World of Warcraft has been synonymous with the MMORPG genre since it was first released back in 2004. Although WoW has stayed the definition of a fantasy role-playing game over the years, its community began to slowly dwindle as soon as Blizzard started operating under the banner of Activision in 2008 with the most influential slump coming to pass during the Warlords of Draenor expansion when Blizzard stopped publicly reporting the subscription numbers. With the WoW community slowly abandoning their favorite game, Blizzard began desperately searching for strategies to skyrocket it back to the top. Little did the devs know back that the solution to all of their problems would be re-releases of the original games. Blizzard even went as far as to deny the players’ wishes to bring back WoW Classic. In the infamous words of J. Allen Brack: “You think you do, but you don’t.”
Today, we’re standing on the verge of witnessing Blizzard re-releasing the third WoW Classic edition, Wrath of the Lich King Classic. Although WoW Classic and The Burning Crusade Classic turned out to be a hit that rekindled love for WoW among long-lost fans, both game iterations were riddled with problems like botting, boosting, and gold selling. Expectedly, Blizzard has, in its own fashion, addressed these critical game-ruining issues, however, it has, in one way or the other, remained a persistent problem of Classic WoW that’s been ruining the gaming experience for average players. Largely because of botting, boosts, and gold selling, Classic WoW’s economy, together with average players, has been suffering from gold inflation and needs to optimize and increase gold farm.
Blizzard’s attempts to rid Classic WoW of the system abusers were received poorly, with the community still believing Blizzard is not doing enough work to cleanse the game and return it to its original state, like in the 2000s. Unfortunately, as we’re slowly stepping into the third iteration of Classic WoW, there is still no sign of Blizzard’s intentions to completely eradicate this kind of behavior in the game. What’s more, Blizzard has, since the release of the WOTLK Classic pre-patch, only further worsened the current state of the game with mass bans, server overpopulation, server disbalance, general lack of concern for long-queue times, and tickets unresponsiveness. With all this in mind, it seems as if Blizzard is gradually losing its touch and failing to meet the bare minimum standards to make buying a subscription worthwhile. Since Blizzard is treating its game as second-rate, why should we care and lose our precious time and money on it?
Overpopulated imbalanced Classic servers with excruciatingly-long queue time times and a lack of fresh servers
In 2019, Classic WoW launched with fresh servers that welcomed and hosted die-hard Classic fans from across the world. Since the sudden resurgence in popularity of Classic WoW surprised Blizzard and exceeded every possible expectation, the initially-launched servers were infested with long-queue times forcing Blizzard to launch more fresh servers. Even though the community had fresh servers at their disposal, players still surged to the originally-launched server, and with that, the giga servers were born. As time passed and the Classic WoW hype train slowly lost its steam, the servers began slowly bleeding players leaving some servers deserted and the others overpopulated. Although the community repeatedly called out this problem, Blizzard’s only solution was the server transfers that only treated the symptom of this problem. On top of this, this has caused more problems than solutions in the long run since many players were stuck in a loop of searching their home server while never settling down.
The release of TBC slightly improved the server situation since it once again brought back tonnes of players looking to enter the Dark Portal and eradicate the Burning Legion. Still, TBC Classic servers found themselves in similar shoes to Classic once the expansion reached later phases. And throughout TBC Classic, Blizzard again showed little to no effort to sort out and balance servers.
The third time’s the charm; everyone thought when the release of the WOTLK Classic pre-patch went live on Aug. 30. Even though the WOTLK Classic pre-patch was an excellent window of opportunity to fix the faction disbalance, overpopulation, and long queue times, the pre-patch only further damaged the already fragile state of Classic servers by making the queues longer and the servers more imbalanced and overpopulated. On top of this, Blizzard initially launched only two fresh servers per region that immediately became full houses. Blizzard, which took its time before even addressing the queue times, washed its hands off this problem. “There’s no technology solution to this. There is no hardware solution to this. This situation will not improve when Wrath of the Lich King Classic launches on September 26th, it will only get worse,” it said on Sept. 8.
And to this day, plenty of WOTLK Classic servers are suffering from long queue times and overpopulation that probably won’t be solved any time soon.
Unfair Alterac Valley mass bans
With the release of the WOTLK pre-patch, Altarac Valley, the legendary 40-man battleground that could last for hours because of strategic defending, or rather turtling, rose in popularity once again. This was largely due to PvP now awarding experience and handsome reputation gear. Since players surged in masses to Alterac Valley to kill time and have fun before the expansion’s official launch, unsportsmanlike behavior quickly transpired with players entering the battleground and AFKing without making any effort to secure the win. This resulted in mass bans from Blizzard that unfairly banned even the most dedicated grinders.
Although there was no response from Blizzard for days, the Blizzard devs spoke up in the end and revealed that they had discovered a bug in their system that was behind the mass Alterac Valley bans. Sadly, Blizzard didn’t reveal the true nature of the bug that most thousands of players game time and effort.
Allowing this fatal error to slip into your game and cause undeserved mass bans of thousands of players is yet another sign of Blizzard’s disregard for the loyal Classic community that has already been struggling with issues like long queue times and server disbalance.
Complete disregard for the community’s tickets
Bearing the mass bans and server queue times in mind, it’s no surprise Blizzard’s customer support is facing backlash from the community in the form of exhaustive tickets and complaints. Instead of dotting on the Classic community and immediately helping them with their issues, no matter how small and irrelevant they might be, Blizzard ignores tickets for days only to not solve the problem and mark it as resolved. Although there are plenty of cases discussed on Reddit, we’ll discuss three major cases that stood out in the bunch.
Case No. 1 – Seven-day ban appeal answered after five days
Redditor u/Hammitch shared a post on Reddit about how Blizzard issued a seven-day-long ban after the player accidentally spammed the trade chat with lockpicking advertisement. The player simply forgot they swapped the trade chat macro with his mount macro and received the ban by repeatedly pressing the trade chat macro. The player immediately appealed the ban to Blizzard customer support but received no answer for four days straight. On the fifth day of the ban, Blizzard finally answered by lifting his ban, admitting it was a minor mistake that could happen to anyone.
Case No. 2 – Simple account merging request ignored
A veteran WoW player who played the original WoW back in 2004, believing he lost access to his account, created a new Battle.net account to once again play the game he fell in love with back in its golden days. So, the player created a ticket asking Blizzard to simply merge the two accounts even though he would lose some valuables in the process. After a six-day waiting period, customer support finally took a look at this request. By sending an automated response and marking the ticket solved, customer support deemed the player’s case unworthy of further attention.
Case No. 3 – Blizzard sabotages character transfer
Another story coming from Reddit is the story of u/Fast_Month_9460’s transfer gone wrong. The Redditor, who wanted to transfer from the giga realm Gehennas to Mograine to join the group of friends and guildmates, encountered a bug during the free transfer period that blocked the transfer process. Although Redditor successfully transferred almost all characters to Mograine, the main character, a Warlock, couldn’t be transferred due to an error claiming the mailbox was not empty. Checking the mailbox and trying other methods like disabling addons, u/Fast_Month_9460 still couldn’t transfer the character. In a final desperate effort to transfer the character to Mograine, the player wrote a ticket outlining the case. Luckier than other players, the Redditor got a response from a GM after only four days. But the free transfers had, by that time, been closed. Unsurprisingly, the GM said there was nothing left to do and that the main character would stay on Gehennas.
Blizzard is out of touch with the Classic WoW community and treats its product as a second-rate
Blizzard has a long history of ignoring the player base’s feedback and treating them as strangers to the game, not as loyal fans who want to see their favorite game succeed. Blizzard’s recent behavior only proves that it has been out of touch with the Classic WoW community, and doesn’t even provide players with services that satisfy the bare minimum of playing the game and accessing Blizzard’s resources. This is a clear sign Classic WoW is nothing more than a cash cow that’s not worth investing their time and effort, let alone your time and effort. So, why would the Classic WoW community continue to revere the game Blizzard treats like a second-rate product not worth maintaining and fixing? Once Blizzard starts treating both the game and the community with the respect they deserve, the game might once again see its glory days.
Published: Sep 26, 2022 04:31 am