”Do i just like… (LINKS TO REDDIT) keep running naxx over and over and over for years? What do these people DO with their WoW time. I literally have nothing left to do and quit playing.”
Did the game simply stay this way forever? Would Blizzard start developing new content to extend Vanilla separately to the original release (as had happened to old school Runescape)? Would they reset the game? Or was Burning Crusade Classic on the way?
Blizzard wasn’t too sure themselves. They knew they wanted to go with the latter, but they weren’t sure how to make it work. A survey was sent out, asking players for their opinions. All of the options proved popular, so they tried to appeal to everyone.
There was a lot of nostalgia for Burning Crusade – nostalgia which had yet to be monetised. I won’t explain what BC was because we’ve covered it here before (LINKS TO REDDIT).
The crazy thing about the ad was that it promised BC Classic would be available in less than a month.
”We’re less than a month out of this date and we still don’t have official word, it’s fucking stupid”
[…]
”Blizzard needs to communicate better so i can book my fucking vacation lol.”
Once again, there were a number of questions to answer.
BC couldn’t overwrite vanilla - that was the whole point of Classic – so players weren’t sure how it would integrate into the existing game. But by that point, Blizzard had decide it would be a separate service to Vanilla, but still covered by a single WoW subscription.
So far, Blizzard had done everything right (more or less). But the announcement of BC was incredibly botched, and infuriated the community in multiple ways. They offered players the option of transferring their Vanilla characters to the BC servers for free. Or, for the price of $35, they could clone their character, keeping one the original in Vanilla and getting a copy in BC.
Cue the shitstorm.
”$35?! To copy some code?! (LINKS TO REDDIT) I mean even $10 would be a lot for that, but it’s in the realm of reasonable.”
[…]
“Oh wait, you’re serious. Let me laugh even harder.”
[…]
”At this point (LINKS TO REDDIT) I’m reasonably sure I don’t want to spend any dime on TBC. Even a subscription. This is just going to continue to get worse.”
”This process takes SECONDS (LINKS TO REDDIT), and now we are supposed to pay 35 USD for each character if we wanna have a copy in both eras of the game?!”
[…]
”Horrifying amount of greed for something that is basically 100% automated.
Their excuse for charging so much for retail server transfers/race changes is they don’t want people to do it too much (some do anyway), what possible excuse is there to charge so much to simply ACTIVATE a clone?”
A lot of players were discussing the idea of abandoning the Burning Crusade altogether out of protest.
”Vote with your wallet. Don’t sub, don’t play TBC.”
The player base worked itself into a lather, getting angrier and angrier until the developers had no choice but to respond. Just days after announcing the price, Blizzard backpedalled and reduced it to $15.
“However, over the last week or so, we’ve gotten a very large amount of feedback from the community, and we’ve decided to lower the price.”
The players had won.
”Absolutely amazing. Thank you so much for listening! I wasn’t going to clone my main due to the high cost, but now it certainly looks a lot more tempting.”
But some were quick to point out that they shouldn’t be paying anything at all. Others suggested that this had been the plan all along. Blizzard never intended on charging $35, they just wanted to make $15 look good by comparison.
Lord Bobby has blessed us. Now I only have to pay an extra £12 on top of the annual £120 access fee, if I want to keep playing the game I bought in 2006 for a tenner.”
[…]
”They are charging money for literally a copy/paste. “
[…]
”I’m still not buying it and i’m not falling for this crap for 1 second, Blizzard have revealed their true intentions when it comes to Classic.”
Alas, the cloning fee was not the only controversy here.
Players could buy a Dark Portal Pass for $39.99, which would take any character on a BC server straight to level 58 and provide everything they needed to start playing in Outland right away. That pissed people off even more than the cloning fee.
In an AMA prior to the release of Vanilla, one of the developers had declared, “Character Boosts are not in keeping with Classic. We don’t want to break any hearts.” (LINKS TO REDDIT) That had come as a huge relief to the community at the time. And now it came back, as a betrayal. The cracks were starting to show. The only crack players wanted to see in Burning Cruade was Illidan’s, and that’s the only one they weren’t getting.
We already covered the arguments against boosts in the Warlords of Draenor write-up, but those feelings were felt more strongly here. Not only did players care far more about levelling as a rite of passage which was meant to be slow and painful, they were also keenly watching for any signs of ‘corporate money-grubbing’. They saw modern WoW as the ‘darkest timeline’ and wanted to prevent Classic going down the same road. As far as they were concerned, meddling with BC was like trying to rewrite the Bible.
”Please change your mind on providing boosts. It makes me happy to see you guys are noticing our complaints and that you’re talking to us because maybe y’all will take boosts out. Tbc is still a classic wow game, and it had no boosts originally.”
Not everyone was against the idea of boosts, however.
”The leveling was part of the draw of Classic, and so they did not want to take away from that. The boost for BC Classic takes you straight to the bare minimum level to get into BC, where that leveling can take place, and gets you to endgame faster, which had a much bigger focus in BC than it did in Vanilla”
Some players thought boosts should be conditional – perhaps they should be limited to players who had already hit max level in Vanilla, or they should only be available for a month after launch.
There were also concerns about bots. Classic already had an issue with them, and giving them a way to skip levelling risked making the problem worse. More bots meant more gold farming, which in turn meant more damage to the economy.
In protest, a thousand players banded together to ‘reboot’ BC on one of its smallest servers, starting over from level 1. ““Blizzard announced Burning Crusade Classic with no fresh servers and no mention of what will happen to the existing low population / dead servers, except hinting there could be the possible creation of new servers post-Burning Crusade Classic launch,” said the organiser behind The Fresh Crusade.
"This makes sense especially in the current state where most servers don’t have a levelling scene with players very much soloing their way from 1-60 with issues finding groups for dungeons/group quests, which is an integral part of the WoW Classic journey.”