Just two months before the rollout of World of Warcraft’s long-awaited Wrath of the Lich King Classic expansion, in the shadow of widespread excitement continues to grow a thorny issue for Blizzard Entertainment: servers. True hearts of the so-called “original” experience of WoW, these virtual kingdoms, one of them mainly, are indeed at the center of a growing controversy… And it is high time to talk about it.
Happiness is above all your server
If many players have forgotten it over time (and especially the appearance of the generalized interconnection on the modern version of the game), the servers of World of Warcraft were at the very origin of the relations between the players, and therefore the success of the game (in addition to other elements of course). Everything was originally linked to your exchanges with the players who shared your daily life on your virtual kingdom, and if you played regularly enough then you often found the same players doing wild PvP, the same scamming the entire server by selling items at exorbitant prices in Stormwind, or even the same players who intensively practiced “pick up” in PvE!
It was, so to speak, crucial to work on your “e-reputation” if you were looking to evolve in the game. The slightest conflict could quickly send you directly to the blacklist of the best guilds on the server, and that was it for you. It was therefore rather interesting to keep a check!
With the return of WoW Classic in 2019, this way of playing and approaching the World of Warcraft universe has resurfaced. Well, to a lesser extent of course since the relations between players have evolved over the past 18 years, but the base remains present. And if we mainly regret the abusive integration of “sharding”, this mechanism introduced by Mists of Pandaria which consists of splitting each kingdom into micro-kingdoms in order to avoid lags and other problems linked to the presence of too many players in one given place, the “Classic experience” remains relatively acceptable as it is, although absolutely not faithful to that of the time.
Finally, that’s for the common French-speaking players…
The Firemaw Scandal
In a version of the game represented massively by the over-representation of a single faction on a given kingdom, Firemaw, a PvP kingdom where all European nationalities intersect (French speakers included), was a real UFO which delighted the great combat enthusiasts in the open world.
Firemaw was the art and the way to truly be the most populated server in the world with an almost perfectly balanced population: 51% of players fromAlliance for 49% of the Horde. No matter where you roamed, you were pretty sure to run into someone from the opposing faction at some point; and if during the leveling we often exchanged courteous greetings so as not to slow down the progress of the other, everything sometimes quickly degenerated into important fights involving many players!
But with the deployment of Phase 5: Fury of the Sunwell, the crowds were so large on this extraordinary server that the queues quickly greatly tainted the pleasure of playing for many players. We are talking about more than 10,000 players in line in the middle of May, just for the deployment of a major content update!
Inevitably, Blizzard quickly had to intervene and propose a solution to limit the breakage while waiting to find a long-term solution. And the idea found was one of the most radical: as of May 24, 2022, Firemaw became completely locked and isolated from the other kingdoms. Impossible to create new characters there if you didn’t already have one there, and impossible to migrate there. On the other hand, free migrations aimed at relieving the population of this kingdom have opened their doors! And that’s where things turned sour.
Blizzard and its silence: The time too many
After weeks of waiting and isolation, and even as the queues came to an end barely two weeks after the Phase 5 rollout, Firemaw’s huge numbers of players stopped hoping for news of the from Blizzard. Absolute radio silence, we saw day after day the server being emptied of its population which nevertheless made it famous until very recently.
And guess what happens when you lock down a realm for two months without communicating? Players flee so they can play with their friends. Worse still, by allowing some already heavily populated servers to host “Firemaw refugees” through free migrations, Blizzard orchestrated the largest exodus of Horde players in WoW Classic history to mega- European servers dedicated to the Horde. Thus, since the beginning of July 2022, Firemaw is 93.2% populated by players from theAlliancefor barely 6.8% on the side of the Horde.
Note : The real population of the server is not known, we are only talking about players who have “logged” on WarcraftLogs. However, this gives an idea to players not present on Firemaw, the observation on the ground being more or less identical.
If the problem isn’t quite clear yet, here it is: many players have chosen to play on Firemaw for its near-perfect balance allowing lively and interesting outdoor PvP. With nearly 94% of players from one faction due to the Blizzard-orchestrated exodus, the realm has been drained of interest and the many who were hoping for a memorable experience during Wrath of the Lich King. Classic find themselves suffering from the disastrous choices of Blizzard… In general indifference. No solution has ever been mentioned by the publisher to counter this problem, and we now find ourselves with a half-locked server at the antipodes of what it was a few weeks earlier.
Thousands of players are currently clueless and bitterly regret ever migrating to Firemaw, or simply choosing to create a character here in search of great experiences at WotLK Classic. What do we tell them today? That they are misguided, and that the “PvP” next to the name of their kingdom in the list of available servers will never be useless on a server inbred by the massive presence of a single faction.
This situation could have been avoided with a minimum of communication and anticipation on the part of the publisher. She should have been. And if we’ve been ironic a lot lately about the lack of communication from Blizzard’s side, this time it’s probably the time too many. No excuses, no explanations, no transparency. Nothing.
They just throw us in the face a few days earlier than “the server is open again” over a thread barely visible on the Battle.net forums. For two months, we have suffered. We are waiting for a simple press release that will reduce our fears a little bit and give us hope in Blizzard after this disaster, a press release that will probably never happen in view of the situation in which the server is bogged down. The Horde players are gone, Firemaw is dead, it’s already too late no matter what.
On the eve of the rollout of the most anticipated Classic expansion for players, thousands of them are already sure of one thing: their experience of Wrath of the Lich King Classic will be mediocre at best, and it will be difficult for Blizzard to make them swallow the pill with some false artifices possibly deployed in order to hide the absurdity that these mono-faction servers represent.
A situation invisible to the eyes of all which nevertheless says much more than we imagine on certain subjects, in particular the state of the kingdoms dedicated to the Classic version of the game. A situation which will undoubtedly remain unfortunately in the shadow of happiness many players generated by the (re)discovery of Northrend… On single-faction servers.
mmo
Good news for Burning Crusade Classic players at the start of the week: the “Happy Voyages” experience bonus has reportedly been seen on certain realms, hinting at the deployment schedule for the Wrath of the Lich King Classic expansion of World of Warcraft.