World of Warcraft Classic Season of Discovery has been making rounds through the gaming community, bringing many seasoned WoW players back to the revolutionary MMO. Its success was already evident, but it’s now been confirmed that SoD is the second-most popular WoW server, just behind the Dragonflight expansion.
The poll was launched World of Warcraft on YouTube on Dec. 15, with over 65,000 players participating at the time of writing. The developers asked a simple question: “How are you playing WoW right now?” with most players opting for either Dragonflight or SoD. In terms of percentages, 47 percent of players said they preferred Dragonflight, WoW‘s latest expansion, but a surprising 41 percent said they’re actively engaging with SoD instead, which goes to show how much people love the old-school feel offered by this Classic spin-off. Nine and four percent of players said they’re playing Classic and Hardcore, respectively.
WoW Season of Discovery went live on Nov. 30, a bit over two weeks ago at the time of writing, and it’s insane that it’s already been able to pull nearly half of WoW‘s player base. To put things into perspective, Dragonflight has been out for over a year, and not even half of all WoW players engage with it as their preferred mode. The discussion surrounding World of Warcraft and how the game has evolved has always been heated, especially with particular expansions released after Wrath of the Lich King (often considered the best WoW expansion, though even that is debatable). Vanilla WoW has always been regarded as somewhat of a “golden age.” The current player base still appears to believe that, considering how much they’re playing Season of Discovery.
But why Season of Discovery? If you’re out of the loop, it is a phased Classic WoW experience that increases the level cap incrementally over time, starting with 25. It also adds a Rune system; there are no mounts, no mage portals, only Warlocks can summon players, and so on. It epitomizes the real, old-school, limited World of Warcraft that many people grew up with—and there are already iconic stories cropping up all over the place. As ironic as it may be that a game had to go back to progress, Season of Discovery is Blizzard’s rare hit in the sea of consistent misses regarding World of Warcraft, and the numbers prove it.
