The WoW Forever beta is now done. We have about a week to wait until we get to the official live release of the project.
WoW Forever
I played both more and less than I thought I would. I find the ideas behind WoW Forever attractive and I am invested in the project. I am in, and I was keen to get a glimpse of what Blizz was planning to deliver.
But this also wasn’t 2019, when WoW Classic was looming and we were about to be let back into content that had been removed from the game nearly a decade back, content that hadn’t been in something like its original form since The Burning Crusade arrived.
If I feel the burning desire to play vanilla content, Blizz has classic servers for that purpose. If this was all about that content as it was back in 2006, WoW Forever wouldn’t been a thing.
But you couldn’t tell that if you spend any time on Reddit. The retail, classic, and forever subreddits have all become an angry stew of puerile resentment. I’d already decided to cut back on Reddit lately, but the reactions to WoW Forever pushed me further away.
I am on this vanilla content thing in part because there is/was a persistent group over on Reddit who were both demanding Classic Plus but who also explode in rage at every aspect of WoW Forever that isn’t 2006 vanilla, hauling out the argument that Classic Plus must not be anything that isn’t “classic” as we already know it. It boggles the mind.
Whatever.
The beta did what betas are supposed to do. It let the company test things, find problems, and experiment with new ideas. Again, this seemed to enrage a certain subset of vocal players, with complaints when they did change things, when they didn’t change things, and when something wasn’t changed fast enough or too fast. Kind of crazy. I suppose some feel that Blizz won’t listen unless there is outrage. But I would counter that assuming Blizz is listening at always a dodgy proposition.
Next week we’ll see how a wider audience feels. The beta was popular and a lot of people threw down cash to get in, but betas are always a self-selecting audience that is often not representative of who will show up once an MMO goes live. My EverQuest II tale of the Rise of Kunark beta, where those players in raid gear felt all the content was too easy, might be a couple decades in the past at this point, but it still serves. When it went live the overland content was brutal for anybody showing up not completely kitted out.
There are certainly some things I will be keeping an eye on.
The whole layering plan, which was probably the most complained about aspect of the game in beta, will be top of the list… though I am not sure how much it will matter to me. It is the solution to the server population disparities and the being able to play with your friends problem that plagued the first dozen years of the game, which came back strong again for WoW Classic.
The downsides include not getting to see everybody standing in Westfall.
The upside is that if you did see everybody standing in Westfall there would be no Defias to speak of, they would be hunted into extinction, so if you want to run quests there you might actually have a chance.
I know, somebody is going to say something about server communities and I am going to roll my eyes so hard it will probably detach a retina.
Even Poncho, who pissed off a ton of people by cutting in line on the opening night of WoW Classic back in 2019, who ended up having a guild named after him (the public “No Ponchos” guild) and had a Reddit thread about him was probably only known to a couple hundred people tops on a server with thousands of players. So I don’t give the idea of server communities much weight.
More concerning to me is how to manage the layering as a player. Blizz has taken a very “don’t worry your pretty little head” view on the topic which I do find a bit irksome. I’d pay some extra, for example, if I could choose never to be in a layer with anybody who follows Asmongold… or maybe just see what layer of how many I was in.
Launch day… launch week… will be a clown show and many people will be complaining about every little problem. Ideally that will all settle down quickly enough. That is another intent behind this new single server thing. If people are posting images of hour long queues to get into the game it is going to be a failure for layering. What is the point if it cannot solve that? The excuse for it with beta was being surprised so many people would fork out the cash for beta so the servers were not up to it. With it going live you don’t want to make the same mistake twice.
There are a lot of other little changes coming relative to WoW Classic. Some I have commented on already, like the revamp of crafting which felt pretty good in beta. Others I steered clear of or never got around to posting about. The reduced xp for dungeons… that sounds like a good idea, but I’ll have to see how it plays out. And old school player that I am, the boat route update, so night elves don’t have to run the wetlands gauntlet to join their friends… I might run it anyway, just for kicks, but it was probably a good idea and within the spirit of the original game because the Deeprun Tram was supposed to go Teldrassil in the original plan.
Everything else… well, we’ll figure it out. I hear you might even be able to tank as a pally.
The group will be trying to reform. We’ll be going PvE and probably Alliance.
We won’t be in a hurry. As I have said, I expect the first week to be comedy and complaints as the servers get overrun by players far in excess of Blizzard’s expectation because there won’t even be a “buy the box” barrier to entry. We’ll see.
I’ll do some name reservations tomorrow… one thing you got for buying into the beta… though I still have to think on some last names. A couple decades with WoW has caused my last name thinking to atrophy a bit. That used to be important back in the days of MUDs or in EverQuest.
We’re also going to experiment with grouping outside of our small, core group. I’ve put a WoW Forever section on the TAGN Discord server as a way to coordinate what we’re up to. It only has a discussion channel currently, but if we need more… channels are free.
That will be open to anybody. The TAGN Discord has a very small population, so I don’t expect it will be an issue. And if it ends up being one, well I can always make that section invite only. I hate getting into roles and permissions, but I’ve done it enough professionally that doing it on Discord should be no problem.
And next week we’ll see how it all begins.