I started this blog on a dare, and am ending it out of apathy. It was fun to write my thoughts for a few years, but then I realized one day that I don’t even care anymore. Honestly, given the line of work I am in, I would like to reboot this blog and dedicate it to making people’s financial lives better. It’s a thought, because I’m damned good at what I do.
Since this was dedicated to the WoW universe and gold making and not thinking like the millions of talking monkeys that play this game, it’s become dated. Sort of like anything you see anymore to gold making out there, it just doesn’t matter. Blizzard essentially removed the need to really be a cut above the rest. And people react more to streams than they do anything else, because lazy and no reading.
Today, you probably, no matter who you are with the exception of people just starting the game, have about 100k in your pockets. During Classic, having that sort of wealth would have put you in the top 0.01% of players in the world. It’s nothing today to have several million, because everything that is known is known, and everything that used to gate wealth from the player base has been removed. If you want to snag a quick 10k, go hit up all the old raid content, vendor everything, you’ll be flush with cash. Or go do WQs for an hour, target only the gold rewards, you’ll land thousands.
Inflation is the enemy of gold making and most every economy. It puts most things out of reach for players, and causes people to have to work harder for their play time. The token system was an interesting idea, it allowed players with the means to buy the gold, while those who chose to invest their time in gold making a means to pay for the subscription. That’s win-win-win. Blizz ultimately won, and given the reaction to D3’s AH, I was always surprised they even went that direction.
Today’s game is inflated like never before, and that’s not going to change. Realistically there’s not a reason to up gold rewards, vendor prices, or anything else in the game. They could have depleted the value of old world vendor prices with ease, stripping the value of a Cata Dragon Soul trinket to 1g per (you get 45g per on those things, just saying), but they didn’t. But with this expansion, they did just the opposite. You have vendor trash today selling for the price of epics from Wrath. Game requirements don’t ask you to do anything beyond what we had to do 12 years ago – which was flask, use potions, and carry foods. Yet prices for items is 2000% higher than back then. They’re perfectly fine with it. And I know why, you have so many options today to make gold to buy things, chief among them being the ability to buy or sell your gold.
Add to this, professions today are insanely more time intensive than ever before. This crap really kicked into high gear with MoP release. Unless you’re part of the crowd that has this sort of time, or part of the crew that is just insane, it’s not a ton of fun. Of course there’s the other crowd that does nothing but reprice stuff. And then you have the transmog crowd. None of it is fun for me, so that’s why I’ve parted ways with it.
What’s next? Well, I moved on with my life nearly 2 years ago. This time sink is simply entertainment for me when I have the time. I got the notice the renewal was up on the website, and I’m not going to bother with it. The gamer community today strikes me as a larger crowd of people in need of solid jobs than it was 15 years ago when I really got into it. The answer for me was to move to Arizona back in 2015, get back into my old career, and dedicate myself to not taking shit from anyone anymore. This last month I was again one of the highest paid sales reps on the West Coast. For me, the only question is how much house I should buy in the coming months? Life’s good, I suggest you get one, too!
Zerohour was my alter ego online, but the things I really took away from my blog was to reprogram myself back to what I always was and become Zerohour again. For 7 very long years I struggled due to the financial markets in the US. From damn near homeless to a 5 figure monthly income again. I learned a ton about myself in that time, I learned to not give respect where it wasn’t earned, stop wasting time on those that those that waste mine, and the best thing I ever did was to act on my personal beliefs and not bother with the little things. Charge forward, worry about things like feelings and emotions later. Man, I like being home again. I like the person I’ve resurrected.
In closing, I wish the best for you, and if you can see the brass ring in your life, don’t let anyone (including yourself) get in your way.
This site will expire and self immolate by February 23, 2017.
In the documentary The People vs. George Lucas there was a statement that nerds compete with each other generally by promoting their hatred for something they love. Star Wars fans go apeshit with every release, and no I didn’t care for Phantom Menace and my favorite of all time is still Empire Strikes Back (I saw that in the theater when I was a kid). Warcraft is pretty much like this, everyone reading this who plays the freaking game is a nerd, whether you like it or not, and we can all agree that WoW today is not what it used to be and Legacy servers should be the next release. Or can we?
So today on the advice and reviews I saw online I decided to give Warcraft a go. Since I work 6 days a week like a maniac I checked out of work early on Saturday and caught the 2pm showing. I really wanted to splurge on this one and see it in 3D – and spoiler alerts here I would not do 3D again. Especially since I wear transitions lenses and it ALWAYS messes with my eyes. I will eventually learn.
Either way, I didn’t read anything or see anything about the storyline. I promised myself I wasn’t going to see this movie because I’m still pouting over the closure of Nostalrius and damn Blizzard for their ways. I’ve also promised myself I’m not going to buy Legion, and I think I know myself – I’ll end up buying 2-3 copies of the fucker just like every other expansion. But I will NOT read anything about it before I buy it because I don’t want to spoil any surprises that I’ve promised I would not enjoy because I am not buying Legion. So see you August 30th in Azeroth because I’m a weak willed loser.
The Whole Enchilada
So here’s my take on it, this part being spoiler free.
I’m a big fan of high fantasy. I can sit through all LOTR movies in one sitting, including the Hobbit trilogy the same day. No problem. If there’s orcs or swords, I’m pretty well sold. My gaming experience goes back to the old turn based games on the Commie 64, so high fantasy has always been a big part of my escapism.
I sat through Warcraft from opening credits to the copyright warning in the closing credits. The cleaning staff had to wait on me. I will encourage you to sit through the credits at the end, just to hear the brief fan service with the music.
The theater wasn’t crowded at all either. Maybe 7 people in a large theater? I even went to one of the bigger venues here in Phoenix to watch it because I prefer nice theaters. My only question when the curtain went up was – “Where the hell are the fans?” Certainly not everyone saw it yesterday. Us greybeards were in full representation mode though, 5 of us were all easily over 40. Yes, original fans!
I sat and chomped on nachos for the first few minutes of the movie, just totally waiting to bust the inconsistencies like any good nerd would do. This being set in pre-First War era, this was a Challenge Accepted moment for me. I’m huge on the world’s lore pre-Wrath. What I found?
I was more interested in meeting the characters and watching the pretty CGI. They didn’t have the best development of the characters, as this is almost exactly like any video game movie or comic book movie – it is assumed that you know who the main characters are prior to seeing it. Ok, fine. Overall you’re going to be seeing a movie meant for the average viewer, not something completely developed for fan-service. If you want fan-service, then you aren’t going to get a big budget movie, they just aren’t going to make them. You have to compress thousands of pages of lore into 2 hours, and you have to make it make sense as a story.
But this wasn’t Mortal Kombat and it wasn’t like the vast majority of video game to cinema conversions. They were absolutely faithful to the names and people you meet, with the exception of a few new characters. You get to see how the world was when humans ruled the EK. Not enough Ironforge, and after seeing the way Stormwind looks it makes me wish they could make a game world just like that given we have the technology, just not the budget.
The places they visit are awesome and incredibly well captured. Visually the movie is stunning for CGI. They did not spare the eye popcorn. The orcs looked badass with the exception of the human like faces, Elwynn Forest looks awesome, and I found myself looking in the background most often trying to peg the neighboring game zones.
I would recommend seeing it if you are a fan of the franchise, but definitely turn your brain off and slip out of lore nerd mode. Red Shirt Guy’s head didn’t explode, so neither should yours.
When I go to the theater (which is rarely during the year), I look for the following things to keep me from saying I wasted my time:
Was it entertaining? Are you not entertained!?
Did I believe the story?
Was it delivered in a way that made sense?
Could I root for the good guy or bad guy or both?
Was it loaded down with filler and garbage tangents that didn’t complete the story?
When I left, was I happy or depressed about it?
(for modern movies) Was it just eye candy or was it just CGI?
Overall I’m giving this a 9.5/10. It didn’t suck. Like Cata. Thank goodness.
Some Spoiler Action Below
Don’t read this part unless you want to know what to expect. You have been warned. Skip to the Conclusion. Stop by again after you’ve seen the movie, see if you disagree with me.
There is some major retcon action going on with the primary characters. Not going to say exactly but if you know anything about this period of Azeroth lore you should expect things to not fall into place as you know them. In other words, this movie is about 20-30% faithful to the things you know.
I complained about character development earlier. They should definitely have gone about this for many of the character actions or explained it better. For example, we all know that Sargeras was instrumental in corrupting Medivh to assist Gul’dan, everyone who’s run Black Morass knows he was the culprit. It is more or less implied in this movie that he fell sick with fel corruption due to almost cursory exposure. So I guess no Burning Legion sequel because those guys are essentially not present – just fel energy did it like the Dark Side of the Force. Thank goodness they didn’t make someone else the fall guy for this at least, like Khadgar.
You’re going to meet Thrall’s parents, King Llane and his family (Chess Event!), Garona, Medivh, most of the orc clans, and you’re only going to see about 4 of the classes represented in the movie. They are faithful to the different races that were active. For obvious reasons you’re not going to be seeing any squishable gnomes, loveable tauren, or night elves dancing on mailboxes. I was sorta hoping for some fan service with at least one class breaking out in /dance. I also had no idea that blood elves were mostly Asians. At least the eye coloring of everyone was spot on.
The deaths of the various major characters were absolutely not faithful. The alliances between certain characters were not faithful as well. Certain characters were supposed to be friends but weren’t. In other words, this was a reboot of the lore somewhat. Oh yeah, I had no idea that the Green Jesus was actually Moses. That made me laugh out loud in the theater when it happened. But he’s incredibly cuddly and he’s awesome, looking forward to the plushie. Even if he and his family aren’t supposed to be anywhere near Azeroth at this point.
You will recognize some game sound files playing in the movie. And I really liked sitting through the closing credits to hear the Classic login musical score. That was actually awesome.
I would very much like Kara to be redone in the image we are presented with in this movie. And Dalaran is absolutely faithful to the general look. But it’s floating. And it still looks awesome.
Sadly, the current playerbase is going to be thinking lots of things are the way they are because they saw it in the movie. It is definitely going to be like Star Wars where things happened in the books and then you see the movies and ask WTF is going on here? Even the game has inconsistencies with the books, and we’re just going to have to dismiss this as entertainment and not canon. Perfectly fine with that.
As a player of the game, I think my favorite part was seeing Black Morass on the big screen. It was amusing to see how the Dark Portal functioned since I spent hours and hours grinding exalted in that thing back when I was competitively raiding a priest just so I could have the epic bracers. I think they were bracers. Amazing what you forget in 10 years. Further, I immediately thought “Drop your damned enchant” when I saw one particular character.
Spells from the mages and warlocks were executed with visual splendor, I felt like I was watching the original cinematic to the game. Except I’m trying to figure out why air spells were being cast when mages clearly have no access to those and we have an infernal-ish monster under the control of a mage. Maybe the fel influence? And melting faces is real!
Conclusion
Of course, we can nitpick all we want and so can everyone else on the internet. I remember in 2006 when South Park did their parody of the game and they stuck so much anti-fan service into the show that the players were up in arms for weeks. Frostwolf tabard on an Alliance!? What were they thinking!? Mages can’t summon scorpions! Shut up nerds, enjoy it for what it is, not what you want it to be. If you went to the theater just to see what you know played out for you in perfect execution, that would be a pretty dull movie, wouldn’t it? I think they executed it very well.
Go see the movie, so they can make some money on it and we can have more. And maybe there will be an interest in old Azeroth again. Hint, hint.
Good news everyone! Our long international nightmare is nearly at an end!
This is even more awesome news for everyone who obviously played on Classic servers because WoD was getting tiresome! I know I was; I was absolutely forced to seek old content and with Legion coming I look forward to a MAXIMUM of 2 weeks of entertainment that I’ll never forget! And Blizzard is releasing Legion in just over 4 months! Just in time for everyone to have gotten back and leveled all their characters to 100 and raid the content for all that wonderful epic gear. There’s plenty of things to do because everyone has had the raid content on farm since last summer, so get on back there and remember the good times! (Disclaimer: There were no good times, only the first 2 weeks)
Why did Nostalrius go from 0 to 800k accounts from February 2015 (a full 3 months after release of WoD) through closure? Of course 500k of them were banned Chinese gold farmers and hackers, but more obviously because WoD had such riveting content and new content never before seen in… oh wait. Maybe it was the lack of new pet battles? Garrisons were awesome content, totally optional for everyone because there was so much to do out in the game world. If you didn’t truly get into them then you just aren’t a true WoW player! And Ash-can, the “Heart of PvP” was DOA after Blizz saw people were having too much fun with it. Raid content was totally built for everyone, not a single world guild fell apart this expansion. At least we can still only count them on 2 hands, haven’t gotten to the toes yet.
This company has been the original Zin’Rokh since 2010. Name a title in their IP that’s engrossing that’s not RTS. Cataclysm started us off with an aptly named title, and then they had to go through an expansion to fix Diablo 3. They listened to the playerbase, and the playerbase said we wanted to pay another $60 to get a game worth playing. I’m sour grapes, because dammit I liked their video games, but anymore I feel like I’m digging a grave of broken titles $60 at a time. And then the company has the balls to shut down a popular tribute server without so much as launching a lawyer bomb. No apologies, censorship everywhere in their forums, and possibly the most heavy-handed-shove-it-up-your-ass-fans move a company can make. At least we know they don’t invest a dime into PR.
This is probably why the only thing I really enjoy in current WoW is pet battles. Because it is the last part of the entire game that’s actually somewhat interesting, and FFS it’s turn-based RTS. Gold making isn’t even enjoyable anymore because it’s basically the metagame within the game for everyone. I remember when goldmaking was considered the oddest thing you could do in WoW, and now everyone (with more than 2 brain cells) is basically doing it.
The reason people were playing on Nost wasn’t because they were bored with WoD, they were bored with WoW’s new mechanics and gameplay in general. Some of us actually like long, tedious, meticulously designed games that take months and even years to complete. Diablo 2 was built around this type of design, you would have to log weeks of play time to get the gear you wanted, and then months to years to perfect it. Classic Warcraft was especially this way, with 40 man raids designed to take months to gear up in. PvP grinding that took several hundred hours of play to get your pieces and ranks. Drop rates and farming that didn’t come fast. You could spend the next two months leveling a character and still not hit level cap. No boosts or shortcuts, just that thrill when you could leave one zone and go into another after spending several hours every night for a week getting 40 to 45. Hell, level 1 to 20 took a full day of play if you were doing it right. There was a true feeling of accomplishment. Sort of like being given a 1st place ribbon in a contest of thousands, as opposed to a participation trophy for everyone involved.
Enter today’s WoW: Level 1-100 in a few days played, build a garrison, raid or PvP. The only fun part about WoD was the questing experience, which seemed to go splat when you hit 100. And then content releases that were hardly content releases – new raid tiers and one new daily zone. Oh, and the boat game. Tanaan Jungle wasn’t even a good attempt at a Timeless Isle, which was actually about the last time they hit paydirt with some content.
Why did I seem to have more fun in Classic? Or TBC? Probably because the carrot was always out there. You were always collecting something between raids, you were always wanting to get better but there was a clearly defined line between average player and excellent. You had to be SOCIAL in a MMO to get anywhere, and you know what I enjoyed most on Nost? Finding groups to do most EVERYTHING and making new friends that weren’t on some server I never heard of and could be counted on to help you with things. Today everyone is rewarded with purples for showing up, everyone has access to gear, there’s no incentive to really try harder. You can’t unwind this. As my daddy used to say, “Son, you just can’t put the shit back in the horse.” We can never truly go home again, because Blizzard won’t let it happen.
Of course I could go nuts and try to find people to do dungeons, but the only people that do that are people interested in speed running and not enjoying the ride to get to the destination. And of course, there’s no CC required, which is a huge downer. CC was great because it required you to think about your pulls vs. your group’s makeup. One of the first things you learned how to do in an MMO was pull properly, to take your time, and not wipe the fucking group because you could get labeled as a bad and never get invited to any reindeer games in the future. LFG dominates because hurt feelings are bad, and our new generation of gamers cannot be anything but epic looting heroes. I hate LFG most of all because I cannot kick people anymore. I think I’ve been on perma-cooldown for Vote-To-Kick because I used to initiate more kicks than anyone else in the US. As least the ignore feature still works, but then you end up with a full ignore list after a night of playing. Thank you crossrealm.
Will Legion offer anything up beyond what we have in play today? Without the obvious clickbaiter kings and queens whose very narcissistic existence relies upon the anonymous attention of thousands of people, and possibly their incomes as well, is there anything that will make this future release last beyond the shelf life of a jar of mayonnaise in the hot sun? Maybe, but I’m not going to buy into any hype. I only know one thing about Legion – it’s made by the same people that brought us Cata, MoP, and WoD.
I’m going to call it – by the time Blizzcon comes out you will hear the grumblings of people tired of Legion. It’s unfortunate that a world I called home 10-12 years ago has devolved into something I don’t recognize anymore. I also predict that within a month of release, they will nerf/change everything that people find interesting or wildly overpowered in the game.
Actually, that’s too easy, they do that in every single expansion. As long as they don’t fuck with pet battles. Then it’s war. Because I’ll probably only buy the silly expansion for one reason – weekend pet battles. I sure as hell am not buying it for the content, because we all know what they do with old content. They burn it, deny it, and tell us we don’t want it. And the “legion” of real fans tell us the same.
Blizz put the kibosh on Nostalrius.org, and as of this writing we’re just hours from it leaving us forever. I guess it’s time to take your hats off (or whatever you kids wear) out of respect, this was the best run Classic WoW experience of all the different servers that have arisen over the years, mostly because it was operated by real fans of the game that were intent on giving the public the experience that Blizzard long ago said they would never do, and to paraphrase Blizzard’s official position which went something like this: “Fuck you”, and then a mic was dropped.
And while this was not my only Warcraft, I personally flipped and flopped between Classic and Retail WoW, because I have (or had) that option. Last July I landed my dream job, so anything beyond 4-5 hours of gaming per week is completely out of the question. To be honest, 1-2 hours per week is more like it. I work 70+ hours a week because I can, and I love doing what I do, and my income is getting close to what it was pre-financial-world-meltdown. Coincidentally, it was Warcraft that helped me get through that mess, back when I wasn’t thinking about walking in front of a speeding bus, I was busy raiding.
But now they’re taking it all away, and now we’re left with the other hundreds of private servers like Feenix and Twilight and other pay-to-win style servers. Seriously, why would they go after the free one? Simple: It was too fucking good.
Blizzard has long maintained a laissez-faire attitude with the private servers, provided they don’t do something stupid like host their server here in the United States. Hell, even the bot makers know you have to do that shit in Germany, or at least go to someplace remote where they don’t give two shits and a doorbell chime about intellectual property like say, China? I’m pretty sure however the government would storm the place and turn it into something like “Place of Happy Fun Goodtimes” and redo all the artwork and give rights to one of their party leaders who would then become another billionaire in the knockoff community. But, the gang at Nostalrius made the lethal mistake of believing France wasn’t a friendly country when it came to having one of their employer’s backs – I mean Blizzard has brick and mortar operations in that country, I’m shocked they didn’t nuke it down after it started.
But provided you aren’t going into hiding just to rub out your nostalgia, the Nostalrius server made one HELL of a clone to the original, with scripted raids and even original Alterac-fucking-Valley PvP. Sure I got 200ms latency on the left coast of the USA, but it was worth every second I had to play it. I took a mage all the way to 60 in about 3 weeks played – my first character ever in the game when I started playing, why not really relive it except choosing the proper race this time (gnome with Chromie appearance). And then I began leveling rogues and everything else that I missed. I finished by getting an undead rogue to Level 22 in 24 hours played with another 13 hours dedicated to professions because that’s just the kind of nostalgia whore I am. Of course given my schedule, this rogue was started at the beginning of February 2016…
The experience was everything I remembered.
Frustratingly trying to remember where to go to get new quests while visiting about every town/city at random levels or otherwise missing out on a giant chain quest worth thousands of XP.
Getting my shit pushed in by level 60s in STV while trying to collect Nessingwary kills.
Having to run all the way to 40, and then run a little more because mounts are not going to buy themselves when the economy is focused primarily on high end mats.
Running into old Org and SW and just taking in the music and sights.
Freaking elite quests scattered in almost every zone requiring social skills that consist of typing in chat to locate others to help. Outside dungeons we used to call them.
Thousand trolls event that lasted longer than 10 seconds and one AOE blast.
Running through Barrens to the Great Lift and realizing I forgot to pick up a quest.
Standing on the great dam in Loch Modan and watching water spit from the dwarves.
Checking out what WAS at Karazhan prior to the release of TBC. Just a hint: Just a bunch of angry ghosts, though I remember wisps.
Actual weekly PVP ranks given for random battleground action and not having to coordinate Rated Battleground groups. Anyone could see how high they could get through their own efforts.
Being very fearful of opposing faction mounts with glowing eyes.
Being able to gank someone 12 levels below you and still get honor at 60. Sigh.
Freaking Un’Goro Tyranosaurs patting around eating you at random.
No flying mounts and gank marathons in questing zones. I loved being hated.
Being able to charge for level 55 water because you couldn’t buy it anywhere else. Oh man, the coin.
It exposes retail Warcraft’s evolution in a way that makes me sick to my stomach.
Outside of some of these fun memories, I actually got to see them on other servers however. Private servers are everywhere. Just Google them for fucks sakes (a favorite saying of my old Classic GM). So why was Nostalrius different?
Easy.
Quests weren’t broken in random points making the experience frustrating as shit. You could expect scripting to work correctly.
They had working raids on par with the original.
Twinking was actually a thing.
They offered a PvP and PvE experience and was entirely on par with the original.
They enforced the ever living shit out of hacking, botting, dual boxing, gold buying, and cheating. Seriously, they made Blizzard GMs look weak by today’s standards.
They actually cared about the community experience, you could tell it was run by fans who were just helping other fans.
Your leveling experience was exactly how it was in the good ol’ days with no cheats or speed levels. Drops were 99% accurate to the way it was. You actually were playing Classic.
Allegiance to immersion and good play.
And this is exactly what broke it.
They thumbed their noses at retail and offered a place for us fogies who enjoyed 2 month leveling experiences a place to remember home, even if the game was over 10 years ago. The experience was so good that it became the most popular private server in the history of private servers. Word spread like wildfire that this was the best place to enjoy the game the way it was, and we can’t have that competing with the piece of shit we currently call Warcraft today. This was the game that actually put Blizzard on the map and having someone outright copy everything down to the most minute detail is bad for business. Ultimately they showed that a handful of programmers could emulate something Blizzard has been resisting for a decade now… an awesome experience with bugs and all… for free.
You have to remember 12 years ago that prior to WoW, you had 3 IPs over at Blizz – Starcraft, Warcraft, and Diablo. Of the 3, 2 were their own brainchildren, with Diablo being designed by a subsidiary that came to them to get published. Otherwise, they were busy making RTS games. MMOs were gaining steam, and Blizzard even stated that if they got 1 million subs for WoW they were going to be happy. They ended up quadrupling that and crashing servers due to lag and bad forecasting. Blizzcon developed out of this monster. Licensed merchandise. And now a big budget film due out this summer. An entire gaming culture with tens of millions of alumni. Outside of Wrath, this was the game that really put them on the map of the gaming world.
Now this server is illegal of course (by most First World Intellectual Property laws), but as J. Allan Brack stated several years ago – “You think you want to do that, but you don’t”. I guess he was wrong, tens of thousands of players joined in on the hype and kept playing daily because his game was out of content and it was getting bigger and bigger. And competing with him and his crew is not going to happen because they’ll tell you how you’re going to be delivered your WoW fix, not you. Fine, you don’t care about your own title other than the money, why not license it to someone that cares more than you and might make it work? I mean, it’s not like it’s Star Wars Galaxies or anything, this is a game beloved by fans (note: JAB oversaw SWG before coming to wreak havoc at Blizzard). Hell I’m sure crowdfunding it would even work.
What a sad end for the best tribute to the granddaddy of the franchise – Blizzard sicking their attack dogs on something they’ve really never given a shit about in 10 years. There’s something in this world called good politics and doing what’s right by your base. This just made a legion of fans realize that it’s now no longer about the game, it’s about what’s up Blizzard’s ass. Of course, they should zealously protect their trademarks, but after seeing WHAT IS possible, you would think they would maybe approach these guys and see if they could make it work for everyone… including the fans.
When the Lich King died, WoW died with him
So sayeth my friend Vargas. But MMOs are dying in general, they are too big budget, take too much time to develop, and ultimately they cost a fortune to sustain. Everyone that’s tried after Warcraft hasn’t made it big, they’ve merely kept the servers going and gone the way of microtransactions. Even Blizzard has gone both ways – a monthly sub and micros. It’s gotten so grim at Blizz they aren’t releasing sub numbers anymore, and probably because they’ve gotten to sub Classic numbers. The only thing keeping the lights on and the people employed anymore are the micros which make for nice infusions of cash every other month.
And who are the real fans of the game? The ones that pay for it all or the ones that play it just to play it regardless? A gamer is someone who enjoys gaming, not worrying about patches and expansions and new content – these are modern day developments. I play Classic because this is the game I enjoy. Since Blizzard won’t do it, I’ll seek it out. I’ll still support their retail version and keep buying into Diablo 3 (which is now bordering on ridiculous; release another expansion please FFS). But ultimately, what I want are choices, not a story. The way they release content today is entirely too fast, and since I really lack any time to get anywhere in my favorite title, I enjoy leveling characters and going through the old backstory.
The story was interesting up until Deathwing came along, and MoP was somewhat whimsical even though I wasn’t invested in the plight of the pandas. We’re playing Time Warp now, which has been a snoozefest for me since about February 2015. Legion is probably going to end up being the same. I guarantee that within 6 months of release nobody is going to care anymore except the hardcores and the no-lifers. Everyone loves the leaks from MMO Champion and is busy buying the expansion in pre-sales, but I just cannot see myself having the same experience because the story is getting stale. Stop rebooting content and release the trusted content.
Of course I’m probably wrong in everyone’s eyes and a bad person because I enjoy nostalgia. Guess what, that’s how I like to play my game, I’ll choose to be left behind… in Classic, or Vanilla, or Old School, or whatever you want to call it. Just don’t call me a bad person for wanting something that was fun and enjoyable and would give me hundreds of hours of entertainment. Hopefully one day Blizzard will realize the error of their ways one day.
Long time, no see. Sorry, been transitioning into a new job out in Arizona. I left my hometown to embark on a new mission. No, I’m not stalking our favorite bleggar, either. Something’s been on my mind a long time, and it was confirmed today.
I chose to name my blog and officially place it on it’s own domain at a time when WoD sorta looked like it had promise. It was a short time after that I found myself finally throwing in the towel and playing content from 10 years ago… and loving it. So outside of relocating halfway across the country, beginning a new job, and messing with a game that was dead I made a big choice to quit Warcraft (even though I’m part of the subs thanks to tokens) and then start playing Warcraft. Just in a different time.
Since today’s numbers demonstrate that I’m not alone in leaving the game, with 1.5 million people (mind you, this would be considered a major city in the USA) telling Blizz where to stick their content. And even more humorous to me was this gem:
They were more fucked than 5.6 million prior to the release? How low? One can only speculate, but I don’t even want to think about it. They’ve officially arrived at December 2005 numbers. The game had 5.6 million players a year after the official release of Classic. Why? Because players were joining in droves and telling their friends to get in on the phenomenon or get left behind. Today’s community is telling their friends to gtfo while the getting is good. Sad, no?
While I’m playing in a completely non-TOU way to enjoy my favorite MMO my way, that’s also sad. I’m forced to seek out my favorite content because the manufacturer is busy retconning and hyping their official game, while ignoring that they have players that would like to take in the sights and sounds from years past, even though the toxic community of assholes they’ve developed are busy telling me “nostalgia”. I dunno, I have a 60 and am about 2 months out from 3 more. I am taking in the lore of the game and dealing with the bugs like a hardcore, and I get talent trees that actually are somewhat interesting. I’m not playing nostalgia, I’m playing a game with evolving content by hardcore fans of the game. Further, my server is packed with between 3500 and 8000 players at any given time. People are halfway decent to one another because you have to be to get things done, and being a jackhole will land you on a blacklist. Further, cheating is aggressively sanctioned. You, on the other hand, get forced into more and more solo gameplay and told “no” more than “yes”, content gets burned through in days rather than months, and your announcements are peppered with new store microtransactions.
I don’t want to slam the game for those that are enjoying it, because I simply don’t enjoy your content. I enjoy my favorite content. If we went to an ice cream store and you ordered a banana split and I ordered a fudge sundae, I think we can both agree that we got what we wanted because we had the options. There are officially 5 expansions and classic content. How do you make 6 generations of Warcraft players happy and benefit your bottomline at the same time? Gee, I dunno. Burn those previous tiers of content and tell your players to adapt or die? You’re telling a story? Like it or not, this is a game, a business, and entertainment for millions. There’s a reason why reruns are shown on TV. There’s a reason why you change your business paradigm when things aren’t working.
With an announcement of another expansion just hours away from this post, it just makes me wince. We got royally fucked with this expansion in terms of almost everything. Price? Higher than the previous expansions while being told “free 90”. Content? 3 patches with 2 raid tiers. Developers outright telling us how to think. PvP content receiving change after change to very cold reception with the lead developer exiting Twitter. The gold game was practically destroyed and everyone shoveled into the same funnels. And now, after years of precedent, the next expansion is being announced at Gamescom, and the rest of us will miss out on seeing it except in YouTube videos and streams. Woohoo. Pinky swirl. And /golfclap.
Blow by Blow
Straight from MMOC’s comments…
More developers are working on World of Warcraft than ever before
If I was involved with Warcraft at Blizzard, I’d be pulling a Ghostcrawler/Bashiok. Bashiok is now a Senior Content Manager over at NCSoft. Smart move, they keep releasing new IPs and building on them and he was just a CM at Blizz.
I would expect that with the loss of about 1.5 million subs, which at most would be a hit of around 22.4 million bucks per month, there’s going to be some massive adjustments incoming. You don’t go from 10 million to HALF your income without rethinking the office cubicle layout. Someone’s got to pay, and it won’t be any of those bloated officer/VP/Executive Director checks. In these situations, the little guys in the trenches feel the penalties, not the guys at the top. All those GMs and CMs you like to abuse, they get to pack their desks. Raises don’t happen. Careers go stagnant.
It’s not all doom and gloom though, maybe an adjustment is just what they need? New ideas, new blood, beheaded managers who were stopping innovation get replaced by people who come up with better ideas and paradigms. When you stare into the abyss, you figure out what’s really important.
The Warcraft movie is a chance to expose Warcraft’s lore to new audiences and increase interest in World of Warcraft overall.
This is a year away. They won’t even show us the trailer unless we attend SDCC, and YouTube accounts showing it get instantly hammered. So you’re going to show a movie demonstrating lore that was followed up with game content that was destroyed by Cataclysm and the company refuses to re-release. I’m telling you, if they don’t open legacy servers with this next expansion (and I know how popular they really are), you can count on the same graph as you see right now. If this is acceptable, then the executive management has officially lost their fucking minds and need to go back to business school.
Show me lore from 15 years ago and then put me into a game that doesn’t have anything to do with the demonstrated lore. That’ll be a nice introduction for those people. Other issue: New players coming in? What will happen to the game as a result? You guessed it.
The subscriber count was down in the east, in part due to Diablo 3 release.
Ah yes, because people often quit Warcraft when Diablo 3 is released. I assume they are talking about the season that was released shortly after 6.1, because 6.1 was a pile of dogshit and I for one was happy to pay attention to Diablo 3 instead of Warcraft. Eastern players recognize what’s best, and Diablo 3 kicks ass now – and the game has come light years from the 7 year development period that resulted in another pile of dogshit. The thing I fear is that they may cut devs from Warcraft and put them on D3 and one of them may be Jay Wilson. /shudder
Patch 6.2 helped to stabilize the subscriber count in the last few weeks of the quarter.
Again. They were LOWER than 5.6 million? Third quarter is going to be an A-Bomb. This explains their actions the past month in three letters… S.O.S.
Blizzard has been listening to players experiences during Warlords of Draenor and thinks players will be excited by the announcement this week
Fanboys will be excited. Fan sites will promote the news. Twitter will go nuts with screenshots. The hype machine cometh. That’s the biggest no-shit statement I’ve heard all day.
Tokens are included in this timeframe, as they launched in Q2.
/Raises Hand. Yes, I have tokens out the wazzoo. Will I play? No. The account can rot. I have zero desire to play live Warcraft today. I log into Classic and I’m excited to see if anything sold for a few silver. Log into WoD? Blow CDs, look at mission table. Check friend list for who’s on? Noone? Ok, log out.
Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, and Destiny combined now have more than 70 million registered players.
The future of Blizzard and Blizzcon, gang. Learn it, live it, and love it. Once Overwatch releases and with all those micros, they’ll have one forum at Blizzcon for the Warcraft people, and then we can all scuttle off and enjoy the rest of our weekend.
Blizzard Entertainment had the largest online player community in its history, with Q2 MAUsB up 50% year-over
I believe this, given the new games. Thanks for making me feel like a Blizzosaurus. Maybe in two years we can all check into a gamers museum where people can sit and speculate what we died of.
Hearthstone engagement metrics nearly doubled year over year, largely on account of the new content and new platforms
See above. Yikes. Get me my cane and lawnchair.
Diablo III has now sold-through over 30 million units life-to-date globally.
And this was the good news for the day, because Diablo will always be my favorite game universe. I wish I had a Tyrael hood for my “fun” photo up at the office.
Conclusion
I think it’s great that lots of people still enjoy the game as it is. 5.6 million people? No other game has that player base, unless you count all the Asian-market-only MMOs. Or the playerbase of some of these non-MMOs. It supports a rather large group of people’s lifestyles, which I’m sure they’re thankful for. Nothing is worse than wondering where your next meal is coming from, so hopefully the bleeding won’t be too bad. Of course, it will be more challenging for people to get into Blizz, with a looming freeze coming since they have more candidates internally than you can shake a stick at.
Here’s hoping that the next expansion has nothing to do with Draenor, and possibly has content for those of us that like the old stuff (Say it with me… Legacy… servers…). But this would require lots of resources, and unfortunately it looks like they’re going to be playing that old card moreso in the future.
There are so many things that are different between retail and the original inception. Aside from obvious things like “No Garrisons” and “No flying, ever” and “Professions only require one material”. Here are some additional things to know before you jump in and find out that Warcraft really wasn’t that easy.
Food Costs Money, Water Costs Money
Even for mages. While they can make their own food, it’s typically 5-10 levels behind what they need during leveling, and they had the largest mana pool of any class – try filling a level 30’s mana pool with level 15 water. You still buy water. And since every ranged class uses mana, you’re going to go through a ton of it.
You have to buy these things most of the time, which means you have even less money to buy your skills, and after 40 levels you’ll have no money to buy your mount so you get to hump it all over until you do get the funds. After 40 however, the coin rewards from quests and vendor trash begin to get a lot larger, so that’s why you’ll see people generally get their mounts in the mid to late 40s. When you get to level 45, a stack of food is going to run you about 1.6g before discounts. In a world without dailies and low value vendor trash, this is a small fortune!
For the majority of classes, you need to refill your health pool quickly, because this eliminates downtime and prevents you from hitting respawn timers. Drinking to refill mana typically takes 21-40 seconds and eating from near death generally takes about 20 seconds. The average person will need to do either or both every 2-3 pulls. That’s a ton of future gold reserves when you add it all up. There are several solutions here.
Eat what you loot. The problem here is that mobs tend to drop less superior foods, requiring you to have to eat more of it and waste time.
Beg mages for them. Mages have nothing better to do than cast “Conjure Water” 3-4 times to make you a stack of crappy water, and then drink for 30 seconds after. While we all treated mages like vending machines back then, you should not ask them for their wares unless you are willing to tip for the favor. It’s just rude.
Best solution: Learn fishing, cooking, and first aid, because (to quote Roguecraft) that’s what they’re fucking there for. Fishing can be long and frustrating in this content, because you have a 30 second cast timer and the fish has the opportunity to get away. The easiest way to prevent missed catches is to be of the appropriate skill level, so use lures when needed. The zone will also match the fishing skill, so if it is a level 30 zone, then missed catches will be lesser if you have about 150 fishing. Take the zone’s level and multiply by 5, that’s where you should be to prevent missed catches.
You want to get your fishing to the maximum level for your character level as soon as possible, and since you’re going to probably spend 2 weeks played getting to 60 anyhow, this is a small sacrifice of your time. At level 10 you can learn Journeyman fishing from the trainer, at 20 you can learn Expert from the book the fishing supplier sells in Booty Bay, and at 35 you can embark on Nat Pagle’s quest line to get Artisan. Keep in mind Nat doesn’t reward a fishing pole in this content, to get the best poles you either have to win the fishing tournament (good luck with that) or buy underwater breathing potions and spend an hour opening Clacker cages in southwestern Desolace. Neither are necessary while leveling to 60.
Cooking goes in hand with Fishing. If you didn’t make that correlation already, you aren’t paying attention. Fishing will make leveling cooking an absolute breeze, while you can also good the raw meats you will find while leveling. Cook Brilliant Smallfish to 50, Longjaw Mudsnappers to 100, and go to your respective faction’s vendor to buy Bristle Whisker Catfish because this will be your primary means of leveling to about 170/180. From 170 to 190 you will cook up appropriate meats until you can make Rockscale Cod. Mystery Meat will provide you with the means to level to the 240 range, and beyond this you will be cooking up whatever meats you can find until you can fish Azshara for the level 45 foods. Blizzard did NOT implement level 55 foods that you could cook up, only mages have that stuff and only after they do their class quest for level 55 water and get the drop in Strat for their 55 food. (This is why mages were vending machines at 60, they controlled the high level food. Yay for advantages!)
Training cooking will require the same levels as other professions (10/20/35), with the book available for Expert training from a faction vendor (who is always a nice long jog). To learn Artisan, you get to visit Dirge in Gadgetzan who sends you off to collect materials while questing.
If you keep up with both, you will hardly spent any gold on needed foods saving you a small fortune for things like new spell ranks and your possible mount training at 40.
First Aid is also going to be a lifesaver for you, provided you keep up with it. You know what to do here, just convert the cloth you find into bandages, and use them every two minutes when you are in desperate need for a quick pickup. If you have the ability to CC, often times this will mean the difference between a 2 minute GY run and just spending a few seconds drinking/eating. The books to train to Expert are in Arathi Highlands for Alliance and Dustwallow Marsh for Horde, so don’t run around vendoring your silk because you haven’t gotten to those zones yet. Further, there is no need to buy them off the AH, they are NOT drops unlike some poison guides.
Bonus: I can’t say enough for potions, they each have 2 minute shared cooldowns but if you are fishing and come across Floating Wreckage, you can retain them from the chests you will fish up. If you spend a healthy amount of time fishing, you will never need to buy them off the auction house. Unless you are an alchemist, in which case you can just make your own! Effective use of them is at your discretion, I often use health pots on overpull mistakes, and I use mana pots while drinking just to speed things up. Time it right, because the CD can cost you if you make your next pull a bad one.
Class Selection
Part of what made Classic Warcraft insanely fun and challenging was that each class had severe strengths and weaknesses when it came to leveling. At this point in history, you didn’t have all the signature skills at level 10, and you often struggled to hit levels where you were granted the skills you love today. Several classes were unfinished and could not perform the tasks like you think they should. Essentially, this is not your grandkid’s Warcraft!
Hardest to Level
Paladin
Warrior
Druid
Paladins do not get ANY of the toys you know them for today and are essentially auto-attacking with some Judgements and auras helping. You have to refresh seals after every Judgement. They stack spellpower, and if you have access to a ton of it you can perform decently in either prot or ret specs. Paladins were primarily healers in Classic, and if you go to a dungeon don’t be surprised if you have to respec to holy just to get a slot. If you want to tank you are probably going to get put on ignore.
Warriors are THE tanks of Classic. Dungeon group? Tank. Raid? Tank. PvP? Arms. They are the most gear dependent class in the game, with their lack of performance being felt immediately when you overpull a group of mobs and getting hit like a train while hitting the mobs feels like you’re gear is broken. The reason warriors tended to almost always level blacksmithing was because they needed gear all the time. Getting rage at early levels feels fruitless. But at 60, they become wrecking balls. Get ready to sword and board until you can find a 2-hander, but get wrecked because you haven’t got any mitigation or CC.
Druids were almost strictly healers in this time. Rolling Bear tank required a hotshot healer, Kitty form was a joke and you don’t get it until 20, and Moonkins go OOM in seconds. Mage have no where the drinking problem that Boomchickens have. So that leaves you with Resto, which is where you shined. Leveling will ask you to play an awkward combination of Balance and Bear form, until 20 when you can choose to go Kitty, but why would you since the spec is really weak without gear? I knew several high ranked Feral PvPers back in Classic, but it takes a ton of patience on your part to get to that point. If you want a slot in leveling dungeons, always have a Resto spec at the ready, and to be fair you should just stay in it and dungeon crawl.
Easiest to Level
Hunter
Mage
Rogue
Warlock
Priest
Shaman
Outside of the Shaman, the others are pretty well like you know them with the exception of shamans which are dual wielding burst machines, and only if you’re Horde. Rogues get the benefit of never being seen, Warlocks have unlimited fear, Mages have polymorphs and can burst things to shreds, and priests have the benefit of not needing to respec out of holy to heal dungeons (Discipline is a joke here). Hunters, outside of AFK Autoshot, simply required a person to have some knowledge of how to spec a pet, while learning the various pet skills out in the world. They are by far the easiest class to level. While Shamans still feel unfinished, you will see where the attention to class performance came in with the others.
Dungeon Groups
This isn’t retail. If you played Cataclysm at release, you saw something similar to what we as Classic/TBC players saw on a routine basis. Most every class has a responsibility on almost every pull besides “kill the mob”. Crowd Control (CC) is extremely important, healers were simply not going to be able to have the throughput needed to heal a tank with 3-4 elite mobs beating on a tank. Non-tanks would typically drop dead if they pulled aggro off a tank and didn’t pay attention to their threat. These are not sprints, they are marathons. If you get too far ahead of yourself you’ll wipe the group and everyone will be thrilled with the run back to the instance.
The Tank is considered the party leader ALWAYS. They tell you who to CC and which mob to kill. Unless you outgear the content AOE is bad form. Learn your class (which was performed through the 2 week played leveling process, sigh) and learn the universally accepted raid markers. Skull means kill, and stop dotting up the sheeps. Here are the markers for those that are unaware or too old to remember:
Skull: Kill this target first. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.
Red X: Your second kill target, should there not be enough CC the tank will mark another target with this, indicating that you should allow the tank to have threat on the target and not pull it off as it will be a live mob. Watch your dots.
Star: Rogue’s sap. These will generally be the 2nd target to kill after a Skull dies unless an X is given. Rogues cannot resap a target in combat.
Blue Square: Hunter’s trap. You have to kite the target into the trap, and unlike retail you cannot reset the trap again in combat. These will generally be a 2nd kill target as well. You can tell a good hunter just from this ability.
Moon: Mage’s sheep. These are going to be the last to die generally, because mages can re-polymorph as long as the have mana.
Purple Diamond: Warlock CC. Succubus/Enslave/Banish. This does not mean fear like it does in retail. Fearing in an instance is the dumbest thing you can do, as mobs do not stay in place and will fear into friends who will pull and give you a nice 10 minute run-back. Because the CC is castable again in combat, these targets are also left for the end.
Green Triangle: Shaman’s Hex, Druid’s Roots. If both are in the party and one is a healer, the non-healer is expected to do the job.
Orange Circle (the Condom): Priest’s Mind Control or Shackle. Rarely will you be asked to Mind Control unless it is a particular pull, but Shackle is used all the time in Strat and Scholo. It is recastable in combat, and a last kill target.
Remember if you are playing Classic today, there’s not many places to go should you want to be a ninja or play with bad manners and attitude. When you’re leveling, and want to get groups together, the best thing you can do is be friendly and outgoing. There are no LFD buttons to push, you will see these people again, and getting blacklisted is about the worst thing you can do because word spreads really fast. There are no name changes, your only option will be to reroll if you get a terrible rep. Dungeon groups also take a while to form, and leaving in the middle of them is extremely bad form.
Trash in dungeons typically respawns after 60-90 minutes, so having to reclear is not fun. People know this so removing people from groups is really a hard process because you have to go back outside and find someone to take their place. Unless you have a warlock with you, there are no summons, either. People have to make their way to the dungeon. This is why blacklists and ignore lists are formed – to remove the rabble and send them back to retail for Blizzard to worry about.
If you are new to the dungeon or need help, always ask. People are generally wanting to help, because you’re going to be there a while. As you progress in levels, dungeons get longer and longer. For example, while Deadmines may only take about an hour and a half to clear, some later dungeons like Scholo, Mara, and Sunken Temple could take as long as 3 hours to clear. Strat Dead is going to be the fastest dungeon, mostly because it’s a timed run but plan on at least an hour and a half to two hours.
Keep in mind that most people you’ll be playing with haven’t seen this content in nearly 5 years, and this content at this point in time was not refined or changed as in later expansions. You’re seeing the content as it was presented in 2006, not prior to the Cataclysm where mob health was adjusted. Best advice, play smart and slow. Nobody likes wipes and they often destroy parties.
Enchanting Sucks, Unless You Raid
And even then getting the raid recipes will prove difficult because guilds select who will receive all recipes first. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t have an enchanter so you can disenchant greens and acquire materials for yourself through other means like crafting and world drops. Those materials will then be used to tip other enchanters to acquire enchants you want. You will also be able to vendor soulbound quest rewards, thus improving your overall wealth.
Do yourself a favor, spend the hour to roll a character you don’t care about to level 5 so you can acquire the profession. Enchanters in this time did not have to have a specific level in order to disenchant items, although they did require you to have the levels to learn the different tiers of the profession. In other words, you can disenchant everything in the game at level 5. You’ll also level to about 50 just disenchanting pieces you mail yourself.
There are NO vellums, those did not arrive until Wrath with the introduction of inscription. If you want to sell your wares as an enchanter, you have to spam trade looking for buyers, and then meeting them somewhere in the game. Further, you were working for tips, so having that Spellpower or Intellect enchant generally meant you were getting 2-3g from cheap bastards, who probably blew 150g on the mats to make it. It was more a labor of love. Worse, you were often enchanting your guild’s gear so anytime someone picked up a new weapon, you were running all over the world. Best to be a mage with the profession because guildies were always in Darnassus for some reason when they needed the enchants.
Learn the needs of the various classes before you disenchant those items. “of the Bear” was highly desired by Warriors, whereas Gorilla was needed by Paladins. Visiting the Auction House with certain pieces could be a better place than as dust in your bags.
Professions for Profit
I’ve gone into fishing, but the best profession to have during Classic was Alchemy. Raiders, PvPers, and levelers want potions, and Classic Alchemy delivered.
Unlike current retail, where the elixirs only allow you a Guardian and a Battle version. There is no cap on the number of elixir types you can have ticking, and people need what you are selling constantly. Some of the best things to make were through fishing as well…
Free Action Potion – For 30 seconds you are immune to stuns and roots. Flag carrier in WSG? No problem, especially if you are a druid with speed boost in cheetah sprinting across the mid with this power up.
Health and Mana Pots – These go without saying, and while it was considered bad form to use a potion in a PvP setting, it’s all about the amount of kills you make per week, not just participating.
Water Breathing – Again fishing wins. There are so many places to use these things in both leveling and out in the world, they are indispensable. Many of the quests take you under water, and with a 60 second breath timer for everyone but Forsaken and Druids, prepare to find buyers for these.
Buff Elixirs – Strength, Agility, Intellect, Fortitude, Mana and Health Regen, Spellpowers and Armor. All usable at the same time. Raiders have to farm for weeks to retain these for their raids.
Resistance Potions – You can’t kill Ragnaros or Huhu unless you’re rolling these potions. They were considered stronger than health potions and guilds would often buy them and their reagents in bulk off the AH. Everyone would keep them on hand. They were also a blast to use in BGs, because you would be immune to most of the casters in the game. They come in all the different flavors.
Transmutes – How do you get Thunderfury? By bribing an army of Alchemists.
Toys and Piss-Off-People Pots – Elixir of Dream Vision could take you into areas to look around. Gift of Arthas would give melee something to remember you by if they touched you. Some potions detected undead, demons, and stealthed NPCs/players. If you have no flares, Cat’s Eye was the next best thing and cheap, too.
Flasks – If you are fortunate enough to get into a Scholo run and have a ton of mats, you can make these at a profit almost all the time. For the most part raiders will take care of themselves, but when you have BGs and weekly honor requirements, many people will take any advantage they can get.
Alchemy is the king of the professions in Classic. Other professions pale in comparison to the sheer amount of gold opportunity you have otherwise. The profession is not like the others where a person only needs them every so often, with Alchemy you have a mobile slot machine.
This concludes Part 2 of my Lil’ Survival Guide for Classic. If you like what you’re reading, please be sure to comment, and if you have any suggestions for future guides please let me know.
Thanks for stopping in!
With the recent news from Blizzard today, apparently you WILL be able to fly around Draenor in a minor patch after 6.2, but only after completing a rather lengthy meta achievement which consists entirely of PvE content. Don’t worry, no raiding required, no gold dumps, and it applies to your entire account.
As an aside, the debate was a virtual storming of the Bastille and cost tens of thousands of productive hours of lives that will never be refunded. We all owe these Flying Justice Warriors (FJW) a debt of gratitude, because without their passion and sacrifice, we may not have won the day that will probably result in resubs of about zero. For my part, I contributed nothing towards the debate, I was busy manning my lawnchair keeping FJWs off my lawn with my rocksalt and bucket of ice cold beer. Back on track.
People are posting guides right now how to get those achievements done, but I, being the forward thinker that I am, am giving you a guide of things you will be able to do with that newfound flight ability, which will probably only cost you about 5-7 days of your life to retain.
Hover above your garrison AFK rather than in front of the mission table.
Sit AFK on top of the mountains between the zones.
Sit AFK on top of the various houses, huts, inns, and domiciles at the various quest hubs
Fly around completing all those puzzles that required leet jumping and walking skills.
PvP Servers Only: Camp noobs without flying until they log out.
Fly into your raid instances rather than walk into them. This may destroy the World PvP scene single handedly.
Level alts with flying. Goodbye immersion, hello Pan Am express!
Actually use all those expensive store mounts in Draenor, which were always flyers, but not in Draenor. /confused
Given there’s so much interest in getting on a Vanilla/Classic Warcraft server today (not unusual, the content sucks so people always run for the hills when that happens) and playing the way we used to play in 2006, I figured a little information about my discoveries and findings would be of help to the community at large. Not the retail fanboys, because they deserve what they get and what they have.
So You’ve Decided To Go Back In Time
I’ve already mentioned in the previous post my favorite server. I like Feenix servers, which are GMT+2 and hosted somewhere in Eastern Europe the last I heard. Click HERE to go to the website which requires you to set up an account in order to play. For whatever reason, the website blocks most traffic originating from the USA, so US users will need to use a proxy. Don’t have one or know what it is? Google it. I’m using Europroxy which I’ve found to be highly responsive and quick. If you don’t want to play on Feenix, you can also play on the other sites like Vanilla Gaming or Nostalrius.
Revision (June 8, 2015): Since first writing this article I have also rolled a character on Nostalrius to the teens and taken a look around. For comparison’s sake, the population on this server would be equivalent to a Medium to High pop realm in retail. The server was just opened this last February (2015) and doesn’t offer most of the end game like other servers. Given time I’m sure they’ll work that out. Questing is a little different from a Low-pop private server, since you have such a large population you will sometimes have to camp for spawns of lootable items and NPCs. I did experience some latency issues, which is a little strange given I am not that far from the server compared to others. Attractions include 1x Blizzlike experience, old-school AV, PvP ranking system in effect, and first tier raids are opening as well as Classic high level dungeons. What I liked most? Running into Ironforge and seeing the sheer number of level 60s hanging out like the old days, which sort of flies in the face of Classic interest deniers. I’m coining that. I also rate this server 4.5/5 stars for the immersion experience.
I personally like Feenix because it supports the game in several different ways. This server originally started in 2005. I’m really big on the old questing experience, and like my quests to be working. Every so often I discover a bug, but it’s usually nothing gamebreaking. They offer instant 60s, 12 times experience, and the good ol’ 1x Blizzlike experience. I am currently beating my way through the 1x server known as Emerald Dream, but am converting over to Nostalrius. If I was interested in actually raiding the content, I would play on one of the other servers they offer as raiding is supported better on them. Emerald Dream is more a server that supports leveling and lots of PvP. And since we miss the olden days, 1x it is. The population of the server has unfortunately waned, as there are only a handful of progressed raiding guilds. It also sports a large Chinese guild, filled with nice people who always party with you rather than tag-steal the named quest NPCs. I give them 4/5 stars for the immersion experience, with that missing star because several of the major quest chains are buggy or broken entirely. I say several, which means about 1 on average per zone cannot be completed. If you want a leveling experience that is devoid of fighting for mobs and potential world pvp camping, this is the server for you.
I do have experience with Vanilla Gaming, and it’s a rather well run community. They host a mirrored version of Wowhead from that time (see below). It’s one of the older servers, started in 2009. Questing on the server is a bit messed up for my tastes (loads of bugs) and loot tables from mobs are weird. They tend to drop their entire normal loot table of gear with each kill. Because this site offers 15 times leveling experience, a full loot table makes sense so you can always get gear off mobs that you might need. This 15 times speed can be set to 1x speed with a simple command, and reverted. As for immersion in the Classic experience, I would rate it 3/5 stars because the drops are buggy and quests are commonly broken. You will often have to swap to 15x experience to make up for quests you cannot complete, and I don’t care for that.
Things to Remember
These servers are moderated and bad behavior is slapped down far better than on Blizzard’s servers. They’re free to play, but that also doesn’t mean you are free to berate others. From what I’ve found on my server, the game is populated by people that absolutely love the game for what it was, so prepare to be treated like a pariah if you’re a jackass. Hey, just like the old days, nobody will want to play with you and you can’t just click a button to join dungeon queues. To make it easy on the eyes, I’ll put the rest into bullet points.
Loot ninjas get reported, shamed and actioned, unlike retail. Toxic behavior generally results in outright bans. Screenshots are your friends, otherwise it never happened.
You should expect people to be rather outgoing and interested in leveling with you if they see you on a quest or in a zone they are in.
Server residents are typically older players with experience going back 10+ years, but there are lots of interested people who have never seen this content before.
Many people also play retail, but many have left that world behind.
These people are serious fans of the game, so be prepared to see lots of people rattling off patches of the game they liked.
I’ve forgotten more about the game than you’ll probably ever know, but even I need reminding that certain classes lost an ability or certain things were used more often back then than today.
On most servers, the channel World is used as a catch-all general chat and can be read everywhere. This is how you will find groups for most everything.
The capital cities are generally vacant for a reason, people are busy leveling. You won’t find much to do in the cities anyhow. For Alliance, Ironforge is generally the hangout. For Horde, Orgrimmar.
Questing is NOT linear (more on this in a bit), you will enter and exit the different zones multiple times while leveling.
Hit rating is in effect. If the mob is +4 your level, expect to miss and have spells resisted commonly.
You have to level weapon skills along with defense skills again. Defense will level with you while level, but swapping from Axes to Two-Handed Swords will prove interesting.
Further, in 2006 we specced talent trees from level 10 in order to hit higher level mobs and bosses. Perusing your server’s general forums is a great place to get build ideas. While leveling, go with what you believe would work for you. Since you will be doing quests with mobs that are +2 or +3 your level, getting hit rating is paramount.
Every 2 levels you will need to train new ranks of your skills. Every level will award you a new talent point.
Gold doesn’t rain down from the sky. Grinding for gold was common, and these Auction Houses are similar to a low population retail server. Best advice – take up mining and herbalism first. Don’t waste your money on silly things.
Join a leveling guild. On my server, we have a few and in my guild generally we have 40-60 people on at any given time. These will come in very handy when you need to do Elite quests. Did I say Elite quests!? Oh yeah, Hogger’s there. Further, posting in world chat is off limits to you until you get to 20 (Feenix) so lowbie dungeons will be harder to form.
Back in the day, getting a level beyond about 20 was considered a moment to let people know. DING! This is commonly yelled and spammed in chats. Common courtesy it to “grats” them.
Most every class comes with some form of crowd control. Be prepared to use it while leveling because mobs are usually grouped together. They usually leash within about 100-150 yards, but not always!
There are no heirlooms, glyphs, experience nerfs, and leveling will take you about 14 days played to get to 60. Expect to see levels like 24-25 or 38-39 take you 3-4 hours to complete. Your only buff is Rested XP.
Remember some classes will need to purchase reagents in order to perform buffs or cast some spells.
If you play melee – you have sharpening stones back. If you are a caster, wizard and mana oil are available. Hunters use different grades of arrows again! These can help greatly while waiting on gear upgrades or boosting your character.
Share and share alike. Don’t be selfish. This was a game about making friends. If you don’t need a particularly nice green for yourself, give to your friends or offer it to the guildies. What comes around, goes around.
Aggro radii will seem ridiculous. You’ll pull gray level mobs from 20 yards away. Watch where you’re going.
Respawning mobs are going to drive you nuts. Clear to the center of a cave, only to have everything back up when you need to exit. Kill quickly, but don’t pull too much because that is often deadly.
Drinking and eating will slow you down greatly. Always have the best possible foods you can find on hand and afford without going broke. Learn Cooking and Fishing to save on food costs and get stamina food buffs. Alchemy is great for potions (2 minute cooldowns even in combat yay!). First Aid should be one of your first professions.
When you die, be prepared for runbacks from the other side of the zone. Flight points are not where you remember them, there is almost always only one flight point per zone, and in some cases NONE.
You have to treat this experience with a grain of salt. It’s “like” playing the old game, it’s not exact. There are bugs, mobs may act strangely, the server may crash for a minute, and you may not be able to complete all the quest lines as you remembered. This is free to play, supported by someone else’s time and money. Please respect that always.
While Blizzard currently turns a blind eye to private servers, take steps to try not to have their client running along side these programs. Just fair warning, playing this way IS against the terms of use. Odds of getting into trouble? Pretty low, but one never knows if they’ll get cranky with the way their game is going today.
Addons
Many people think addons are the devil because they interfere with the experience. The way I remember Classic, I had addons installed from the beginning because they make certain activities easier and you can monitor things better, like durability. You’re going to die. A LOT.
I’m not going to give you a complete addon installation guide, but you want to know where the game looks for them so you can use them. Simply stated, the game looks in the WoWFolder/Interface/AddOns directory for the addons, and then populates them from there. If there are no addons recognized, then you won’t get the “Addons” button on the login screen.
This should be self explanatory. (o.O)
Back in the time before everyone relied on Curse.com, we actually had to install our addons by hand. You had to track updates yourself or at least have guildies let you know. Thankfully, since the game is essentially frozen in time, there aren’t any updated addons to keep up with, and I’ve taken the liberty of hosting the vast majority of them HERE.
Go through and look for your favorite addons from today, they probably didn’t exist back then. Many of them did exist, but are in states that you probably won’t recognize. Getting them to function to your liking also required a little bit more knowledge.
Unzip the file, pick your favorite addons, and drop their foldersinto the Addons directory. For reference, you should look at your retail addon directory structure if you are unsure how this works. If you can’t get it working, then ask a friend. And if neither of you can get them working, then addons aren’t for you!
Keep in mind that addons generally didn’t have fancy bells, buttons, or whistles. You had to usually type /addonname to configure them. And most addons came with a Readme.txt file. Read them.
Questing and You: Can You Handle It?
Outside of the Level 1-5 Starter zones, the quests are scattered all over Azeroth. The different zones may be familiar, but if you haven’t leveled a character since Wrath this may appear very confusing. Questing relied on a person to be very inquisitive and curious, so you did a lot of exploration looking for the “!”, and they aren’t going to appear on your mini-map. Turning them in will also require you to look for the yellow-dot on the mini-map, as the turn-in location is not always obvious.
If you’re going to wing it, my best advice is to go to the various zones and look for mobs to be within your range. Cataclysm completely changed the playground, but here are the two maps showing you suggested character level maps.
While these show “70” in some zones, realize that locating anything from Classic Warcraft is just nigh impossible anymore, so just use your imagination.
But what if you get stuck on a quest? Wowhead doesn’t support this content anymore, they’ve long since moved on (besides only getting started towards the close of Classic WoW anyhow). Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered. A while ago, all that Wowhead data was dumped (or ripped) to another server database, which maintains everything (even the silly comments from back then) to this day. This can be found at AoWoW, sponsored by Vanilla Gaming. Pay no attention to the Wowhead graphics. =)
Years ago, one of the best leveling guides in the game was published by Brian Kopp for Alliance, and Joana for Horde. Just an aside here, but today’s guides and fansites all owe Brian Kopp a huge debt. He was the first to take Blizzard on when they sued him over his guide, prevailed, and opened the door for others to publish things about the game at a profit. The lawsuit was over copyright infringement, and I believe it was because he used photos from the game in his guide. Could you imagine a world where Blizzard would have won? No more sites with game graphics, no more anything. Ahh, our favorite gamemaker.
Anyhow, thankfully I still remember his name, because I can Google it. For those of you who are looking for a solid walkthrough of the quests and want to experience almost everything in the game from 1-60 without losing all your hair, Valkyrie-WoW published an in-game addon for leveling based on both Kopp’s and Joana’s guide. In the first link it will lead you to the site you can get it, and you want version 1.04.2. The guides back then bounce you back and forth between multiple zones, but that’s how the game was played.
At release of Classic, there weren’t even enough quests to level you to 60, they had to be added later! So finding the best path to get there often took you between (for Alliance) Darkshore, Wetlands, Redridge, Duskwood, and Ashenvale one level after the other and back again. Unlike today, where you will spend about 5 straight levels in each of those zones before leaving them. It seemed crazy, but you had to watch whether a quest was actually orange, red, yellow, green or gray. Stay within the yellows, and you’ll be just fine.
While questing is great and all, often times you will flat out have to grind for your levels. There aren’t enough quests to get you far enough, or you may encounter a bugged quest (or worse a quest line). You will just simply need to pick a yellow mob type, and kill them until you hit the next level. Everyone remembers the parts they liked, but once you encounter little problems like these, you sort of realize why they changed the questing in Azeroth.
Playing In Groups
Outdoor dungeons are a reality for you again. Elite quests are all over Azeroth, meaning you need to finish long quest chains so you can participate in them. Outdoor dungeons were elite mobs that were available to anyone in the world, and you will not be able to complete them solo.
They offer some of the better rewards and best experience so keep questing. You will have to be social and locate groups, many times lowbies in your guild will want to knock out all the elite quests in a zone, so that’s the time to do them. You have to kill quickly, drink quickly, and keep moving because the respawn rate for these mobs is very fast. They are some of the most fun you’ll have in the game while leveling.
Unlike current Warcraft, CC is hardly ever needed. So here’s what you need to know so you aren’t screwing up the groups!
Mage Sheep – Half-Moon
Warlock Seduce/Banish/Enslave – Diamond
Rogue Sap – Star
Hunter Trap – Blue Square (be prepared to kite the target, traps aren’t launched nubby)
Druid Root, Shaman Hex – Green Triangle
Priest Mind Control/Shackle – Orange Circle (lovingly called the condom)
Make sure all raid buffs go out. If you are the lead, make sure you mark so everyone knows their jobs. If noone is marking, you’re odds of success diminish. These require coordination. They’re very challenging because generally the group is always lacking a tank and it’s 4 or 5 dps, and a healer if you’re touched.
Reputation Is Actually Important
Blizzard took mercy on the poor in later expansions, but if you’re playing Classic, your wealth is almost determined by your reputation with the various factions. You have to buy water, food, reagents, crafting goods, and most importantly your mounts. The mounts are NOT cheap in this content.
At level 40, your mount training will cost you 90g. The mount will be another 9g.
At level 60, your epic mount training will cost you 600g.
All of these items can be reduced in cost by reputation.
5% off for Friendly
10% off for Honored
15% off for Revered
20% off for Exalted
About every 15 levels you will have the opportunity to turn in Wool Cloth, Silk Cloth, Mageweave, and Runecloth to each faction. Best advice: Turn the cloth in to your racial faction to get your mount out of the way, everything else can wait.
Good Luck, Have Fun
Everyone who plays Classic/Vanilla Warcraft has their reasons. Some just want to get shoulder deep in nostalgia, some want to see the changes they’ve made to the game, some just want to be ported back to when the game made sense to them, and others are just chasing that free play time. Whatever the reason, everyone’s choice is their own. The most important thing is that you have fun while paying homage to one of the greatest releases in the game’s history.
You should now be armed and ready to re-experience, or experience if you’re a newbie to Classic, everything that you’ve forgotten about the unforgiving Classic World of Warcaft. If you decide to take up the old ways, feel free to send me a PM on Consortium if you’re headed to Feenix. I may not be here forever, but I’m always up to try to help.
Nobody reads my articles. Oh wait, records show nearly a thousand views this last week while there’s a nearly three week old article last posted. That means I’m read by 0.014% of the Warcraft population. That would mean you’re one of the elites, and I thank you for your readership. I don’t write too often because I really only like posting when there’s something to say. If you’re getting fed my drivel on a daily or even weekly basis, I feel it just becomes like everyone else. I’m not a journalist or anything in search of a daily story, I’m a gamer in search of himself and his sanity.
Today I’m going to test your moxy – can you read over 10,000 words in one sitting? I’ve warned my Twitter followers for the past few weeks that this was going to be long, so grab a coffee and prepare to be nostalgia-tized. I’m going to go over what has become of this game and why I’ve chosen to do something else, why there should be legacy content released, and ultimately a host of reasons WHY it can never be released. Just to whatever headings interest you the most, I know this is a lot of text.
I’ll start by saying right up front…
Warcraft has become a travesty of it’s former self. And by travesty I mean a game that was in production for about 4 years, released over 10 years ago, and only took 10 years to tear itself up by appealing to a new playerbase that likes Warcraft for the social media functions rather than the original lore and the game it was supposed to be. They’ve successfully removed the “RPG” in “MMO-RPG”. You are now playing a game that has very little role playing, not much gaming except for the meta games inside raids and garrisonville, and people can now buy their way to 90 without knowing a damned thing about the game. There’s no real exploration, the original lore of the game has been removed to the point that nobody knows why we even fight anymore, and the fanboys have taken over the asylum. It’s more of an altered state, whereby you log in and there’s not much threat of failure, new players are not required to really learn their classes through leveling anymore, and the development is in a direction of more removal of features and more additions of features that are essentially mini-games of other online social media productions. It’s everything BUT Warcraft.
In the beginning, the artwork was toned down to the iconic “cartoonish” style. This was for several reported reasons – 1) It insured those with 5 year old machines would be able to play the game and 2) the fanbase that came into the game was from original RTS Warcraft. I personally bought Guild Wars prior to playing WoW, and after playing through that game and looking at WoW the first time, my reaction was … “What the hell is up with the cartoon graphics?” I had a new machine with dual graphics cards at the time, which thankfully lasted for 5 years because the graphics requirements eventually did me in. At least the one thing that’s not changed is the style of the graphics in all that time, because we still get to play cartoonish style in a 10+ year old world, which is almost the game’s homage to the way things were. To change those to life-like models today would no doubt cause an enormous disturbance in the playerbase, moreso than anything they’ve done to date.
If you know me, and you probably don’t, one of my favorite memories in World of Warcraft history was sometime between the time I joined the game during Classic and when I downed Illidan during The Burning Crusade. Borelords of Draenor, the latest money grab and non-canon expansion, is already doing a terrific job of plunging subscriptions to below end of Classic numbers. Like I said, they’ve replaced a game of exploration, social skills, and good gaming with a near Facebook and smartphone app. And just like George Banks (Steve Martin’s character from “Father of the Bride”), I’ve had enough of it and so I am saying NO. Throw me in jail. But hear me out, the latest expansion was fun in the beginning because it put things in place for Burning Crusade, you jumped into Doc Brown’s time machine and got to see a world that could have been. I had a great time for the first 3 months of the game. This wore off for me after I figured out that the game was really headed towards “more of the same” after 6.1’s release and development that rivaled even the worst ideas in MMO history. There’s too much resting on their laurels. And for distinctive and refined pallets, more of the same equates to McDonalds menus and boredom for all, catering to insure grandma and her 5 year old grandson can both enjoy the same accessibility, as we all get fat and happy as what we liked best gets removed and things become much easier to retain.
Of course, Mythic raiding is insanely challenging, but that’s just one piece of the game that’s also a problem. The same content for everyone used to be the rule for years, but today our characters are not separated by content but by difficulties of the same content. Since Wrath there are no more MC, BWL, Naxx, Mag/Gruul, SSC/TK, BT/MH, SWP guilds. You’re now all the same, the only difference is not in the actual bosses you’ve downed, but only what version of the boss. Everyone in 6.1 was immediately a BRF guild, and if you started in normal your content was Normal to Heroic to Mythic. The same game. While bleeding edge guilds have been gearing alts in Mythic for weeks now, many haven’t finished Blackhand in Heroic. Super characters for the top 2%, for everyone else you get to repeat the same content in different difficulties. You know, Diablo 3 on release had this exact same system. How’d that work out? You used to invest your time working with your guild outside of raids to insure everyone had their consumables, proper resistance gear and materials to make them, and even running previous tiers to insure you had the best possible gear between lockouts. Guilds tended to stick together and be a lot more social than today’s “log in for raid” culture. With the removal of incentives, those days are gone.
After months of sitting around doing CDs, missions, and making sure work orders were always replenished, I realized that they took the Tiller’s model and amplified it by 1000x. Then they took the “we’d rather be doing something else” model and inserted it everywhere else. I’m sorry gang, but again I’m voting with my wallet. I have 3 years of gametime prepaid through tokens, and I’m going to just say screw it and wait out until the final patch, and let’s all pray that there isn’t one and it goes straight into the next expansion along with the announcement of a bunch of people exiting. I played the PTR, and Patch 6.2 is nothing more than a snooze-fest, and no matter WHAT the people over at ZAM (Wowhead) keep promoting, or the nice fellows at MMOC keep posting on a daily basis, ultimately their jobs depend on your interest in bullshit minutia, dealing with ignored requests, and enhancing the mini-game of garrisons even further. Bloggers who make revenue off of information are dropping like flies or reaching for content. This game has dropped 30% of subscribers since release of the expansion, and with the recent botter banwave it’s probably going to drop another million before it’s all said and done by July’s numbers. (Cool fact, if they hit 6 million they’ll achieve a new low not seen since Classic’s days, and I congratulate them on royally fucking up another franchise like they did with Diablo. If quarterly meetings were live shareholder meetings these guys would be burned at the stake and their heads placed on pikes at the company entrance by the stockholders.) No matter what they do, per my last post, they won’t get anyone back. And given Ian Hasikostas’ recent interview (and I’ll predict for his upcoming interview) they don’t care. It’s a given that you’ll lose interest and that’s fine. They’re perfectly fine with loss of subs mid-expansion. Hey, they don’t have to try, because all those people will be back at expansion time, right? Well, it’s time to make it hurt so they’ll listen because businesses don’t fund themselves through apathy.
I’ve decided to dedicate my playtime to two things. Number one being Diablo 3, because Diablo is my title with Blizzard. I’ve been a fan of the franchise for going on 15 years. But number two, if I’m playing Warcraft, I’m playing it on private servers. And more specifically, I’m playing the original Classic Warcraft frozen in time at Patch 1.12.1. That’s right, Naxx was out, the GM/HW grind was in swing, and there wasn’t any damned flying available and nobody asked for it or demanded it. Trade chat was littered with groups looking for tanks and healers for dungeons instead of raids, people were in love with the game and it wasn’t a toxic atmosphere like today. We liked the game like it was. Sure, you can count my sub as subbed, but I’m not playing, and that’ll screw up the forecast for a new expansion. The private server method of playing has been around for years, and the people PLAYING on private servers aren’t really doing it because they’re cheap and don’t want to pay a sub.
They’re playing on them because they love the game more than ANY fanboy streamer who raises money for Blizzcon on streams you can name. When you’re talking to a believer or a real fanatic, you do not mess with their religion, their politics, or how they like to play Warcraft.
Regular people buy the current game and accept it and play it for what it is. They keep subbed because it means they get to play with “friends”. But a person who is willing to play the game in a previous version of it has selected something they like. And they also play with friends, those that are more passionate about the game that they play and respect it for what it was. Almost like a connoisseur of fine wines and art, they’ve said “screw the rest, this is best”. But you can’t tell that to today’s Blizzard. They know all about private servers, and they’ve chosen do nothing about it (thankfully). What IS a private server? It’s a server that’s completely dedicated to playing a game without subscription, with dedicated personnel monitoring it. People have retained copies of server side software to organize a playing field for those that want to play their way for the various points in time that were most relevant to players. That means those that liked Classic, TBC, or Wrath can play the game in all it’s glory until there is no more electricity or internet.
J. Allen Brack, your Vice President of World of Warcraft, has officially proclaimed that Blizzard will never support legacy servers at Blizzcon. Just take a look at how he shot down a fan at Blizzcon in 2013. Mind you, Blizzard completely skipped 2012 because of “release dates” and this is the first WoW Q&A since 2011.
Go to exactly 30:00 on this video, and you’ll see Mr. Brack give a shit-eating grin while he talks down to some poor fellow who was probably about 10 years old when the game was released that he doesn’t know what he wants. This is possibly the worst case of brow beating in a video game I’ve ever seen, and I read trade chat. He could have said, “You don’t want to do that, you’re not a real gamer and you’re used to the easy tools we’ve given you. If we were to ask you to become a real gamer and be social with others in order to succeed or progress, you’d bring pitchforks and torches to the forums and we’d rather not.” Christ, the guy should have started that whole tirade (against a fucking customer mind you) with “look into my eyes” like Chili Palmer from Get Shorty. But you can’t argue with Mr. Brack, the guy is a martial arts master and can probably kick your ass.
All I heard in his statement was, “Fuck you, I’ll tell you what you want, do you know who I am?” Of course, most people asking questions wouldn’t know who he was, because he’s the hidden barricade behind the scenes. There’s customer focused, and then there’s sales focused. Mr. Brack is sales focused, and is akin to the assholes you see when you go shopping for a car or a life insurance policy. Those people are 100% about themselves, don’t let anyone tell you different, because in real life I’m sales focused in my profession. And seriously, when you’re title is also Head of God Damned World of Warcraft and Keeping Blizzard Afloat, I’m positive it goes to your head, because I guarantee you I would have a size 10 hat size if I was in charge. His job is to keep the game relevant and sell 10 million copies every two years, and after that the job is mostly cashing paychecks and buying sports cars for family members and telling the wife they’re going on some exotic vacation. I know that situation, and I can tell you the worst thing in the world you can do is interrupt it. So what do we do with salesmen when they take this attitude? We walk off the lot. We hang up on them. We call their boss. We take them down a notch. I’ve had to get my boss on a number of occasions, and once it got me actually fired (years ago).
Unfortunately, J. Allen Brack is the Vice President of Warcraft, which means the seat he moistens everyday is nearly at the top when it comes to making decisions within Blizzard. There’s zero chance of the game coming out in re-release format from the manufacturer with this attitude, unless they send him packing or the brass has a heart to heart about it. And corporations are cool in this respect, they don’t respect anyone’s tenure. If you’re stupid opinions stand in the way of the share value, then they come up with a nice severance and a nice group of guys who will pack your shit and courier it to your house. Ask my friend, he was nearly 20 years with my old company, and his ideas weren’t very good. Everyone liked him, but they liked their stock options better, so he was sent to the unemployment lines. Cold truth of life – your value is only as good as the value you are returning for the company. Lucky for us we have Activision on our side. Can you believe that’s actually the case?
Mr. Brack came into Warcraft as a producer shortly after the game’s release in 2005. Prior to this he worked for various other titles, with the most notable producing Star Wars Galaxies. Given that Blizzard borrowed an assload of content while developing the game for that game, this is a good fit, so just borrow a producer of a game you copied. Since then, he replaced Mike Morhaime as the Executive Producer of the game. He wasn’t involved in the original game’s development in the least, but he has been directly involved with the escalation of the games popularity through Warth and cratering of the game’s popularity through today. The original developers were probably pretty freaking passionate about the game, treating it almost as their child. Just from watching this character at various Blizzcons, he seems to have an extreme elitist attitude towards the serfs who write his check. And by serfs, I mean the customer base. But enough about this celebrity within the Warcraft universe, I just don’t like his attitude because he scares away the innovation.
Everquest, when it reached 10 years, released legacy content for the playerbase. This gave everyone the chance to go back and experience the game as it was at release, regardless of all the content patches. I wouldn’t say it was a precedent so much as a way to increase market share. When you have an aged intellectual property (IP) like Blizzard has on their hands, you pretty much want to exploit all avenues in order to keep people both interested and shoveling cash your way. And Blizzard has a real situation on their hands.
Blizzard today has THREE properties in production today. They own Diablo, Starcraft, and Warcraft. That’s it. And in the past few years, you’ve seen spin-offs of these franchises more-so than you’ve seen any new IPs. World of Warcraft was a spin-off for crying out loud, but it was also the game that really put the company on the map as not only a creative studio, but a gold tier publisher. Overwatch may be coming, but that’s essentially Team Fortress, and for fucks sake they really reached on that one in the panels in 2014 explaining that they didn’t rip anything off. Of course they did. With the cancellation of Titan, they’ve reached the bottom of the exploitation hole and they can’t dig further. All that creative talent (Chris Metzen, who was in charge of that shit at one point) cannot come up with anything better than a reboot of Team Fortress, being produced by one of the former lead developers of the original Warcraft, Jeff Kaplan. Seriously, you can’t make this up. Kaplan was awesome at designing Warcraft, he got his real notoriety in the gaming universe leading a world ranked guild in Everquest. The guy got his job by actually being a hardcore MMORPG gamer, knowing what hardcore MMORPG gamers want, and designing like a hardcore MMORPG gamer.
Passion for gaming and love for their genre is what built the different IPs. The Diablo franchise was masterfully fucked up with a 7 year development cycle and caused near Armageddon level hatred towards the developers. The game’s predecessor, was able to proclaim 7 million copies sold 2 years after release, and this was at a time when computer gaming was not exactly a big deal. This was a game that was originally released by a subsidiary of Blizzard (known as Blizzard North) who all self terminated by 2004 because they didn’t like the direction of Blizzard back then. So what this should tell you is simple – Blizzard never developed the franchise originally, they were just the publisher. That worked well and resulted in memes and a black mark for Blizzard. Today the current inception of the game is liked by thousands of players around the world who told Blizzard in the beginning that they released the biggest piece of shit since ever and to change their ways. Hey, the game was only in development for seven years. They patched the hell out of the game over the next year just to turn it more into Diablo 2, even though they hemmed and hawed for seven flipping years developing it. Today, Blizzard loyalists pray Jay Wilson doesn’t come within a cubicle conversation of anything they’ll be playing. The fact he’s still there and even remotely close to any of the IPs makes fans wince today. I don’t fault Mr. Wilson for much however, he overpromised and underdelivered. In the lead up to the game’s release, we started to see that there were probably going to be issues.
Starcraft is probably the most steady of their IPs, with the Asian market dominating the circuit, and nobody in the US or EU really pays attention except a marginal group of fans, yet it becomes a prime topic during Blizzcons for some reason as we see the top teams only from one region of the world dominating. Of course it would make sense, these parts of the world also have MMOs with 3-4 times the subscribers that Warcraft has ever had. Economies of population scale. If you want to dominate in gaming, make something the Chinese love, because they are 1/5 of the world’s population afterall.
I mentioned Overwatch. Since Blizzard’s loyalist fanbase of several million would probably eat a pile of cowshit on command if it meant they could get a new legendary item, there’s no telling if this will be a hot IP for the company. Diablo 3 had the same problem… if Blizzard had shipped a jewel case with a real, honest to goodness turd enclosed, some Diablo fans probably would have bought it and rated it 5 stars. It’s no joke, there is a real cottage industry developed around Blizzard fandom and appealing to them. Social media marketing and merchandising is a really hot paradigm, so the future is to insure you get THEIR message to your friends, and keep buying new titles, expansions, plushies, and mircotransactions so you won’t be left out. Social media is nothing more than appealing to the herd and steering it in a direction so everyone in the herd follows suit. Think for yourself, and if you like something, stand up for it.
So Which Direction For WoW?
This leaves the IP of World of Warcraft, or sub IP as I mentioned earlier. This is Blizzard’s biggest cash cow to date and the reason Morhaime lives in a big house rather than just a regular house. No doubt, he’s worked hard for it, taken the risks, and deserves all your pennies. The idea behind ANY IP is to maximize the profitability of it, regardless of personal bias. If there’s a market for people to buy it and you can produce it at a profit, you owe it to your stockholders and to the customers to exploit it to the absolute fullest. Take for example the following titles:
Diablo: Single player game, still probably played by people who hated Diablo 2
Diablo 2: Still supported by Blizzard, playable online through Battle.net
Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction – Still supported by Blizzard, playable online through Battle.net
Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos – Still playable online via Battle.net. You can buy the game today.
Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne – Still playable online via Battle.net. You can buy the game today.
Starcraft – The original is still supported on Battle.net.
Starcraft 2 – Obviously playable today.
World of Warcraft – No longer playable. Replaced by The Burning Crusade.
World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade – No longer playable. Replaced by Wrath of the Lich King.
World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King – No longer playable. Replaced by Cataclysm.
World of Warcraft: Cataclysm – No longer playable. Replaced by Mists of Pandaria.
World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria – No longer playable. Replaced by Warlords of Draenor.
World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor – Awaiting replacement
The whole World of Warcraft issue is troubling. Basically, every two years the company tells us that they’re pulling the plug on the content, and if you don’t like it, that’s fine. You can deal with the game changes with the next expansion, or don’t buy the expansion and be left behind. “We’re telling a story” is the common excuse for not allowing others to remain behind under the previous rules, but that’s pretty weak. The stories they release is valid for about a week after they launch a new expansion or a patch.
Oh no, what will happen to Thrall? What about the love child between Proudmoore and Wrynn? Did it happen? They killed yet another major lore figure and it ruins the entire game! With WOD we’re going back in time, so everything you see from the point Gul’dan got pimp slapped no longer applies. Who gives a fuck? This is about killing people online and sending them to the graveyard. Or whatever you make it to be for yourself because THIS is entertainment. It’s not reality. What matters is the game and the decision you made to become invested in it.
The World You Don’t Remember or Never Played
I’m not trying to get anyone in trouble with my statements here today, but I am going to ask that before you develop an opinion on anything that you at least look at the alternatives. With that being said, let me expose you to the other side of Warcraft.
What IS most important to gamers is the way their game is played. The original Warcraft was extremely well thought out for a rough draft of four years in the making. This was the Warcraft that I, your humble writer, discovered after much prodding from friends. It was unforgiving, it required you to spend insane amounts of time leveling by today’s standards, it was unclear as to how to get from A to B, and most important it was fun because it appealed to actual gamers who wanted to solve the puzzle. In other words it was Role Playing Game. Today’s Warcraft would drive yesteryear’s Warcraft players to quitting immediately, which it has in droves, and they don’t care. Just look for someone running around with actual GM/HW transmogs, the person who opened AQ on your server, or someone who isn’t 22 today telling you they lead their guild to MC/BWL/AQ40/Naxx glory. I have 1-2 friends on my friends list today from back then still playing, down from about 80.
And that’s not a bad thing, it’s good that Warcraft evolved to meet a new generation of players, even if they are merely players and not gamers. Watch Twitch, the people playing are, for the most part, players and not gamers. Very few of them are gamers. Gamers think things through, they make decisions, are highly competitive and you can put them in a situation and they work it out. They execute critical thinking, whereas the majority of people playing today require flashing ore nodes, highlighted NPCs, or definitive “!” marks to let them know where quests are available. They demand this type of play. Curiosity is no longer a part of Warcraft. Warcraft was built on the carrot and the stick model, which is definitely missing today. The carrot is now in the raid level gear, as opposed to completing that next quest, solving that long and drawn out chain nobody else wanted to do, and having a sense of real personal accomplishment.
How to find out what the differences are for yourself: Go to www.wow-one.com (you may need a proxy to access this website in the United States, but this one has far fewer bugs) or www.vanillagaming.com and download Classic Warcraft, install it, and play it. A standard 1-60 leveling trek should take you about 14 days played if you’re doing it correctly. That’s 336 hours of gameplay. Unless you opt for the turbo cheats, and then you can call yourself just a player. My first 60 in Warcraft was started in a late July, and I finished 60 by early October with time to level between my evenings home from work and weekends. My second took less than two months, and my third took me just over a month because TBC hit (of course, I had the free time at that point and I was also on a hunter). Now if you’re a person who stopped at 1 day played, you’re not a gamer. You’re a hamster. You like getting rewards quickly and you don’t care about the journey or the fun along the way. This is what original Warcraft offered – a journey that allowed you the time to meet new friends, join several guilds, and meet others on your server that would possibly lead to lasting relationships in the game. In some cases – it led to marriages and kids. I know, I had a former GM that happened to PUG his future wife. You learned how to play the game through leveling and you identified what your class was about and how to play it properly.
If you didn’t play the original, you’re a person who would have missed out on 3 hour Sunken Temple or Maraudon runs. You missed out on braving your way through other faction zones just to run Deadmines, Wailing Caverns, Scarlet Monastery, or Shadowfang Keep without summons or queues. You missed out on having to designate crowd control responsibilities, personal responsibilities, and even communicate in game so you could succeed. You see, when you spend 3 hours with people in runs like that, you tend to bond even if the run went to hell. You make new friends and others can see you are a gamer that wants to go places or just another player for the ignore list. That’s the social aspect of the game that was taken away with the introduction of Icecrown Citadel and the “button” that Mr. Brack alluded to in his response above. Back in the wayback years, we used to have to find others to party with and possibly make in-game friends. We couldn’t succeed unless we could count on friends we had made. And that’s something J. Allen Brack is against for whatever reason. This is now a game about getting loot, gold, and other prizes quickly and who cares who gets offended and turned off along the way! I’m not into instant gratification, or phony recognition, I’m a Gen-Xer which means my father probably walked downhill in the snow but still didn’t have shoes on.
As a proud member of the Gen-X generation (1960s to early 1980s) my generation tends to be nostalgic. We grew up in a time where video games were just being introduced, and we were taught a punishing lesson – 3 lives is all you get, otherwise you get to insert more quarters and start over again. My generation’s movies were things like Revenge of the Nerds, Back to the Future, Rambo, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (along with most everything else written by John Hughes). With me being more in the middle of that generation, I was exposed to computers at an early time, and I was part of the original geek culture when it was just labeled “geek”. Computer club, math and science being my favorite subjects, and D&D/Bard’s Tale/Ultima in my free time. I was also a jock, but that also meant I got made fun of for being smart, into computers and hanging out with kids who wore horizontal stripes on a daily basis. Still, we got yelled at about homework, participation trophies weren’t handed out, and our parents didn’t follow us along for job interviews or final exams. But, like I said, we’re nostalgic. We put away our childish things as adults, but we all have memories, boxes, scrapbooks or closets that hold things very dear to us, because we have a hard time letting anything go.
Today the game is almost a single player paradise, almost driven that direction by greed for subscriptions and shut-in wants and needs. Blizzard has gone through (based on previous interviews) over 30 million subscribers to the game over the years. That’s horrific, considering only about 7 million today still bother to subscribe. In the sales world we call than churning and burning. Find new customers, take as much money as you can, and replace them as soon as possible. Pretty soon you run out of prospects. Today you don’t need friends to succeed, you need the LFR and LFD button to just be satisfied. You won’t make friends that way when half the group can’t speak your language, are shut-ins anyhow, and are just there for quick runs and loot. At one point guilds used to recruit for raid positions looking for a 5th dungeon slot in chat (they would bring you hoping you were at least capable), while today replying to trade chat spam is the norm. Absolutely, the game is too old.
There are literally thousands of players today who used to play Warcraft in previous incarnations. No doubt, many have moved on into new lives, made families, or have discovered new diversions. I get that, prior to D2 and Warcraft, I was a really good golfer. Think “Person you want in your foursome when money is on the line” level. But being a Gen-Xer, it’s really hard to surrender your past. Gaming for me became my chief escape, and I found I liked using my mind to entertain myself rather than my body years ago. And this is where I propose Blizzard finds their solution in their past as well.
With millions of former players, the answer is not to replace the current playerbase, but to appeal to those that came before and left. You’ve had your time in the sun, your average player today is a Millennial, who is more in touch with social media and short attention spans than they are in solving anything important. When the game was released, Gen-Xers were the playerbase, who also happen to be the majority of the Blizzard development team even today. My old guilds were filled with people my age, and I imagine at Blizz the offices with doors are filled with receding hairlines and guys wearing earrings with gray hair. Even Mike Morhaime is a Gen-Xer. It’s surprising to me that nobody has slapped their forehead and said, “We really need to appeal to those that have played the game before and would enjoy coming back for another hurrah.”
You won’t do it with new storyline. Gen-Xers are now at an age where change sucks. We’ve dealt with it all our life, and humans have that one characteristic that requires new generations to kill; new change. As you get older, a fantastic thing happens. You reach a comfort zone, you get used to doing things, and you develop a routine. In our daily lives at work we are asked to make changes all the time because the world is ever evolving. It’s considered a weakness to be resistant to change. Warcraft has asked it’s playerbase to deal with it every 2 years for 8 years now. Some kept up with it, others not so much. If you want to appeal to a new customer base, appeal to your former customer base. Nothing says warm and inviting like a familiar place, which is why Warcrafters historically have always been able to say they will never be able to go home again – the freaking place changes far too often.
Classic and Burning Crusade offered a spectacular thing you don’t see today. You were a part of a community just by joining a server. You had some say over your dominion, the people you ran dungeons and raids with, the types of people who infested your server’s trade chat. Do you know at one point GMs could ban people for bad behavior (cursing, berating others)? Along the way the game became super popular thanks to millions of dollars in advertising, but that was short lived. But prior to this, the advertising went like this: My friends need to play, I’ll tell them. I have kids that want to play, time to buy 6 copies, with one for the wife! I’ve moved on from that old game, you should really try Warcraft.
You could hold Blizzcons every month of the year, with live streams and Twitter feeds, but there is no more powerful an interaction that leads to continued streams of revenues as a trusted friend telling another – this is the golden ticket, you should join, too. All of that marketing has already been bought and paid for, there is a giant market of players aching to play their favorite and possibly last game again with one another. I would dare say that if it ever happens the first day of a Blizzard sponsored legacy server’s trade chat would be filled with people trying to reconnect with one another. People seeking out that which they once knew as home, and building on that.
But Blizzard destroyed all of that goodwill. The game we knew and loved was replaced every two years while we were left with shrinking friends lists, only to be cast aside to be told we had to find new friends. If you’re lucky enough to have been in a guild for the past decade, then count yourself one of the few. For the vast majority of people, they’ve found themselves in an ever changing universe that required them to constantly look for new people to play with. The features that they proclaimed would strengthen us only caused people to flee.
Change is good, when taken in moderation. With each new expansion since Wrath, the game has thrown the puzzle into the air and told the players – figure it out. When people don’t want to figure it out, they simply say, “I’m done”.
Today, as with expansion that have gone past expiration dates in the past, there’s a lot of talk about “Vanilla Servers!?” This happens every so often to coincide with the content becoming consumed. If you are one of the curious, I would encourage you to seek them out, and the two links I’ve provided will give you a safe environment with which to play, just don’t give them anything personal about yourself. By far Feenix is my favorite, since I can either take a sight seeing tour or level to 60 almost like the old days. They aren’t perfect, but they are definitely close. You’ll encounter lots of bugs, many of which existed even with the retail version of the game. The worst bugs I’ve encountered are quest issues, whereby questgivers have been either removed or completing a quest is not possible. But like any true gamer following their passion, I work around the problem, I don’t spend my time complaining. I’m happiest just being back in the world I knew before it went and got itself blown up!
I’ll close this argument like any geek would, I’ll go into Star Wars. Almost 40 years ago, the original Star Wars was released. I, like many kids my age, remember buying empty cardboard boxes in place of Star Wars figures because the marketing was ahead of production – we had to mail away for our figures. I had a C-3PO, which some jerk kid stole from me because I was dumb enough to take it to Kindergarten with me for show and tell. I got it back though, thanks to a teacher’s aid. Anyhow, these movies were awesome, and became a real part of the culture. Until George Lucas re-released them in 1997 with all the revisions and computer graphics. And then released 3 more stinkers after that that most people of my generation wished they had never seen. Mr. Lucas has refused to release the original movies (New Hope through Jedi) in their original format, finding every reason under the sun not to do it. So because the new releases before the release of DVD players, I have to own a VCR today just to be able to watch them. I can jump up and down, but I don’t like seeing Greedo firing first or that old clip between Han and Jabba, that’s not how I remembered it. Mr. Lucas is an artist telling a story, and he’s telling you the story his way, and the only way to see the story the way you remembered it 30+ years ago is to retain copies of those old video tapes, or go online and get it through other methods (they do exist).
Do we see any similarities here? Since J. Allen Brack is a massive Star Wars fan himself, I doubt we’ll ever see Classic Warcraft being actually re-released. But alternatively, Classic is New Hope, Wrath was Jedi, Cataclysm was Phantom Menace, and you can see where we’re going from there. Hopefully JJ Abrams does a solid job rebooting it, but change of authority is often needed to get what the fans want.
Valid Reasons NOT to Do It
Source: MMO-Champion put together a nice compilation on this issue
Let’s address this one, shall we? Because it is the 800 pound gorilla in the room and we have to give rational thought to all sides of the issue. Blizzard, as I’ve always preached, is a company. While we would like to believe it’s a magic funhouse where people are sprinkled with fairy dust on the way in to work and the Oompa Loompas handle most everything, they are like all companies, they have the following:
1) A budget that has to be watched over and allocated annually and each department is responsible for keeping their costs under it. Putting this together is one of the hardest parts of running a company of any size because you have limited means (or resources as Blizz likes to say). That brings up a funny point – when they say “we haven’t the resources”, that’s a nice way of saying “it’s not in the budget right now”.
2) Someone in charge of PR that has the job of not telling you a damned thing about what their intentions are. We call these community managers with gaming. In many companies, those in R&D aren’t allowed to so much as speak to the press much less go on Facebook and Twitter and say anything about their current roles, responsibilities, and opinions. This is where Blizzard ultimately gets it’s tit in a wringer, the Devs say something or misspeak, and pretty soon it’s an expected patch note or feature. See The Current Flying in Azeroth Snafu.
3) A finite amount of desk space, computers, and software licenses. I’m talking about employees here. Hiring personnel has amazing hidden costs, and Blizzard is subject to them just like anyone else. You have training and ramp-up, benefits, unemployment insurance, matching governmental taxes, etc. A person that is paid $50,000 a year can easily be a $75,000 expense and more. This is your most important investment as a business, and it’s easily the trickiest.
4) A better direction for their cash. We all believe when we buy something the company goes right back and reinvests those costs and profits back into the product. That’s not the case in the least. Most of the time you’re wondering what new product you’re going to produce, when it will be delivered, and what kind of overruns you’re going to run into along the way. Titan’s failure had to be devastating and I wonder who actually pulled the plug on that alligator.
5) Crusty old managers that are fine with the status quo. These are the people there to mind the store, and in Blizzard’s case they answer to titles like Vice President. Come to them with a million dollar idea, they’ll focus group it to death and kill it if they aren’t on board with adding more chores to their daily punch list. Usually these guys can be found in meetings, planning meetings to schedule future meetings. Bad thing? Sometimes, they can strangle innovation.
5) Everything else and every other headache that you have to deal with on a daily basis. Avoiding those speed bumps is very difficult when operating a business, so the less crap you can throw on the fan, the better.
While Lore confirms that it’s talked about internally, we know who’s in charge up there. J. Allen Brack, as I mentioned. And if you watched his answer in the video – the answer was clearly “NO” when it came to people discussing legacy content on his team. So Lore’s contradicted his boss. Obviously the guys at Warcraft would love to see it, but Lore and his people are missing the paygrade to make the decisions. And if there’s one thing I know about big companies, when you settle in and get used to the 1st and the 15th, you get a mortgage, a house payment, and 2 kids with one on the way, your job specialty becomes “Don’t Rock The Boat”.
Would Classic (I hate the word Vanilla) Warcraft have a market? Would there be the desire to actually play it? Would it just be a server of 100,000 level 5 alts running around the world just to see the old content and have no desire to log in after? This is impossible to know.
Starting a retail server that has to be maintained, programmed, and repaired is an expensive proposition. And remember that Blizzard maintains multiple server locations, they aren’t just housed in Irvine. If it was as easy as wiring a server up, loading the software, and resetting it every week, I assure you that the servers would be in service immediately. But you can’t simply do this. You have to hire the employees who would service this stuff, and the last time I checked IT personnel were some of the highest paying middle income jobs in the USA. You’re looking at several hundred thousand dollars in annual maintenance just in people who have a job to maintain the game’s operation. This is a specialized ask, not a bulk effort like maintaining the current server farms all working on the exact same content.
Customer Support would have to be very specialized. Back then, if you made a looting mistake in a raid, you had to file a ticket. Workarounds for CS workers today are not the same as they were back then, so you would need either specialized people dedicated to answering tickets, or people that were dual trained. Look, CS GMs are just entry level workers at Blizzard trying to get a toehold in the gaming industry. They aren’t exactly people engineering the next level of space exploration, they have stresses in their lives as well and for the most part get no respect from players. Given you would need many of them to handle the issues, then you’re looking at a rather sizable investment.
The code for each patch is probably sitting around on some thumb drive in accounts payable, but it’s going to have to be fixed. There were bugs, exploits, and other devious issues that were fixed in Patch 2.0 and later, so many of those things will have to be reworked. Does anyone from back then still work on the programming of the game? Were copious notes maintained so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel? Could you imagine an undertaking like that? You’re probably looking at one to two years of recoding at the very least.
The playerbase will make even more demands on Blizzard. Remember the days when you couldn’t transfer from PvE to PvP servers? How about 90 day cooldowns between server transfer transactions? This would add a whole new level of microtransactions as people would retain various pieces (Full GM/HW gear, Full Tier 3) and start demanding transfers from Classic to Live Retail so they can do transmogs. While full GM/HW gear would definitely piss off a small minority, it’s a reality that would be asked for. Since we now have the ability to do most of these things in-game and don’t have to go to the website to do them anymore, they would have to rebuild the infrastructure to allow these things because we all know Blizzard loves microtransactions. So go ahead and add website development and possible game recoding to the mix.
So in order for something like this to even make dollar one, they would need to have a server population that probably rivals today’s high population servers. People think money grows on trees and you can just throw something together and ship it, but this is Blizzard maintaining their own game, not a private server that’s run more as a hobby. Private servers fix bugs to the best of their ability, but they aren’t 100% and never will be. They specialize in giving you an experience, not THE experience.
The game was made for a generation that was familiar with difficulties in gaming, not today’s crowd which demands outright perfection. We used workarounds to get things to work back then, and I assure you the minute people found the first bugs the forums would be littered with trash screaming about their experience being ruined, slaps in the face, all that. A virtual PR nightmare in the waiting. Today’s WoW gaming crowd is pissed off about flying not being available and lack of content. While I agree flying should have been introduced at some point (given they sold how many store mounts that fly?) but it shouldn’t be the reason you cancel a sub. But to each their own.
Over the years, gamers have morphed from a beat-the-game mentality to a content whore mentality. Classic had several distinct content releases during the 2+ years it was active. Molten Core was released shortly after going live, BWL and Onyxia, the AQ40 opening event along with all of the 20 man catchup raids, and finally the Scourge invasion. How the hell would you stay true to the game? One private server (Feenix) has reconstructed those events over the years, but they aren’t held every day. Further, between all of this content they fixed massive bugs – one most notable being the Hakkar plague which shut down entire servers because gamers being the gamers they are ran around infecting everyone. You got to see a version of it at the close of TBC, and the results ranged from insanely funny to truly sad, with people outright in love with the idea to people unsubbing from the game because they didn’t have a sense of humor or love for the game’s design. I digress, but the point is people would land into the world, and either all of the content would have to be open or they would have to spend a ton of money to roll the various events out. Could you imagine the former and hearing the reaction from the public when they hear the AQ event would never happen because of lack of resources? Talk about slaps in the face, Blizzard would destroy everyone’s experience! This is actually a real consideration, and goes right at the heart of the costs.
While they could institute a one-sub-for-all-content model, what effect would having a Classic server parked right in the middle of your current content have on the overall playerbase? Given that Classic made demands on progression raiders that by today’s standards would be considered criminal, should people opt to actually play on Classic servers they would be making a commitment and a choice. Gold didn’t magically rain from the sky in the form of dailies, and players were expected to farm up their own mats for flasks and guilds would make multiple runs to Scholo for a 60 minute grind to the Alchemy lab next to Raz. This was coordination by guilds on a totally different level by today’s standards. If you couldn’t handle the moose mount, what chance do you think you would have being tied up farming materials in between a 5-6 night raid schedule. Remember, you cleared Molten Core AND Blackwing Lair in the same week because you were gearing 40 raiders and people needed those sets, reps, and trinkets just to progress. You collected materials specifically for crafting resistance pieces so you could down just ONE raid boss. You didn’t just wait on the vendors to offer you items at a discount, there were no crafts to replace set bonuses, you got your gear the old fashioned way through DKP.
This would also have a drastic effect on PvP. In the final patch prior to The Burning Crusade, the Grand Marshal/High Warlord grinds were STILL in effect. If you wanted Rank 14, you played everyday, 14-18 hours a day, with teams of others and shared the title week to week so everyone could get the prestige and their weapon. People quit their jobs, people abandoned their lives, all to run around for a week sporting the title you can now pick up with a few hours of running Rated Battlegrounds. Given that it would probably end up being one or two servers per region, you would have immense competition. I knew people that scored GM/HW titles purely because they were on small servers, but what if you had 10,000 people crammed into a server all vying for the same thing? Like I said, people gave up on life to get that title and Blizzard scored some really piss-poor press over the results of it. If you offered Classic, you would have to offer this again or else the release would be sub-par. Private servers today offer this grind and for many people it’s the only reason they play private.
For many people, playing would definitely only be a trip down nostalgia lane. If you’re my age, you remember the world as it was, so flying over parts of it you weep for what was. They’d create characters just to run through the world and take a sight seeing tour, aggroing everything within 60 yards away because they made some nice changes to that issue in later expansions. After that, the server would be littered with characters that never got played again. I can see a workaround for that one, instituting a 6 month requirement that if the account isn’t logged into that the names become forfeit. But the question stands – who would actually play this way? Well, I would, I’m doing it right now as I take a break from the WoD grind. I know that many others would return to the game for it, since you have over 10 years of accounts and tens of millions of players that have played the game over the years and left on their own due to whatever circumstances, but I’m positive a strong dislike for the content was a leading reason.
We’re into the unknown here with this reason. Add a marketing study to the mix, to determine if the project is even worth doing. Would the server have a population that stays and plays or would the server have a population of selfie spammers? Have you seen the average player today? WoD was a nod to the TBC fans and they came back in droves, if only for a few months. Blizzard’s researched the project for certain and I will say that unless the lights were about to go out on World of Warcraft and they were shutting the doors and turning off the lights, we’ll never see Classic servers. That is, unless there’s something else on the horizon. What if they were to call it concluded on this path of World of Warcraft, and the future holds a sequel and not an expansion? Guild Wars did it, and people love that title. Diablo 2 became Diablo 3, and people STILL play Diablo 2 like fiends 15 years later and Blizzard still supports it. What if World of Warcraft II was the hold-up? It’s plausible, I know when Diablo 3 was announced back in 2008 it was a banner day for me and completely unexpected. If this was the case, you would have all the infrastructure almost immediately in place, just fill in the seats. Yes, we can dream, it’s what we do.
One really interesting fact about the game that people forget, and this isn’t for or against the issue but just an aside. Blizzard developed World of Warcraft over several years not knowing what the market demand would be. They expected to hit about a million subscribers and call it a success. They hit that within the first few weeks of the release and skyrocketed to 8 million accounts over the next 24 months. This is why certain original servers (my server being one of them) were hammered to the point that they were nearly unplayable and resulted in Blizzard having to put new infrastructure in place and begin splitting servers. This is why you have over 250 servers in the US, up from less than 10 originally. So whenever they talk about not being able to tell what the demand would be, they don’t have the best in forecasting ability.
Conclusion
Private servers run the content really freaking well so there’s no real compelling reason for Blizzard to compete. While Blizzard definitely frowns on them, they’ve picked up the ball and done the job for free and given the real diehard fans of the game a place to play the game they love their way and for no fee. I have absolutely no idea how they get the server side content to run these things, I can only guess reverse engineering or having a source inside at one of the various farms/distributors. Either way, they are your time machine if you want to play on a legacy server. There are thousands of others doing it right now, and if you have the mentality, then these servers are definitely for you. But rest assured, if they ever re-release the original, I’d gladly fork over the money to play the game I originally fell in love with and not what it’s become. Into the shadows for us.
Thanks for stopping in!
BONUS
I spent some time brainstorming prior to writing the “Not to do it” portion, here’s my list. Just for some humor.
Reasons not to do it:
1) Players will want not one but 3 server types – One for PvP, One for PvE, and one for RPing in Goldshire. Get bent RPers.
2) Endless whining about QOL things. Like lack of dailies. No flying in Azeroth. And talent trees are too complex, no glyphs, no gems, flight points, lack of AOE looting, hell nothing you know today. And Blizzard will be within their rights to tell players to get stuffed.
3) J. Allen Brack was right, there are bugs. And players simply can’t resist complaining about them. But this guy is also in charge of producing the game, so he doesn’t want the extra headache. And looking bad. Well, worse than he does already.
4) Owning a full Naxx character will become the new metric of being good at the game. With no LFR, this gear will be out of reach for most players today.
5) Sun, Mon, Thurs, Fri, Sat are now Legacy raid days. Tues, Wed current content raids.
6) Recruiting for a 40 man raid will prove difficult because most of the guild has never played under a DKP system.
7) Curse will have to sponsor addons for EVERY flipping version, and people might run out of disk space.
8) The whole “$60 90” is lost on people wanting to level to 60/70/80/85
9) A Cataclysm and Mists server will probably suck. Yeah, I said it. Gamekiller servers.
10) There is no TSM, there is only Auctioneer. And we all know people can’t live without TSM. And Auctioneer back then was no click-a-button-get-rich system.
11) Before you know it, people will demand the ability to transfer to current content with their characters, faction changes, and transfers from PvP to PvE servers. More revenue streams for Blizzard in bleaker times would be a bad thing, just fire people.
12) There’s a story being told here, people! One that holds people’s interest for 7 days every 2 years, but a story none the less! Certain people have worked hard here, and you will abide and stroke their egos when told!
13) Given the graphic engine changes over 10 years, and people’s required upgrades, they might get to see Classic in max settings and realize how much their computers sucked back then.
14) 22 year olds today who tell you they were leading raids in Molten Core will have to possibly prove they aren’t full of shit.
15) There’s no transmog. And given the original Naxx set was probably one of the most awesome looking sets for every class and would be available again, we just can’t have that. Not to mention the guild drama when people hit 8 piece and ask for transfers to current content.
16) Asking today’s gamer to endure 2 weeks of played time to hit max level in a high quality-well developed game environment would be too much to ask.
17) People will immediately see that the quality of the game has regressed and put more pressure on today’s B-Team developers. They already get enough crap on Twitter.
18) Showing Millennials how Gen-Xers liked to play their games would only prove we’re headed towards an idiocracy. For the good of mankind, this cannot happen.
19) Blizzard copied every single successful MMO to make the original World of Warcraft. Everything since has been mostly their own design. Do you want people to get fired?
20) World of Roguecraft-like videos would resurface because world PvP would be noticed again and naked undead rogues would be everywhere. Do you want that? Well, do you?
21) Blizzcons would have to dedicate an extra day to panels discussing no changes to legacy servers and people asking for Quality of Life improvements to things like Classic, TBC, and Wrath. Of course we could shoot everyone asking for them, but that would get people in trouble and be bad press.
22) If they did release legacy content that people had to pay the same sub as everyone else for, then you would see demands for more content when there was no more content. Hey, fanboys, they can be demanding.
23) Knowing Blizzard, they couldn’t just release it as a “moment in time” or “appealing to the nostalgia of the game”, they would have to “fuck it all up” with improvements and finishing touches. Blizzard – just can’t keep well enough alone.
24) A re-release of Classic’s GM/HW grind would probably end up on the front pages as 2-3 Asians die at their computers per week and someone gets stalked and killed in real life because of a Dishonorable Kill while partied in Crossroads.
25) Once people realize that it takes about 20-25 hours played to hit level 20 with no mount waiting for them, they’ll probably hold naked gnome protests in Ironforge crashing the servers.
26) Without guild banks, people won’t understand that you really do have to mail mats to that guy named “Guildbank”.
27) All hope of a legacy vanilla server was destroyed during the remake of Level 100 Molten Core, as mages/priests/shamans/druids couldn’t perform the simple act of decursing/cleansing raid members.
28) While private servers have successfully executed the Opening of the Gates at AQ without massive server crashes and lag, a full reset of this event would cause too much drama as people would open the gates in the middle of the night and Blizz would have to deal with thousands of irate customers demanding a reset.
29) No microtransactions were available at that time.
If you have a reason, humorous or otherwise, please feel free to add below.
Yesterday reminded me of this classic movie scene:
War’s over, man. Wormer dropped the big one. More prophetic words have never been spoken. I harken back to my post from 2 months ago. Most important, I reference my cartoon:
Still no word about dupers, I hate being right
Blizzard took action against the largest number of EULA infractions than I’ve seen since Diablo 2. Kotaku happened to post a conversation from a GM claiming over 100,000 accounts were suspended. That’s a ton of business they just flushed. $1,495,000 bucks in revenue per month. Everytime they post losses, they have historically pulled out the pink slips and sent their customer service division packing. We should all feel more sorry for those that actually need to eat and put a roof over their heads than the guilds that just lost their main tank at 8/10 Mythic.
And Bossland posted an “official” statement on their website, I’ll post it here to protect your virgin eyes:
I’m more amazed Blizzard ran a sting operation and kept it all internal.
Internet lawyers started chasing internet ambulances all over the official forums, in search of someone to believe their half-assed non-Harvardish explanation between what Blizzard can legally do and the rights of the consumer. Eventually they made their way over to the Bossland forums talking about class actions, the legality of the EULA, and how they were going to get their $15 back for this last month of subscription without taking Blizzard to the Supreme Court. But in the end the majority of those caught seemed happy, almost relieved that their long addiction was forcibly at an end, with very few even caring about appealing their suspensions which, as luck would have it, were supposedly on a 100% decline status by order of the Blizzard Gestapo.
It was a choice between Paul Blart and Colonel Klink
Make no bones about it, Bossland will come back, the bot will be updated, because this is nothing but an arms race, a game of cat and mouse, and cops and robbers. I think the next massive actual ban will be sometime next year, because all of these accounts are now on the final leg of Blizzard’s famous volcano, so one more infraction out of them and they’re history. For those that are sitting in the corner thinking about what you’ve done, take heed. Blizz Security is not going to take any prisoners next time.
How many of us knew that Blizzard lost a good portion of their legal case against Bossland last week in Germany? I didn’t until recently, but it seems relevant. Basically, for years now, Blizzard has been suing Bossland (the creators of Honorbuddy and other bot packages) in their home country of Germany. This is what they’ve been doing to counter the bot wars in Warcraft, giving the money to the lawyers! Apparently Bossland was ordered to not run a competing exchange for Diablo 3 gold, and as of May 7, this was overturned with Blizz being ordered to pay restitution for legal expenses. Well, since the RMAH has been dead since March 2014, and everything has been account bound since in Diablo 3, better late than never, right? So if Diablo 3 ever makes gold trading available again, at least the people of Germany are covered.
But this is significant because Bossland was essentially created by members the old Glider team, who developed and maintained what was largely considered the Go-To bot for Warcraft during Vanilla and Burning Crusade days. The company lost it’s ass in legal battles with Blizzard in the US courts, over copyright infringement of all things. Eventually that was overturned and Glider was simply removed from the market. Given that the software sold over 100,000 copies in the time it was active and Warcraft hadn’t even really hit it’s stride yet, one can only BEGIN to speculate how many copies of Honorbuddy and it’s sister software packages for other games have sold and made their way into professional bot farms since.
And you were worried about that guy ninjaing your Felweed?
Upon losing their battle in the US, they did what any good entrepreneur did. They consulted lawyers, told them what they were up to, and found the proper venue from which to distribute. Sort of like the Chinese DVD copy farms that are parked off the West Coast of the United States. There isn’t shit anyone can do about it unless they touch US soil. Or all those gray area casinos that popped up years ago – the IRS had standing orders to arrest on sight, but nobody could touch them unless they were within US jurisdiction. Almost the same thing here, Germany obviously provided certain intellectual property protections that Bossland was aware of prior to opening for business. And Blizzard would have to go through the hassle of building a civil legal battle against them, while being an alien company having to locate patent attorneys in Germany that could understand what they were talking about – with language barriers and such, and I mean getting attorneys to understand “nerd-ese”.
I can’t imagine how much all this has cost both parties, because Bossland and Blizzard are still in the courts over everything else. One thing’s for certain – Bossland has had to sell a shitload of licenses to fend this off, while Blizzard has had to spend millions themselves. Resources anyone? Why does WoD suck? Because the lawyers got there first. Har har har, I made a funny.
So why is this loss in the courts over gold for a game that doesn’t even trade it anymore mean anything? Well the optics of it are horrible. Sources within Blizzard have said that they’ve spent the past 30 days collecting account information of those within Warcraft using specifically Honorbuddy software. May 13th was D-Day, when a rolling blackout worldwide suspended all those accounts for 6 months to indefinite time periods. That’s 6 days after losing the court case. Understand when I say “optics”, that means “How It Looks”. Ok? The optics say that Blizzard was anticipating this court case’s findings, and regardless of the outcome they intended to send a message to all of Bossland’s customers – “We see you”.
You see, Bossland has long said (see the memo above) that they have been beating Blizzard’s detection. Ever wonder why after a patch certain raiders in your guild suddenly sucked or went MIA for a week? Ever wonder why Azeroth felt bot-free for about a week after a patch? It’s because with every patch, Bossland has had to reprogram their software to make it blind to Blizzard’s detection methods (Warden). I have no freaking clue how they go about doing that, but it sounds like they essentially take Warden out back after every patch and cut his ratty little eyes out. This gave the customers of Bossland a false sense of security, and the hubris was obviously too great, being unbeatable since 2010. Or did Blizzard just stop giving a shit after Glider got closed? I can’t say, but I would say that Blizzard has been in an incredible balancing act since the close of Wrath, when their IP began to wane in terms of sales and cash flow. Let me back that up, shall we?
Here’s a graph demonstrating the Product Life Cycle stages, for those of you who’ve never taken any sort of college level business classes.
It’s like looking into a mirror! (Source: MMO-Champion)
That’s right, the game hit the point of decline about 3-4 years ago, and there’s NOTHING you can do to get it back. This game is over 10 years old today, and while it has a major following, it’s entered the realm of Cheerios, a 12-pack of Coca-Cola, and a box of macaroni and cheese. Of course there will always be those brief introductions of each expansion, but notice how fast they hit decline status… within months of introduction. Not even the content patches between expansions give the game any sort of short term growth, the content between expansions is practically nothing but cost for them because it doesn’t do one thing to help in the quantity of subs. Blizzard knows that the future of this game is going to be in releasing new content in the form of expansions and storyline, and it has been for a very long time. Don’t expect anything revolutionary, because that would just be unreasonable for a game of this age and history. But do expect them to release the content in the form of expansions quicker over time as the interest in the game continues to wane. This is their cash cow – those one time purchases in the millions that result in 2-3 months of subscription time. Beyond that, the 2-3 tiers of content between expansions are merely keeping the bills paid and developing new microtransactions and expansions.
What Was the Logic of This?
This brings up the next topic – what was the actual reason for the ban? I’ve shown you that it ultimately wasn’t about revenge or retribution. Blizzard has a long history of destroying botware, just not very quickly. During Diablo 2, the chase was on to destroy Pindlebots and D2JSP, which it ultimately did. Today the game is absolutely overrun with knockoffs of each as Blizzard has apparently decided that 15 years is too long to support a dead game. With Warcraft, they’ve wiped out Glider through legal action and Honorbuddy through massive suspensions. So they merely kept up their promise of eliminating cheats and hacks, if only partially. Wait, partially?
Absolutely. Look at the timing of this. We are at the close of the first tier of WoD content. The results are in – Blizzard isn’t able to keep the sub base and the verdict on Garrisons is in. 30% of the playerbase has said: Eat a bag of dicks, Blizzard, your content is horrible and not worth paying for. In fact, so awful, that they’ve returned to numbers that were below their worst point in MoP. If this was a sales force, heads would be rolling and locks would be changed. Personally, I can’t stand logging into Warcraft anymore, and 6.2 information tells me I’d be wasting my time bothering. I’ve retained everything I can stand from GDKP runs, and will probably just wait for the next expansion. I get no feeling of having fun, and for a longtime veteran player, that’s bad news for Blizzard. By me logging in I’m doing it almost entirely out of habit. While I’ve paid for the gametime via gold, I really don’t care to even log in. So I won’t. (More on this another time, I’m working on a deal right now that’ll probably end my hardcore gaming career.)
I’ve taken the liberty of reading dozens and dozens of ban reports, so I can say the following with extreme confidence. With this content being so stale, most of the gathering bots aren’t even working. Blizzard’s suspensions apparently didn’t hit anyone “wrecking your economy”. Reason? Not economically viable at this time since most people aren’t doing anything craft wise. These are the botters I depend on to make my money, and I can say that lately they haven’t been posting many materials for sale at the normally very reasonable prices.
The people they DID ban in massive quantities were those using the bot for rotation assistance. This reminds me of the ban from last winter, where people from Ownedcore lost their accounts overnight for using the same thing. And many of these accounts in this wave proclaimed to be long time players of 6-10 years. I’m sure Blizzard noticed this as well, and the best course of action was to realize that longtime accounts were cheating, maybe it wouldn’t be a smoking idea to give a permanent ban as a parting gift. Afterall there are other titles they want them to buy, and press coverage was bad enough during the GM/HW grind.
The evidence of PvE use that evening was readily apparent, as Mythic guilds were missing several players and were busy recruiting for new people to join. I even read reports of entire PvP guilds getting smacked down. Now, these are “players” of the game, even if we use the word player with some literal license. These aren’t people out farming thousands of stacks of ores and herbs, these are people who’ve apparently decided the game is at such a point that even being asked to do their rotations in raids has become too big of an ask.
But the PvPers are different. For years and years, you couldn’t join a legitimate random battleground without realizing 2-3 minutes into the game that you were one of two people in the place who were actually controlling your character. For a very long time Arenas have been dominated by people running scripts and getting an insanely competitive advantage in the form of interrupts. These bots are able to randomize when they kick, and with surprising accuracy they could hit a healer within milliseconds of completing a cast. That’s flat out the wrong application for a bot, and the people using this should have been struck dead by the hammer a long time ago. But Blizzard never really bothered to investigate with any vigilance, they chose to just eliminate everyone in one fell swoop. Even the makers of Honorbuddy seem to acknowledge that the bot is not meant to be used in Arenas, which is probably why it’s not named “Conquestbuddy”. But like all things, players wanted that extra advantage to own and pwn, and now they get to pay the price.
If anyone has forgotten, Blizzard has only one IP that’s associated with E-Sports, and that’s Starcraft. However, World of Warcraft was tossed out of MLG on it’s unbalanced ass a long, long time ago. The hallmark of an E-Sport? Well balanced and reasonable expectation of performance by a player actor. Warcraft offers absolutely none of that, so they aren’t invited to any reindeer games and have to throw their own parties. Warcraft is often the punchline of jokes in the E-Sport community, and it isn’t even regarded as an E-Sport. “Warcraft an E-Sport? Yeah, right! And monkeys might fly out of my butt!” If you want to get any respect in the E-Sport community, you have to take appropriate steps.
And closing accounts of cheats in PvP situations is critical, so this was one step in their direction towards gaining some respect back in the E-Sport community.
It’s demoralizing for those that want to learn how to do it, it’s frustrating for pros that are competing, and sponsors aren’t going to give money to any gaming company that treats the complaints of their PvP class of players like Marie Antoinette. PvP is an arms race, and if everyone is doing it, then you can be assured that they’ll take every step however legit or illegit to get to what they want – total pwnage.
The memes for Marie were hideous
Arena PvP content really never goes away. It’s been about the same thing since patch 2.0, with 0.5% being awarded Gladiator, and god comps, and people rolling the flavor of the patch classes. It’s essentially stale as crap content, but of ALL the people that play this game, PvPers ask for the least content. And I don’t count public PvPers as PvPers, I’m talking those that play for actual rating like PvEers play for progression. So if you ignore people who are anxiously trying to get a sponsor and treat this like an E-Sport, whereas you the manufacturer regard it as an E-Sport but ignore everything that would make it an E-Sport, pretty soon you have to realize that you should be listening to your customer base because believing your own press is bad for business.
Frustrated consumers then take it out on the manufacturer in public. Imagine being Lore or Bashiok? Both are professional spin doctors for Blizzard. They aren’t in community management, their actual job description is more public relations than anything else. And given the heaps of shit that the PvP playing public has been throwing at Holinka, something had to be done. Holinka doesn’t even go on Twitter anymore because the playerbase treats him like a bastard red-headed step-child with a death warrant. I can’t say he doesn’t deserve it, he is the face of PvP content after all and his normal course of action is to run and hide under his bed. Own it, you made it. Nobody likes a loser that ducks the issues.
Conclusion
While this was an interesting step in the right direction, I question why gold sellers and dupers were going absolutely nuts after the ban and still allowed to run roughshod. They haven’t touched them yet, and don’t give me that line that “it’s coming”. I’ve reported dupers for years, but Blizzard doesn’t care about the economy in their games, they never have. They provide the means, but rarely test it’s effects. This is why I don’t believe a single utterance that this ban was for in-game economic reasons, hell those of us in the gold game made our millions off the botters.
So given what I’ve seen, the reasons for these suspensions were more of a lesson than anything else. Blizzard isn’t interested at this point in shedding more subscriptions, because that’s just silly. I think their ultimate intention was to send a message to Bossland’s customer base that the jig is up, there will be no more of this business, and everyone suspended is welcome to come back in 6 months and play again. Sort of like the parent sending the kid to timeout in their room. They might yell and scream, but they still love and feed the kid.
In my professional life, I’ve never told people who I do business with that “you’re an asshole, take your money somewhere else”. But I have removed problem clients from my account list and let them know I was no longer working with them. Those being people who cost too much time, don’t listen to my instructions, or tend to not treat me with the respect I deserve. I’m under no obligation to do business or help anyone, I believe in reciprocal business relationships, not symbiotic or parasitic. I always give people a second chance however, which I think was just smart business on their part.
I think Blizzard does believe in second chances as well. Even though I don’t really respect the decisions they’ve made the past few years, I still like their titles, but I still don’t like having to pay for bad content. Maybe I’ll fire up that private Vanilla server account again until the next expansion, I can get no flying zones there as well! But realistically, I just don’t see the need to be another hamster on the wheel playing just because I like the gold game. If I poured that energy into this next situation, I’d probably look at Warcraft as just another fond memory.
As always, I welcome your comments, provided they are well thought out and not part of the pitchfork and spoon crowd.
Zerohour's Abuse of the Economy 