WoW: What’s the hatred for WotLK Classic? Your criticism makes no sense
In the coming months, Wrath of the Lich King Classic will not just be another new edition of a WoW era. This time the most successful expansion in the history of World of Warcraft is on the program. Twelve million paying subscribers … that’s a unique success in the field of online role-playing games with a buy2play system and a mandatory subscription.
But not only the sheer numbers of players make WotLK the most successful WoW expansion of all time, but also the retrospective evaluation of the community. In umpteen surveys, the Nordend adventure was voted the most popular or best WoW addon (here is an example from 2021), often at a great distance.
Anger instead of hype – where are the WotLK fans?
Personally I would call Wrath of the Lich King a very good (though not the best) WoW expansion that I had a lot of fun with at the time and with which I associate many beautiful memories to this day. That should be the case for many WoW veterans. When WoW Classic was announced, however, I was a lot more excited about the chance to visit the original Azeroth and catch up on some content that I missed at the time (such as parts of the Temple of Ahn’Qiraj and Naxxramas).
Apparently, others fared… well… differently. Again and again I read in the comments: “WoW Classic will only be a transition, I’m keen on WotLK Classic!“, or later then: “Oh TBC, yes, I’ll take that with me or maybe not, but with WotLK Classic I’ll definitely be at the start!“. These players would probably have preferred to fast-forward time so that they could travel to Northrend immediately.
Since that doesn’t work, patience was called for. Patience that will soon pay off. The beta is already runningthe Release could be in September 2022 queue. But so far there is hardly any sign of anticipation, namely only when I hang around in the international communities of certain classic streamers/youtubers or Wrath Discord channels. On the other hand, instead of anticipation, I only read anger from many of the comments here on buffed, Facebook and Co. The criticism expressed in many places makes no sense to me at all.
Criticism number 1: Blizzard just warms up old content
Of course, this criticism is not new. It already existed in WoW (buy now ) Classic and TBC Classic. Often added with an insult because obviously those who enjoy the classic content must be dumbed down idiots. What the critics are forgetting here: Blizzard did NOT want to develop Classic (“You think you do, but you don’t”). The community had to fight for years to get these classic variants. And even when the developers decided to relaunch vanilla WoW, they were obviously sure that that this will only be for a small niche – which can be seen, among other things, from how few servers Blizzard wanted to make available for the launch of WoW Classic.
Speaking of servers, the population sizes of the WoW Classic and TBC Classic servers smashed Blizzard’s expectations. Or to put it another way: there is a relevant need and a great desire for classic WoW content. You don’t have to be able to understand that. But if you don’t want to be “§”§$”$%%, you could be happy that Blizzard has been accommodating this desire for a few years, especially since it doesn’t take anything away from you.
If we look back at Activision Blizzard’s quarterly reports over the past few years, one could even argue that the successes of WoW Classic and TBC Classic outweighed the downturns in Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands (apart from launch sales, there’s been here in recent years hardly anything to celebrate) could absorb to a certain extent. Who knows if Dragonflight would even exist this year without WoW Classic and TBC Classic in the form announced?!
Last but not least, I want to state that Blizzard is no longer just warming up old content in the classic area. That may have been the case in WoW Classic, but since then the strategy has clearly evolved from #nochanges to #somechanges or even #manychanges (season of the championship). Which brings us to the second point of criticism that directly affects WotLK.
Reference-www.buffed.de