i played vanilla classic back in 2020 or whenever it was, and left the game entirely (retail & classic) when naxx came out. I just did not like shadowlands, then resented paying a sub just for classic, a 20 year old game nearly.
on returning, i’ve found my characters are on cata classic. i am ticketing to see if i can get them returned to vanilla, but otherwise i will be deleting those original characters.
so my question is, what should i play to be as close to vanilla as possible? i won’t be playing hardcore. so its between era and SoD. i don’t understand SoD and what its future is meant to be, and era seems totally empty.
is there a viable vanilla to play now that has the vanilla community spirit and feels alive?
You spotted exactly which realms you want to go onto, the Classic Era realms! Although yes, as I expected the pink glasses crowd moved onto other greener pastures and so on.
The realms progressed to Cata Classic. Back then you had the choice to clone them once for free to Classic Era or the progression realms, TBC which then moved on. If you made no choice, the default choice is the progression TBC realms.
Reverse transferring down expansions has never been possible and cloning has been discontinued.
There have been community suggestion balloons on restarting with fresh progression realms (sorta cycling) or new fresh Classic realms but honestly the same fate awaits them in several months when they’re not fresh anymore.
Hence that is why SoD gave a spin to the Classics with a “could’ve been”. You should try it out!
that is amazingly sad considering how popular private vanilla servers were for years, almost a decade? its clear people wanted a classic server. how did blizz mess things up so much
ty. i got to 11 on SoD, but will just restart on era. i don’t need exactly the numbers of 2019/2020, but it would be nice to have a healthy environment. wont do hc though as i don’t want the pressure of your work being lost on death. its bad enough all my progress on classic is lost now that my classic
toon was progressed to cata
This is not possible, as Blizzard stated numerous of times.
There was a period of almost 1½ year during the TBC patch were you could clone (move) your character to the Era servers, but after that all characters not moved would follow the normal progression into WotLK - just like your characters did.
As many have already posted above you have three options:
Play Season of Discovery (SOD) - which is Classic with TBC and Wrath spells. The server will be closed again within a year or max two, and then most likely another Season will be made.
Play Hardcore - Classic Era with one life. See the Hardcore for exact details.
Play Classic Era - this are the servers closest to what you left in 2020.
The Firemaw PvP cluster have the largest population of all Era clusters, but is also infested with GDKP runs and bots all over.
The PvE cluster is less populated (especially Horde side) , but both sides have raiding guilds so none of them are dead in any way.
Do not go to Firemaw if you want anything remotely close to 2019. Seriously, it’s a cesspool parsing andies, GDKP sweatlords and failures at real life camping horde rogues in low level area’s.
it looks really like blizz f* over the people wanting vanilla all these years:
the fact that SoD servers will close mean its not worth the investment,
HC is too stressful for casual play.
for era, looking at ironforges numbers for alliance players on Era, they feel like the size of my retail guild for the entire pve playerbase.
and to make it worse, they split the playerbase with Cata classic, something nobody ever asked for, and i predicted would come out over 6 years ago. i’ve possibly been proven right too with MoP event in retail. so, WoD classic coming soon…?
but it is sad that they can’t just run a classic vanilla experience alongside retail as they suggested in 2017 and like private servers did which just have everybody together so people experience life.
knowing the situation of how bad classic has gotten population wise makes me regret returning
Not long after you left you had three choices, Move to Era, Stay on Classic which changed to TBC, or pay and be on both.
If you chose not to decide, you’d still have made a choice.
Vanilla is still there, I have no idea what you are on about.
The original idea was to go Vanilla to TBC then to Wrath and onto Cata, and they will probably go on. People almost forced Blizzard to give them Era realms, which is Vanilla but some people weren’t around for the 14 MONTHS they had a chance to choose. Like you, they abandoned the game.
back barely 3 days and running already into the die hard blizz defenders
i abandoned the game for numerous reasons including how poor SL was as an expansion, and the way blizz were acting as a company at the time. has everyone forgotten the breast milk already? really?
and maybe im mistaken, please point to the video in 2017 saying im wrong, but people wanted vanilla, not wotlk/cata. nobody wanted cata. while i know its harder these days to pick the worst expansion, at the time of the announcement of classic it had always been between cata and WoD.
I want to talk about ice cream. ice cream is great. ice cream is one of my favorite desserts. personally I love chocolate, and I love cookies and cream. cookies and cream is actually my all time favorite desert. but I understand that for some of you, your favorite flavor is vanilla.
i didn’t hear him talk about cata, wotlk or even tbc flavor ice cream. here’s the video title if you need a refresher:
How WoW Fans Really Reacted To World of Warcraft Classic Vanilla Legacy Announcement (Amazing React)
and maybe people wanted era cause they wanted to remain in vanilla, but now the playerbase is split between 4 versions of classic AND retail.
again i say its amazing the popularity that the private servers of vanilla had, but when blizz put their hand to it, (begrudgingly) this is what happens. almost like bringing back flying in wod. begrudgingly. hence pathfinder 2/3 of the way into an expansion.
I honestly don’t understand how people just delete max level characters.
It’s not like you’re paying more money for having them.
A friend of mine, back in MoP, levelled a Monk all the way up, then deleted it some time later cause he “didn’t like looking at it on character selection screen”.
I’m pretty sure there’s something wrong with him
except I’m not defending Blizzard I’m having a go at you for abandoning your characters.
People wanted TBC, there was even a survey, then Blizzard went on from there and you had the whole of Classic TBC to choose where your characters went and it was free.
just cause i will never play cata. just dont see the point in the data existing and taking up space, even if its only a few kb. i would rather liquidize those toons and give the gold to someone, like i did with the toon i had on the RP server. i just sold everything, got about 40g from it, and ran to goldshire and just gave it to a random lvl 9.
nah, i remember you from years ago being very pro blizz. and you may be having a go at me for abandoning my characters, but i already clearly stated i didn’t like the SL expansion nor BFA before it, and the way blizz were acting in general and also the way they were ignoring the playerbase by not dealing with dying servers. but hey.
Era is far from dead. I recently rejoined horde pve, which is the lowest or second lowest population community. On day one I was able to get a dungeon group and join a guild that does all the raids on a weekly basis.
You might find fewer people leveling, but there’s certainly plenty of people once you hit 60, and the population continues to grow
It’s also worth being aware that SOD characters are much easier to level and will probably migrate to era at the end of that season. If you want to replace the 60s you lost to TBC, leveling up a bunch of alts in sod is not a terrible idea.
that is amazingly sad considering how popular private vanilla servers were for years, almost a decade? its clear people wanted a classic server. how did blizz mess things up so much 