Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama.
This is the seventh part of my write-up. You can read the other parts here.
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Part 1 - Beta and Vanilla
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Part 2 - Burning Crusade
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Part 3 - Wrath of the Lich King
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Part 4 - Cataclysm
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Part 5 - Mists of Pandaria
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Part 6 - Warlords of Draenor
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Part 8 - Battle for Azeroth
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Part 9 - Ruined Franchises
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Part 10 - The Fall of Blizzard
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Part 11 - Shadowlands
Part 7 – Classic and Legion
Classic was a separate game created to emulate early WoW. Legion was the sixth expansion for retail WoW, coming after Warlords of Draenor but preceding Battle for Azeroth. Since Legion was relatively uncontroversial, I didn’t want to dedicate a whole post to discussing it, so I have added it to the end of this one.
“You don’t want to do that. You think you do, but you don’t.”
Those words, delivered by WoW executive producer J. Allen Brack, became immediately symbolic of the relationship Blizzard had with its community. The customer was not always right. In fact, the customer was a fucking idiot who needed to sit back, shut up, and keep paying. At least, that’s how it was seen. In the years since, Brack’s statement has only grown more infamous, more telling, and more painful for the company. It resurfaces whenever Blizzard shoots itself in the foot – an increasingly common occurrence these days.
It came in response to a question asked at the 2013 Blizzcon Q&A – had they ever considered creating legacy servers so that players could revisit old expansions? The answer wasn’t just ‘no’, it was a disgusted, emphatic, overwhelming ‘no’. It was a ‘no’ that said the developers were affronted that they had even been asked.
It wasn’t the first time, either. They had been refusing the idea for years. In February 2008 a community manager said, “We were at one time internally discussing the possibility fairly seriously, but the long term interest in continued play on them couldn’t justify the extremely large amount of development and support resources it would take to implement and maintain them. We’d effectively be developing and supporting two different games."
Again in November 2009, they said no.
"We have answered these requests quite a few times now saying that we have no plans to open such realms, and this is still the case today. We have no plans to open classic realms or limited expansion content realms.”
And again in August 2010, Tom Chilton responded to requests with this,
"Currently, my answer would be probably not. The reason I say that is because any massively multiplayer game that has pretty much ever existed and has ever done any expansions has always gotten the nostalgia of, ‘Oh God, wouldn’t it be great if we could have classic servers!’ and more than anything else that generally proves to be nostalgia. In most cases - in almost all cases - the way it ends up playing out is that the game wasn’t as good back then as people remember it being and then when those servers become available, they go play there for a little bit and quickly remember that it wasn’t quite as good as what they remembered in their minds and they don’t play there anymore and you set up all these servers and you dedicated all this hardware to it and it really doesn’t get much use. So, for me, the historical lesson is that it’s not a very good idea to do"
Perhaps he was right. But the demand was clearly there. And since Blizzard failed to provide, players did the job themselves.
Enter the private server.
These were alternative copies of wow, hosted by a third party. Many private servers were simply replicas of the retail game, offering the same content for free. Others specialised, providing powers and mod commands, the ability to skip straight to max level, to gain items that might normally take weeks or months to get, or visit secret areas which were usually inaccessible.
Since private servers did not update along with the main game, they acted as a kind of time capsule. A private server created during Wrath of the Lich King would stay there long after new expansions had come and gone. Modern World of Warcraft bore almost no resemblance to its earliest form, not in its philosophy, its aesthetic, its gameplay, or most importantly, it’s community. As players became increasingly dissatisfied with WoW’s new direction, and began to hunger for return to the older instalments, these servers gained a new relevance. In some cases, private servers could be listed among the most popular MMORPGs in the world – quite the achievement for something technically illegal.
One of the most successful was Nostalrius, a server preserving Patch 1.12 – the sacred final patch before WoW’s first expansion. It was true to life in every possible way. Recreating the experience of vanilla WoW was easier said than done - not many servers had been able to crack it, but Nostalrius was one.
What’s more, it was a totally non-profit endeavour. Its creators never asked for any kind of re-numeration, though they could have. They ran the server at a loss. Over its short lifetime (it was up for little more than a year) Nostalrius grew at a faster rate than Guild Wars 2, FFXIV, or Elder Scrolls Online.
“The heart behind all private servers, including Nostalrius, is to recreate a version of the game that many enjoyed and that Blizzard no longer provides,” the team wrote in their AMA (LINKS TO REDDIT).
But it was not to last.
On the 10th of April 2016, Blizzard issued the Nostalrius administrators with a cease and desist letter. At that time, the server had 800,000 registered accounts, 150,000 of which were active. The creators had no choice. During its final days, users flooded onto the server. Those crowds, a seething mass of furious indignation and loss, reached a scale that hadn’t been seen in retail WoW for years. It was covered across gaming media.
Some players fired off /cry emotes, others mounted their most impressive horses, or spammed the chat with calls to protest, or made a last ditch attempt to advertise their guilds, and a few simply wished a fond farewell to the server they had come to call home. On the Horde side, hundreds of players marched the hour-long journey from Orgrimmar to Thunder Bluff, before leaping to their deaths from its highest peak. “ATTACK BLIZZARD SERVERS!! TAKE THEM DOWN!!”, one player screamed as he fell.
”THANK YOU NOSTALRIUS FOR THE GREAT MEMORIES THANK YOU AND GOODBYE! <3”
Time ran out, and the game reset to the login screen, where the black portal sat glittering in the background. ‘Disconnected from server’, said a popup message in yellow text. The buttons no longer worked. Nostalrius was dead.
And its community exploded.
All of Blizzard’s social media accounts were overwhelmed by angry messages, begging them to find some morsel of mercy and, in some cases, threatening them if they didn’t. Major gaming figures weighed in. The scandal broke into every forum, every subreddit, and every server. No private server had ever been the topic of such passionate discourse. But the Nostalrius scandal had come to represent more than a server, it was a martyr in the fight for the right of the consumer to preserve games. Vanilla WoW was not the first game to disappear because its owners no longer wanted to support it. Someday, all online games would face the same fate.
Across the video game industry, a conversation arose. Was modern World of Warcraft the same game it used to be, or something else completely? If Blizzard were not going to provide vanilla servers, did they have the ethical right to stop players from making them, just because they owned the IP? Was this new attempt to clamp down on private servers a desperate bid to reclaim players who had left the retail game? That last question provoked a backlash of its own.
”This is not stealing profits from your game”, declared Jontron. “These people weren’t even subbed. In fact, most of these people just don’t like your current game, so they’re trying to go back and play your old one.”
A petition was created on Change.org to resurrect Nostalrius following its closure. Ex-World of Warcraft team lead Mark Kern pledged that if it gained more than 200,000 signatures, he would print all five thousand pages and deliver them to Blizzard President Mike Morhaime personally. It reached 279,000.
In June of that year, something remarkable happened. The team behind Nostalrius was invited to a meeting at Blizzard, where they met Morhaime and Brack, as well as Tom Chilton, Ion Hazzikostas, and Marco Koegler – all the men who held power over the future of Warcraft. For corporate executives to meet with people who had effectively stolen their game was unheard of. They didn’t even put them under a non-disclosure agreement – which Blizzard usually required for all visitors.
”People at key positions inside Blizzard attended the meeting. They were also all very interested, curious, attentive, and asked a lot of questions about all of the topics we mentioned.
We did everything we could to make this presentation & discussion as professional as possible, which was something that clearly was a pleasant unexpected surprise for the whole Blizzard team, Mike Morhaime included.”
It was planned to last two hours, but went on for five. It was summarised on the Nostalrius forum.
”One of the game developers said at a point that WoW belongs to gaming history and agreed that it should be playable again, at least for the sake of game preservation, and he would definitely enjoy playing again.”
The most important thing to come out of this meeting was a confirmation from Blizzard – they wanted legacy servers, but it would be a tremendous undertaking. At the end of the meeting, Blizzard promised to keep in touch.
But they didn’t. In fact, Brack wrote a letter prior to Blizzcon 2016 insisting that legacy servers would not be discussed at the event.
”We had invested our hearts and souls into this meeting, and we got some really good feedback while we were there. But after we left, we heard nothing from Blizzard for months - even after continuing to reach out. And so what were we supposed to do at that point? Were we supposed to just let the legacy server die? Is the dream dead? Well we took things into our own hands, and that’s when the Elysium project happened. We released the server code for the entire Nostalrius project to the Elysium team, Including the player databases for both of our servers.”
Elysium was a new project intended to take over from Nostalrius. A short while later, Nostalrius itself was re-created, but not for long. It shutdown and withdrew its code from Elysium under pressure from Blizzard. Elysium struggled on for a short while alone, until it was broken up from within by internal strife and embezzlement.
All seemed lost.
“I want to talk about ice cream.”
It was Blizzcon 2017. New adventures had been announced for Hearthstone, new maps for Overwatch, and StarCraft 2 was going free to play. The next World of Warcraft expansion was about to be revealed, and there was no doubt that ‘Battle for Azeroth’ would overshadow everything else at the convention. That was until J. Allen Brack stood on stage and started discussing food.
”Before we get to the big news, I want to take a minute. And I want to talk about ice cream. Ice cream is great. Ice cream is one of my favourite desserts. Personally, I love chocolate, and I love cookies and cream. Cookies and cream is actually my all-time favourite dessert. But I understand that for some of you, your favourite flavour… is vanilla.”
A trailer played, reversing through all of the expansions in order, before returning to the famous opening shot from when World of Warcraft first came out. The reaction was colossal.
”It brings tears to my eyes thinking of sitting down with my son and wife to show them WoW Classic.”
[…]
”Thank you blizzard for giving me the game i fell in love with back”
[…]
”THE ABSOLUTE MADMAN BLIZZARD ACTUALLY DID IT. STRAIGHT FROM THE GUY WHO GAVE US, “YOU THINK YOU DO BUT YOU DON’T”.”
[…]
”No game has had me tear up before, that changed when I saw the announcement. And after rewatching this 40 times, I still get the same feeling.”
It wasn’t just a trailer, it was a landmark shift in Blizzard’s philosophy toward its games and its community.
With a quick two-minute trailer, Blizzard backpedaled on years of dismissal to finally offer fans an official, unblemished version of the world’s most popular MMO as it existed in 2004. This is something they said they’d never do.
To this day, the trailer is the second most upvoted post on /r/wow (LINKS TO REDDIT).
”Amazing. I can now ruin my 30’s in the exact same way as I ruined my teens.”
[…]
”This is not good for my career prospects”
[…]
”I’m legit crying right now. SO FUCKING PUMPED!”
[…]
”It took me a few seconds to get the ice cream bit, but when I got it my jaw fucking dropped.”
It’s really difficult for me to convey quite how shocked the community was. This wasn’t like any other announcement. It was spectacular to watch it all unfold.
There were a lot of questions asked in the following days.
Would this be covered by a normal WoW subscription, or separate service entirely? What version of Vanilla would be chosen? It had spanned two years and twelve patches, after all, each different in its own way. Which bugs, glitches and performance issues would be included for authenticity, and which would be left out?
No one at Blizzard knew the answers to most of these questions. The project was still in its early stages.
“We’re going to hire people specifically for this job, and we’re going to staff it with people who are interested in bringing back Classic WoW in the best, most authentic way,” Brack says. “And that’s how we’ll be successful.”
Even with the whole team focused on it, several years would pass before Classic went live. Blizzard has always loved deadlines – especially the whooshing noise they made as they went by. There were those who started asking why it was taking so long.
If you’ve been around the World of Warcraft ecosphere for a while, Blizzard’s tentativeness might come as a surprise. There is no shortage of emulated vanilla servers on the internet. The official subreddit for the scene points to 15 of them, and there are dozens more holding crystallized copies of Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, or Cataclysm—wherever you happened to leave your happiness.
The reason was this: Blizzard didn’t want to just throw up an emulated Vanilla server. They wanted to fully integrate Classic into the modern game. Brack explained more in an interview with PCGamer,
“We think we have a way to run the Classic servers on the modern technical infrastructure. The infrastructure is how we spin up instances and continents, how the database works. It’s those core fundamental pieces, and running two MMOs of that size is a daunting problem. But now we think we have a way to have the old WoW version work on the modern infrastructure and feel really good.”
Why did they bother? Well if they took the easy route, they faced a number of potential issues down the line. These servers were unstable, buggy and incredibly insecure to hacking. Anyone who had touched a private server could tell you so. The work required was immense.
”First, they DO have the source code for Vanilla WoW. Code version control systems are not something new, as it has been a standard in the industry for a long time. With these systems, they can retrieve the code at any given previous backup date.
However, in order to generate the server (and the client), a complex build system is being used. It is not just about generating the “WoW.exe” and “Server.exe” files. The build process takes data, models, maps, etc. created by Blizzard and also generates client and server specific files. The client only has the information it needs and the server only has the information that it needs.
This means that before re-launching vanilla realms, all of the data needed for the build processes has to be gathered in one place with the code. Not all of this information was under a version control system. In the end, whichever of these parts were lost at any point, they will have to be recreated: this is likely to take a lot of resources through a long development process.
In addition to the technical aspects of releasing a legacy server Blizzard also needs to provide a very polished game that will be available to their millions of players, something existing unofficial legacy servers cannot provide.”
A lot was still up in the air. Blizzard were clear, however, that it would be as authentic as possible. They sneered down their noses at the quality-of-life changes which had, according to fans, ruined the game. Guns and bows would need ammo, pets needed to be fed, and they even laboured to recreate the annoyances caused by early 2000s dial-up internet, like spell batching, which processed user inputs in clusters rather than instantly. But some changes remained, like the in-game clock (which wasn’t originally added until Wrath).
Cross-realm grouping? Never.
Flying? Come on.
Achievements? Nope.
Unified Auction Houses? No Way.
”ITS FUCKING HAPPENING!”
On Tuesday 14th March 2019, the fandom awoke. News. Fresh news. Wherever they were, whatever they were doing, thousands of nerds stopped on the spot, and scampered back to their mothers’ basements like they’d just won a golden ticket to the chocolate factory. They finally knew (LINKS TO REDDIT) when Classic would go live.
”I just have to stay alive for 3 more months.”
Another user wrote, “THAT’S THE WEEK OF MY HONEYMOON - WEDDING’S CANCELLED”, and he was reassured that if his fiancé was ‘the one’, she would understand. She did not.
”This is what I imagine a former junkie feels like when they’re offered an Oxy.”
Rather than start at 1.12, Blizzard decided to resurrect Vanilla from its first moment. It would begin with Onyxia and Molten Core - the two first raids to be added originally. From there, the patches of Vanilla would be added over the course of a year and a half, so that players could relive Classic as authentically as possible – and so they wouldn’t get bored and unsubscribe.
The days ticked slowly by, and the hype grew to astronomical levels.
I’ve dreamt of this since I first got into private servers and I never thought they’d do it but the mad lads did it
Honestly half the fun right now is being part of they hype wave, it’s like sitting at a starting line revving your engine”
[…]
”Shit, it’s like being back in 2004 all over again, waiting for release. But the hype is deeper, I have so many memories I can’t wait to re-live.”
[…]
”Never in my life have I been this excited to play a game.
AZEROTH, I’M COMING HOME BABY! JUST 11 MORE DAYS, 10 HOURS, 12 MINUTES AND 30 SECONDS!!”
Then all of a sudden, the day had arrived. On 26th August 2019, the Classic servers opened, and immediately collapsed due to high demand. But once players got past the hours-long queues, they rushed into the Azeroth of their childhoods. To many, it was everything they had dreamed of. They dived in with youthful abandon. Over a million concurrent viewers tuned in just to watch it on Twitch.
”WoW was essentially struck with a nuclear blast of nostalgia that sent the franchise back into the stratosphere, appropriately enough, for the first time since 2004.
Sixteen years after the game’s original release, WoW permeates the many spheres of online culture once more. What’s most impressive, though, is how the game has stayed resurgent. While the nostalgia surrounding Classic WoW was a driving force for the resurrection of the franchise in August 2019, that nostalgia has morphed into a sustainable platform for WoW.”
During an earnings call a few months later, J Allen Brack revealed the extent of Classic’s success.
“Given the content updates for modern WoW, and the cadence that we have for Classic, we exited our year with a subscriber base that was double what it was at the end of Q2.”
Stories immediately flooded out of the game. Screenshots showed players queuing up in their hundreds to kill mobs in busy areas. One player sent another a box full of mangoes following a conversation in a random battleground. A famous Guild sponsored a race (LINKS TO REDDIT) to be the world’s first max level character, only for a completely separate unrelated player to beat them to the punch. In one bizarre case, hackers discovered a way to leap between copies of the world, in order to get a PvP advantage. I would write about the political intrigue and guild drama surrounding the opening of Ahn’Qiraj, but someone has already done a good job of it (LINKS TO REDDIT).
The long and short of it is this: Classic was a resounding success. It re-vitalised the game and even prompted people to look at retail wow in a more positive light. That was a return to player driven adventures, bizarre encounters, and collective action. For the first time in many years, Warcraft was a community defined by its optimism, not it’s nihilism. And all this did wonders for Blizzards reputation at a time when they desperately needed some good PR.
”People were loving this recreation of the great massively multiplayer game’s early days and lamenting what WOW had become in the 14 years since. Someone celebrated freedom from the tyranny of item levels. Someone mentioned the hushed sound design, noting that they could hear every footstep and clink of their chainmail. Someone else remembered how the community was so much friendlier back then, in so much less of a rush.”
”git gud scrub”
For some, Classic was a rude awakening.
WoW had been slowly replaced over the years like the ship of Theseus, piece by piece, patch by patch, until nothing remained of its original form. Those who noticed the change were often unable to pinpoint what exactly was happening, or why. But Classic peeled back all the layers to reveal the bones of Warcraft, and it suddenly became clear.
It wasn’t just that the game was buggy or janky or tedious – though it was all of those things. It was a product of a its time, built in the days of Ultima and Everquest, and that showed in its philosophy. What should be rewarded? What should be punished? How should players overcome challenges? What makes a game fun? Is it more liberating to have a thousand things to do, or nothing at all?
Blizzard answered these questions differently in 2004. Nothing came easily. The time and effort required simply to hit max level were crushing. And for every player the game captured in a cruel cycle of addiction, another bounced right off it.
Perhaps more than anything, Vanilla WoW had been designed for new players. That might sound contradictory, but stick with me. Vanilla had been a new game. Most of its players had never seen anything like it, and it was made with that in mind. While every new expansion brought along more and more features to help newbies find their feet, they gradually abandoned them as the target demographic. Rather than inspiring wonder, they opted for spectacle. The point was not to capitalise on Vanilla, but to depart from it.
The best example is when Cataclysm remade the two continents from Vanilla. Each zone became a sequel to its previous (lost forever) self. A new player wouldn’t understand the references or story threads, but that was okay. New players weren’t who Blizzard wanted to impress.
Vanilla had been awkward, unintuitive, confusing, unforgiving, and full of bizarre experimental edges, but it was only after Blizzard ironed out those wrinkles that players realised how much they lent the game its character.
[…]
”There can be no argument at all that quest design and storytelling were better in early WoW. They could be quite poor. There’s an awful lot of mechanical drudgery, with endless culling of wildlife and troublesome local populations, low drop rates and high kill counts padding out the levels with makework. You can find grace notes, of course, like an amusing spat between rival goblin factions, but these could often end up fighting the game systems or poor design.”
It has always been difficult to pin down what made Vanilla great. Topics like design philosophy and historical context are complicated and difficult to explain.
”I logged into current WoW, and just looked at the character screen, wondering: How it was possible to start with such a great game, and end up here like this?”
A lot of people in the Classic community boiled it down to difficulty. Its leaders encouraged an almost cult-like obsession with ‘the grind’, because things had been better back in the day, before the game went soft. They thought suffering and inconvenience were part of what made WoW great.
”If there’s no sense of challenge, there’s no sense of reward (LINKS TO REDDIT)
In retail, challenge is only an optional way to see content, so there’s much less incentive to actually do the challenging content”
Not everyone was unreasonable, and plenty of Classic fans (LINKS TO REDDIT) mocked those who took it all too seriously. But some were, and unfortunately they clung to the spotlight. To them, you weren’t a ‘true fan’ until you accepted Vanilla into your heart. And if you weren’t a true fan, you were the enemy.
Yes, rose-coloured glasses were involved, but you couldn’t say that to people in these circles. To suggest their feelings were the product of nostalgia meant implying they weren’t ‘real’. It was tantamount to an insult, and had been used by the fans and developers of modern WoW for years to dismiss calls for legacy servers.
”Nostalgia is, of course, an important part of the overall picture. WoW landed at a really formative time for a lot of people, a time when they were in high school or in college, had a lot of free time, and all their friends had a lot of free time, and their lives meshed well with the pace of the game, and the game became their shared social space. That is a potent element.”
[…]
When asked about the differences (LINKS TO REDDIT) between modern WoW and Vanilla, one user responded, “Vanilla didn’t have people crying about how much better Vanilla allegedly was.”
Discussions of difficulty in games have always evoked strong emotions, and WoW is no exception. This Puritan style of thinking was nothing new – fans of the Souls games had been treading these waters for years. But in the lead-up to Classic, it gained a toxic edge.
Vanilla became an almost mythological entity. Its strengths made it great, they said, but its weaknesses also made it great. Criticism wasn’t just wrong, it was seen by some as actively harmful, borderline blasphemous. But a lot of the people who bought into this idea had never actually been around during WoW’s early days, and so when the first servers came online, they saw behind the curtain.
”For many, this complete lack of direction was clearly overwhelming. The global chat was a chaotic mess of players asking where to find gnolls and bandits, with many picking a random direction from the quest hub and striking out to explore the region, hoping to get lucky and happen upon the right kind of enemy.”
For a lot of players, that was the moment they realised this promised land had never been that great to begin with. They found themselves apostates, cast out of a fandom which was far too busy touching heaven to even notice them leave.
”Wow Classic is god awful. (LINKS TO REDDIT) I played the game at various stages and i have no idea how Wow even survived when it launched in this state. People shit on retail when its magnitudes superior to classic no matter its faults. Classic doesnt even do the basic things well at all.”
[…]
”There is a strong and passionate fanbase of folks for whom this is the best thing ever, but I think a number of people don’t realize how many quality-of-life and mechanical changes have been made in the years since.
Blizzard may have strayed too far in some areas, but it’s hard not to see some of the tedium reintroduced to WoW with Classic.”
Some weren’t sure if they loved it or hated it.
”Blizzard could not have picked a better zone to stir nostalgia and then skewer it on the truth of how boring the game could be.”
But everyone acknowledged there was something here.
”World of Warcraft Classic is compelling in ways that modern WOW isn’t.”
[…]
”I think it’s true that Classic offers something for everyone that retail WoW cannot. They say it’s about the journey not the destination, and I definitely feel that’s the case with WoW.”
And veterans weren’t the only ones who loved it.
”I figure this is mostly for older gamers who have a rose-colored, nostalgic view of the game, but I’m a little curious, so I test it out.
Oh boy was I wrong.” (LINKS TO REDDIT)
It’s hard to have an impartial talk about Classic. The discourse has always been fraught. Classic actively fosters an in-group mentality, due to its emphasis on social dependency. You can’t get by as a lone wolf. You can’t dip a toe in the water and hope to remain competitive. Either you give everything to the game, or you get left behind.
”If you’ve only got a few hours a week to dedicate to an MMO, Classic may not be the game for you and you may be better off looking at modern Warcraft to fill that Azeroth-shaped hole.”
[…]
”You spent time together (LINKS TO REDDIT) and got to know each other. Maybe that still happens in small doses but it used to be the whole game.”
This aspect was so strong that for some players, Vanilla WoW was less a game and more a social network.
”WoW was so popular because it gave a sense of community (LINKS TO REDDIT) - something that wasn’t really available elsewhere. Social media wasn’t a thing, outside of MySpace(lol) and bare bones Facebook you needed a college email to sign up for. No Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Discord, etc. So after a long hard day at work/school, you chilled with your guildmates, who were doing the same.”
”Just because I have nipples, does not mean I want to be milked, Greg.”
Once the roll-out of Vanilla’s patches was complete, the community began to discuss what would come next. (LINKS TO REDDIT) Many players had gained top level gear, and were effectively finished with Vanilla, but didn’t want the fun to stop just yet (LINKS TO REDDIT).
Did the game simply stay this way forever? Would Blizzard start developing new content to extend Vanilla separately to the original release (as had happened to old school Runescape)? Would they reset the game? Or was Burning Crusade Classic on the way?
Blizzard wasn’t too sure themselves. They knew they wanted to go with the latter, but they weren’t sure how to make it work. A survey was sent out, asking players for their opinions. All of the options proved popular, so they tried to appeal to everyone.
There was a lot of nostalgia for Burning Crusade – nostalgia which had yet to be monetised. I won’t explain what BC was because we’ve covered it here before (LINKS TO REDDIT).
The expansion was revealed by accident, when an advertisement appeared on the Blizzard launcher. It was immediately taken down, but the cat was out of the bag (LINKS TO REDDIT).
The crazy thing about the ad was that it promised BC Classic would be available in less than a month.
[…]
Once again, there were a number of questions to answer.
BC couldn’t overwrite vanilla - that was the whole point of Classic – so players weren’t sure how it would integrate into the existing game. But by that point, Blizzard had decide it would be a separate service to Vanilla, but still covered by a single WoW subscription.
So far, Blizzard had done everything right (more or less). But the announcement of BC was incredibly botched, and infuriated the community in multiple ways. They offered players the option of transferring their Vanilla characters to the BC servers for free. Or, for the price of $35, they could clone their character, keeping one the original in Vanilla and getting a copy in BC.
Cue the shitstorm.
[…]
[…]
[…]
A lot of players were discussing the idea of abandoning the Burning Crusade altogether out of protest.
The player base worked itself into a lather, getting angrier and angrier until the developers had no choice but to respond. Just days after announcing the price, Blizzard backpedalled and reduced it to $15.
The players had won.
But some were quick to point out that they shouldn’t be paying anything at all. Others suggested that this had been the plan all along. Blizzard never intended on charging $35, they just wanted to make $15 look good by comparison.
[…]
[…]
Alas, the cloning fee was not the only controversy here.
Players could buy a Dark Portal Pass for $39.99, which would take any character on a BC server straight to level 58 and provide everything they needed to start playing in Outland right away. That pissed people off even more than the cloning fee.
In an AMA prior to the release of Vanilla, one of the developers had declared, “Character Boosts are not in keeping with Classic. We don’t want to break any hearts.” (LINKS TO REDDIT) That had come as a huge relief to the community at the time. And now it came back, as a betrayal. The cracks were starting to show. The only crack players wanted to see in Burning Cruade was Illidan’s, and that’s the only one they weren’t getting.
We already covered the arguments against boosts in the Warlords of Draenor write-up, but those feelings were felt more strongly here. Not only did players care far more about levelling as a rite of passage which was meant to be slow and painful, they were also keenly watching for any signs of ‘corporate money-grubbing’. They saw modern WoW as the ‘darkest timeline’ and wanted to prevent Classic going down the same road. As far as they were concerned, meddling with BC was like trying to rewrite the Bible.
Not everyone was against the idea of boosts, however.
Some players thought boosts should be conditional – perhaps they should be limited to players who had already hit max level in Vanilla, or they should only be available for a month after launch.
There were also concerns about bots. Classic already had an issue with them, and giving them a way to skip levelling risked making the problem worse. More bots meant more gold farming, which in turn meant more damage to the economy.
In protest, a thousand players banded together to ‘reboot’ BC on one of its smallest servers, starting over from level 1. ““Blizzard announced Burning Crusade Classic with no fresh servers and no mention of what will happen to the existing low population / dead servers, except hinting there could be the possible creation of new servers post-Burning Crusade Classic launch,” said the organiser behind The Fresh Crusade.
(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)
”/spit /spit /spit”
And as if Blizzard was deliberately trying to infuriate their Classic players as much as possible, they announced the Digital Deluxe Edition, for the low low price of $69.99. Every single feature came like a new dagger to the heart.
As well as a Dark Portal Pass and 30 days of game time, it included the Path of Illidan toy, which caused characters to leave a trail of green flaming footsteps, a unique hearthstone, a mount for retail-WoW, and most important of all, the Phase Hunter mount, specifically for BC Classic.
[…]
[…]
[…]
[…]
Asmongold, one of the biggest WoW personalities, who had followed Classic from the beginning, encouraged his fans to fire the /spit emote at anyone who used the mount. The idea was that if they disincentivised the mount enough, no one would buy it, and Blizzard would learn not to try these kinds of techniques again. The harassment campaign applied to everyone who bought store mounts, but was specifically targeted at those who bought the Digital Deluxe Edition.
It was intensely controversial.
Most content creators strongly opposed the campaign, whatever their views on store mounts. But many players were on Asmongold’s side.
An addon was created to automatically spit on players with the Deluxe Edition mount. Screenshots emerged of players’ chat logs filling up with notifications that they were being spat on.
In the PTR (Public Test Realm) of BC Classic, Blizzard removed the /spit emote entirely, and took it out of Retail WoW shortly after. This wasn’t entirely due to Asmongold’s campaign, but it was a factor. We’ll cover the rest in another write-up.
This once again provoked the wrath of the #nochanges gang, who wanted Classic to preserve BC to the letter.
They insisted that Blizzard didn’t care about harassment at all, they were just trying to protect their golden goose. After all, Blizzard had done nothing to curb the use of racial slurs.
[…]
“Wait, is it actually dead? What the fuck? It’s actually dead.”
When Classic first released, there was little no real concern about it cannibalising the playerbase of retail WoW – the games were totally different, and catered to different people. Burning Crusade Classic didn’t have that advantage. It was directly aimed at players who had enjoyed Classic, but who wanted to move on to Outland. There was a serious risk of splitting the community in two.
When Blizzard cloned players over to the BC servers, their Vanilla characters remained, and the Vanilla servers were never going anywhere – the company had been clear on that. But with everyone playing in BC, the Vanilla community simply disappeared. Since most players went on to BC without paying the $15 dollars for the character cloning service, their favourite characters were gone from Vanilla forever.
Folding Ideas compared World of Warcraft to a religion going through a major schism, with a more progressive branch (Retail) and a fundamentalist branch who desired a return to the old tradition (Classic). And here with BC Classic, the branch split again. Vanilla was left in the hands of ‘Classic Forevers’ who rejected expansions of any form, and chose to remain pure.
In those servers left behind, it was often hard to find more than a dozen max level characters online at once. They soon grew disdainful of the traitors who had abandoned Vanilla.
I wish there was more to say on this topic, but there isn’t. The vanilla servers have languished, largely untouched and unthought of ever since. While they are technically still there, and will be there for years to come, the experience of early wow is gone once again.
(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)
”FOR THE HORDE!”
When it came to the Horde/Alliance split, very few servers had ever been equal. Often, one faction would vastly outnumbered the other. In the fifteen years since the game began, Blizzard had worked tirelessly to find a solution. Some ideas had worked, but all of them had come at a cost. Whether it was combining servers or splitting them up or developing systems that moved players seamlessly from one to another depending on the need, it always meant messing with the delicate ecosystems and communities of the game’s many ‘realms’.
Faction ratios were just some of the many problems Blizzard recreated in Classic. Racial abilities were much stronger when the game first came out, and certain classes were exclusive to one faction or the other. After many years of debate and investigation, it is generally agreed that the Alliance had an edge in PvE content, whereas the Horde pushed ahead in PvP. The two were different, but surprisingly balanced.
That all changed (LINKS TO REDDIT) with Burning Crusade.
Without going into too much detail, it all came down to Blood Elves. They were the one Horde race that could play Paladins, which had been an Alliance-only class in Vanilla. To differentiate them, Horde Paladins got an ability called ‘Seal of Blood’, and Alliance got ‘Seal of Vengeance’. Combined with the overpowered racial ability ‘Arcane Torrent’, Blood Elf Paladins had a major PvP advantage. The Undead racial ‘Will of the Forsaken’ was equally overpowered, and nothing on the Alliance could compete with it. To make matters worse, BC introduced arenas which pitted players against one-another in groups of just two or three. In that setting, a small boost went much further.
This imbalance left a legacy that remains even now. The Horde still dominate high-end raiding and PvP on retail.
Blizzard had no choice. When BC Classic came out, it brought this problem with it. Whether they wanted to or not, they couldn’t betray the spirit of the original, or incur the fury of the #NoChanges mob.
And so, as expected, the faction ratio slid inexorably toward the Horde. Their majority quickly grew from 53% to 62%. On PvP servers, the Horde simply had no one to fight against. Queues to get into battlegrounds and arenas got longer and longer, so players went out into the world for their fun, which usually meant ganking low level Alliance as they quested in the zones of Outland. In the face of these roaming death squads, those Alliance players either quit, switched to Horde (LINKS TO REDDIT), or fled to the safety of PvE realms, where they formed a majority of 65%. That just made the problem worse.
The end result was a lot of servers where one faction made up over 99% of the population.
In retail, Blizzard had fixed the problem with ‘Mercenary Mode’, a feature that magically swapped players to a race of the opposite faction to fill in gaps. It had never been around during BC, but Blizzard piloted it anyway. It was either meddle with the game, or let it die. Horde players were given cardboard masks with Alliance races painted on them.
The #NoChanges community saw Mercenary Mode as just the first step to destroying the greatness of BC. There were even calls to reboot the whole project. And with ‘Classic Classic’, we’ve come full circle.
Some disagreed.
[…]
Should Blizzard implement modern changes, or preserve the game in its original form, no matter how broken it may be? This debate has come to define the Classic community, and corrupts all discourse surrounding it. And as long as the developers keep trying to find a way forward without upsetting either side, they will be paralysed as well.
In the days of Nostalrius, fans had one simple goal - they knew what they wanted, and everyone was on the same page. Their united effort was able to change the will of a billion dollar company.
But that is the past. Now everyone has a different idea of where the game should go. And so the problem remains; lots of the people are mean, and most of them are miserable, even the ones with digital deluxe editions.
(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)
Legion
The most remarkable thing about Legion was that it was, for the most part, a success.
There is drama to be had, but it’s thin on the ground. This summary is mainly for non-players, or people who skipped Legion, so that we don’t have a two-year gap in the write-up between Warlords of Draenor and Battle for Azeroth (there will be PLENTY of drama there, I promise). If you just want the controversies, skip to the next section.
It began with a teaser trailer , showing Gul’dan (the only important guy from the last expansion) awakening Illidan (beloved and iconic antihero from Warcrcaft III and Burning Crusade). It generated a lot of hype.
Blizzard officially revealed their next expansion with a features trailer at Gamescom 2015, and then went into further detail with a cinematic and the usual presentations at Blizzcon a few months later. Like a beaten hound loyally returning to its master’s side, the community overflowed with excitement, and optimistic hope that this expansion would be better than the last.
After the mess that was Draenor, Legion had a simple premise. The biggest big bad in Warcraft history was back. Led by the fallen titan Sargeras, the infinite Burning Legion had tried multiple times to escape the Twisting Nether and conquer Azeroth, but had always been thwarted at the last moment. Now it had arrived for a full invasion. The heroes and nations of Azeroth had to do the impossible - defeat the Legion once and for all.
With the previous two expansions, Blizzard had done everything possible to avoid touching their existing lore. Now it seemed the shackles were off. Major changes were happening, major characters were dying. No one was safe. Everything was coming to its natural conclusion.
That resonated with players who had been around since Warcraft first started. Everyone wanted to see the final battle between the Titans and Sargeras. When Legion released in August 2016, the number of concurrent players hit the highest peak since the launch of Cataclysm – though the subscriptions immediately fell again, as had become tradition.
The expansion took place on the Broken Isle. It had always existed in the lore as a group of tiny islands, so Blizzard scaled it way up. Dalaran was copied (with a few improvements) into the skies above the new continent, and served as the major hub.
Players began with an all-out assault on the Broken Shore, where demons were pouring through into Azeroth. But the assault failed (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE9HVy1vgws). Both faction leaders were killed. King Varian was succeeded by his son Anduin, and the troll Vol’Jin was replaced as Warchief by Sylvanas (with whom we will get VERY familiar in later write-ups).
There were five zones at launch, and players could complete them in any order they liked. Each held a magical item, vital in the fight against the Legion.
The Norse-themed Stormheim, full of steep ravines and jagged rocks, a deliberate call back to the popular Howling Fjord of Wrath. Players helped WoW’s version of Odin defeat Helya, the goddess of the underworld.
Tauren-focused Highmountain, with its scenic plateaus and snowy peaks, complete with a small city called Thunder Totem. Its story revolved around a dispute with the local Drogbar.
Azsuna was a wet, murky zone brimming with Night Elf ruins and haunted by their spirits. The main enemy here were the Naga.
The ancient groves of Val’Sharah played host to druid society, which had gathered around the world tree Shaladrassil. Its story focused on the Emerald Dream.
Suramar was the stand out zone of Legion. This ancient capital of Night Elf civilisation had been protected from history by a huge magical barrier, which had only recently fallen. It was basically ‘Elf Venice’, and remains one of the most visually stunning cities in WoW – or any game. Since the Nightborne of Suramar were working against the Alliance and Horde, players could only explore the city with a disguise. Certain NPCs had the ability to see through it, and would voice their suspicions whenever the player got too close. This made navigating the city frustrating for many, and caused the NPC lines (which were repeated ad-nauseum) to gain meme status.
Each player joined a Class Order – a secret society where the most iconic lore characters of each class worked to repel the Legion. Each class got a separate ‘Order Hall’, a uniquely designed headquarters that no one else could reach, with its own story and mounts. The halls carried forward several aspects of garrisons, but lacked major conveniences like hearthstone points or auction houses, so players never spent too much time in them. The community loved the Class Orders, though some of the campaigns were better than others (LINKS TO REDDIT). Priests were particularly screwed over, and had to be rescued by the Paladin class hall in their own campaign. But some, like the Death Knight story, had repercussions that are still playing out today. Since every class had such a different experience, it was a good time to level alts.
Then there was perhaps the most well-received addition, the Demon Hunter class. With a dark aesthetic, a double jump, and fan-darling Illidan as their poster child, they became wildly popular. Players have been begging for demon hunters four years, and Legion was the perfect time to make them available.
The dungeons were good (and there were ten on release, an improvement over the previous expansions), and both of the first raids were excellent. The Nighthold ended with Gul’dan’s spectacular death.
Patch 7.1 brought with it a short raid and a fantastic remake of Karazhan, one of the game’s most popular raids (the new version was a dungeon). It also added to the story in Suramar.
Patch 7.2 began when the final General of the Legion, Kil’Jaeden, made his big move, and the armies of Azeroth pushed back against him. Players returned to the Broken Shore, where they gained Legionfall reputation through a mix of world quests, rare bosses, treasures, and story quests. There was also a new dungeon called Cathedral of Eternal Night, and a raid to pair with it, the Tomb of Sargeras. Players repelled the Legion and defeated Kil’Jaeden. At the end, Illidan opened the space between Azeroth and Argus, the fractured homeworld of the Legion. It became visible in the sky in every zone.
Patch 7.3 took the fight to Argus. Players boarded a Draenei spaceship and began their offensive, meeting with the Army of the Light (the new reputation) and working to take the Legion capital. Argus had three small zones, which players could navigate by moving their ship, the Vindicaar. They were Krokuun, Antoran Wastes and Mac’Aree. The latter, a reference to lead level designer Jesse McCree, was renamed to Eredath when he became accused of sexual harassment, but that’s a clusterfuck for another write-up.
Blizzard introduced Invasion Points, which were like world quests, but they teleported the player to small alternate worlds to sabotage the Legion. And of course, there was a dungeon and the big raid: Antorus the Burning Throne. Players worked with the Titans to trap Sargeras once and for all, putting a conclusive end to the Burning Legion. In the climactic final moments, Sargeras thrust his sword into Azeroth.
(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)
Legion was a triumph.
Almost every media outlet praised Legion, with Gamespot declaring,
It is the only instalment since Wrath to gain more positive reviews the negative ones on Metacritic. Blizzard had taken a major gamble by killing Warlords of Draenor to give Legion a shot at success, and it paid off. To many, it was the best expansion ever – the culmination of everything that had come before it, and a fitting send-off. Indeed, it felt like we were seeing the end of World of Warcraft. And in hindsight, it may have been best if the game ended there, when we look at what was to come.
But it was not without flaws, or controversy. And if one thing should be obvious by now, it’s that the World of Warcraft community will always find something to complain about. There are the doubters, the cynics, and those who insists that Legion wasn’t that good at all, it didn’t deserve the praise, but “being an okay expansion sandwiched between two dumpster fires will have that effect on people.”
They may have a point. While Legion has carved itself into the history of wow as a golden age, it benefits from hindsight. Most of its problems were fixed by the time its final patch released. The early days were far from perfect.
Let’s have a look for ourselves.
Grinding and Gambling
One of the big features of Legion was ‘Artefact Weapons’. Every class got a weapon for each specialisation, which they gained through a unique story mission. A lot of these weapons were lore-significant, so players were eager to get their hands on them. There were various appearances you could mix and match for each weapon too, and these were all obtained in different ways.
Artefact power (AP) was best understood as a way to continue levelling, after levelling was done. Each weapon had its own progression system, with unlockable abilities and levels. This was all done through AP. Some of these abilities were woefully unbalanced, but that’s what players loved about them. Gone were the tiny stat increases and passive bonuses of previous expansions - here was max level progression that felt consequential. Some abilities made getting around more convenient, some completely changed the gameplay, and some were so good that they were made permanent at the end of the expansion. Long story short, AP was seriously important.
Unfortunately, it was incredibly grindy.
Unlocking all of the abilities for just one weapon took weeks of work, and every class had at least three. The early traits came thick and fast, before slowing to an insufferable crawl. And if you chose the wrong weapon, you were shit out of luck. Though perhaps the worst part of AP was that it technically never ended. You could keep levelling up your artefact weapon forever. Of course the benefits were slim, but completionist players nonetheless felt the pressure.
AP is often attributed with driving away or burning out most of the players who returned at the start of the expansion.
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The system also did much to undo the alt-friendliness of Class Orders, by incentivising players to invest time in a single character. If you switched, you had to start from zero every time.
Another major issue was the overuse of RNG mechanics – random chance – particularly when it came to legendary item drops. Legendaries could drop during almost any max-level content, and came with unique abilities. Players were guaranteed to get the first few quickly, but the drop rate lowered with each legendary they obtained. The game gave no indication when players might get a legendary that was necessary to play competitively. Since there was no clear connection between work and reward, some felt like they were slaving away for nothing.
Blizzard gradually made it easier to gain AP, and by the final patch, the grind was removed entirely. They also created a vendor for legendary items. That did nothing to bring back lost players, but it did wonders for the reputation of Legion going forward.
Unfortunately, many unpopular systems from Warlords made it into Legion (like the garrison mission table) and even more of the unpopular systems from early Legion made it into the next expansion. But that’s a story for another post.
Tentacle Boy Just Won’t Go Down
As the general of the Burning Legion, it’s reasonable that Kil’Jaeden would be a difficult enemy to kill. But what resulted was one of the most unforgiving, brutal bosses in the history of the game, with zero margin for error. It was a fight riddled with bugs and design issues, to the point where it was impossible for even the top guilds in the world - until Blizzard tweaked it. To some, that made him the best boss ever. To others he was the worst. Entire guilds disbanded over Kil’Jaeden, such was the trauma of smacking over and over into a brick wall without making the slightest progress.
At first, only one guild was able to defeat him – Method. Here are some quotes from them.
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On the highest difficulty, every small advantage was vital. His knockbacks pushed players off his platform to their deaths. Every class had some ability to overcome it, with the sole exception of priests. And when they died, the fight failed. But Goblins could be priests, and they came with a racial ability that dealt with the knockback. When the Tomb of Sargeras released, almost all top Alliance raiding guilds had already switched to Horde, but the final holdouts were forced to bite the bullet just for a chance to beat Kil’Jaeden. (LINKS TO REDDIT)
On one server, he wasn’t killed on mythic difficulty until three years later.
Really though, the fact that these were the worst complaints about Legion should tell you how good it was. It was a fantastic time to be a World of Warcraft player. But there were storm clouds on the horizon. The two expansions that followed would reduce the game to its lowest ebb, leave its playerbase a weathered and self-hating shade of its former self, and bring Blizzard to ruin.
Until next time.
(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)