And as if Blizzard was deliberately trying to infuriate their Classic players as much as possible, they announced the Digital Deluxe Edition, for the low low price of $69.99. Every single feature came like a new dagger to the heart.
As well as a Dark Portal Pass and 30 days of game time, it included the Path of Illidan toy, which caused characters to leave a trail of green flaming footsteps, a unique hearthstone, a mount for retail-WoW, and most important of all, the Phase Hunter mount, specifically for BC Classic.
Pretty bold of them to firstly cater to a hardcore traditional community by making classic versions of the game, to then add something that this community deeply despises in the pursuit of some extra revenue.
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”This is precisely why I’m #NoChanges because you give Blizzard an inch and they take a mile.”
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“What do u mean it’s a slippery slope?! We just want X and Y!”
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”The sad part is (LINKS TO REDDIT) the whales will still eat it up.”
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”I know I shouldn’t be (LINKS TO REDDIT), but I’m always amazed at the incredible amount of corporate fanboying and defending of corporate greed going on here. It’s really hard to tell if it’s bots/paid shills or if these people genuinely just want to suck the teats of Blizzard that badly for some reason.”
Asmongold, one of the biggest WoW personalities, who had followed Classic from the beginning, encouraged his fans to fire the /spit emote at anyone who used the mount. The idea was that if they disincentivised the mount enough, no one would buy it, and Blizzard would learn not to try these kinds of techniques again. The harassment campaign applied to everyone who bought store mounts, but was specifically targeted at those who bought the Digital Deluxe Edition.
It was intensely controversial.
”If you think people trying to punish others (LINKS TO REDDIT) for not conforming with your opinions isn’t toxic then you may need to take a break from the internet. That is the real childishness here.”
Most content creators strongly opposed the campaign, whatever their views on store mounts. But many players were on Asmongold’s side.
”If you think people emoting on a game is harmful, might wanna take a break from the internet until you grow up.”
An addon was created to automatically spit on players with the Deluxe Edition mount. Screenshots emerged of players’ chat logs filling up with notifications that they were being spat on.
One user on Reddit suggested (LINKS TO REDDIT), “I guess Blizz was worried people would be afraid to buy the mount LULW. While another added, “they found a spit emote too problematic and ‘toxic’ because people were using it against players who spent money on their cash shop.”
They insisted that Blizzard didn’t care about harassment at all, they were just trying to protect their golden goose. After all, Blizzard had done nothing to curb the use of racial slurs.
”You can buy the n-word pass from the ingame store.”
“Wait, is it actually dead? What the fuck? It’s actually dead.”
When Classic first released, there was little no real concern about it cannibalising the playerbase of retail WoW – the games were totally different, and catered to different people. Burning Crusade Classic didn’t have that advantage. It was directly aimed at players who had enjoyed Classic, but who wanted to move on to Outland. There was a serious risk of splitting the community in two.
When Blizzard cloned players over to the BC servers, their Vanilla characters remained, and the Vanilla servers were never going anywhere – the company had been clear on that. But with everyone playing in BC, the Vanilla community simply disappeared. Since most players went on to BC without paying the $15 dollars for the character cloning service, their favourite characters were gone from Vanilla forever.
Folding Ideas compared World of Warcraft to a religion going through a major schism, with a more progressive branch (Retail) and a fundamentalist branch who desired a return to the old tradition (Classic). And here with BC Classic, the branch split again. Vanilla was left in the hands of ‘Classic Forevers’ who rejected expansions of any form, and chose to remain pure.
In those servers left behind, it was often hard to find more than a dozen max level characters online at once. They soon grew disdainful of the traitors who had abandoned Vanilla.