Classic Hardcore and the Unexpected Revival of Hydraxian Waterlords

WoW has a long history of community-created challenges. The earliest one I remember learning about was the Ironman levelling challenge: permadeath, no grouping allowed, no professions or consumable use, and no gear better than white quality. In Classic, a variant commonly referred to as "hardcore" seems to have gained traction instead (and I wonder whether the name ever causes confusion, considering that the term has commonly been used to refer to other play styles). It's a similar concept to Ironman but a little less restrictive - probably because the open world in Vanilla is dangerous enough without asking people to run around close to naked.

I'd heard mutterings about it for years... a former guildie of mine really got into it for example, but personally I didn't pay too much attention to it. Similar to the changes made in Season of Mastery, I can understand on an intellectual level how the hardcore rule set could be appealing to some, but it's very much not for me. I loathe deleting characters in any game, for any reason, and not being allowed to group with others sounds extremely depressing to a socialiser like me. But to each their own of course.

Long-time readers of the blog may also remember that I spent most of my time in Classic on Hydraxian Waterlords, the EU's only English-speaking RP-PvE server. I actually started out on the biggest PvE server, Pyrewood Village, but rolled a character on HW as a side project and soon came to prefer it there. I did love the Hydraxian community throughout all of Classic, until Blizzard decided to make everyone transfer off during BC Classic... though they then changed their minds about that in Wrath and enabled free transfers the other way round from what I heard. Let's not talk about that; it just makes me mad again.

The era version of Hydraxian Waterlords did not do well, as the RP tag meant that Blizzard's server connection policy meant that it was left out in the cold with no connections to any other realms. There were some attempts to re-grow a small community there in the early days, but ultimately these did not work out. By the time I sadly transferred off my last (Alliance) character, there were no auctions left on the AH and /who showed me to be literally the only person on the server.

Anyway, to get back to the hardcore challenge, even as someone who's not specifically been following it, it's been hard to ignore that it's been gaining more and more traction over the past few weeks, helped by multiple streamers promoting it. On the Classic era Discord, the subject was even given its own dedicated channel. In the introductory post in that channel, the servers named as dedicated to hardcore play by the community were the old RP servers: Hydraxian for EU and Bloodsail Buccaneers for US.

This was an intentional choice because they were dead. As someone in the hardcore channel put it (in their words, not mine): they're aware that their play style can be considered "abrasive" by other players due to the whole not wanting any interaction thing, and a larger population doesn't really help a person going hardcore anyway. At the time, they stated that their guild on Hydraxian was very small... maybe 5-10 people online at a time.

However, as I said, the whole concept has been increasing in popularity recently, and today someone pointed out that Hydraxian Waterlords had become the first single era server on EU to be marked as having a "medium" population instead of low. I was so baffled by this that I had to log in and see for myself. And indeed, even on a Monday at 2pm, the medium flag was right there. I created a new level one character and killed a few mobs while my census addon ran a check on the population - and it came back with more than 400 people being online on Alliance side alone, just at that particular moment, which is more than we see on era Pyrewood Horde side even on a good evening. The hardcore guild was no longer small - in fact, they had filled up at least three guilds worth of characters and had started on a fourth one.

While I'm happy to see Classic era get any kind of recognition, I've got to admit it feels super weird to see my former abandoned home get repurposed like that, and to see the hardcore challenge generate so much interest much faster than era on its own ever has. I also feel like the server name still means enough to me that I'll want to keep an eye on what happens there, even if I don't care to "go hardcore" myself.

Classic Era Is Not Just Naxx

Most of the conversation about Classic era revolves around its population. How many people are playing on which servers? However, in the past couple of weeks I've encountered another... misconception about era that I've found interesting. The first time I really noticed it was in a troll comment in reply to a reddit thread about era. It was rightfully downvoted, but I still found it oddly intriguing. After first expressing annoyance with the era-focused thread, the commenter finished with a sarcastic: "Enjoy your never-ending runs of Naxx though!"

As it goes with these kinds of things, once you spot a certain trend for the first time, you suddenly notice it everywhere. First it came up in conversation with a friend, and then on the era Discord when a disgruntled player complained that everyone on era seemed to be all about min-maxing their Naxx speed runs. (When I asked him which server he was playing on, he said he hadn't made a character yet and didn't know where to go, so what he was even basing his complaints on, I have no idea.)

The common theme among all of these conversations is that people seem to think that Classic era is simply an exact continuation of the state of Classic as it was in May 2021 when the servers were split into era and Classic BC, with the majority of the player base being focused on Naxx. That is simply not the case.

That server split was effectively a social cataclysm for era. The world may have technically stayed the same, but all guilds disappeared, and 99% of the population effectively vanished in a form of rapture. You can't just go on as if nothing happened after that; doesn't matter if all the content is unlocked and your character is fully kitted out in T3.

I remember when I was chatting with the few who remained on Hydraxian Waterlords before the free transfers to Pyrewood Village were introduced, and hearing about how some had tried to continue their Naxx runs but had to give up eventually after barely being able to scrape twenty people together. In terms of social structures, everything was reset and couldn't just be rebuilt in a day.

From what I gather from comments by those who played era during that time, it was a slow process of scraping enough people together to even do ZG or MC again. Of course, nearly two years have passed since then, and yes, there are people who are running Naxx now, but they are by no means the majority of the player base.

New players are joining all the time, and old players stop playing (whether temporarily or permanently). Guilds that used to raid successfully fold and new ones arise as social groups that formed during levelling decide to try out raiding for the first time. People play the content at all levels, and I smile whenever I see someone post on the era Discord that their guild killed Hakkar or Nef for the first time. The content is static, and there's no "patch momentum" to carry a majority along at the same pace. Instead it's the fluidity of the small community that determines which content is run the most in any given month, depending on who shows up.

Don't get me wrong, if you want to step into Classic and play like it's 2020, speed-running all the raids with maxed out world buffs and most of the raid being warriors, you can probably find a guild that does that if you roll up on the right faction and server. However, you can just as easily find a guild that's focused on socialising, levelling, or maybe just starting out with raiding. You might have to shop around a bit, since not all servers are the same, but the important thing is that while there are obviously a lot of characters at level 60, there isn't a meta in terms of how to play, an "it's what everybody does". 

I think this is important to state for people who are worried about perhaps being late to the party, that it's all been done and that they won't have anyone to play with if they don't want to jump straight into Naxx. Era may not be everyone's cup of tea, but just like Vanilla WoW back in 2005 it accommodates people with lots of different interests.

Questing, Flying and Riding Dragons

I wasn't even playing WoW during Warlords of Draenor, but I still remember the big hubbub about the idea that Blizzard was considering not having flight in that expansion. It was just being talked about everywhere (as you can see from the "here's what other bloggers are saying" section in the linked post). At one point I considered reviving the blog purely to tell everyone that I thought they were being stupid, but fortunately I had enough sense not to do that. I don't think that lecturing devs or players of a game you're not actively playing about how they're doing it all wrong is a good way to spend one's time.

What I was thinking though was that I found both the complaints from players and the devs' attitude annoying in their own way. As someone who fell in love with WoW in Vanilla, back when there was obviously no flying, the wailing about how the game was literally unplayable without it made me roll my eyes every time. At the same time though, I didn't get why Blizzard were being so weird about it with these arguments about how flying supposedly trivialised the content. It's possible to design things like questing with flying in mind, and I had seen them do that in both Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King; why were they suddenly acting as if they couldn't do it?

In the end we got an awkward compromise in which Blizzard still designed the content for ground-bound play and then would let people fly over it by the end of the expansion after they'd "done their dues", as if questing was some sort of chore and AFK-flying through a whole lot of nothing while ignoring all the action on the ground was some sort of amazing reward. Because make no mistake - letting people fly in content that was designed around players being ground-bound does mess things up.

Playing Burning Crusade Classic was actually a good reminder of that, because while it did have content designed with flying in mind, the early levelling quests generally weren't, and if you went back to those with a flying mount later, they were kind of dumb: the stereotypical situations where you were supposed to fight your way through an enemy camp but would then just fly over it to pluck your objective straight out of the air.

Blizzard's decision to design Dragonflight with flight in mind from the very start has been a huge sea change after all those years, and to be honest it's been great. Aside from the first few intro quests, everything is meant to be done with a flying mount, and it really shows. There is more verticality than we've ever had in WoW before and it's very fun.

The fact that dragon riding functions differently from normal flying plays a huge part in this as well. In my opinion dragon riding is honestly so much better that it makes old flying kind of feel like a mistake in hindsight to be honest, with its slow and boring "swim through the air" mechanic. Dragon riding isn't difficult, but it does take a bit of practice to get used to, and it does require continued engagement, meaning that travelling is part of gameplay instead of "time to AFK" (though flight paths still exist if you do find yourself wanting to go for a bio break while flying from one end of the Dragon Isles to the other).

Actually engaging with the game while travelling in turn gives it meaning and opens up opportunities to get distracted and sucked into other activities. It's kind of like the travel in Vanilla, where crossing the landscape would give you a sense of scale, and while doing so you might find yourself discovering something interesting by the side of the road or running into other players. This isn't to claim that Dragonflight is totally like Vanilla (please don't @) me) - it's still a more modern game where everything is much more fast-paced and requires more key presses, but my point is that the vibe in the open world is similar.

Often when I log into retail and fly across the Dragon Isles with a certain goal in mind, I'll end up soaring over something interesting on the ground and landing to pick it up, then I spot a rare just a little bit away and go to that instead, and before you know it I've almost forgotten what I meant to do originally and been playing for much longer than I intended to. This is not something that happened to me in Shadowlands, but it's definitely something that has happened to me in Classic and I'm digging it in Dragonflight too... even if it means that I'm often spending more time playing it than I had planned.

Connected Realms Are Confusing

Server connections as introduced during Mists of Pandaria were one of Blizzard's more clever technical innovations, as they basically allowed them to merge servers without generating any bad press or complaints from people who were at risk of losing their unique character names. Connected realms continue to exist as separate entities on the server selection screen and for naming purposes, but otherwise they are server merges in anything but name: Players on realms that are connected will see each other in the world, use the same auction house, join the same guilds and so on and so forth.

It's also a feature that is utterly opaque from a player perspective if you don't already know about it and have looked into it in depth. In game there are zero indicators whether your realm is connected to another, not on the server selection screen nor anywhere else. At best you could hazard a guess based on the server suffixes that you see pop up in general chat, but that's unlikely to give you the full picture.

To give an example, most of my currently played retail characters are on the Azjol-Nerub server. As it was starting to fill up with alts, I began to worry that I might run up against the old ten-characters-per-server limit and found myself wondering whether there were any connected realms that I could use for additional alt storage. So I googled my way to this support article, which informed me that Azjol-Nerub is connected to the servers Molten Core and Quel'Thalas.

Wanting to see this in action for myself, I created a new mage on Quel'Thalas and asked my husband to invite her to our little guild. And it worked! Of course, this is when I found out that Blizzard apparently removed the cap on how many characters you can have on a single server some time ago, so if you want to reach your account-wide character limit on a single realm, you can - meaning that my worrying about creating alts on Quel'Thalas was entirely unnecessary anyway.

Which brings us nicely to another point: While the realm connection system in retail is weirdly opaque, it doesn't really matter to most players, because so much content is cross-server nowadays that it doesn't make much of a difference what server you're actually on and what it's connected to, with the exception of some edge cases like high-end raiding. But in terms of chatting, questing, dungeons... you can do all of those things with people from any server within your region, whether your realms are officially connected/merged or not.

When Classic Burning Crusade came out and Blizzard announced that they were going to connect era realms with each other to make sure they maintained a healthy population, I thought that sounded like a good idea. As much as people had balked against having any retail technology in Classic early on, by then this seemed like a sensible application. And in some ways it has been!

However, the problem is that in Classic (era), which server you're on does still matter, because aside from connected realms being effectively merged into a single server (cluster), nothing else is cross-realm. So if you log into Classic era in Europe (which is where I play), the realm selection screen presents you with a list of 38 servers with no indication of what's what. They're not even separated by language anymore, aside from the Russians! So you have no good indication of where would be a good place for you to play, and it's basically a roll of the dice whether you'll end up somewhere where people will speak your language and/or whether it's a server that's connected to an active cluster at all.

Fortunately the era community has done a lot of work trying to compile information on this and is sharing it at every opportunity to guide people. According to the Classic era Discord the European realms are grouped as follows:

• Firemaw, Ashbringer, Bloodfang, Dragonfang, Earthshaker, Gandling, Golemagg, Mograine, Noggenfogger, Skullflame - this is known as the main English PvP cluster as it's the most populated, thanks to Blizzard offering free transfers to Firemaw from other realms for a long time
  
• Pyrewood Village, Mirage Raceway, Nethergarde Keep - this is the main English PvE cluster, where I play - same deal with the free transfers to Pyrewood Village from other PvE servers
• Gehennas, Dreadmist, Flamelash, Judgement, Razorgore, Shazzrah, Stonespine, Ten Storms - this is a second English PvP cluster that wasn't connected to the first one for some reason and we don't really know of any major activity happening there
• Venoxis, Dragon's Call, Heartstriker - German PvP - there's at least one Alliance guild raiding there still based on Warcraft Logs, but that's about all I know
  
• Lucifron, Patchwerk, Transcendence - second German PvP (whyyy is this separate)
• Everlook, Lakeshire - German PvE - similar to Venoxis we know there's at least a tiny amount of activity there but not much
• Sulfuron, Amnennar, Finkle - French PvP (no idea whether anything's happening here)
  
• Auberdine (French PvE), Celebras (German RP), Hydraxian Waterlords (English RP), Mandokir (Spanish PvP), Razorfen (German RP), Zandalar Tribe (English RP-PvP) - due to serving different niches these servers were not connected to anything and basically had to be abandoned due to lack of population

So you have both a PvP and a PvE cluster with a healthy population, but they only contain 13 of the 38 servers, meaning a player rolling up on a server at random (since they all show as having low population on the realm selection screen) basically has a two in three chance of accidentally ending up on a realm that is either close to or completely abandoned.

Only the green lines actually lead to a healthy cluster.

Needless to say, this sucks and has not helped the perception of era being dead. I often see players campaign for full merging/connecting of all PvE/PvP servers and I have to admit at times I was a bit confused by why this was such a big concern. Yeah, I was sad that my old home Hydraxian Waterlords was left out in the cold, but that's just one server, right? Well, wrong! Actually it's two thirds of all servers that are being "left out" like that, and I agree that's very bad.

If I could get Blizzard to do one thing for Classic era, it would be to either to merge/connect (nearly) everything (I'd be fine leaving a smaller cluster for people who really like that empty world feeling or whatever... but not this many) OR to make the realm selection screen more transparent so that people understand what they're signing up for. Considering the realm selection screen is the same on retail and they haven't bothered to make things more transparent there in nearly a decade of connected realms being around, I'm not sure I'd hold out hope for that one... but more connections or merges for era should definitely be doable.

Classic WoW & Me in 2022

I love that this end-of-year summary post has become a tradition, because every year I look back at the previous ones and every year so far my situation has been totally different 365 days later, in ways I never would've been able to predict.

Last year I was - after some struggles - quite happily playing Burning Crusade Classic, and hopeful for the near future, though I said even then: "Blizzard seems to want to push us through all the phases pretty quickly, so I reckon we'll either be in Sunwell or might even already be looking at a Classic Wrath of the Lich King by the end of the year. And what I'll do when that happens, I genuinely don't know."

What ended up happening in practice was that my guild fell apart in early spring, and Blizzard announced that there weren't going to be any BC era servers, which killed any and all motivation I had left to play BC Classic. I bummed around in retail for a bit until I made the decision to give Classic one last try by investing into Classic era, and I've been playing that ever since.

Giving an overview of my era characters is going to feel a bit weird when looking back at previous year-in-review posts, since their stats will be based on where they were at when era split off from BC one and a half years ago plus whatever time I've invested in them now, which means that Alliance characters in particular might look like they've effectively regressed since I last played them... but it is what it is.

Horde

So, thanks to the fact that I found myself invited to a friendly Horde guild soon after I started playing on era, my focus shifted back to Horde side for the first time since 2019.

Shika - Pyrewood Village

• Level 60 Hunter
  
• 25 days, 11 hours played
• 300 Mining, 300 (Gnomish) Engineering, 300 Cooking, 300 Fishing, 300 First Aid

The tauren hunter I originally created because all my friends abandoned me about a month into Classic has returned to being my main, and she's also the character that made the most progress this year, going from the hodgepodge mix of greens and blues pictured in my 2019 year-in-review post to a mix of tier 2 and 3.

I'm not sure she'll stay my main in the long run, but for now she's not going anywhere.

Shilu - PV

• Level 60 Druid
  
• 9 days, 20 hours played
• 315 Herbalism, 300 Alchemy, 300 Cooking, 246 Fishing, 300 First Aid

Not much to say about this one, considering that I just wrote a whole post about getting her to 60! She's a feral/resto hybrid since I like being able to tank dungeons and heal in raids without respeccing. I expect to have some fun next year gearing her up a bit.

Shintau - PV

• Level 41 Shaman
  
• 5 days, 2 hours played
• 275 Skinning, 232 Leatherworking, 263 Cooking, 282 Fishing, 260 First Aid

My original Classic main, the resto shaman. Being part of a guild now, she might actually have a future, but levelling as resto is very meh when you're mostly playing solo and there are no dungeon pugs to speak of. Still, I continue to make progress in baby steps - levelling her leatherworking in particular has been fun. And at least she reached 40 and got a mount (which was graciously financed by my hunter).

Shinny - PV

• Level 36 Mage
  
• 3 days, 1 hour played
• 254 Tailoring, 121 Enchanting, 235 Cooking, 172 Fishing, 255 First Aid

My troll mage is back to having the same job she had in 2019: disenchanting stuff and making bags. I level her a bit every now and then when it feels like her bags are too full and I really need to make some sort of progress. Sometimes I wonder whether it would be good to get her to max level solely because there are very few mages in the guild for some reason - it's not unusual to have a 40-man raid with only a single one.

Gemba - Mirage Raceway

• Level 19 Warlock
  
• 16 hours played
• 65 Herbalism, 94 Skinning, 2 Cooking, 34 Fishing, 98 First Aid

This is the orc warlock I made to store gems and other valuables - it's in the name! However, I've also levelled her a bit just for fun. I'm actually kind of excited to do the incubus quest line soon, one of the few pieces of content in era to completely deviate from #nochanges.

Fooba - MR

• Level 16 Warrior
  
• 14 hours played
• 84 Mining, 75 Skinning, 20 Cooking, 1 Fishing, 81 First Aid

My bank alt for food and consumables - again, it's in the name! Also done a bit of levelling but not much.

Tir - Nethergarde Keep

• Level 9 Rogue
  
• 3 hours played
• 30 Herbalism, 25 Skinning, no secondary professions yet
  

So I moved/renamed my Alliance characters before Blizzard had finished purging the old clones, which meant that Tir had to become Tirr and Fali became Faly - but then they actually did free up the old names eventually and I had this sudden anxiety about someone else getting "my" name. So I created new characters with names like Tir and Shintar just to hold on to the names. This is the only one I've levelled a bit, because I thought that having a rogue on Horde side as well would be neat.

Alliance

Aside from the little night elf rogue I created to re-familiarise myself with era, my Alliance characters have seen very little play, but I'm still glad that they're there, so I'll at least list them all this one time to note down where they're at. Who knows what the future will bring?

Tirrona - MR 

• Level 34 Rogue
  
• 2 days, 21 hours played
• 208 Herbalism, 154 Mining, 175 Cooking, 197 Fishing, 144 First Aid

My night elf rogue turned into a rarely-played side project once I moved to Horde side, but I still love her for being the character that helped me get back into era. Starting over really helped with familiarising myself with the culture and environment of era from the ground up instead of (unsuccessfully) trying to jump straight in with a cloned character at max level.

She's also in a super-casual guild led by an older guy who actually used to play on Hydraxian Waterlords too. I didn't really know him there, but just having that little tie to my past still makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Tirr - NK

• Level 60 Hunter
  
• 36 days, 6 hours played
• 300 Skinning, 300 (Dragonscale) Leatherworking, 300 Cooking, 300 Fishing, 300 First Aid

I actually joined a guild called <The Old Raiders> on Tirr (my old Classic main), when I still had this idea that I could maybe casually join for the occasional Naxx run or something, but while guilds are clearing Naxx on era, it's not an easy thing to do and understandably they don't want to take any old random who might jeopardise their chances of success. So I thought about how I'd first have to attend x number of other raids to build up a reputation, on top of mainly playing on Horde side and doing other things, and... I just gave up because it sounded like too much effort. I just log into her every now and then to check her mail (I got some arrows crafted "just in case" which I keep sending back and forth between Tirr and Sarelle because I never end up using them) and to use her salt shaker.

Sarelle - NK

• Level 60 Paladin
  
• 20 days, 13 hours played
• 300 Mining, 300 Weaponsmithing, 300 Cooking, 284 Fishing, 300 First Aid

As my other Naxx-raiding character, Sarelle was subject to similar considerations as Tirr, especially since she had several T3 pieces in her bank that she never got to trade in back in the day due to a perpetual shortage of plate scraps. However, ultimately she's in the same boat as Tirr. I healed a ZG on her and went and won the fishing contest, but that's about it.

Jehna - NK

• Level 60 Mage
  
• 7 days, 13 hours played
• 295 Tailoring, 250 Enchanting, 281 Cooking, 122 Fishing, 300 First Aid

My mage was that character that hit level 60 just before the expansion pre-patch who never really did anything at max level, and she's still that. About the only thing I did on era was buy her an epic mount, since I realised I had enough gold between my other characters to afford it. Oh, and one time I went and randomly farmed satyrs in Felwood for an hour.

Faly - NK

• Level 57 Druid
  
• 8 days, 21 hours played
• 300 Herbalism, 300 Alchemy, 292 Cooking, 225 Fishing, 300 First Aid

My night elf druid became one of my favourite alts in Classic BC, but on era she's not even 60. Sadness. I did a few quests and a bit of flower-picking in the Plaguelands at some point, but not enough to make her level.

Shintar - PV

• Level 30 Priest
  
• 1 day, 17 hours played
• 121 Mining, 141 Engineering, 146 Cooking, 114 Fishing, 142 First Aid

I cloned this one but basically did nothing with her. The memory of how much fun I was having playing priest in Classic BC just before everything fell apart still lingers.

Razorr - PV

• Level 30 Warrior
  
• 1 day, 20 hours played
• 130 Mining, 178 Skinning, 150 Cooking, 61 Fishing, 150 First Aid

I did do a bit of questing on this one, and played the tank in a three-person Stockades run. Her biggest "achievement" however was being handed 500 gold by a random level 60 in Stormwind who said that he didn't really need it because he wasn't playing anyway. 😅

Tirutak - PV

• Level 20 Warlock
  
• 23 hours played
• 132 Herbalism, 150 Skinning, 32 Cooking, 27 Fishing, 78 First Aid

This was my little summon alt back in Classic, and also a bit of a silly RP idea as I levelled her purely by farming mobs in the Barrens. I originally left her behind on Hydraxian Waterlords "just in case" anything ever happened over there but eventually decided to just move her as well, because what's the point of a summon alt who's got nobody to summon?

As for what'll happen next year? I do think we'll get a full year of Classic Wrath of the Lich King, but after that: who knows? Either way this hopefully shouldn't affect me too much as I hope that Classic era can continue to just chug along in peace. It would be nice if for once, I won't find myself in a situation a year later where everything's changed completely yet again.

Did the Cloning Service Harm Classic Era?

A few weeks ago there was a bit of a kerfuffle on the Classic era Discord during which a lot of people ended up airing various grievances they had with Blizzard's handling of Classic era. One subject that came up multiple times - very much to my surprise - was the cloning service. As far as I could tell, people had two main complaints about it:

1. That it cost money to begin with
   
2. That it was eventually shut down and all the inactive/unclaimed clones were deleted

Specifically, people seemed to think that those two things put together had a massive impact on the size of era's population, as in: it would be much more active if everyone who ever played the original Classic could return to clones of their previously created characters at any time, for free.

I was honestly pretty surprised by this because I always thought that the cloning service was a pretty decent compromise, and based on my personal experience, I don't think that unlimited, free cloning would have made a significant difference to era's population at all.

To address the second point first: I just don't think that money has been the primary obstacle to Classic players returning to era. Playing any incarnation of Classic requires a subscription to begin with, so Blizzard already has these people's credit card info and they have enough disposable income to afford it. Sure, there will always be that edge case that can just about afford the sub while any extra expenses would be too much, but most people aren't going to be like that. In fact, I think the whole debacle with Classic's server populations - which was largely brought on by paid transfers - showed that people are quite happy to give Blizzard extra money for any perceived advantage.

I also know people who paid to clone their characters to era and then never even played them. In fact, of all my old guildies who I know cloned characters, I'm the only one who actually ended up playing on era. Money was never the problem; time and investment was. MMOs are quite time-consuming as it is, and playing several of them at the same time requires a pretty large investment. It was always clear that the majority of players were going to choose to move forward into TBC, and the idea that more of those players would have also played era on the side if only they didn't have to pay for their clones just seems totally unrealistic to me.

I say this because I was one of the few who wanted to be that person, who paid full price for two clones early on and thought she'd check in on them every now and then even while focusing on Burning Crusade Classic. However, the truth is: it wasn't really feasible. BC (and other games) were already eating so much of my free time, there was precious little left to even consider spending on era, and whenever I did log in, I didn't know what to do with myself. So much of Classic's original appeal was about community, and if you cloned a kitted out level 60 like I did but none of your friends had any interest in playing on era, it wasn't as if you could just randomly log in on a Saturday afternoon and jump into a Naxx pug. With the "mainstream" moving on, Classic era had to build its own community, and getting to know that takes time. Unlimited, free cloning would've just increased the number of people randomly logging in to stand around in Stormwind or Orgrimmar for ten minutes while wondering what to do, but I don't think it would've done much for era's true activity levels.

Now, I'll admit that even that little bit of extra activity still wouldn't have been a bad thing, and in a world with unlimited resources - yeah, sure why not. However, it's worth noting that when Blizzard was first testing the waters for how to handle the transition into Classic Burning Crusade, cloning wasn't even on the table as an option; they were thinking about a straight-up split that forced you to choose one over the other or else start over from zero on a brand-new server. I said back then that in my ideal world, they'd just clone the entire server, though I'm not surprised that didn't turn out to be feasible. When they announced the paid clones, I was just glad that they'd listened enough to at least make character copy an option.

Honestly, knowing what I know now, I think the only reason we got even that much was that Blizzard overestimated how many people would choose to use this feature. I mean, I obviously don't have any numbers, but considering that millions of people signed up for Classic in 2019 and looking at the size of the Classic era community now - it's gotta be a minute number. Even if we consider people like my old guildies who bought clones and never played them, I reckon the service saw minimal use. Even though the creation of Classic era was announced right there on our character selection screens, I think that the vast, vast majority of players didn't give a fig about it.

So again, I'm not at all shocked that Blizzard decided to shut the whole thing down and clear out their database. Yes, I get that this sucks if you played Classic two years ago, never paid any attention to era or any of the news around it and suddenly realise now that you would have liked to clone - but you've got to admit, that's at least partially on you. And yes, in an ideal world, Blizzard would have preserved all those millions of inactive clones somewhere just in case (though I would've still liked them to free up all those inactive character names) but again, if you think about the effort involved just to appease a teeny tiny number of players, I can't blame them for not doing that.

Basically, I'm not saying that there aren't things about Classic era that Blizzard could've handled better... but in terms of the cloning service, I think they did a pretty decent job when you consider player interest and resources, and I think it's quite alright that the feature is gone now. For Classic era to live and successfully continue to develop into its own thing, it needs people to create and level new characters in the here and now - not to forever sit on a pile of abandoned clones in hopes that people will maybe come back to play them one day.

Classic Era Milestones

The other night I hit level 60 for the first time on Classic era. It's not as exciting as it sounds, considering that I already had four 60s from transfers/clones, and this one didn't start era at level one either, but still... the character in question is my tauren druid, who was level 42 when I made the decision to activate her on era, so she "only" had 18 levels left to go, but those did take me quite a while. Considering that I both raid and still want to limit my time spent in Classic to a casual amount of hours, there just aren't that many opportunities to spend time on levelling alts. I'd usually do a bit of questing on an evening here or there, but then I'd go for pretty long periods of time without any progress whatsoever.

What has levelling on Classic era been like compared to OG Classic? Well, in terms of speed it seems to be about the same, as my druid's /played was a bit over nine days, which is about on par with other characters I levelled in Classic. It did feel a lot more... quiet though. The higher-level-but-not-quite-endgame zones are always less populated than the lower-level ones, and with era's lower population that was even more pronounced.

This had both pros and cons: As someone who enjoys gathering, I loved that there were herbs everywhere, and it wasn't unusual that all the yellow dots distracted me from actual questing for a while. Selling some of those spoils on the auction house was a good money-maker too. Competition for quest mobs was never an issue, and I ran into many rares.

The downside of course is that it's much harder to find people to do group quests with, and it's easy for your quest log to become quite cluttered with them. The ones that were important to me I usually managed to get done eventually by asking guildies for help after a while.

Dungeons are in a similar place and I didn't get to run as many of them as I would have liked, though I did heal Zul'Farrak once and tanked both a Sunken Temple and a BRD run. People are running dungeons, at max level too, it's just that on an individual level, the lower population kind of requires the stars to align in just the right way, especially if you have limited time to play. It's not unusual to ask whether anyone's interested in a dungeon in guild or LFG and get no response, or to encounter the even more frustrating opposite: meaning that you finally see a group setting out for a dungeon you need, but you yourself can't join at that particular moment because you need to log off in ten minutes. Basically as I've said before, there's nothing you can't get done in Classic era, but it often requires patience.

I will note that despite the slowness and frequent solitude, I didn't find the fifties to be a drag or struggle at all. I remember mentioning in the past that I used to not be a fan of this level range as I don't particularly love many of the vanilla endgame zones, and when the solo quests start to dry up, everything feels increasingly grindy in general. However, I've also noted in the past that if you do have an interest in grouping and your eye on raiding eventually, it goes a lot easier as there are things like attunements to work towards that provide you with alternative goals to simply gaining XP. For example my guildies let me tag along to an UBRS at level 55 which allowed me to get my BWL attunement done early, and nobody minded me signing up to heal AQ20 at level 58/59 either.

There was a particularly sweet bit of synchronicity to my druid's first raid at level 60 as well. When I joined the Warriors of Sunlight back in July, Garr dropped a Thunderfury binding in one of my first MC runs and I remember that being one of the first really exciting moments I experienced with the guild. Well, this week I decided to switch to my druid for our weekly binding run, and Geddon's binding dropped... meaning that the guy who got the Garr binding back in July could finally complete his Thunderfury.

I've written in the past about how the creation of a Thunderfury is always a special occasion: how it made me feel connected to my first Classic guild even when I didn't really fit in otherwise, and how similar yet different it was when the Forks serendipitously managed to finally get a Thunderfury just in time for the release of Naxx. In the same vein, it made me feel all warm and fuzzy to help with and bear witness to Tefflar of WoS getting his Thunderfury - it's not the guild's first one and it won't be the last, but it was my first with them and felt like a nice way of putting a capstone on my first few months spent with the guild and in Classic era in general.