So it’s been al most 3 months since the release of WoW classic. I thought I’d give my take on the whole thing good and bad.
The launch: - Initial Realms
It’s easy to say now but none knew what the demand would be for classic. I don’t blame them for only releasing 4 realms initially as realm death is still a very real posibility. The big mistake was seeing the amount of accounts created during the name reservation and not adding more realms before launch. People would have been much more willing to move if 1 week prior to launch blizzard announced new realms and suggested moving to avoid queues. Instead we got launch + new realms. After a few days when the queues hadn’t died down why would guilds and friends move if they have already invested time in their characters. This led to way overpopulated realms and massive queues which still persist on some realms.
Europe? only english
This is something I commented on at the time and I think one of the only things that was total BS. The idea that the main languages in europe couldn’t get enough players for 1 pvp and 1 pve realm was a joke. Big props to reversing this decsion quickly and giving people a chance to experience the game in their native language.
Launch day
I want to say a great job to the team. The launch went fairly seemlessly, it was very laggy for the first hour to be expected due to the amount of people trying to login/level it was insane, it was amazing the servers could function at all.
Layering
I never really understood the negative outpouring for layering. It was the best option to avoid dead realms due to player drop off following launch. There were a few small issues but ultimately it was a very smooth experience.
Various bugs
Another thing to be applauded was the speed at which blizzard reacted to the raid dungeon exp exploit and the layering dungeon boss exploit. Within a week or more both were patched.
Dire Maul & Phase 2
Both of these were released too early. Unfortunately it seems pandering to the streamer and hardcore playerbase comes before the average player. Classic isn’t the type of game that needs constant content to keep people enganged, it feels rished at this point.
Faction imbalance
Something that is a big problem for the health of the game. This is an example of the game may be the same but the people playing it aren’t. Times have changed since vanilla and people want to min/max and it’s lead to a big faction imbalance. What can be done? not much really, you can’t stop people from rolling horde, you can’t free transfer to an underpopulated realm because its horde majority on practicallly every realm. I think the fairest option is a faction queue within 15% of the lowest faction population. For any game there needs to be some sort of balance attempt if this doesn’t happen naturally it needs to be forced. It won’t be popular but for health of the game in the long term it’s needed.
wPvP
This is another example of the games the same but the people playing aren’t. In my opinion p2 and world pvp are a disaster. I think we all expected a big drop off in population but suprisingly the active users have stayed very high. This comes with the problem of the relams being way too populated to have a functional game with wPvP. The third problem is honor is now available, there’s a motivation for players to kill often and much as possible. It’s now impossible to roam around the areas: farm materials, quests, even get to dungeons. I know we are already seeing a big drop in alliance population on my realm and I’m one of them. I can’t be bothered to deal with it so I just don’t play. Solutions? I think BGs would help, faction queue would help. Ultimately even with BGs with the realm populations being so high will wPvP ever be in a balanced state? I’m not sure
For myself I played mid tbc > early cata I’ve really enjoyed stepping back into wow again. I opted for a pvp realm with ideas of a few skirmishes and maybe some big battles in SS etc. I first noticed the faction imbalance around level 40 it was annoying but managable. This current wave of “pvp” isn’t what I signed up for and it’s left me with only 2 options transfer my char to pve or quit. Thanks