You Think You Don't, But You Do: WOW Classic's Launch

Yesterday, at 5pm Central Time, World of Warcraft: Classic went live and official Vanilla WOW finally became a reality. Some folks are having to eat crow today.

I just realized Rami was a non #classicwow believer too.

These did not age well. pic.twitter.com/v5jMVbFw6y

— Mark Kern (@Grummz) August 27, 2019

I suspect J. Allen Brack--whom I willfully misquote in the title--is taking this all far, far better than the #fakenews fraud like Ramalamadingdong here will. Being so very wrong doesn't sting so bad when it means making a tidy bonus of some sort by the end of the year, and Classic did just that purely by having massive numbers of lapsed players resubscribe just to access the Classic servers. Even Mark was all happy about playing; he streamed his play live earlier today on Twitch.

As I write this post, the login queues to all but the most pathetic of servers remains significant. I can get to a North American RP realm easily. Anything else? Might as well leave it open and do something else, including going to work and putting in a full day, because the queues can get that stupidly long. (10:30 hour wait time just for ONE PVP server? Madness.)

Of course I'm playing. Hell no, I'm not racing to the cap this time. Nor am I rolling a class that's going to suck as solo play, or be very dependent on gear. That means I'm sticking to Rogues and Hunters for now, as I'm going to be casual about Classic and take my sweet time to arrive at Level 60. I don't care about raiding; I'll go once things are on farm so I can get Profession-related drops that only come out of raids that I can't trade for. I plan on being an in-demand crafter, not a World First raider, who does PVP on the side.

So what does this mean? That we're officially experiencing the popular emergence of the Old-School Renaissance in MMORPGs, following Runescape's example previously. As with tabletop, I fully expect most people to swap between Current and Classic WOW as the current game ebbs and flows; Classic is intended to be a customer retention scheme to keep the subscription numbers up, and as the game is truly static--no, phasing the content to emulate patch releases doesn't mean it's not static--you eventually reach a point where you're done with a character. Current will need Classic and Classic will need Current, and both will make WOW a better game in the long run, assuming the two dev teams don't fall into a pointless dick-measuring contest.

But the real hope is that Classic's massive success shows the Current team that a lot of the changes made that took away the RPG in their MMORPG weren't good for the game and need to be reverted, starting with all the catchup mechanisms that turn Current from playing the expansion to playing the patch like it's a seasonal thing ala Path of Exile or Diablo 3 and working back from there.

We'll see in due course what comes of this development, but for now here's to the return of the game that broke MMORPGs into the mainstream--to the D&D of MMOs--and the many people who've decided to come home again. Blizzard even cut an ad for it.

Spot the celebrity cameos. Also, the woman who plays the current Warchief, Sylvanas Windrunner, gets a spot. Good ad. Well done. See you in (Classic) Azeroth.