One of the great benefits of an MMORPG game is player choice, and occasionally a World of Warcraft player really stretches that autonomy. One such plucky adventurer had managed to get to level 50 without leaving their first area, a feat that’s taken more than a little dedication, and a few worms.
Nobb the Goblin has yet to venture away from Kezan, the island home for goblins in the fantasy game. Instead, they’ve been grinding away on the creatures and encounters that exist there, gradually building towards the big 5-0. It started with tunneling worms, a good 5,000 of those to reach level 20, then another 10 from the banked experience you’re allowed without subbing.
Once he subbed, he started using alts to complete dailies that impacted the whole account, slowly feeding Nobb points to help him. Goblins become Horde once you finish the main questline in Kezan, and without doing that Nobb isn’t able to enter dungeons or PvP or anything like that. This is the only effective method of still gaining experience points, and now that Nobb’s at level 50, gains from everything, even dailies, is severe diminishing returns.
Talking to WoWhead, the owner has put out a plea for anyone who might know how to get to level 60 without taking eons. Current pace means it’ll take several weeks to reach level 51. “If anyone knows another way to gain XP on alts where mining and herbalism aren’t possible,” They said, “feel free to share it with me so I can expedite the process a bit more, that’d be great.” You can find them on Reddit.
World of Warcraft is offering cute pets in exchange for donations to Doctors Without Borders right now, and while we can’t help you reach level 50 in the first area, we do a have WoW Classic leveling guide for regular progression.
Thousands of World of Warcraft Classic players last night descended upon a single server to get a fresh levelling experience – and it was absolute chaos.
Last week, I reported on how over one thousand World of Warcraft players had banded together to create a “fresh” experience in the Classic version of the famous MMO.
In the absence of incoming fresh servers with the launch of Burning Crusade Classic, those who only now fancy playing the famous MMO as it was in 2004 face starting on realms filled with maximum level players and botting.
In response, players came together en masse to “reboot” the vanilla experience on one of the least populated servers.
When I reported on it last weekend, The Fresh Crusade was a community project whose Discord was 1300 players strong. Last night, on 5th March, when the server that would be home to this massive re-roll event was announced, the Discord had over 10,000 members.
The original idea was to offer a fresh levelling experience akin to what was on offer when World of Warcraft Classic – and indeed the original World of Warcraft it simulates – first launched.
But The Fresh Crusade ended up too popular for its own good. The server in question, Dragonfang [EU], immediately rose from being a low population realm to a medium population realm. Caszhar, the player who started The Fresh Crusade, told me over Discord that they couldn’t say exactly how many players joined the launch, but estimated it at 30 per cent of the Discord’s member number – that would mean 3000 players descended upon Dragonfang all at the same time. At launch, there were over 20 guilds formed and ready to go, each with hundreds of players as members.
“I think everyone knew what we were in for,” Caszhar told me tonight. “The launch was different to the launch of Classic in 2019. Then there was layering, putting players into instances to reduce overflow, but here everyone was in one space. The experience was chaos but it was amazing, so many people in one place was phenomenal and though it took around three to four hours for people to spread out, everyone had a lot of fun. Many people claimed that this launch was bigger, more chaotic and enjoyable than the Classic launch due to its craziness.”
The Twitch video below, from World of Warcraft streamer MetaGoblin, shows what it was like in The Valley of Trials, the Orcs and Trolls starting area in southern Durotar. Spoilers: it was busy!
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Caszhar’s re-roll experience was similar to that of others, it seems:
“I started with five people from my guild and we tried to do some quests but it was hard to even kill anything so we ran ahead to higher level areas and just killed as many mobs as possible.
“It was far from a traditional leveling experience and quite overwhelming to have so many people around you at all times but still something unique that I have never experienced in an MMORPG.”
Here are some screenshots of the action across Dragonfang last night, provided by Caszhar (to explain the images showing players standing in a queue, some quests require you to kill a particular NPC that respawns on a timer. Dragonfang was so busy at the launch of The Fresh Crusade that some players patiently waited in-line for their turn to kill these NPCs):
Now though, a day after launch, things have calmed down somewhat.
“… today we have been playing further and lots of people have spread out and it has been less competitive to level,” Caszhar said. “There are tons of groups around doing their own thing and it’s felt like this WoW Classic server has been revitalised and filled with life from players being everywhere once again.”
One of the reasons for The Fresh Crusade’s existence is to combat the botting and economy inflation that afflicts World of Warcraft Classic.
The Fresh Crusade targeted a low population server in a bid to provide players with the chance to get the best “fresh” experience they could despite this botting problem.
Unfortunately, botting exists even on dead servers, and Dragonfang was no exception. “Even if Blizzard released fresh realms then it would only be a month tops before it would probably reach the same levels of high population servers,” Caszhar said.
“The people part of this project have had their concerns and they are perfectly valid. The botting wont be so much of a problem for players as they level through the game together and promote the positive mindset we have tried to instil reaching endgame, but it will always be a big inconvenience and there’s nothing players can do about that, besides report bots.”
While Caszhar is delighted with how popular The Fresh Crusade has turned out, it sounds like organising the thing and keeping on top of the bulging Discord has been pretty stressful.
After The Fresh Crusade hit the headlines, some people tried to disrupt the project – an effort that has continued post-launch.
These people tried to “pre-level” by trying to guess the server The Fresh Crusade would be played on and level there beforehand. This upset some within the community who wanted to start on a level playing field.
And then there’s the predictable toxic behaviour from some that emerged as The Fresh Crusade grew in popularity throughout the week.
Despite this, Caszhar is in good spirits: “Now that it’s cooled down a bit and I’ve been able to immerse myself in the world with all the other people and take a step back from managing it all, I have been having an amazing time with all the players that are a part of this.”
Caszhar and co now plan to host server wide events to keep players interested, as well as another re-roll event to bring more people into the server for the pre-patch of Burning Crusade Classic. Caszhar expects Burning Crusade Classic to bring in even more players than Classic.
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For nearly two decades now (and long before that if you count its Warcraft predecessors), World of Warcraft has centered around a conflict between two factions: the Alliance and Horde. Never have the twain been able to meet to do content together cooperatively in the MMORPG…but Blizzard says that may one day change.In today’s World of Warcraft Q&A at BlizzCon 2021, panel moderator Scott Johnson asked a number of questions regarding the recent announcements of World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Classic and World of Warcraft: Shadowlands’ upcoming 9.1 patch to a panel of Blizzard developers including game director Ion Hazzikostas, touching on topics such as the recent cinematics and lore, character availability and transfer for The Burning Crusade Classic, and game balance.
The discussion turned to the fact that some of the “realms,” or servers in World of Warcraft have an exceedingly low population of either Alliance or Horde. And since players can only do raids, dungeons, quests, and most other content with their same faction, this can often lead to players either changing to higher population servers or switching factions, effectively either ensuring some servers become even more skewed, or are abandoned entirely. Hazzikostas cited features like cross-server gameplay and connected realms as having alleviated much of that issue, but acknowledged that it was still a problem due to the need for guilds to be made up of characters all on one server, among other issues.
Have you played World of Warcraft: Shadowlands?
Johnson then asked the panel a question that he acknowledged comes up seemingly on a yearly basis, with a negative answer each time: would Blizzard ever let the Horde and Alliance raid, or do Mythic dungeons together?
Hazzikostas bucked the trend with his response:
“I honestly would not say never…There are a ton of reasons why it is essential to retain faction identity, but for the sake of rated arena, from day one, Alliance could fight Alliance and Horde could fight Horde. When Burning Crusade Classic comes out later this year, that will be a thing and that will be a competitive activity, and that was one of those areas where the gameplay and the need for matchmaking was the top priority and had to be. In an ideal world, all of these priorities would co-exist, but at the end of the day an MMO like World of Warcraft is about being able to play with your friends, being able to play where you want to be and arguably, there’s greater stretch in the faction identity if you feel you can truly choose the faction you identify with, that you feel most a part of, and not have to sacrifice that because you need to be with your group or you want to join a higher-rated guild.
“I have coworkers who are lifelong Alliance players who now play Horde, who really wish they could be Alliance, who are doing it for guild reasons, and I know there are tens of thousands, maybe more, in that exact same boat around the world. We’d love to do something for them.”
Whatever this change ends up looking like, it’s clear that the potential unification Hazzikostas suggests isn’t coming anytime soon. While Patch 9.1 Chains of Domination includes a number of new features including a new raid, a mega-dungeon, and a new outdoor area, it doesn’t look like the Alliance and Horde will get to play together for now.
But Blizzard does seem open to further big leaps that it may not have considered in the past, with developers telling IGN in a pre-BlizzCon interview that they are open to the idea of one day releasing a Wrath of the Lich King Classic version — if enough players are interested.
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
It was leaked yesterday, but Blizzard has now made it official: World of Warcraft Classic, the retro version of the huge online game, will be extended to include first expansion The Burning Crusade this year.
That means an increased level cap of 70 (Classic players will actually outlevel players on the modern game, which has had the cap squished to 60); an inter-dimensional adventure through the Dark Portal to the trippy, broken world of Outland; the addition of the Blood Elf and Draenei races; arena player-versus-player, flying mounts and more.
As before, World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Classic (it’s dropped the “the”, for some reason) will be included for free in a WOW subscription. Players whose dedication is really to the original version of the game won’t be forced to upgrade; you can choose whether to progress your character onto the Burning Crusade expansion along with the rest of your server, or move to a server that will stay forever on the current version of the game – which I guess we now have to call Vanilla Classic. Original Classic. Classic Classic? (Blizzard is calling them Classic Era servers.)
Production director Patrick Dawson.
Serving a retro community as it splits into camps who want to experience the game as it was in different eras is a potential minefield, but Blizzard does seem to have thought through all the options. Lead producer Holly Longdale and production director Patrick Dawson told me over Zoom that players who don’t want to choose between the two versions of the game will be offered a paid service to clone their character across Classic Era and Burning Crusade servers. Furthermore, diehard Burning Crusade fans who haven’t been playing Classic and can’t face the long grind up to the level requirement for the expansion can pay for a boost to level 58. This option is strictly one-time-only, because “we don’t want to minimise the accomplishments of those who have worked so hard in Classic to get their characters ready,” Dawson said.
Blizzard now finds itself maintaining three versions of its flagship MMO simultaneously; potentially more, if this model continues through to subsequent WOW expansions. That sounds like a headache, although the Classic community is clearly big enough for the effort to be worth it – Activsion Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick has spoken approvingly of the effect Classic has had on WOW subscription numbers. “Yeah, it is more complicated to run multiple products in this environment,” Dawson said. “But we have a world class lab operations team that is up for this challenge. Even going from one mega game to two mega games when we [launched WOW Classic] was a big change for that group as well. So the good news is, we’ve done that before, we know what it’s like to add a new game to World of Warcraft.”
Flying over Nagrand. My 2007 laptop did NOT have this draw distance.
As with WOW Classic, content from the original game will be rolled out in phases over time, so the raiding community can look forward to the Black Temple, Zul’Aman and the Sunwell opening up over the next year or so. But systemically, Burning Crusade Classic will actually start from the expansion’s endpoint. “Our starting template is that final patch,” Dawson said. “It is the class abilities, the class balance and everything that existed for the final version of Burning Crusade… and then we’re going to go ahead and take a look at what else makes sense to change on top of that.”
Ah yes. New changes. Originally Blizzard took a purist approach and made only very minimal changes to the game as it was for WOW Classic, but that approach has evolved as the team has listened to player feedback. “As a team, we’re calling this… I hesitate to say this, but I’m gonna anyway… we call it #somechanges,” laughed Longdale. It turns out that players wanted the game exactly as it was – but better.
Remember how scary Fel Reavers were in 2007?
Longdale gave a few examples of changes that will be made in Burning Crusade Classic. Spell batching, a latency in processing player actions to work around the limits of mid-2000s server hardware, was emulated in WOW Classic, but will now be ditched for a “more reactive” feel to the gameplay. Seal of Blood, an ability granted to Horde Paladins in Burning Crusade and known to be more powerful than the equivalent Alliance ability, is being granted to Alliance Paladins too. The Blood Elf and Draenei races will be unlocked before the Dark Portal opens, to give players a chance to level up new characters.
Most controversially, perhaps, the team is opting for a “pre-nerf raid approach”. In Classic, players got later versions of raid bosses that had been tuned down (wisely so in the case of a fight like C’Thun, the pre-nerf version of which, Dawson said, was proven to be “mathematically impossible”). With Burning Crusade Classic, however, the community will get the chance to test themselves against bosses in their terrifying pre-nerf forms. “We’re taking a look at that raiding community and it is extremely vibrant, they’re extremely talented raiders, and they know a lot more today than they did 15 years ago,” Dawson said. “So we want to give them that pre-nerf version of those fights.” (Well, mostly. Some poor game design choices, like spell pushback on the original version of M’uru from Sunwell Plateau, will be left out, but “that hit point nerf and damage nerf that we got a few weeks in – let’s not do that right away,” Dawson said, with a glint of mischief in his eye.)
A return to classic raid Karazhan will be top of many players’ wishlists.
The WOW Classic team has learned that returning the game to its exact state at an earlier point in time is not really what the community wants – and nor does it take into account how things have moved on. “Like, back when Burning Crusade first released, you were having the beginnings of YouTube, right? It was a very different world – the community sites, the guilds weren’t as savvy and robust as they are today.” Dawson said. “The game that was designed for that community holds up amazingly well today, which is something that is just awesome to see. But the way people are engaging with it is a little bit different. And that’s okay. But that’s partly why we want to make a few of these changes to say, hey, let’s let’s serve the needs of today’s community, but keep that same nostalgia, keep that feeling that people had back in 2007.”
Nostalgia is a powerful force, and memory is subjective. One of the oddest problems the team faces is that players’ memories of the game – even the development team’s own – can diverge a little from the facts. (“A lot,” interrupts Longdale.) Should they remake the game as it was, or as players remember it?
Holly Longdale.
“One thing that we always have had both for Classic and for Burning Crusade is a reference client, so we can actually go back and look at how things actually were,” Dawson said. “With Classic, people would bring things up and we would do a deep dive and be like, ‘Hey, this is exactly how it works.’ And they’re like, ‘Okay, but that’s not what I remember’… With Burning Crusade, rather than have us just answer ‘this is how it was’, the question is, well, what do you think it should be? And we’ll listen .Because ultimately, we’re making a game for the people that want to play it.”
“Our goal is to bring the best experience possible to the greatest number of players, even though, you know, I might not like it so much when Pat was mounted in PvP and killing me constantly over and over again,” Longdale laughed. “It’s about keeping the nostalgia, the spirit of Burning Crusade and Classic for that nostalgic experience. But we want to make sure that it remains as fun as possible for the greatest number in the community as possible.”
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