Vanilla WoW Is BACK! (and i’m not talking about Hardcore)

Over the past few months much of the talk around classic wow has been surrounding the hardcore scene and a ton of people have been trying it out and seeing what makes it so popular for themselves and though we do now have official servers confirmed their release is still sometime later this summer

Leaving much to be discussed as to what will or will not be allowed but it’s not just the hardcore scene that has witnessed a Revival on the classic servers I feel as though this has very much Fallen to the Wayside but regular classic error servers are seeing a huge

Boom in players and no it’s not just people’s semi-afk on their bug mounts with thunder Furies in Capital Cities though there are certainly a lot of them it’s people coming back for Battlegrounds open world PVP raiding and leveling on entirely new characters despite every issue that there is with a

Server stuck on the last phase of content with a promise of no further updates people are willing to come back and hit that new character button and just start over again it seems clear to me that it’s it’s not just hardcore players who are making a home in vanilla

Once again and I believe both Crowds Are after something which cannot be achieved by One Singular new server release what I’m saying is even though we have the hardcore servers confirmed which is great and all is it also time frame no changes ish 2019 vanilla classic fresh

In today’s video I’ll be checking out the growth of non-hardcore servers going into why people are choosing to revisit them now and ultimately why blizzard should consider more than just the hardcore servers for the good of the game let’s go back though imagine how it was in 2019. classic World of Warcraft

Is finally releasing you’ve cleared your entire calendar for two weeks you have your healthy diet of Doritos and Mountain Dew prepared you’re physically and mentally ready to smash this game and you are a ripe young age of 28. ah to go back to simpler times I guess

Really none of this should have been a surprise vanilla has been popular seemingly forever now and even compared to TBC and Rafa the Lich King it really does offer a totally unique experience autyman raids World Buffs no flying insane stacking of Buffs questionable class balance PVP ranking a huge open

World and so much more you probably heard some of those and recoiled at the thought of going back to it others are waiting for a chance to go back and do them all again if you can say one thing about vanilla is that it really doesn’t

Try to cater to everyone and if somebody hates something there’s going to be someone else that loves it even still it’s kind of amazing how many people are going back to these servers and it’s always difficult to know exactly how popular any realm is given we don’t have

Official numbers from blizzard but there are some ways we can estimate it even just logging into a server and eyeballing it is a reasonable starting point I did a walk through Stormwind and algrimmar between around 8 30 a.m to 8 45 on a Wednesday morning also there

Were no world boss dropping at this point point in time if I’m making a video about these servers being popular this is potentially one of the worst times I could have possibly picked to get a view of lots of people being logged in and honestly I couldn’t

Believe how many players were there in Stormwind Orgrimmar leveling zones or just throughout the world this was on the fire more round cluster on Europe by the way there isn’t even anything weird going on here with people from different time zones being online now these are the classic error non-hardcore Realms in

The morning on a weekday and dare I say it this looks pretty good to me I mean a stolen looked like this on a morning during actual classic I’d be kind of happy with it and I don’t have an active n a account to go and check but I’m told

Their most active server cluster is white Main and it’s quite a similar story also in case you are wondering the PVP clusters are a lot more active I suppose I should mention this now but servers on error are linked together so this will contribute to how many players

You are meeting in the world this happens sometime after error servers were made to boost player encounter answers within the game this is different from merging too which you’ll see players with their own name and then their realm name after the PVE Realms are less active in general and are all

Linked together too be it on EU or an A so you can pick any of them if you want to play on PVE it doesn’t matter the RP Realms are not part of any cluster which is why the hardcore players have gone there anyways back over to fire more I

Went and had a check on the auction house to see whether there were many items being posted and how much they were going for there were some 30 000 items in total and some pretty reasonable or even cheap prices for things such as Arcane Crystal Black

Lotus Elemental Earth or fire and so on I also had a character over on gollumag horde to check out how things were looking for the Reds gollumag is on the same cluster as fire more by the way again there were plenty of people occupying Orgrimmar and chilling on top

Of the bank the auction house had nearly 25 000 items and again some pretty sensible prices I also flicked through some leveling zones on slash shoe for both horde and the alliance and as expected there are a ton of players just doing some plain old vanilla wow leveling starter zones were often capped

Or near enough showing 50 players and the later game zones also had a decent number of players progressing too this to me says there’s pretty clearly a whole bunch of players who are just after the vanilla experience they want to be able to do multiple dungeons to

Trade to group whenever and if they die they just resurrect and go on their merry way and I get it it’s way more chill than hardcore you don’t have to worry about losing your character or going again you’re happy to get a dungeon run going without that worry of

Being griefed and perhaps biggest of all there’s just a lot more going on at the end game there are more raids running and it’s a less Min Maxi or gatekeepy whatever you want to call it not that these are a bad thing in hardcore settings if you’re raiding and its death

Equals delete and you’ve invested hundreds of hours into your character you can bet people are going to want to see a certain level of commitment from all the active Raiders but during the regular end game this isn’t really a concern also Warcraft logs still maintains a page where the data is

Actively populated from error servers so we can see how many players to this day are choosing to raid on this version of the game we’re going to be looking at passes here a pass being a single ranking for one boss kill over the past two weeks you already know you’re

Looking at vanilla when Warriors are this far ahead don’t you anyways over just the past two weeks there’s been about 68 000 passes total in molten core 51 000 in Blackwing Le 42 000 and aq40 and about 74 000 in naxramas these are from All Passes logged globally here’s

Another way of putting that so if naxramas has 74 000 passes and is a 15 boss raid that’s kind of similar to saying 4933 people have done naxaramus over the past two weeks or have full clearness at least and if you consider a rage is 40 people that’s about 123 40 Man raids

Having done knacks over the past two weeks which is not too bad actually people are definitely running the end game content in vanilla era I think the popularity of the raids is pretty normal too A lot of people are coming back to the game they want to check it out so

They start off with molten core there’s less people doing Blackwing lure and aq40 because I mean well NAX is out and then NAX is the most popular because it’s the end of the end game in vanilla in terms of PVP there was a less action compared to leveling or PVE and it seems

As though War Sun Gulch was the most popular Battleground at least outside of weekend events this again makes sense warsong gauch is the smallest Battleground and in total only needs 20 players to start I believe there is cross-faction Battlegrounds in error 2 so this should help game Star more

Regularly remember in classic there’s no experience from Battlegrounds and blizzard has recently announced they will be doing a rank to reset though people in Battlegrounds when I’m doing this video are the hardcore Battleground enjoyers who are playing just for fun and not as much for ranking if I checked

Prior to this announcement I’m confident in saying I would be seeing more people pvping the leveling zones were plenty busy though so you should expect World PVP just don’t expect it to be fair I mean you already know there’s going to be level capped Rogues or lurking and stranglethorne Vale it’s vanilla open

Well PVP it ain’t fair so the question is why are people making a move back to a no changes no updates last phase vanilla server now biggest reason honestly this is the option that exists if you want to play it you know on the subreddits and forums I’ve already seen

A bunch of posts cropping off about TBC too recently lizard should have 100 kept that on error to anticipate future demand maybe it’s not too late but it just feels like a missed opportunity vanilla is also a very different experience to wrath I feel as though I

Kind of already had my mind made up about wrath as an expansion despite not being all the way through and it seems as though many players didn’t quite appreciate to what extent it really changed the core fundamentals of the game still our way towards the end before making that video and as popular

As hardcore has been it’s just very different from that standard vanilla wow formula you can’t do things such as trading or grouping not to mention having one life these can all be deal breakers what we’ve just looked at seems to tell a story that whilst there is a

Demand for hardcore well there is equally many players who just want to play your standard vanilla and while standard vanilla is currently not on the cards hardcore is so here is what might be kind of a hot take I think people who are after fresh kind of want hardcore

Realms to be that fresh experience when in reality they should be something completely different no trading restrictions on grouping and so on are all part of what makes hardcore wow what it is it might be different in other games they might have different names for it but it’s under this formula the

Challenge has reached this popularity in the first place yes hardcore is a more single player than World of Warcraft is typically and know the game was not made to be played like this this is why we’re getting separate realms for it it and there are things that suck about

Hardcore 2 such as queuing for named mobs enchanting just straight up not being viable to level due to needing rods from blacksmithing and so on do we throw away some of the core aspects of Hardcore just to make these things possible again I don’t think you do what

If you had the blacksmithing rods on enchanting vendors where you could trade in some materials for them and grouping for name mobs is going to be inviting four random people around you you all Spam a macro you get the tag you say thank you you disband and that is it

It’s just not really that great why not add additional name to mobs for low level quests that can drop the quest items there’s gold tooth in Fargo deep mine hey let’s add silver tooth and bronze tooth all of them can drop the quest item and three different spawn

Locations will be more than enough to not create bottlenecks you may have noticed with the launch of Rapha the Lich King and Beyond blizzard specifically split players up into different zones wrathaborian tundra or howling Fjord cattle was hydrol or vashir and so on I mean this is going to

Be effort with adding extra and update in the quest text so don’t expect it to happen or anything but hey I think it would fix the problem it’s just by now we’ve had 2019 classic where you can group and trade seasonal Mastery we can group and trade error where you can

Group and trade TBC we can group and trade rather the Lich King where you can group and trade and now we have a server where this might not happen and it’s a problem I don’t know I think we could try something different and it might not

Be a bad thing and yes of course there will be hardcore enjoyers who are skipping it at the moment because of the rules I’m not saying these people don’t exist it’s just you can actively see how many people are going by the rules at the moment even if they are not perfect

And they won’t ever be perfect by the way there is a saying don’t sacrifice something good for perfect what we have at the moment is good it’s really good in fact but it is clear all the same that the standard vanilla enjoyers have been growing alongside those who like

Hardcore why is it only one of them is getting what they want because you won’t be able to keep both crowns happy with the same servers I am sure about that do vanilla fans just have to wait for the next seasonal server later this year instead well it’ll be a fresh where you

Can trade group all of that stuff I think we can safely assume that but who knows what other changes it will have I mean imagine the thoughts of a warrior not doing four times the damage of half the classes in the game who would want to play that right or should there just

Maybe be well a normal fresh there are of course potential issues such as splitting the player base for one we’ve already got so many iterations of World of Warcraft and do we really need more and it creates competition for people’s attention in your own game and that just

Doesn’t seem very sensible then again whatever you do someone is going to have a problem with it overall I just hope for hardcore servers we can play launch day or after six months and it’s fundamentally the same experience and that’s going to mean it’s different from vanilla which will mean it’s not for

Everyone and I think that that is okay also I think the amount of people just taking on Plain vanilla are worth noticing too it might not have been as prominent of arises hardcore has been but it’s clear that a lot of players want that that’s all for the thoughts

Today though just a bunch of things I wanted to say about vanilla doing well and the hardcore servers in general any thoughts you have about all of this do drop it down below and as always thank you all so much for watching and listening in and I’ll see you on the

Next one very soon