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.
[…]
”This is precisely why I’m #NoChanges because you give Blizzard an inch and they take a mile.”
[…]
“What do u mean it’s a slippery slope?! We just want X and Y!”
[…]
”The sad part is (LINKS TO REDDIT) the whales will still eat it up.”
[…]
”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.
When it came to the Horde/Alliance split, very few servers had ever been equal. Often, one faction would vastly outnumbered the other. In the fifteen years since the game began, Blizzard had worked tirelessly to find a solution. Some ideas had worked, but all of them had come at a cost. Whether it was combining servers or splitting them up or developing systems that moved players seamlessly from one to another depending on the need, it always meant messing with the delicate ecosystems and communities of the game’s many ‘realms’.
Faction ratios were just some of the many problems Blizzard recreated in Classic. Racial abilities were much stronger when the game first came out, and certain classes were exclusive to one faction or the other. After many years of debate and investigation, it is generally agreed that the Alliance had an edge in PvE content, whereas the Horde pushed ahead in PvP. The two were different, but surprisingly balanced.
”Even during Classic WoW, there are many arguments about which side is actually best. In the Burning Crusade however, the player base pretty much unanimously agrees that one side is better than the other.”
Without going into too much detail, it all came down to Blood Elves. They were the one Horde race that could play Paladins, which had been an Alliance-only class in Vanilla. To differentiate them, Horde Paladins got an ability called ‘Seal of Blood’, and Alliance got ‘Seal of Vengeance’. Combined with the overpowered racial ability ‘Arcane Torrent’, Blood Elf Paladins had a major PvP advantage. The Undead racial ‘Will of the Forsaken’ was equally overpowered, and nothing on the Alliance could compete with it. To make matters worse, BC introduced arenas which pitted players against one-another in groups of just two or three. In that setting, a small boost went much further.
This imbalance left a legacy that remains even now. The Horde still dominate high-end raiding and PvP on retail.
”For some, this radical asymmetry is the biggest scar of the Burning Crusade.”
Blizzard had no choice. When BC Classic came out, it brought this problem with it. Whether they wanted to or not, they couldn’t betray the spirit of the original, or incur the fury of the #NoChanges mob.
And so, as expected, the faction ratio slid inexorably toward the Horde. Their majority quickly grew from 53% to 62%. On PvP servers, the Horde simply had no one to fight against. Queues to get into battlegrounds and arenas got longer and longer, so players went out into the world for their fun, which usually meant ganking low level Alliance as they quested in the zones of Outland. In the face of these roaming death squads, those Alliance players either quit, switched to Horde (LINKS TO REDDIT), or fled to the safety of PvE realms, where they formed a majority of 65%. That just made the problem worse.
”Obviously not all horde are like this (LINKS TO REDDIT), but there’s soo many that seem to just try to do whatever they can to make alliance experience a frustrating experience. My last straw for me was leveling in Zang. I realized out of the past 3 hours I had played, about an hour of it was spent corpse running. I could never get alliance to come help. And every day it seemed like I saw less and less alliance. Finally after seeing a horde blockade around one of the towns, I just threw in the towel. Switched to a PVE server and never looked back.”
The end result was a lot of servers where one faction made up over 99% of the population.
“My server at the beginning (LINKS TO REDDIT) of phase 2 was healthy and strong pop with the most balanced h:a ratio at the time.
It’s like 5:1 ratio now and the alliance has basically all stopped playing, or left the server.”
In retail, Blizzard had fixed the problem with ‘Mercenary Mode’, a feature that magically swapped players to a race of the opposite faction to fill in gaps. It had never been around during BC, but Blizzard piloted it anyway. It was either meddle with the game, or let it die. Horde players were given cardboard masks with Alliance races painted on them.
The #NoChanges community saw Mercenary Mode as just the first step to destroying the greatness of BC. There were even calls to reboot the whole project. And with ‘Classic Classic’, we’ve come full circle.
If Classic starts solving ‘old’ problems with modern solutions, at what point will the two MMOs become indistinguishable?”
Some disagreed.
” You know, it seems like people seem to not get that there’s a HUGE gulf of QOL improvements that could be added to Classic and wouldn’t “make it retail”. This is a strawman at its best. You can like parts of Classic and, god forbid, parts of retail and it’s not binary.”
[…]
” I think people just look at the differences between classic and retail and assume anything that retail has that classic doesn’t is “retail” and bad.
The truth is that the problems with retail are numerous, but that not all things that changed are bad.”
Should Blizzard implement modern changes, or preserve the game in its original form, no matter how broken it may be? This debate has come to define the Classic community, and corrupts all discourse surrounding it. And as long as the developers keep trying to find a way forward without upsetting either side, they will be paralysed as well.
Glad that the classic wow community has devolved into the world largest trolley problem. (LINKS TO REDDIT) You can either not pull the lever and let the game run into the same problems that have been there since the original release or you can pull the lever and implement the fixes to these problems that came later in the games lifetime BUT someone will say its retail bullshit
In the days of Nostalrius, fans had one simple goal - they knew what they wanted, and everyone was on the same page. Their united effort was able to change the will of a billion dollar company.
But that is the past. Now everyone has a different idea of where the game should go. And so the problem remains; lots of the people are mean, and most of them are miserable, even the ones with digital deluxe editions.
[Repost] [Games] World of Warcraft (Part 7: Classic and Legion) - How an illegal server birthed a protest that forced Blizzard to remake WoW, the new age of nostalgia, grinding, toxicity, and spit
Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama....