Friday, May 24, 2019

My Life As A Gamer: WOW Classic Has A Big Audience

The beta for World of Warcraft: Classic has proven that there is sufficient demand for official retro-servers to merit launching them. Right now, this Beta is not only dominating WOW livestreaming on Twitch and YouTube, but dominating traffic on those sites in general. At one point, 100 thousand people watched Asmongold fully clear one of the early dungeons: The Deadmines.

This has the hacks in Fake News mad. One of their tenants is The Cult of the New, as commonly expressed in Current Year form, so looking back at all is disdained and saying that older is not busted is tantamount to treason and heresy to the Death Cult that is SocJus. They saw the reaction and out came the spin. "It's hype." "It won't be like this on launch." and so on.

They don't get why Blizzard acquiesced to the demand for Classic, despite the answer literally being in their faces: to improve subscription numbers. The business plan is to use Classic as a retention mechanism for WOW subscribers, as you are required to have an active subscription to access Classic; you can play either version of the game so long as you subscribe at all. That, from a business perspective, is a good decision since development costs for Classic are so low compared to the live game.

The parallel to the continued demand for pre-Wizards of the Coast editions of Dungeons & Dragons cannot be overlooked. We're seeing the biggest expression of the Old School Renaissance in MMORPGs since Runescapeand Everquestdid it and likewise succeeded beyond expectations.

Below is the video capturing the moment when Asmongold and four others took on Herod in the Scarlet Monestary's Armory wing. Clutch plays like this don't happen anymore.

And now the beta activated the first Battleground: Warsong Gultch. The first recorded match is on YouTube now; Asmongold gets salty, so keep the kids away.

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