First, before the digging in the reasons for this anger : I’m still happy to play Classic, and I’m still happy that Blizzard finally opened Classic realms. It’s not a complaint that Classic was a bad idea, it’s a complaint that it was a botched job, for two reasons.
- The overpopulation is insane.
It’s a staple of private servers to have ridiculous overpopulation, but I didn’t expect Blizzard to follow in their footsteps…
Blizzard has been incredibly obtuse and stubborn about opening new realms as needed. They made everything they could to stuff idiotic amount of players in the least amount of realms possible, under the pretext that “merging servers later would be bad for community”, despite merging being mostly painless - it’s much harder to make people leave a server than to just group servers together.
The result is an extremely degraded experience. The main problem is not actually fighting mob, but to actually FIND them. It’s incredibly frustrating to want to explore and do quests, and then whatever the quest, when you reach the point where you can do it, there is already five people waiting for the respawn. It’s not an RPG where you have to use your wits and abilities to overcome foes, it’s a boring case of whack-a-mole where each group try to tap a mob before another, and there is no danger because the players outnumbers the mob.
Also notice : all this is felt on a LAYERED realm. It’s going to be WORSE if they ever take the layers off.
That’s not what Vanilla was, and it significantly detract of the fun of the game.
Blizzard claimed they could put new servers “in the hours they are needed”, but they were horribly stingy with them, leading to congestion.
And when the lack of realms was obvious, instead of adding new ones, they simply… increased the amount of players in each realms, compounding the problem instead of fixing it. Great job 
It’s especially inexcusable as they had ample warning that they expectations were grossly inadequate, the initial servers being completely filled in the hour just by name reservations alone.
- The bugs.
Seriously, and I’m not exagerating, I’ve played on private servers which felt better coded. There are significant bugs that are simply inexcusable that late in time, and impossible to miss even with the most basic QA. There has been a beta, a reference server and now we’re well into one month and a half, and still we have bugs that affect the very basic mechanics of the game. Some examples :
- When you stun a mob, his orientation often change. Especially noticeable as a rogue, with gouge and backstab requiring positioning. I very often do a gouge (can only be done from the FRONT) and then the mob makes a 180 and I’m facing his BACK. That’s just ridiculous.
- Also a rogue one : energy tick often give less, or more, than 20 energy. It just looks like a rounding error.
- You often ends up aggroing mob for no good reason, or end up in fight because someone else far away (not in your group) started to fight a mob.
- Hunter pet stop reacting for a few second after each kill.
These are just some of the glaring examples of bugs that really should not happen anymore so long after release considering how they affect core features, and considering how many of them works without hitch on retail.
All this gives a definite “private server” amateurish/unpolished aspect to the game, which is pretty unacceptable when a full subscription for a 15 years old game is paid.
Seriously Blizzard, stop being so lazy and up your game, this is a shame.
Nochanges, right?