.

On the other hand... there is a lot of negative public sentiment surrounding Cata, so much so that annoyed forum threads and articles pushing back against the mere idea started popping up shortly after the survey came out. Even if you liked Cataclysm, it's hard to deny that the destruction of the old world kind of marks the end of the original "Classic era" (not to be confused with Classic era servers! 😉) and makes a potential re-run of the expansion seem a little less interesting simply because it wouldn't be as far removed from the modern game. I know there probably won't be another BlizzCon for a while, but can you imagine a live audience cheering for a Cata Classic announcement? The potential controversy it would create would probably not be Blizzard's favourite thing to deal with in their current position.

So... I'm honestly not sure about this one myself. At first it seemed like a given, but seeing a lot of the negative reactions around it and with Blizzard currently in desperately-trying-to-please-the-people mode, I'm not 100% sure they'll actually want to be that controversial.

What about Wrath Classic era servers that remain in Wrath of the Lich King forever? This is another subject on which my opinion has gone back and forth a lot. When Blizzard decided not to do permanent Burning Crusade era servers, I figured they were just going to plough onwards from now on and Wrath wasn't going to get era servers either. Then I saw people talking about them a lot and figured: hey, there's clearly more demand for these than there was for BC, maybe it'll happen. However, as I've spent more time on Classic era, I'm kind of doubting it again. As much as I've been enjoying my time on era, it seems very clear that from Blizzard's point of view, era is a bit of a nuisance: a game mode that doesn't have a lot of players but still requires resources to maintain (you'd be surprised by the amount of bugs that have been introduced to era by updates to other versions of the game and that then needed fixing).

WoW Classic producer Aggrend supposedly also told someone on the Classic era Discord that we're unlikely to see something like the Classic cloning option again going forward for technical reasons, so unless Wrath era was literally the only thing happening at the end of WotLK classic (which seems kind of unlikely), people would likely be forced to choose whether to stay or go forward, without any option to continue playing in more than one version of the game. I'm just not sure Blizzard is keen on adding yet another version of WoW which will only be played by a minority to their maintenance list. So I'm leaning towards no on this one, though one should never say never I guess.

What about the next Season of Mastery then, or other "fresh" servers of any kind? We haven't really had confirmation of that one happening either, and Blizzard devs that have been asked about it in interviews have been evasive, saying things like how much they loved SoM and how much they learned from it, without giving any clear indication of another one being in the works. I'll throw my hat into the ring for this one though and will say that I expect some sort of fresh start server to launch either around the time WotLK Classic hits Trial of the Crusader or when it's on its final patch. Whether Wrath transitions into Cataclysm and/or people get the the option to stay on a Wrath era server, there'll be people who'll find themselves longing for more of the "true" Classic experience instead, and yes, while that is available on era, the push for fresh servers and continuous progression is strong.

So I think there'll be fresh servers and a Season of Mastery 2 of sorts, though I think it will not be called that and will be quite different from the first one. Examples of what I could imagine happening here is a fresh Vanilla server but with Burning Crusade or Wrath talents, or a server with a three-year-plan to progress through Vanilla, BC and Wrath again in quick succession. Maybe even an actual hardcore server, what with how much publicity that has gotten recently! Basically nothing too crazy, but with enough of a twist to arouse curiosity from the masses. Just three months ago I wasn't sure whether Season of Mastery could be considered a success, but I think that having some sort of seasonal server running at all times will probably be in Blizzard's interest; they'll just have to make it more interesting than SoM was.

Finally, someone always brings up "Classic+" or continued development in the Classic world in the form of an alternate timeline or something. I already said back in 2019 that I considered this unlikely due to the risk and cost involved, but honestly, I've only come to view this idea less and less favourably over time. I've learned that Old School Runescape is a much more sandboxy game than WoW, so that it doesn't actually work that well as a model to emulate, and cramming more dungeons and raids into old Azeroth just seems like it would create problems left and right. People who continuously push for this honestly just give me the vibe of wanting to eat their cake and still have it too - as in, they want Vanilla Classic to simultaneously stay the exact same but somehow also have new content every couple of months just for the sake of having new content, without any real vision for how to actually square that circle.

I think in practice Classic will continue to be about rehashing old content with only minor changes, and that is fine - that's what we all signed up for after all. However, I think it will increasingly become a challenge for Blizzard to maintain all these different versions of the same MMO (something I seem to remember them saying at some point they really didn't want to do... yet here we are with three different game clients already), while the community will become more and more spread out and pulled in different directions.

The (Lack of) Allure of Classic Wrath

Ever since I decided that I definitely wasn't going to bother with Wrath of the Lich King Classic, I haven't really been keeping up with the latest news about it. However, with the launch being only a few days away now, it's been kind of hard to escape the subject as someone who's still involved with and plays other versions of WoW.

My old levelling buddy decided to resubscribe and run endless AVs on all his alts to gear them up just before the expansion, which has been kind of baffling to me. Bloggers I follow who don't always play WoW have jumped back into Classic for the Wrath pre-patch. Blizzard's promotional emails have been trying to lure me in with interesting behind-the-scenes videos about subjects such as designing the continent of Northrend, death knight class design, or the making of the Wrathgate cinematic.

WoW's official social media accounts have seemingly been all Classic, all the time for the past week or so. Today I marvelled when they shared a video called "Wrath of the Lich King Classic Journey Trailer", which looks pretty amazing. I learned that it was done by a fan called Hurricane, whose work I'd actually encountered years ago in promotional materials for the private server Kronos, such as this AQ trailer. His style is very distinctive as he drains a lot of the colour out of his videos (presumably to make WoW look more "serious" or adult), which is actually an artistic choice I don't agree with as I think WoW's bright colours are a big part of its charm, but that aside he definitely does some fantastic work and it was actually nice to learn who'd created all these amazing clips that I'd seen previously.

To get back to the subject of Wrath however, Blizzard is even offering people a free mount for retail if they complete the death knight starter zone in Classic... and I have to admit that was probably what pushed me over the edge. I mean, I'm playing retail at least casually now, right? And getting a throwaway death knight through the starting zone takes like no time at all, right? So I re-installed Wrath Classic today and created a night elf death knight on my old home Hydraxian Waterlords. The server was actually meant to be on the chopping block back in August, but for some reason Blizzard changed their minds about that, and after previously emptying the server out by offering free transfers away from it, there are now free transfers available onto it from selected realms. Have I mentioned yet that Blizzard have really fucked up managing server populations in Classic?

Anyway, I was actually surprised to find the server not completely dead, with some chatter going on in the LFG channel, including some server personalities whose names I recognised from back in the day but who I thought had transferred away. Still, I wasn't here to socialise but rather to get a job done.

I'm kind of relieved to say that the whole experience did not leave me with an overwhelming urge to suddenly play Wrath Classic after all. I know people are gaga over death knights because of how OP they were at launch, but for me the class never really did that much personally, probably because melee dps is my least favourite role. I mean, it felt okay to play, but not amazing.

In a similar vein, I can appreciate on an intellectual level that the death knight starting zone is a pretty well-crafted experience, but playing through it doesn't exactly fill me with joy - or any other emotion really. (Except that part where you have to execute the prisoner; that one still tugs at my heart strings every time, not gonna lie.)

Instead, I often found myself cynically noticing small flaws or inconsistencies, such as that several quest givers addressed my character as "Unknown" (but who reads quest text anyway, right), or that the Battle of Light's Hope Chapel was a rather annoying affair in practical terms that involved mobs getting punted all over the place and evading all the time. When I arrived in Elwynn Forest, I also had to chuckle at the fact that Brewfest was being celebrated right next to a Scourge invasion. The descent into nonsense starts with small things...

Anyway, I got my mount and I'm glad I satisfied my curiosity. All the hype was starting to affect me, but that little play session was a good reminder that I decided not to get invested in Wrath Classic for good reasons. I hope that those who do decide to play it have fun, though I maintain my suspicion that a large chunk of the community will soon find out that what many consider WoW at its peak does perhaps not hold up as well on repeat as they remember. But I guess we'll see.

Remembering LFD

In case you missed it somehow, the announcement of Classic Wrath of the Lich King was accompanied by a disclaimer that the devs weren't planning to include the automated dungeon finder that was part of late Wrath, since it seemed to them that this would go against the spirit of WoW Classic. This piece of news caused a huge uproar in the community and I believe there's been a bit of back-pedalling on the subject from Blizzard since then, though last I checked nothing definitive had been announced.

I went back and forth a bit on whether to write anything about the subject at all. Since I've settled on not wanting to play Classic Wrath, my first instinct was that it wasn't really my place to express an opinion... but after seeing that this hasn't stopped a lot of other commentators, I figured to hell with it.

My actual opinion on the question of whether the Looking for Dungeon tool should be in Classic Wrath is extremely easy to sum up anyway, because my approach to Classic has always been one of striving for authenticity - not because I necessarily believe that Classic was the perfect game, but because we've had more than a decade of Blizzard trying to make the game better for one group of players or another, and the results are never quite as expected, so I just wanted to stick to what was a known quantity. Therefore, I would also strive to emulate the original Wrath of the Lich King by adding the dungeon finder with the ICC patch, just like it was the first time around.

It seems that neither Blizzard nor the players care that much about authenticity at this point though. #nochanges is out, endless arguments on the WoW Classic subreddit about why you think your personal vision of the game would be the best are in. Blizzard said they want to spend more time listening to the players, so you never know when shouting loudly will suddenly pay off. But that's a subject for another post...

Really, what I'd like to talk about in this one is not so much whether LFD should be in Wrath Classic or not, but how I experienced it changing the game and how that has affected my views on it over time. I'm in a great position in that regard, since I started this blog five months before WoW dropped its 3.3 patch and I wrote a lot about my experiences with pugging dungeons, so I have receipts for my experiences back in the day (as the kids say these days).

My observations of dungeon finder day one were overall quite positive. There were technical mishaps, DCs and ragequits, but generally it was all one big adventure. As I stated in that post: "The main advantage of the new tool is simply that it's incredibly fast." If you liked running dungeons, you could now do more of the thing you liked! 100% win.

However, only three days later I already wrote another post with the title: "Three things I don't like about the dungeon finder", which included the line "some people seem to forget that there are other human beings playing with them, not bots created for their entertainment". And that after three days! I concluded by saying: "Don't get me wrong, I still love the new dungeon finder, but clearly the added conveniences are not without a price."

That largely remained my attitude throughout the months that followed, with the main thing that changed over time being the importance I assigned to getting things done fast vs. being treated like a bot. In the early days the advantages just seemed to outweigh everything, and the bad behaviour seemed largely forgivable. After all, I'd sometimes had manually assembled pugs go bad too, right? And even when people were being rude, we were still getting stuff done, right?

However, I was basically a slowly boiling frog. I don't think I ever wrote a post where I said something like "I hate the dungeon finder now", but you can see things deteriorating pretty quickly, as my "fail pug" stories went from mostly amusing to increasingly exasperated. In February, only two months after the dungeon finder's launch, I wrote a post called "An exemplary UP pug", in which I had nothing but praise for a run in which only one person dropped group randomly and where, upon me causing a wipe, only one member of the group was mildly rude to me. My standards for what made for a fun dungeon run were in free-fall and I wasn't even really noticing it.

Or maybe I was. In June I wrote about an awful Pit of Saron pug which I had to drop after the people in it voted to kick my boyfriend's warlock for no real reason, and which ended with a rant about how this sort of thing never would've happened in pre-dungeon finder times. In July I wrote about my "pug peeves of the week" because there were now so many bad behaviours on display in my dungeon runs that you could sort them into categories. In September, on a more humorous note, I wrote a checklist of the many ways in which pugs can fail in Halls of Lightning, which consisted of twenty-five different items.

In October I wrote a post called "Ten months of dungeon finding in review" in which I summed up the major pros and cons of the feature as I saw them. The main pro was the revitalisation of levelling dungeons... but the cons were a loss of immersion (what a novel concept, I doubt many people playing WoW even care about that anymore) and the deterioration of people's social skills. However, I still concluded: "Looking back at the dungeon finder's release with all the knowledge that I have about it now... I'd still want it to be introduced again, because I think the basic concepts of automating the group-finding process and enlarging the pool of available players are absolutely worth it."

After that, Cataclysm dropped and I didn't end up talking about the dungeon finder as much for a while, as I was busy focusing on the new quests and doing things with my guild. I did write a post in January called "State of the dungeon finder", which I think got a lot of link love based on the number of comments on it and which basically posited that the increased difficulty of Cata heroics made pugs a bit scary, but people's bad behaviours hadn't really changed in significant ways. It wasn't long afterwards that I noted that my passion for WoW in general was decreasing for unrelated reasons.

The general perception of the dungeon finder definitely seemed to be shifting by that point though. Rohan of Blessing of Kings wrote a post in March of the same year in which he wondered why he wasn't seeing all those bad groups that people were complaining about and speculated that it might be related to playing the healer role. I actually responded to that post with a comment of my own, which I think shows a lot about my state of mind at the time:

The majority of my runs are successful too, but that doesn't equal "fun". The other day I ran heroic Halls of Origination with my hunter, and the tank decided to skip four of the seven bosses and the rest of the group kicked our healer for "not healing enough" even though he had kept everyone up with no problems and we even got the Faster Than the Speed of Light achievement. This is fairly representative for my average run - yes, we'll get it done, but not without someone being a jerk to someone else (not necessarily me) for no reason. I "grew up" in WoW enjoying dungeons for the social experience they provided, even when pugging with strangers from the same server, but since cross-server LFD this experience has become a sour one more often than not.

I had definitely soured on the whole concept by then, which becomes even more evident in a post from a few months later that includes the line "it's widely known that the dungeon finder has a bad reputation" in its opening paragraph. The actual title of the post was "Dreaming of a different dungeon finder" and funnily enough, the features I described in it sound eerily similar to the pre-made group finder that WoW ended up adding in Warlords of Draenor. I'd never thought about that!

Anyway, what all this shows is that my descent into dislike for the dungeon finder was a very gradual process. I'm not saying that everyone's feelings necessarily followed or would follow the same trajectory - if all you care about are rewards/results, then getting runs faster might still be preferable even if people behave badly in them, compared to dealing with the decreased efficiency of a manually assembled group. However, for me it became evident over time that the rewards were worthless if I didn't enjoy the gameplay leading up to them, and I missed having pugs engage with each other as fellow human beings.

Now, the really interesting thing is that for all that, I'm still not entirely against automated group finding for PvE content in MMOs nowadays... I just think that the dungeon finder as it was introduced in Wrath was truly set up to bring out the worst in people. When I started playing SWTOR it didn't have a group finder, something that many people complained about, but to me this was actually refreshing after the cesspits of Cataclysm's LFD. When SWTOR did go ahead and added an automated group finder with its 1.3 patch a few months later, I was worried about what that would do to the game, but it actually turned out to be okay.

You still get a little bit of that sort of "I don't care" behaviour, such as tanks dropping group if the randomiser puts them into an instance they don't fancy at that particular moment, but it's not nearly as bad as some of the stuff I saw in WoW during Wrath's heyday. I couldn't tell you exactly why that is, but let's just say that I  suspect that the details of how this sort of group finding is implemented do make a difference.

Lack of cross-server queues means that there's some accountability for example, and the fact that pops can be slow sometimes gives players a vested interest in not dropping group instantly the moment anything looks less than ideal, because it will mean more time spent waiting. From what I remember, SWTOR has also never offered unique incentives to focus on running random instances over other content - in comparison Wrath's dungeon finder was ridiculously over-incentivised, meaning that lots of players were running heroics purely for the reward, even if they didn't enjoy the gameplay at all. In hindsight it hardly seems a surprise that this led to unpleasant behaviour and conflicts of interest.

It remains to be seen whether Blizzard will cave and add the dungeon finder to Wrath Classic after all, or whether they'll try to achieve some sort of compromise with a modified tool, e.g. by adding something like retail's current pre-made group finder. Considering how much the community has changed, I expect that those deciding to play Wrath will be in for an "interesting" time either way.

No BC Classic Era Servers? Come on, Blizz.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pessimism About Classic Wrath of the Lich King

I'm in a bit of a funny place with Classic right now, in the sense that I'm having a lot of fun with it, but it feels very much like all of that is happening inside a very fragile bubble. In general, Classic doesn't seem to be in the best of places. The killing off of my old home server Hydraxian Waterlords was only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to server population issues for example, as people are using paid transfers to slowly depopulate smaller servers and making the faction balance on PvP servers (which are the majority) more and more lop-sided to the point where things can become unplayable for the smaller faction.

At the same time people are already talking about Classic Wrath of the Lich King, which - while nothing has officially been announced - seems guaranteed to be released either by the end of the year or early next year. And I'm not looking forward to that either, as I also said to Redbeard in a comment on one of his recent posts.

Wrath may have been many people's favourite expansion, but as I've previously stated on this blog, for me it was very much a mixed bag. It contained some good content, but it was also the first time in my time playing WoW that some changes and additions started to look genuinely unappealing to me. And what good there was, I already played for all it's worth back in the day - I ran something like 1500 five-man dungeons during original WotLK, for Christ's sake! Even if I obviously had fun with that to some degree, do I really want to farm those badges all over again? I think not. Personal taste in expansions aside, I also have a fairly gloomy outlook on the overall situation as far as Blizzard's handling of Classic goes and looking at the way the community has been developing.

I wasn't as put off as some by the introduction of the paid boost and store mount for Classic BC, but it was definitely a sign that the thumbscrews had come out in terms of monetisation, and I expect Wrath to be ten times worse, as original WotLK was when Blizzard first introduced store mounts - meaning they are part of the "legitimate" Classic experience and Blizz have no reason whatsoever to hold back. There also seems to be a general lack of care for the Classic experience in evidence already - I mean, how many months has that succubus death pose bug been in game now?

And as for the community... it's a complex topic, because it's one thing to talk about something like a server's community, but "the Classic community" is vast and diverse. Still, I feel that in general there's been a lot of complaining from the start about not liking certain features of Classic and vocal demands for convenience updates, which just makes me want to scream: you knew exactly what you were getting with this, if it bothers you so much, why are you even playing?! It can be frustrating to watch people claim to love Classic while also asking for it to be more like retail.

At the same time there's been a lot of over the top min-maxing going on as well as people seemingly treating the game like a checklist of chores, the sheer degree of which has honestly been quite shocking to me. I knew that this was already happening in OG Classic, but it seemed more contained then and not as wide-spread as it became with BC. Even if things have mellowed out now, as those who were the most guilty of this are either burnt out or "done" and have no more reason to log in, the way in which this transformed even people I like and consider friends into relentless grinding machines at the start of BC will remain with me for a long time and that's not something I want to go through a second time. Again, with the introduction of achievements and the additional streamlining that came with Wrath, I only expect this to get ten times worse.

Combine this with all the things I remember not liking all that much about WotLK the first time around, and I think everything will come together to make Wrath Classic a grade A shitshow:

• With dungeons actively designed for easy AoE grinding and the introduction of the dungeon finder, people will feel the need to chain-queue for instances 24/7, leading to even faster burnout than people experienced in BC. The dungeon finder will also eliminate any remaining incentive to make connections or to group up with guildies for anything other than raids, unless you're literally already best friends and doing everything together anyway.
• Everyone seems to forget that the majority of Wrath's first raid tier was Discount Naxx, which made sense at the time because hardly anyone had seen the original, but considering how many guilds cleared the real deal in Classic only a year ago, people will be bored with the nerfed version within a week.
• The death knight meta will cause chaos... everyone always just seems to remember how much they personally liked the death knight play style, forgetting that there'll be thousands of other people wanting to be just as OP at the same time. There'll be all-death knight dungeon runs and battlegrounds, competition for raid spots will be fierce, and people will be thoroughly sick of everyone else playing the class in short order.

All this and more is why I don't think I'll really want to play a Wrath Classic... but the sad thing is, I'm considering it even so. And you know why? Because of my guild. The whole server transfer shenanigans highlighted to me that I've made some strong connections there that are not so easily let go, and I could see myself giving it at least a try for other people's sake... but I'm not optimistic that it will result in lasting enjoyment.