In our round of interviews with Blizzard executives, we had the feeling that the developers underestimated how many players are looking forward to Burning Crusade Classic for World of Warcraft. In doing so, they would be repeating a mistake they made before the launch of WoW Classic.
In the Special TBC Classic – What Mistakes Should Blizzard Avoid? I had already written about it: I think it is absolutely necessary that Blizzard announce and provide new servers for Burning Crusade Classic early. The reasons, in a nutshell:
On heavily populated Classic servers, activities in the open world (PvP, farming, questing) have been frustrating for far too many WoW fans for far too long due to the large number of players – even with layering. Outland is much smaller than Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms, there is a glaring bottleneck with Hellfire Peninsula.
The Burning Crusade is more popular with many WoW fans than the vanilla/classic version. This is shown, among other things, by our survey from February .
Even now, in Phase 6 of WoW Classic, many WoW Classic servers have 4,000 to 7,000 level 60 characters still participating in the raid content (via Ironforge.pro ). These population sizes alone would be enough to negatively affect the game experience in Outland. However, by launch, the numbers could easily double (or worse) thanks to the revenants, which are currently on hiatus, and the level 58 character boost.
If we are right in our estimation, Blizzard has to keep layering active on the heavily populated servers until the last TBC phase so that Outland remains reasonably playable.
We saw in WoW Classic how negative it is when there are too few servers at the beginning and Blizzard gradually pushes in new realms: communities are torn apart, the faction balance can tip into extreme areas due to the transfer offers, and the servers remain too full often too full (because many players don’t want to switch so late), while late servers can only build up a small population.
However, those responsible at Blizzard seem to see it all very differently at the moment. During our interview with Blizzard , we had the feeling that the developers underestimated how many players would like to play Burning Crusade and at the same time overestimated how many players would like to play forever in Phase 6 of WoW Classic on the new era servers to hang out
For example, John Hight explained to us that layering will only be necessary for a short time in order to be able to absorb the large number of players around the launch. Once the players have spread out to the different areas, you will probably be able to undo the layers again. At first, the developers did not respond to our suggestion that Outland is much smaller than the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor. John Hight later added that one must not forget: many players will not play Burning Crusade Classic, but will opt for the Classic Era servers.
What is WoW Classic?
World of Warcraft Classic is a true recreation of the original WoW as you know it from 2006. All parts of the game – from combat mechanics and talent trees to character models and zones – have been recreated, contributing to the authentic experience.
Getting Started
All players with an active World of Warcraft subscription or game time on their accounts have access toWoW Classic at no additional cost.
- Open the Blizzard Battle.net Desktop App and select World of Warcraft from the menu.
- Select World of Warcraft Classic from the Version menu. If you have more than one World of Warcraft account, you’ll see a second Account drop-down list. In this column, select the active account you want to play with.
- Click the Install button. The progress bar will tell you when your game is ready to play.
- Click the Play button when the installation is complete.
You will need to select the realm you want to play on from several different realm types. Make sure you choose the same realm as your friends – in World of Warcraft Classic, you can only group with characters that are on the same realm as you!
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