My Life As A Gamer: Classic Burning Crusade (Too) Soon

If you weren't in the loop about the release of the Classic re-release of The Burning Crusade, here's your announcement.

This video is getting ratioed; check the Like-Dislike ratio. MadSeason's summary gets more specific.

The reason, on the surface, is that this is too soon of a release and too little time for players to create new characters and level them up to the minimum level to enter Outland: Level 58. The deeper reasons become apparent when you look at everything that the Classic WOW team have decided to do with this iteration of Classic WOW and how they're being pushed to install paid services that really don't belong (e.g. the boost) and those that do--arguable the cloning one--are priced at a predatory rate.

Yes, you can lay all of this at the feet of Bobby Kotick and the need to make the quarterly report look good. Blizzard has been a trash fire for too long, such that even long time fans like Asmongold and Bellular are being blunt in calling the regime either incompetent or malicious. (That's not fair. It can be both, and I think it is.) The investors and the head office are leaning so hard on being the dominant player in a Network Effect driven marketplace that they, like Wizards of the Coast WRT Dungeons & Dragons and Magic, are confident that they have no real competition and thus players have no alternative to the slop they're shoveling.

The reality is that the game is moving now only on inertia; if you couldn't pay the sub fee without using real money, the subscription rates would have collapsed even further than they have. The ability to use in-game currency to purchase game time has single-handedly kept disatisfied players on the reservation for years, but even that runs out sooner or later; Blizzard has to deliver, but is too converged by diversity hires in one direction and too riddled with greedy Mammon cultists in the other to actually deliver value to the customer or respect his business.

There are alternatives to everything Blizzard has: Final Fantasy XIV, Valorant, Gwent, LOL/DOTA, Path of Exile, and more are all out there and more are always coming. It may be that only WOW kills WOW, but when it does the void will be filled before anyone realizes that the gap was there- and when it comes we can point to this moment at the point where the writing was on the wall. "Too soon, Kotick! Too soon!" indeed.