oW Classic and TBC Classic show modern MMOs what makes the genre so fascinating: the social interaction on the servers, in the guilds, raids and groups. At the same time, its great strength is also its Achilles heel. Social structures are fragile. How fragile is currently showing Burning Crusade Classic.

In my articles, I’ve argued time and time again that WoW Classic and TBC Classic are much better MMOs than most modern online role-playing games. While you get lost somewhere else in the anonymous crowd and usually play alone or with a small group, in classic WoW everything revolves around your own server community, activities with the guild, group and raid content. Only in such a social ecosystem can the genre unfold its full fascination or potential. This is where friction and competition arise, but also communities and friendships, and thus many memorable moments.

The great strength of classic WoW is also its Achilles heel. Such a social framework is fragile and heavily dependent on compromises, the motivation and cohesion of the members and the high commitment of the management team. Oh, and of course what we call RL. There are things that are more important than WoW, and anyone’s WoW “career” can suddenly be over at any time because they don’t have the time or the opportunity to gamble.

Full-time job and go-around girl
I myself was an officer in vanilla WoW and in the original Burning Crusade for a long time and later a guild and raid leader, and was therefore able to experience first-hand how exhausting it can be to lead such a guild through the turbulent waters. I often felt like an unpaid manager with a full-time job: There were regular meetings and job interviews, we organized the raids, took care of the guild bank and also planned activities from time to time. We’ve acted as mediators, tried our hand at being psychologists, and sometimes had to make tough staffing decisions and say goodbye to people in the community.

You can’t do a job like that for months and years without the fun of the game suffering as a result. My guild was lucky at the time that we were always able to fill vacant leadership roles with a guild veteran in a timely manner. And that apart from the officers, we also had some crazy people with a lot of time in the guild who would have given their last shirt for the community at the time. If you have people like that in the guild, you can cope if there is a creaking in the woodwork elsewhere.

WoW Classic versus TBC Classic
In WoW Classic (buy now) I was lucky enough to be able to join a similarly great troupe as back then. But with a family and a full-time job, it was clear that I would never become a raid or guild leader again. Others took over the job and, despite minor crises, successfully guided us through the classic content. It helped immensely that we could always build on a fairly large core that was online almost every day to farm, run dungeons or organize a raid to Zul’Gurub or AQ20. The cohesion was simply gigantic. And we were proud of it, after all we saw again and again how other guilds broke up left and right – such a social structure is fragile.

How fragile that was then proved to us by Burning Crusade Classic – with an announcement . Like many guilds, we struggled with the transition from 40/20 raids to 25/10 raids. Some felt left behind in the level phase, the allocation to the constantly growing number of Karazhan raids did not always go smoothly and at some point it became clear: We are too many for a 25 raid, but too few for two powerful raids. We were looking for reinforcements, set up two raids, which then farmed away the fairly easy phase 1 content – until there was a sudden interpersonal crash, the guild management made a decision that split, and from now on equally important pillars of the community broke away.

We licked our wounds and finally decided to go ahead with just a 25 raid. After all, there were already more than enough guilds on the server at this point that were not very successful in looking for reinforcements for their raid groups. And there was no one from the core who wanted or could take over the raid management of the second group. Other players left the guild for various reasons.

On paper, the squad was still big enough. But slowly but surely we got into the first raid logging phase of TBC : The buff stuff for the raid evenings was, unlike in WoW Classic, quickly farmed together. Major alts were 70 and ready for the raids. Most people didn’t feel like PvP. There were other reasons too. For example, I became a dad for the second time and at the same time was allowed to spend a lot of time with Diablo 2 Resurrected, New World and Final Fantasy 14 for buffed. It goes without saying that TBC Classic had to and has to back down for a few weeks.

And what happens when you have numerous painful departures over a period of several weeks and many of the remaining players are hardly online anymore? The few players who now carry the entire organization and management on their shoulders eventually lose their motivation. The cohesion of days gone by can hardly be felt anymore. Why should they keep doing the work? And when they consequently announced their departure and no one wanted or could take the helm, the once magnificent steamer suddenly drifted powerlessly on the high seas, while everyone went into the lifeboats to be picked up by other ships or the adventure and to say goodbye to old companions.

So for that matter , I actually underestimated raidlogging in my last column . And this is exactly where WoW Classic has actually done something much better: You always had a reason to log in, if only to get the world buffs for the next raid together with the guild or to get some gold for the next flasks and potions farm.

The future of TBC Classic

I’m really excited to see how this will develop in TBC Classic. After all, in the future we can only expect more raid content, which should also be a bit easier after Vashj and Kael’thas (until we are in front of Archimonde and Illidan). Only in the last phase, with the island of Quel’Danas and all its content, do you have good reasons to be online often and regularly again. How many communities will survive the raidlogging era by then?

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.

1. Open the Blizzard Battle.net Desktop App and select World of Warcraft from the menu.
2. 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.
3. Click the Install button. The progress bar will tell you when your game is ready to play.
4. 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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