Sabotage from within: How Blizzard’s losing touch with the WoW Classic community and repeatedly failing to meet the bare


Sabotage from within: How Blizzard’s losing touch with the WoW Classic community and repeatedly failing to meet the bare minimum

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World of Warcraft has been synonymous with the MMORPG genre since it was Buy WoW Classic Gold first released back in 2004. Although WoW has stayed the definition of a fantasy role-playing game over the years, its community began to slowly dwindle as soon as Blizzard started operating under the banner of Activision in 2008 with the most influential slump coming to pass during the Warlords of Draenor expansion when Blizzard stopped publicly reporting the subscription numbers. With the WoW community slowly abandoning their favorite game, Blizzard began desperately searching for strategies to skyrocket it back to the top. Little did the devs know back that the solution to all of their problems would be re-releases of the original games. Blizzard even went as far as to deny the players’ wishes to bring back WoW Classic. In the infamous words of J. Allen Brack: “You think you do, but you don’t.”

Today, we’re standing on the verge of witnessing Blizzard re-releasing the third WoW Classic Wotlk Classic Gold edition, Wrath of the Lich King Classic. Although WoW Classic and The Burning Crusade Classic turned out to be a hit that rekindled love for WoW among long-lost fans, both game iterations were riddled with problems like botting, boosting, and gold selling. Expectedly, Blizzard has, in its own fashion, addressed these critical game-ruining issues, however, it has, in one way or the other, remained a persistent problem of Classic WoW that’s been ruining the gaming experience for average players. Largely because of botting, boosts, and gold selling, Classic WoW’s economy, together with average players, has been suffering from gold inflation and needs to optimize and increase gold farm.

Blizzard’s attempts to rid Classic WoW of the system abusers were received poorly, with the community still believing Blizzard is not doing enough work to cleanse the game and return it to its original state, like in the 2000s. Unfortunately, as we’re slowly stepping into the third iteration of Classic WoW, there is still no sign of Blizzard’s intentions to completely eradicate this kind of behavior in the game. What’s more, Blizzard has, since the release of the WOTLK Classic pre-patch, only further worsened the current state of the game with mass bans, server overpopulation, server disbalance, general lack of concern for long-queue times, and tickets unresponsiveness. With all this in mind, it seems as if Blizzard is gradually losing its touch and failing to meet the bare minimum standards to make buying a subscription worthwhile. Since Blizzard is treating its game as second-rate, why should we care and lose our precious time and money on it?

Overpopulated imbalanced Classic servers with excruciatingly-long queue time times and a lack of fresh servers.

In 2019, Classic WoW launched with fresh servers that welcomed and hosted die-hard Classic fans from across the world. Since the sudden resurgence in popularity of Classic WoW surprised Blizzard and exceeded every possible expectation, the initially-launched servers were infested with long-queue times forcing Blizzard to launch more fresh servers. Even though the community had fresh servers at their disposal, players still surged to the originally-launched server, and with that, the giga servers were born. As time passed and the Classic WoW hype train slowly lost its steam, the servers began slowly bleeding players leaving some servers deserted and the others overpopulated. Although the community repeatedly called out this problem, Blizzard’s only solution was the server transfers that only treated the symptom of this problem. On top of this, this has caused more problems than solutions in the long run since many players were stuck in a loop of searching their home server while never settling down.

The release of TBC slightly improved the server situation since it once again brought back tonnes of players looking to enter the Dark Portal and eradicate the Burning Legion. Still, TBC Classic servers found themselves in similar shoes to Classic once the expansion reached later phases. And throughout TBC Classic, Blizzard again showed little to no effort to sort out and balance servers.

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