World of Warcraft Classic was launched around 2019. What preceded the official Blizzard launch of WoW Classic servers was a private server named Nostalrius. Private servers are unofficial hosts of live-service games, often given DMCA takedown notices by the companies that own the intellectual property of the games. I stumbled upon this video of one of the developers behind the Nostalrius project. Before I talk about my personal customer experience with this live-service game, let’s take the red pill and head down the rabbit hole. I’ll let Nano Nost, the developer of Nostalrius, talk.
His story is quite the rollercoaster. Can game companies please stop being fucking dystopian?
I’ve played World of Warcraft Classic since 2020. The game actually helped me recover from a rough depression period, brought on by health-wrecking overwork. The impetus to get back into WoW wasn’t just an old friend restarting the game, but also a silly post on Quora talking about Tom Cruise’s The Last Samurai. It’s weird how these sequences of events happen.
Anyway, my experience with Classic has been positive, for the most part. I actually played the original WoW when I was around 15 years old, so I can make comparisons. From a nerd with social problems into a dysfunctional adult with turbulent relationships, it was quite the shock realizing how little had changed in roughly two decades in myself and the game. After making peace with that disturbing discovery, I found the game changed in some major respects.
As most of the playerbase is between the years 25 and 40, it was astonishing, though not surprising, to see how effective the raiding was. People were playing extremely well, showing up on time, prepared with buffs and consumables, everyone using software tools and the latest addons to optimize their performance. My guild mates were running simulations to determine the best choice of gear. The raiding content was a total breeze for these adult gamers. Just a casual conversation with anyone often revealed a company owner, a senior worker, a mother, a pro gamer, just astounding people. These weren’t the scruffy bad-mouthed nerds I remembered. And the content that seemed impassable when we were young, we breezed right through.
What else had changed was the company providing the servers. My friend would get himself suspended several times for being a toxic bad-mouthed nerd in battlegrounds, which he always was without issue in the early days. The playerbase was more prone to reporting others for basic male behavior and Blizzard reacted to these reports with penalties. There was a sense of a cultural shift to everyone being more sensitive. My guild had an actual culture war, with traditional male gamers acting like dudes always do, engaging in trolling and offensive jokes and overall shenanigans, while the other half of the guild found their antics disruptive. We weren’t permitted to be guys anymore, understandable to a degree.
The average age of the playerbase had another effect. Very often there were moments in raids and dungeon groups that someone’s baby would wake up and require immediate attention.
The experience with Vanilla Classic was polarizing. I managed to complete all my goals and experience all the raiding content I missed out on in 2005, even being among the first wave of guilds to kill Kel’thuzad. The guild I played most with kicked me out, and while the next guild was certainly an upgrade, the guild fell apart due to internal drama.
I took a long break after that. While it was no surprise to see guild drama still being a staple of World of Warcraft, it was exhausting. But I came back to The Burning Crusade Classic, focusing only on arena PvP. I also raided, but only casually, only pugging to supplement my PvP gear with higher item-level PvE pieces. We had a rough ride in our 3v3 team, with one of our members ragequitting. I still clawed our 2v2 team to 1900 rating as a resto druid, then my resto Shaman alt reached 1850 in 5v5. My other alts reached around 1600 rating in 2v2, 3v3 and 5v5.
While in Vanilla Classic, Blizzard was committed to preserving the original experience with all its flaws, they were clearly seeing problems with player retention and arena participation. A lot of players were quitting TBC Classic, eventually leading to multiple server mergers. Our server was shut down as well, but we migrated to another and continued playing. Whatever statistics they were reading, they led to Blizzard making big changes to honor gain and arena point gain as TBC Classic progressed, which eventually let me play 5 different characters in high-level PvP gear, reaching decent ratings usually at around 1600. For context, so you don’t think I’m some scrub, the level of competition was intense in TBC Classic. Even at 1300-1400 ratings, you’d find high-geared warriors with top-end crafted weapons, Stormherald and such, bottlenecking many players to abysmal ratings. Gone were the innocent days where I could reach 1800 with push-to-talk comms and mouse-clicking counterspell.
Admittedly, playing PvP with 5 characters was overkill, and I burned out again.
I came back to Wrath of the Lich King Classic, with the sole intent of conquering the arena at high ratings. My focus the entire time has been in arena PvP, so I can’t comment on the playerbase, guild culture, none of that. Juvenile drama just isn’t interesting to me at my age. Unfortunately, because of this choice to play 2v2 and 3v3 mainly with people I know, there’s little to talk about, as WoW arena has always been the same shit fest. We play every week for a few hours around the weekends, or whenever my arena mates are not busy with their studies and jobs.
At the time of writing, Trial of the Crusader patch has been live for some weeks. Elemental shamans are dominating the arena ladder, as the final upgrade to resilience that wasn’t live in the early seasons of original WOTLK has been around since the first season of WOTLK Classic. A change that seemed like wisdom, curtailing the insane burst that made arena a stressful headache, buffed the survivability of shamans to ridiculous extents. Last week we played our 3v3, we fought teams with an elemental shaman in roughly 80% of our matches. We went 5-15 that week.
Summarizing, World of Warcraft has always been a polarizing experience. Blizzard always makes these crazy decisions in the design, that make you scratch your head. This ever-changing live-service game being as immensely complex as it is, it’s hard to tell when something is “broken” or “imbalanced”, and not all of the decisions the development team makes to correct these issues are agreeable. They go back and forth with their decisions, creating new problems with their solutions, which are acceptable to some players and pissing off others, setting off iterative development cycles again and again. But having played this since I was a teenager, I knew to expect a rollercoaster. That, it has definitely been.
